Strange Fruit

Feb. 1, 1907
Los Angeles

I was all set to write about Leroyxez, “The Human Pincushion,” being nailed to a cross promptly at 4 p.m. at Chutes Park, and then a story about lynching in the U.S. caught my eye.

Year	Number of Lynchings
1901	135
1902	36
1903	104
1904	87
1905	65
1906	73

Of the 73 victims for 1906, all but four were African American men, the exceptions being an African American woman and three white men, according to the wire story from the Washington Post.

State	Number of Lynchings
Mississippi	13 (down from 20 in 1905)
Georgia	9
Louisiana	9
Florida	6
Texas	6
Alabama	5
North Carolina	5
South Carolina	5
Arkansas	4
Kentucky	3
Missouri	3
Tennessee	2
Indian Territory	1
Maryland	1
Colorado	1

Triple lynchings were conducted in Georgia, North Carolina and Missouri. The alleged crimes including stealing a silver dollar and stealing a calf (both in Louisiana), carrying a loaded pistol, petty robbery, improper proposals, miscegenation, criminal assault, assault and murder, attempted murder, murder and robbery, double murder, quadruple murder and quintuple murder. One victim was lynched for allegedly attacking three white women in one afternoon, the story says.

In the case of R.T. Rogers, one of three whites lynched in 1906, the mob chartered a train from Monroe, La., to Tallulah. His case had been in the courts for two years and eight months on charges that he killed a business rival.

J.V. Johnson, a white man, was lynched in North Carolina while awaiting a new trial after the jury deadlocked on whether he was guilty of killing his brother.

The third white man, Lawrence Leberg, “a tramp,” was hanged from a telephone pole in Las Animas, Colo., for allegedly killing a farmer who had befriended him.

“One victim was shot and the corpse burned; two were shot while they cowered in their cells, the mobs firing from outside the prisons; four were hanged and burned; two hanged and shot; 21 shot in the open; and 42 hanged,” The Times says, leaving us to wonder about the final victim.

There is no further information on the woman who was lynched.

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The Changing Face of the City

Jan. 17, 1907
Los Angeles

On a trip from Utah to visit his daughter, H.E. Gibson keeps getting lost as he wanders around Los Angeles. No, it’s not because Gibson is 80, for his mind is still sharp. It’s because he hasn’t been back since 1848 and things have changed just a bit.

Even the old familiar landmark of Ft. Hill is covered with homes, he says. About the only spot in town he recognizes is the Plaza, where he keeps returning to get his bearings.

Gibson came to California with the “Flash Emigrant Colony” to establish Mormon settlements. The group couldn’t raise the money to buy Rancho Cucamonga, so they bought a parcel of land in San Bernardino, The Times says.

Land was “dirt cheap” in 1848, with entire blocks selling for $500 to $1,000, ($9,910.34-$19,820.69 USD 2005), Gibson said. But instead of becoming a real estate speculator, he left for Utah to bring the news (published in a New York newspaper that came around the Horn) proclaiming that Brigham Young had been appointed governor of the Utah Territory.

Note: Today presented a difficult decision, but I passed on some incredibly offensive caricatures of an African American who had been arrested, accompanied by quotes in dialect: “Ah dunno nothin’ about no stolen chickens” indeed.

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A Gruesome First

Dec. 27, 1907
Henryetta, Okla., by the Associated Press

A little more than a month after Oklahoma achieved statehood, James Garden became a wretched statistic: the first black to be lynched there.

On Dec. 24, Garden went to see liveryman Albert Bates about renting a rig. When Bates refused, Garden accused him of racism, went across the street to get a gun, returned and shot Bates to death.

By nightfall, a group of 100 men stormed the jail, fought off police officers and hanged Garden from a telegraph pole in the center of town, then used his body for target practice, riddling it with bullets.

“All the Negroes in Henryetta are terrorized and more than 100 came from there to Muskogee tonight,” The Times says.

The strife continued and there were fears that another lynching would touch off a race war. On Christmas Day, a mob stormed the jail a second time and tried to take “a one-eyed Negro named Smith, charged with inciting Garden to commit the crime,” The Times says. However the sheriff took Smith and Jim Johnson, who gave Garden a rifle, to Okmulgee before they could be lynched.

On Dec. 26, The Times reported that the white men of Henryetta had been sworn as deputies and armed themselves in response to reports that an armed band of 35 heavily armed African Americans were en route to seek revenge. There were “only 1,290 rounds of ammunition in the city,” The Times said, enough to shoot each member of the alleged black band 36 times.

Unfortunately, The Times (or AP) didn’t follow this incident, so there’s no telling what happened. But we in Los Angeles need not feel so superior to those in the raw, new state of Oklahoma. A quick check of Proquest shows that a lynching was narrowly avoided at Towne and 8th Street in 1906 after H. Whitfield of 907 W. 28th St., bit off the ear of Fritz Gustavson, 925 Crocker St., during a fight.

Whitfield’s life was saved by Deputy Constable Dennis Johnson, who arrested Whitfield and blockaded himself and his prisoner in a barbershop at 8th Street and San Julian until the police wagon arrived, despite threats from a mob that they would burn down the shop if Johnson did not turn over the black, who was soaked with a white man’s blood.

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Knocking at the Bar

Dec. 25, 1907
Los Angeles

There are precisely two African American attorneys in Los Angeles and their appearance against one another in court provides a bit of amusement for The Times. We can dispense with the news article and its unfortunate use of dialect rather quickly: Paul M. Nash was suing G.T. Crawford, an African American waiter, for attorneys fees after representing his wife in a divorce. Crawford was represented by Charles S. Darden.

Like most mainstream newspapers of the period, The Times rarely wrote about African Americans and stories always identified them as: “John Jones, Negro,” (or in this case, “Paul Nash, a colored man”) a habit that lasted well into the 1940s.

One of the rare occasions when The Times wrote about blacks occurred on the anniversary of Lincoln’s birthday in 1909, when the paper took stock of African American professionals in the city, counting five physicians, two dentists, five lawyers, a pharmacist, three newsmen and a veterinarian.

The story, which also mentions attorneys G.W. Wickliffe, I.D. Blair and W.E. Coleman, provides the following biographies on Darden and Nash:

Darden was born in North Carolina and graduated from Wayland Seminary. He attended Howard University, graduating from its law school in 1904. Darden settled in Los Angeles in 1905 after traveling through the U.S. and the Territory of Hawaii. “He has practiced before the United States District Courts and the State Supreme Court,” The Times says. “Mr. Darden has been promoter for several enterprises among the colored people and at present is president of an insurance company conducted for and by them.”

Nash was born in St. Louis, Mo., and attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., Harvard and Boston University Law School. At Harvard, “Mr. Nash became editor and publisher of two of the university publications and this was the first time this honor had been bestowed upon a Negro,” The Times says. Nash came to Los Angeles in 1905. “He has confined his efforts almost exclusively to civil practice and few lawyers have made the showing that Mr. Nash has in the same length of time,” The Times says.

There are times when history is ugly and this is one of those times. In August 1931, Gov. James Rolph Jr. denied reports that in filling judicial posts, he had selected Nash for the Superior Court, although he conceded that he was seriously considering Nash for an appointment.

In November 1932, Rolph said “he felt the selection of a Negro judge ‘would give the people of Los Angeles a chance to see if they want a colored judge.’ The judge would serve about four months,” the time remaining in the term of a judge who had been elevated to Superior Court. The Times noted that Fred Roberts, the Assembly’s only black legislator, was opposed to creating a court specifically for African Americans.

A week later, Rolph abandoned plans to name a black judge, saying: “In good faith, when the question was presented to me I believed it could be amicably adjusted. But it is evident that it cannot.” Rolph, citing President Coolidge, said: “I believe the people will have to establish the precedents. It is not for me to establish the precedents.”

In 1933, Nash ran for Municipal Court judge against Francis D. Adams and Clement D. Nye, the winning candidate, who was backed by The Times.

The record on Darden is even more obscure. In 1911, The Times noted that he was named to the executive committee of the National Negro Bar Assn., and hoped to organize a Los Angeles bar among the eight black attorneys practically locally. He is mentioned in 1916, when he helped incorporate the Fraternal Order of Beavers. And in 1933, he brought a lawsuit after hitting an escaped horse on the highway between Oxnard and Camarillo, charging that the owner was negligent in not keeping the animal confined.

Paul M. Nash, 3211 W. 17th, died Jan. 26, 1937, at the age of 67., and was cremated. Although he had a paid notice, The Times did not run an obituary on him.

Charles Sylvester Darden died March 12, 1954. He was 74. His death was never mentioned in The Times.

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An Artist Makes His Point

Oct. 18, 1907
Los Angeles

For the last month, the pages of The Times have been peppered with pen-and-ink cartoons signed Gale—in fact some of them have already appeared in the blog, with Nathan’s post on Japanese hobos and mine on Marco Vessella. But that was only the beginning. By the end of the month, Gale’s cartoons have become a regular feature of The Times, usually paired with text by Harry Carr. Gale specializes in ethnic caricatures: Chinamen with long queues, bucktoothed Japanese, Mexicans with sombreros—and don’t even ask how he draws African Americans.

His name was Edmund Waller Gale, but he was known as Ted or “Cartoonist Gale” and he was an institution at The Times, drawing editorial cartoons for decades, on an irregular basis before they became a daily feature in 1922.

“I am not an artist,” he said in 1933.”I never thought I was and never tried to be one. The first work I ever did was cartooning and in this work it is the idea, not the drawing, that counts. Once I get my idea, my day’s work is practically done, for I put it on paper as fast as I can. I often spend six or eight hours figuring out my subject and one hour doing the drawing. I don’t think the actually task of transferring an idea to paper ever took me more than three hours.”

One of Gale’s more enduring creations was “Miss Los Angeles,” an attractive young Latina that provoked a great deal of criticism at one time, mostly for his inattention to detail.

“Funny how fussy people are about drawing, even in cartoons,” he said. “I really didn’t go through any brainstorms when I created Miss Los Angeles. I just dashed off a girl of a Spanish type to typify this part of the country and imagine my discomfiture when her appearance was greeted with a shower of sarcastic letters, informing me that no Spanish lady wore a bullfighter’s vest and a bolero and that the high comb was entirely wrong and the lady was just the same as nude unless I added a mantilla.” I’ll leave it to another historian to trace the history of Miss Los Angeles from Anglo to Latina. Here’s one version from 1929.

A left-handed Santa Claus (he claimed he didn’t even notice) and flags with the wrong number of stars and stripes were also Gale’s bugaboos. “Thousands of people seem to have nothing to do but count the stars and stripes and their ideas of what constitutes an insult to the colors is simply beyond belief,” he said.

Of his first cartoons, he said: “Times have changed a lot since those early days and the style of cartoons has altered too. Nowadays public opinion is molded rather than led and there is little or none of the vicious element that was deemed essential in the cartoons of former years.”

Gale quit The Times in 1934 in a disagreement over its editorial policies and went to the competing Examiner. He died in 1975.

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Unsportsmanlike Conduct

Oct. 17, 1907
Los Angeles

Mr. Woolin, left tackle of the USC team, took great exception to be tackled by one of the black players on the Whittier State team (one of Whittier’s five black players) and voiced his displeasure, emphasizing his point with his fist.

Whittier’s coach, Mr. McLouth, rushed to intervene, whereupon Mr. Woolin further expressed his disdain by striking him in the face. Coach McLouth responded in kind. Peace was eventually restored until Whittier’s water boy came onto the field and retaliated against Mr. Woolin, and had the Whittier team not retreated from the field, the unpleasantness might have continued.

As the score was 37-0 in favor of USC and the visiting Whittier team needed to catch the streetcar home, the game was halted 15 minutes into the second half.


Here’s to Brice Union Taylor, who in 1925 became USC’s first All-American player. He was later a pastor at First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles. By the way, he only had one hand.



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The Curious Dreamer

Oct. 5, 1907
Los Angeles

Hilliard Stricklin is a man with an urgent desire to do something for his fellow African Americans. He says that he came to Los Angeles from Chattanooga, Tenn., about 1895 with a few dollars in his pocket, worked hard and saved his money until he opened a grocery store at 2053 Santa Fe Ave.

What he wants most is to build a facility for the elderly and for orphaned children, naming it the Stricklin Memorial Home for the Aged in honor of his mother.

Two years earlier, Stricklin bought the old Pertinico Winery on Vermont Avenue just south of Pico, paying about $10,000 ($205,235.70 USD 2005). The white neighbors in Pico Heights assumed Stricklin was bluffing with his talk about helping the elderly until the day piles of lumber and a crowd of workmen appeared on the site.

And then they were furious at the idea. Neighbors accused Stricklin of extorting an extravagant price for the property under the threat of bringing blacks into the area.

[Warning: Dialect ahead]

“Followed numerous interviews with Stricklin,” The Times said. “Citizens expressed themselves vigorously. Stricklin sorry that they didn’t like his plans; but somehow the site just seemed to suit him and he kind o’ thought the ol’ folks could be real comfo’ble out there. Reckoned he’d just go ’long with the work.

“Citizens stormed; but Stricklin calmly squinted at the frame of the structure and dropped remarks about the great need of charity and the good he hoped the memorial home would do his brethren and sisters.

“Finally, a great light seemed to dawn. Hilliard Stricklin conceived the idea—remarkable feat—that perhaps the white people of the neighborhood would like to buy him out!”

In fact, according to Mayor Harper, Stricklin made a modest profit on the property, selling it for $13,000. His plan was to duplicate the Vermont Avenue building “in a quarter where it appropriately belongs,” according to The Times.

The location, however, is vague. Some stories say it was at Alamo and Santa Fe, while another lists Alma and St. Elmo, just off Santa Fe, but unfortunately I can’t locate either of them on any of my old maps, which only go back to the 1930s.

Stricklin took out ads for his second project and raised money, but nothing ever came of it except for a lawsuit by the guardian of one of his donors accusing Stricklin of fraud.

“The founder appears to be in hard luck,” The Times said. “His little grocery store at No. 2053 Santa Fe Ave. is tied up under an attachment. He is very discouraged over the collapse of his pet scheme. He lays the blame on poor solicitors but admits his lack of business judgment.”

“If a home for colored people is ever established,” The Time said, “it is believed it will be necessary to purchase ground outside the city limits. To establish such an institution in any residential part of the city would meet with strong opposition from property owners.”

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History Deals a Deadly Hand

May 12, 1907

We’ve been having fun all week with the Shriners, parading around in their costumes, engaging in peculiar rites and pondering silly questions like “What Makes the Wildcat Wild?” Then in a moment, a train wreck at Honda north of Point Conception transforms everything.

The engineer, Fred Champlain, ran three-quarters of a mile to the nearest ranch house for help even though he had a broken arm from being throw 40 feet from the wreck.

He told The Times that the engine hit a switch in the tracks. While the front of the locomotive stopped, the force lifted the rear so that the dining car was driven underneath the locomotive while the baggage car was thrown on top of the engine. The dining car, filled to capacity, split in half so that the passengers were scalded with steam from the engine. Others were buried under luggage and driven through the floor of the baggage car. Fortunately, a water tank for the engine was nearby, allowing survivors to fight the blaze that quickly broke out in the railroad cars.

“When Miss Cora Young of Cleveland was taken from the shattered diner she was still living but frightfully burned. Her entire body had been bathed in boiling water and when women passengers removed her corsets, the imprint of the staves was left deep in the scalded flesh,” The Times said.

“George F. Hagerman of Reading, Pa., refused help after being dragged from the wreck. “I’m dying,” he told his fellow Shriners. “Go help the women.”

One of the more heartbreaking stories involves newlyweds L.N. Ellenbogen and his wife, who were thrown to the ground on opposite sides of a car.

“Tell my wife that I am all right,” Ellenbogen said to Dr. Ware of Cincinnati, the first doctor on the scene. “Give her my love and let me know how she is.”

“Mrs. Ellenbogen, in return, sent a message of love to her husband with the assurance that she was all right. Before the physician could carry another message both had passed away,” The Times said.

The Times reported the final death toll at 32, although it looks more like 31. In addition to the Shriners, the crash killed the fireman, the brakeman, the conductor and one man who is only identified as African American.

Lmharnisch.com

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L.A. Historians Clearing House

A researcher writes to say that he is looking for images to accompany a book on African American Los Angeles in the 1940s. I always recommend the following sites for online images of Los Angeles:

• Archive Org/Wayback Machine
  
• California Heritage Collection, Bancroft Library
  
• Delmar Watson Archives
  
• Google images
  
• City of Los Angeles Photo Archives
  
• City of Los Angeles Archives
  
• Library of Congress—American Memory
  
• Los Angeles, Panoramic Photos (The Library of Congress also has an ephemera collection).
  
• Los Angeles High School
  
• Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection
  
• Online Archive of California, California State Library (This includes the Daily News archive at UCLA).
  
• USC archive
  
• USC Regional History Center

Texts

• 19th Century Periodicals(Digitized (ends at 1901, but still useful).

Note: Even if you don’t find what you’re looking for (and you probably will) I guarantee you’ll have a fascinating chat with Delmar Watson. My experience has always been that news photographers go everywhere and know everybody.

If you have any other suggestions, post a comment (moderated, remember).

I’m always happy to help other researchers. Everyone has certainly been helpful to me.

Blogging the Wolfe Book, Loyalty

Just out of curiosity, I did a Google image search for “loyalty.” I got Johnny Cash flipping the bird (turned into a mock motivational poster); another poster for the Army on its values; a picture of a dog, a huge tattoo reading “Love” and “Loyalty” featuring rosary beads, a cross and other Christian symbols; James Montgomery Flagg’s famous World War I recruiting poster of Uncle Sam; a boomerang; and a couple of ships.

A search for “loyal” brought up a company’s logo; an image of the Boy Scouts; and the cover to Tupac Shakur’s “Loyal to the Game.”

Why am I trying to illustrate loyalty? Because I’m a very lucky man. Lucky because I get to attend the gatherings of two groups whom I respect very much: Retired Los Angeles police officers and retired Los Angeles Times reporters and editors. These are two groups of extremely fine men (and they are mostly men, given the professions and the era) and despite what you might expect, they are very much alike.

Both groups have drinks before lunch, which is a pleasant but not particularly distinguished meal, there’s a little business and a few announcements, a moment of silence for the recently departed and then a speaker. The retired officers say the Pledge of Allegiance, the retired reporters don’t. There’s a little more socializing and then they clear the room.

There’s many other things they share, but what struck me especially, as I attended the retired officers’ luncheon yesterday, was loyalty—loyalty to one another, loyalty to the department (or The Times) and most of all loyalty to the profession.

There are many reasons people become police officers (or reporters) and I don’t think anybody goes into either profession to get rich. Both professions, despite their many differences, require a dedication to integrity and indeed that’s exactly what I have found with both groups. Are there bull sessions? You bet. But what comes through again and again is professionalism and dedication.

I was reminded of that again yesterday when my host told me he was once assigned to ride with an officer who had been transferred over his role in “Bloody Christmas.” My friend told me he rode with this officer for two days, then went to the lieutenant and asked to be reassigned to another partner. He didn’t want to ride with the man because he was too prone to violence.

The reason I’m talking about all of this is because of the portrayals of several figures in the Black Dahlia case: former Chiefs Thad Brown and William H. Parker, and former Capt. Jack Donahoe, who was head of homicide during the Black Dahlia investigation. It is difficult to find three more respected men in the department and until Steve Hodel’s “Black Dahlia Avenger” came along, you never heard a bad word about any of them.

There are certainly those who have a different view of Parker. One of the singular moments of my life was interviewing the late U.S. District Judge David Williams, the first African American federal judge west of the Mississippi, who called Parker “the king of bastards as far as the black community was concerned.”

But among police officers who knew him, Parker is always given the highest respect and admiration, as are Brown and Donahoe. And quite frankly, these retirees take the corruption and cover-up charges against Parker, Brown and Donahoe in “Black Dahlia Avenger” and the other Black Dahlia books as a deep, personal insult. They are nothing less than furious.

Page 33

“Although many former LAPD Homicide detectives, including Harry Hansen, long ago conceded that the murderer was deceased, up until the end of the twentieth century, the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office continued to refuse the release of Elizabeth Short’s autopsy report, claiming that this public document was being retained because the case was unsolved. Yet, there is not another cold-case homicide on record in Los Angeles in which the autopsy report has not been made available to the public.”

OK, first of all does the LAPD concede that Elizabeth Short’s killer is dead? These detectives were sharp men and always left themselves a way out. They will always qualify it by saying “probably” dead. Considering the number of surviving World War II veterans, it would be illogical to assume conclusively and absolutely that the murderer is dead. He may well be. But we don’t know definitively.

I’m not sure Hansen specifically addresses the issue in the 1971 feature in The Times. Let’s check.

Ah, what’s this? Remember when we talked about: “The fact that the body had been bisected by someone with advanced surgical knowledge was never disclosed at the time and the withholding of this vital information led to a misconception of the crime by both the press and the public that has been perpetuated for decades.”

And what does the 1971 Times profile of Harry Hansen say? “Most bizarre of all was that the corpse had been occupationally bisected and scrubbed clean, points which gave rise to later speculation that the killer had to have possessed more than a passing knowledge of surgery.”

Oops.

And what do we find in Hansen profile? Exactly what I said.

Voila:

“While he was on the case, Hansen refused to speculate either way, saying he preferred facts to suppositions. But, today, so many years after the fact, Hansen does permit himself the subjective luxury of his own opinion.

“It’s fairly realistic to figure the killer is no longer alive. By now, he would have done something, said something, that would have attracted attention. If he is still alive, he’s got it made unless he slips up and blows it. That’s a lot of years that’ve gone by; it would be hard now to go back and dig up new witnesses, new evidence.”

I have to go. In the meantime, let’s play a game: You tell me how many autopsies of unsolved, cold cases have been released in Los Angeles County; cold cases in which no suspect has ever been identified. Wolfe makes it sound routine, but offhand, I’d say the number is few to none.

Shout out to:

Dark Horse Comics (70.96.128.8)

University of Michigan Medical Center (141.214.17.5)

Nashua, N.H. (24.63.32.220)

Hurry back!