That Ain't I a Woman Speaker Not What You Thought

 

Sojourner Truth giving her famous speech at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in Akron in 1851.

On May 28, 1851 fifty-four-year-old Sojourner Truth mounted the platform and addressed the delegates to an Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron.  The meeting was held only three years after the inaugural Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. 

Truth was a former slave who had gained fame as a lay preacher and abolitionist speaker.  Accounts differ as to whether she was fully welcomed or if there were some women afraid that her presence would antagonize men otherwise sympathetic to her cause.  But Truth was already friendly with leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and most of her audience that day were either already convinced abolitionists, or at least sympathetic. 

The speech Truth gave has outlasted any other comments at the meeting and it is widely quoted by both feminists and African-American activists.  But the speech she gave may not have been the one widely quoted with its repeated refrain of “Ain’t I a Woman?” 

Truth was born a slave in 1797 in Swartekill, New York.  Her birth name was Isabella Baumfree, one of thirteen children.  The Hardenbergh family which owned her was from old Dutch colonial stock and Dutch was her first language.  She was sold along with a herd of sheep at the age of nine to English speaking tavern keeper John Neely for $100. 

By her later accounts Neely beat and raped her.  She was sold twice more becoming the property of John Dumont of West Park in 1810.  Conditions were less harsh than with her previous owners and Isabella, called Belle, labored there for several years.  She fell in love with a slave named Robert from a neighboring farm, but his owner forbad the relationship and beat him so severely that he later died.  Robert fathered her first two children. 

In 1817 Dumont selected another of his slaves, Thomas, to be her husband and he fathered three more children by 1826.

Under New York’s gradual emancipation law slavery would officially end on July 4, 1827.  Dumont had promised her release early in exchange for “doing well and faithful,” but reneged after a hand injury left her less than a fully effective worker.  Feeling cheated but determined to be fair to her master, she spun him 100 lbs. of wool, what she thought her remaining time was worth and escaped with her infant daughter. 

She could not take her other children because even under emancipation they would be held as bond servants until they were 21.  She found a sympathetic home with Isaac and Maria Van Wagener who took her in and settled her debt with Dumont for $20.  She stayed with them until emancipated under the law. 

Learning that Dumont had illegally sold her five-year-old son south to Alabama, she sued her former master with the support of the Van Wageners and after several months was able to recover her son.  She was the first Black in New York State to successfully sue a white man. 

During her time with the Wagner family, she experienced a religious conversion and became a devout Christian.  

Sojourner Truth's association with the religious fraudster Robert Mathews led to her indictment for the murder of her previous employer.  After a sensational trial she was acquitted.

In 1829 she moved with her son Peter to New York City to serve as housekeeper for evangelist preacher Elijah Pierson.  Through Pierson she met the religious charlatan Robert Matthews, a.k.a. Matthias Kingdom and the Prophet Matthias who had bilked Pierson and several others out of two houses and large sums of money.  Bella went to work for him in 1832.  When Pierson died a short time later both she and Matthews were charged with his murder but acquitted.  Mathews headed west in an attempt to strike up an alliance with the Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith leaving Belle behind. 

Despite the notoriety of the trial she was able to scrape together a living in the city.  Her son Peter signed on whaling ship in 1839 and after three letters never heard from him again. 

In 1842 she adopted the name Sojourner Truth because, “The Spirit calls me and I must.”  She became a Methodist, and like many others became a lay preacher and traveling evangelist mixing in a heavy dose of abolitionism.  Gaining a reputation, she was invited to join Northampton Association of Education and Industry in Massachusetts in 1844.  One of many utopian social experiments of the era, the Association was founded by abolitionists and supported women’s rights and pacifism.  Other members of the association included leading abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Fredrick Douglass.  Like other communal experiments of the era, the Northampton Association collapsed in 1847 and Truth went to work as a housekeeper for Garrison’s brother-in-law.  

The front piece and title page of the first edition of Sojourner Truth's memoirs.

While there she dictated her memoirs to her friend Olivia Gilbert.  In 1850 Garrison arranged a private printing of The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave.  The book was widely read in liberal circles and cemented Truth’s reputation.  The same year she was able to buy her own home in Northampton for $300 and attended the first full National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts where she shared the platform such leaders as Lucy Stone, Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis, Ernestine Rose, and Antoinette Brown as well as old friends Garrison and Douglass.  More than 900 people attended the convention, which attracted wide, if sometimes derisive, coverage. 

Truth came to the 1850 meeting in while on a western speaking tour with abolitionist George Thompson.  The first published version of her speech was transcribed by local newspaperman Marius Robinson and was published a month after the event.  The speech was stirring and contrasted the leisure afforded White women who were “put on a pedestal” with the grim “work or die” reality for Black women both slave and free.  But it was rendered as standard English and nowhere included the words “Ain’t I a woman.” 

Those were included, along with idiomatic—and stereotypical—Southern Black speech patterns in a version of the speech published 13 years after it was given by one of the meetings organizers, Frances Dana Barker Gage.  Gage’s version is the one widely quoted today.  Yet it has its many doubters.  It is unlikely that Truth, a native Dutch speaker who had spent her entire life well north of the Mason-Dixon Line, spoke with any kind of southern drawl, Black or otherwise.  On the other hand, supporters of the Gage version argue that Robinson “cleaned up” Truth’s raw language for his genteel readers. 

More telling are factual inaccuracies in the Gage version, including the claim that she had 13 children “most of which” were sold into slavery.  In fact, she had five children, one of whom was temporarily sold into slavery.  Gage also embellished the circumstances of the speech, making it sound as if Truth spoke to a hostile audience, whereas contemporary accounts, including her own, attested to a warm reception.  The speech as recorded by Gage in 1863 began:

 Wall, chilern, whar dar is so much racket dar must be somethin’ out o’ kilter. I tink dat ‘twixt de niggers of de Souf and de womin at de Norf, all talkin’ ‘bout rights, de white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all dis here talkin’ ‘bout? Dat man ober dar say dat womin needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted ober ditches, and to hab de best place everywhar. Nobody eber helps me into carriages, or ober mud-puddles, or gibs me any best place! ‘And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman?...

By contrast Robinson recorded:

 I want to say a few words about this matter. I am a woman’s rights. I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I have heard much about the sexes being equal. I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it. I am as strong as any man that is now...

To my ears, the originally published journal sound much more likely to have been given by a woman who had been raised in the North, had spent many years in association with highly educated people, and made a living as a preacher and speaker. 

Truth spent the next decade touring in support of abolition and women’s rights working in close association with Robinson.  She had many colorful encounters with hostile audiences, including one where a heckler insisted that she was a man, so she opened her shirt to show her breasts. 

In 1856 she sold her Northumberland home and moved to the Battle Creek, Michigan area which she would consider home for the rest of her life.  The household in her new home included a grown daughter, Elizabeth Banks, and two grandsons. 

                                    

                                                Sojourner Truth in her later years.

With the outbreak of the Civil War she saw her older grandson, James Caldwell enlist in the famous Black 54th Massachusetts while she recruited other blacks to rally for the Union.  In 1864 she was called to Washington to join the National Freedman’s Relief Association to improve the lot of newly freed slaves.  She met President Abraham Lincoln, and almost a hundred years before Rosa Parks insisted on riding Washington horse car trolleys effectively, if temporarily ending segregation on them. 

She tried to claim her 40 acres and a Mule as a freedman herself, appealing to President Ulysses Grant himself in 1870.  But despite seven years of effort was turned down because she was a woman and had been freed by a northern state years earlier.  

The Sojourner Truth Memorial statue in Florence, Michigan.

Truth resumed speaking tours after the war then returned to Battle Creek to try to vote in the 1872 Election.  But she was tired.  Sojourner Truth died in her Battle Creek home on November 26, 1886 at the age of 86.                                                                 

Gerard Malanga Imagined Elephant Armageddon--National Poetry Month 2026

 

Gerard Malanga--the Warhol years.

Poet and photographer Gerard Malanga is best known for his association with cultural icon Andy Warhol.  He was the pop artist’s personal assistant, photographer, and sometimes actor during Warhol’s most famous period in the 1960s and ‘70s.  In fact, he has been called Warhol’s “most important associate” during those years.

Malanga was the son of Italian immigrants and was raised in the Bronx.  He began writing poetry as a teenager and was soon immersed in the New York City avant garde art scene.  He began documenting that scene as a photographer.

Malanga and Warhol.

He was the chief assistant for Warhol from the mid-1960s and founded the magazine Interview with him in 1969. Malanga was also featured in several of Warhol’s films, collaborated with Warhol on his Screen Tests project, and was a member of Warhol’s cross-genre undertaking, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

He was also closely identified with the emerging punk rock movement, was close to The Velvet Underground, Iggy Pop, and was one of Patti Smith’s lovers.

His numerous books of poetry, include chic death (1971), Mythologies of the Heart (1996), No Respect: New And Selected Poems 1964-2000 (2001), and Cool & Other Poems (2019).

The contemporary shutter bug in his element.

Malanga has also published the photography books Good Girls (1994) and Resistance to Memory (1998). He served as the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation’s first photo archivist, and edited a study on the link between photography and voyeurism, Scopophilia: The Love of Looking (1985). With Victor Bockris, he co-authored Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (2003).

Malanga remains an active artist today.

This 2012 poem finds Malanga far from the gritty urban streets with which he is most identified.

African elephants endangered for their ivory.

Elephant Armageddon

NYTimes headline for September 4th 2012:

Elephants Dying in Epic Frenzy As Ivory Fuels Wars and Profits

                                                         

          They return to the site whence they came with eyes tearful,

 with psalms trumpeting the air.

 They stand ever so watchful;

 guarding the graves of their ghosts and their kind.

 They shall not forget.  They shall not want.

 They lie down in green silky pastures

 and finding their way to the still waters.

 They restore and nourish their soul.

 They walk through the dark valleys; always the shadows

 of death lurking behind them.

 Always striding till they reach the comforting light.

 They fear no evil.  Man fears.

 They forage for food and they eat amongst their enemies

 because they fear not.  They are the happiest.

 The honey is under their tongue.

 The winter is past, the rain is over and gone.

 Their hearts awaken.  They know no violence.

 Even in the waning light they tower over all else.

 They are the landscape.  They are the trees.

 They throw up the dust in their dance.  The skies become misty.

 They rise up and lead each other away into the dusk.

 

—Gerard Malanga

 

The Americanization of St. Patrick's Day—Not a Quiet Catholic Feast Day Any More

This vintage St. Patrick's Day greeting card is emblematic of the adoption and popularization of the holiday in the U.S.  In reality the acceptance by Yankee Uncle Sam--presumably Protestant--of Catholic "bog trotters" was far from smooth or cordial.  

Note:  For those of you unaware, this is my natal anniversary. I Turn 77 today.  Bet you wondered how I got the name.  Anyway, I am rerunning a version of an oft run classic. Meanwhile to the Irish and wan-a-be-Irish, enjoy the day.  Have fun but try not to live down to some unfortunate stereotypes.   And for Christ’s sake don’t drink the damn green beer, an abomination and insult to the soul!  Have a dram of Jameson’s with a Guinness back for me!

Today is the Feast of St. Patrick, originally a low-key religious celebration in the Auld Sod.  In the U.S. it’s St. Patrick’s Day, which is, as they say, a whole other kettle of fish.  For better or worse this quasi-holiday is an Irish American phenomenon.  Let’s trace the metamorphosis from religiosity to ethnic muscle flexing, to Irish nationalism, to partisan political display, to equal opportunity public drinking festival. 

"Everybody's Irish!"  is the new equal opportunity slogan of American St. Patrick's Day promoted by breweries, bars, and bottle peddlers of all sorts.  The message seems to be working.

It all began on March 17, 1762 with the very first St. Patrick’s Day parade anywhere in the world.  Irish soldiers in a British regiment headquartered in New York City marched behind their musicians and drew cheers from the small local Irish minority, both Catholic and Protestant—mostly Protestant in those days.  It became if not an annual event, one which was observed most years.  When the Redcoats left the city at the end of the American Revolution various local Irish mutual aid societies like the Hibernians and the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick held often competing events which, if they happened to intersect, sometimes devolved into brawls. 

After the United Irishman Uprising of 1798 was crushed, the British imposed a harsh repression including the banning of the wearing o’ the Green, a new wave of Irish refugees flooded New York, Boston, and other Eastern cities.  They inoculated the annual St. Patrick’s Day observances with a new political significance and wearing green (instead of the traditional Irish colors of blue and gold) became a protest against British rule in the motherland and a call to action to overthrow that rule. 

The Potato Famine unleashed yet another wave of immigration bringing throngs of displaced peasants to the already growing slums of the city. Competing Irish aid societies finally decided to unite behind a single, massive demonstration in New York in 1848.  The theme of independence for Ireland was mixed with an act of aggressive defiance by the now largely Catholic masses against the nativists from Tammany Hall who controlled the city government, the Know Nothings, and street gangs who harassed and bullied them.

In trying to market to Irish Americans, not everyone got it right.  This tonedeaf greeting card featured the pug-nosed Irish stereotypes featured in Know Nothing and anti-immigrant publications.  The figure on the left has a sash identifying him as a member of the Ancient Order of Hibernians.  The one on the right supposedly is from a competing organization that had frequently brawled with the AOH for supremacy on St. Patrick's Day.

In 1858 the Fenian Brotherhood was organized in the United States in support the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), a secret oath society agitating for the establishment of a “democratic Irish republic.”  The St. Patrick’s Day parades in New York and other cities became powerful recruiting tools for the Fenians. Social events around the day annually raised thousands of dollars, much of it to support fantastic plots and buy arms.  On more than one occasion Fenian plots to attack Canada brought the U.S. and Britain perilously close to war, which, of course was the objective. 

By the second half of the 19th Century New York's St. Patrick's Day parades had become elaborate celebrations of Irish nationalism and a display of raw political power in the city.

The failure of the Easter Rebellion in 1916 in which labor leader James Connolly, fresh from several years in America as an IWW organizer, and an Irish-American unit of Hibernian Rifles were both involved, led to a fresh round of frenzied support for independence back home.  The campaign of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which led to the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922 and the Irish Civil War between the Free State government and republican rebels were both largely financed by Irish Americans.  Even after the establishment of the Republic in 1937, Irish-Americans continued to fund rebel groups aimed at uniting Ulster to the rest of the island, including support for Sein Fein and the Provisional IRA in their armed struggle through The Troubles.  All of this was reflected in the parades and other celebrations of the day which had become dominated by Rebel songs.

St. Patrick’s Day celebrations also were important displays of Irish culture.  Traditional Irish music and dance was so suppressed at home that both nearly disappeared.  Irish-Americans like Chicago’s Police Chief Francis O’Neill collected and preserved the songs and began schools to teach them and traditional Irish step dancing.  Both were re-introduced into Irish culture because of these efforts and put on display in St. Patrick’s Day parades, banquets, and concerts.

Hizzonor da Mayor, Richard J. Daley steps off with his blackthorn stick and green fedora at the head of the 1963 Chicago St. Patrick's Day joined by officials of the sponsoring Plumbers union, the Irish Consul General, Cardinal Albert Meyer (second from left} and actor Pat O'Brien to the Mayor's left and a bevy of politicians in the second row jockeying for position.  Then Republican Cook County States Attorney James P. Thompson can be spotted just over Daley's shoulder.

The Irish also excelled at political organization in this country.  Unlike other ethnic groups with large concentrations like the Germans, they were able to create viable political organizations with alliances with other ethnic groups that allowed them to control many city governments for decades.  In Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley brought the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, previously a South Side neighborhood event, to the heart of the Loop and dyed the Chicago River green every year in a display of political power.  Politicians of all ethnicities jockeyed to be as close as possible to Hizonor in the front ranks of the parade. 

By the late 20th Century St. Patrick’s Day spread well beyond its ethnic roots.  “Everyone is Irish on St. Paddy’s Day” became a byword pushed by breweries, bars, and distilleries making the day one of the biggest party days of the year.  Green beer and vomiting teenagers have become new symbols of the holiday. 

The semi-legendary Saint whose feast day is the occasion of all of the hoopla.  He wasn't Irish and did not drive the snakes out of the island--they never lived there to begin with.

And what about St. Patrick?  Well, what about him!

Before Black Lives Matter Protests New York’s Black Silent Parade Stood up to Racist Killings

Behind drummers the NAACP's James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B, Du Bois, center, lead the Silent Parade in New York City in 1917.   

On July 28, 1917 the Silent Parade in New York City was an orderly and mute demonstration by as many as 10,000 African-Americans in protest to the continued brutal onslaught of lynching across the Jim Crow South and border states as well as the anti-Black pogrom that killed as many as 200 and displaced thousands in East St Louis, Illinois that May.  

It may be obscure today, but it was one of the most significant events in the creation of a modern, Black-led civil rights movement and the direct ancestor of the Black Lives Matter movement. 

I was vaguely aware of the Silent Parade and have mentioned it in passing in a couple of posts, including a history of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and a bio of W.E.B. Du Bois, but I was not clear on the timeline and particulars.  Now I am delighted to share what I learned. 

Racial tensions in America had been ratcheting up for decades particularly after the complete abandonment of Reconstruction Era reforms in the South and the disenfranchisement of Southern Blacks in the Jim Crow Era.  Hardening racial attitudes were spreading to Northern cities and states as well.   The rising wave of lynching was just one of the forms of violent intimidation used to keep Blacks in their subservient places.  Although the old Ku Klux Klan disappeared and its reincarnation had not taken root, night riding, vigilantism, and pop-up mobs were all on the rise.  Kidnappings, beatings, rapes, arsons, and deportations were common.  

Even more troubling, was the rise in race riots, most of them in Northern or borders states, especially as the Great Migration began to get underway as oppressed Southern Blacks relocated to North seeking factory work in booming war industries.   In those days race riots meant one thing—a bloodthirsty rampage of Whites against the Black residents of their communities.  Although in isolated incidents some Blacks fought back in self-defense, there had never been a riot in which Blacks targeted White communities. 

The 1917 East St. Louis Race Riot spurred African Americans to new action.

The riot which erupted in East St. Louis on May 28, 1917 was just the most recent and one of the bloodiest.  Whites angered at Blacks taking jobs at local factories staged a mass protest meeting followed by a march by at least 3,000 into the downtown district where they spread out attacking any Blacks they encountered, burning homes, and looting businesses.  It took the Illinois National Guard to quash the violence, though tensions remained high. 

Some efforts at investigating the causes of the disturbance were made, and some officials gave lip service to community reconciliation.  But it was too little, too late. 

On July 2, a carload of White men drove through a Black neighborhood and fired several shots into a group of men standing outside in the oppressive Summer heat—exactly what we would call a drive by shooting today.  As the car sped away, crowds gathered and milled about. An hour later, two police detectives and a reporter were among four men in a car that cruised the same area.  The detectives may have displayed weapons.  Suspecting it was the same car involved in the first shooting or another on the same mission, someone opened fire on their car, killing one officer instantly and mortally wounding the other.  

Thousands of White spectators gathered to view the detectives’ then rampaged through the Black section of town. They cut the water hoses of the Fire Department, burned blocks of the city, and shot residents as they tried to escape the flames.  Police and National Guardsmen called to quell the violence instead either stood aside and let it run its course or in many instances actively joined the rioters.  

After the rioters simply exhausted themselves and almost 6000 Black survivors were turned into homeless refugees the liberal St. Louis Post Dispatch editorially concluded: 

All the impartial witnesses agree that the police were either indifferent or encouraged the barbarities, and that the major part of the National Guard was indifferent or inactive. No organized effort was made to protect the Negroes or disperse the murdering groups. The lack of frenzy and of a large infuriated mob made the task easy. Ten determined officers could have prevented most of the outrages. One hundred men acting with authority and vigor might have prevented any outrage. 

The breathtaking scope of the violence and a staggering death toll galvanized Black outrage across the country.  Various key players sprang into action. 

                    Journalist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B Wells came to East St. Louis to investigate and report for the Chicago Daily Defender.

Anti-lynching activist and Chicago Daily Defender journalist Ida B. Wells rushed to the stricken city to investigate.  She concluded that 50-150 had been killed in days of rioting and its aftermath.  Investigators for the NAACP placed the dead in the range of 100-200. A latter Congressional Investigation Committee—influenced by several Southern members said the death toll could not be determined but gave credence to local official reports of 8 White dead and 38 Blacks.  Some modern scholars have estimated that as many as 400 may have died immediately or of wounds within weeks.  Most accounts now settle on a rough guess of 200. 

Wells’s accounts were spread across the county by the issues of the Defender distributed nationally by Pullman Porters.  Local Black press picked up the story. 

Black nationalist Marucs Garvey used the East St. Louis race riots to promote his vision of an independent Black nation as a refuge from rampant White racism and violence.  Many were receptive to the message.

Black separatist and Nationalist Marcus Garvey declared that the riot was “one of the bloodiest outrages against mankind” and a “wholesale massacre of our people….This is no time for fine words, but a time to lift one’s voice against the savagery of a people who claim to be the dispensers of democracy.”  He also argued for self-defense and ultimately the establishment of an independent nation, probably in the Caribbean as a refuge for the African diaspora in America.  This combination of militancy and a sort of Black Zionism had a lot of appeal to many who lost all hope of fair treatment in the United States.  Whites were torn between stark terror of a militant Black in a uniform at the head of a mass movement and a vague hope that Garvey could become an ally in removing Blacks entirely from the country. 

For the NAACP the East St. Louis riots presented both a test and an opportunity.  The only national civil rights organization was only eight years old and not well established.  Largely the creation of White liberals, it still was still dominated by them.  All the national officers and board members were white except for Du Bois, the Black intellectual and editor of The Crisis and probably the most significant national Black leader since Frederick Douglass.  The white leadership was well meaning but an impediment to making the new organization an authentic voice for Black aspirations.  

Most of the organization’s chapters were in the Northeast and split between white liberals and the small Black educated elite.  It had little representation in the South where the overwhelming majority of Blacks still lived, or among poor and working class Northern Blacks.  The organization first earned national attention for its protests and picketing of showings of D. W. Griffith’s Ku Klux Klan paean Birth of a Nation in 1915.  

It became increasingly vocal in protest to the policies of President Woodrow Wilson.  During his three-way race for the Presidency against William Howard Taft, and Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 Wilson made vague promises of enacting anti-lynching legislation and in favor of some civil rights protections.  Most Blacks who could vote were still loyal Republicans in gratitude for the end of slavery and the stab at Reconstruction.  But in some Northern cities Blacks were being successfully courted by local Democratic machines.  Wilson made promises in hopes for a sliver of the Black vote.  But he was the son of a Virginia mother who was an unreconstructed Confederate.  Upon election not only did he forget his promises about lynch protections, but he also scrapped what few shreds of Reconstruction era policies remained and introduced of segregation into all areas possible of federal government policy, workplaces, and hiring. 

In his early reaction to the East St. Louis riots, Du Bois castigated Wilson for inaction on lynching and demanded action against spreading race riots.  Wilson did not even bother to respond.   

Portraits by Laura Wheeler Waring.

Du Bois knew that more dramatic action was required to both rally Blacks nationally and build the NAACP.  He found a new ally in the second Black elected to a leadership position in the organization, Second Vice President James Weldon Johnson.  Johnson was a perfect example of the Black elite who Du Bois believed would raise the race. He was a lawyer, Republican politian, diplomat under Theodore Roosevelt, and a poet.  He wrote Lift Every Voice and Sing which the Fisk University Singer popularized as the “Black National Anthem.”  He would also soon became a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance. 

It was Johnson who first proposed a silent protest march at an Executive Committee meeting of the NAACP Harlem Branch shortly after the East St. Louis riot.  Du Bois heartily supported the plan.  Johnson himself was the prime organizer, seeing all the myriads of details needed to mobilize an action like no other before it.  He took care to reach out and include all classes of Black citizens utilizing the churches, Black Women’s Clubs, trade union members, social and benevolent clubs, and laborers.  He knew that to be effective the march had to be absolutely peaceful and dignified.  As he recruited marchers, he trained them in discipline.  Any hint of violence or disorder would not only discredit the action but likely bring down a catastrophic police response. 

As a result of that meticulous planning and organization thousands of African American citizens rallied at 59th Street beginning at noon on July 28.  By the one pm starting time, they were organized into perfectly organized ranks, long rows of marchers stretched across the street and spaced rank after rank in order that would have been the envy of any military parade.   They fell in behind an American flag and a line of dignitaries, clergymen, and leaders with Du Bois and Johnson font and center. 

The parade swung smartly south on 5th Avenue, the broad main thoroughfare leading to the heart of Manhattan’s fashionable districts.  That was the same route taken by the 1915 Women’s Suffrage Parade organized by Carrie Chapman Catt and the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and event that helped inspire this march and upon which it was partly modeled. 

Women in the march wore white for the innocence of violence victims but the clothes were also an echo of Suffrage marchers.

Behind the leaders were rank upon rank of women and children decked out in white representing the purity and innocence of the victims of the riots.  It was also a tip of the hat to the Suffragists who marched in white and was a symbolic linking of both struggles for the dignity of full citizenship rights.  Behind them came the men in their best black or somber colored suits.  The black was mourning for the victims.  The attitude was reserved dignity belying stereotypes of ragged idlers, ignorant laborers, and violent predators.  All marched in total and perfect silence. 

Some carried professionally painted placards and banners with messages like: 

Your hands are full of blood. 

Thou Shalt Not Kill 

Mothers, do lynchers go to heaven? 

We have fought for the liberty of white Americans in six wars; our reward was East St. Louis. 

Police turned out in force, lining the parade route with batons in hand or exposed from under their long coats.  They were told to expect violence from the marchers and had orders to disperse them at the first sign of trouble.  Behind them large crowds thronged the sidewalks.  Supporters and virulent opponents of the Parade were both out but were probably outnumbered by the curious and bewildered.  Amid some cheers, curses and occasional objects were hurled at the marchers as they passed by stoically. 

The men of the Parade in black and dignified somber business apparel. 

The silence was finally broken with cheers by supporters when the parade ended at Madison Square.  There was no rally or fancy oration.  Du Boise, Johnson, and some of the clergy were interviewed quietly by the press. 

Reactions in that press varied from outright hostility to mockery in many cases.  But some were impressed by the solemn dignity of the event.  The New York Times wrote, “one of the most quiet and orderly demonstrations ever witnessed.” 

Was anything accomplished?  Not immediately.  The Wilson administration never acknowledged the protest and continued to vigorously pursue it segregationist policies even as it deployed Black troops to France and relied on Black workers in the humming defense industries and in agricultural production.  Both lynchings and race riots continued, and the pace accelerated after the war as troops returned home and competed for jobs in a post-war slump.  1919 would be a banner year for race riots in cities like Chicago.  The revived Ku Klux Klan became an open power not only in the Old South but in Northern States like Indiana where it nearly took of state government. 

On the other hand, Black communities across the country took enormous pride in the event and many were inspired to action.  The civil rights approach of the NAACP gained support over the militant separatism of Marcus Garvey.  As an organization, it grew and prospered and added chapters, including those in the South.   It would be the primary civil rights organization until a new movement arose after World War II. 

Black Lives Matter marches like this one are a legacy of the Silent March.  

Chad Williams, Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies at Brandeis University and the author of Torchbearers of Democracy wrote of the long-term significance in a Miami Herald op-ed on the 100th anniversary of the Parade in 2017: 

The “Silent Protest Parade” marked the beginning of a new epoch in the long black freedom struggle. While adhering to a certain politics of respectability, a strategy employed by African-Americans that focused on countering racist stereotypes through dignified appearance and behavior, the protest, within its context, constituted a radical claiming of the public sphere and a powerful affirmation of black humanity. It declared that a “New Negro” had arrived and launched a black public protest tradition that would be seen in the parades of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s and the Black Lives Matter marches of today.