1/Down the research rabbit hole today. It’s good sometimes to be a non-linear thinker. Am studying two African American families who lived in a segregated district of a medium-sized Southern city between 1880 and 1915.
2/The patriarch of one family was the son of a formerly enslaved woman & an unnamed white man. He had been a professor of Latin & Greek at two HBCUs, then a school principal, while getting his MA & LLB. He then became a chief clerk in the Railway Mail Service - one of the few
3/civil service opportunities for black men by 1880 (as Jim Crow crept across the South). The other patriarch, his neighbor, had been born a free man of color in Indiana but was raised in the South. After serving in the Navy, he went to the city & opened a bakery.
4/In reading about the district the families lived in, I came across a reference to successful black-owned businesses there. Two banks, 4 pharmacies, 2 realtors, a theater, and a bakery earned $30K in 1908. Could that be the patriarch’s bakery?
5/I put a few words in the search engine...It was surely that bakery! The business & its owner were profiled in the (white-owned) city paper in glowing (but nevertheless horribly racist) terms. In 1898, the bakery could produce up to 3,000 loaves of bread a day. It was delivered
6/to 32 towns in 2 states. The owner was popular with children; if he accompanied a driver on residential deliveries, he gave away little cakes. By 1905, he had added a restaurant. Booker T. Washington visited the bakery and the patriarch’s home, & wrote about them.
7/Sadly, the bakery burned down twice. According to family members, the baker couldn’t recoup the second loss. He, his wife, & their adult adopted daughter joined the earliest trickle of the Great Migration and headed north. His nephew, who had lived w/him, did as well.
8/This is all deep background for the specific interest I have in the families. The baker’s nephew married the professor’s second daughter; the nephew and his sister-in-law are my real subjects.
9/But knowing all this gave me much better insight into who the families were, how they might have seen themselves, and what may have motivated them to do things they did./END
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