USA > Pennsylvania > Lycoming County > Picture of Lycoming County, Vol. 2 > Part 16
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TIOGA
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Salladasburg
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Daniel Hughes
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Daniel Hughes house, Freedom Road, Williamsport
Pennsdale. Others were hidden at the Bull's Head Tavern, now the House of Many Stairs, and the Wolf Run House. The McCarty-Wertman house in Muncy also shielded many slaves.
In the decade preceding the Civil War, the slave issue be- came so intense, particularly in Nigger Hollow, that many free blacks and abolitionists were forced to abandon their properties and flee to Canada. The local routes of the Underground Railroad became such common knowledge that throughout the Civil War they remained tourist spots. Le- gends were told of hand hewn furniture in caves on the Daniel Hughes property and mysterious disappearances of slave catchers.
When Fort Sumter was fired upon on April 12, 1861, the people of the county were excited at the prospect of war. However, the war was clearly being fought to preserve the Union so that blacks viewed it as an interruption in their battle to end slavery.
Blacks were not permitted to enlist in the Union Army until President Lincoln reversed that decision after two years of petitioning by blacks and abolitionists who wished to strike a direct blow at slavery. The reversal came through the Emancipation Proclamation which freed slaves living in seceded states and permitted the enlistment of blacks into a segregated army. Approximately 180,000 blacks from across the country joined the Union forces, effectively siphoning the power of the Confederate Army and spreading confusion throughout the South. At least fifteen blacks from Lycoming County joined the 8th United States Colored Troops organized from a five-county area. A few more from the county joined forces in other states.
THE VOTE -- A STEP TOWARD EQUALITY
When the Pennsylvania State Constitution was amended in 1837-38, disenfranchising the black male, blacks in Ly- coming County were frustrated. Though they had not been eligible to vote, eligibility was determined by local au- thorities, and blacks in at least seven other counties had been exercising the vote. From 1838 to 1870, blacks in Pennsylvania labored to reclaim the right that they had exercised in some counties for 47 years.
There was fear in the county that if blacks won the right to vote, they could at some time hold the balance of power. In the midst of increasing migration of blacks from the South, the fear that blacks might gain political control became very real. After all, the case which had prompted the amendment to the constitution in 1838 was an election in Bucks County in which the black vote determined the outcome. Democrats, wishing to win the election over the
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Whigs, petitioned the State Supreme Court to void the black vote. Before a decision was reached the amendment was passed.
Frederick Douglass, fighting tirelessly for black equality and suffrage, campaigned in Williamsport in 1867. On No- vember 14, Douglass spoke at Doebler Hall on the corner of West Fourth and Pine streets. In his first speech he out- lined his "simple plan for elevating the Negro." He asked that blacks be let alone to forge their own position in society, that they be given a fair chance. Douglass asked "If you see him going to school, let him alone. If you see him going into a mechanic shop to learn a trade, let him alone. If you see him going into a railroad car, let him alone. If you see him going to the ballot box, let him alone. Give him a chance and let him work out his own position."
To blacks Douglass said, "Steady persevering work is the only road to greatness .... Nature does the most for them that use the best means." In a speech the following day, Douglass condemned the federal government for dragging its feet in suffrage legislation. He said "A man's rights rest in three boxes. The ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box. Let no man be kept from the ballot box be- cause of his color. Let no woman be kept from the ballot box because of her sex."
After thirty-two years of protest and campaigning, blacks finally won the right to vote when on March 31, 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution was ratified. Blacks across the state organized celebrations to be held on April 26, the official day of celebration de- clared by the Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League. In Williamsport hundreds of people lined the city streets to watch a procession of forty-one carriages and buggies, people carrying banners, and costumed marchers. The pro- cession was led by the Boyer's Coronet Band, hired from Baltimore after Milt B. Repasz refused to lead the William- sport Repasz Band in the parade under any circumstances.
One carriage carried speakers -- E. W. Capron, editor and publisher of the Daily and Weekly Bulletin and the West Branch Bulletin, and Abraham Updegraff, president of the First National Bank of Williamsport and former Underground Railroad conductor. J. B. G. Kinsloe, a fellow editor and publisher with Capron, and Cornelius Gilchrist, a mulatto laborer rode with them. A carriage followed carrying aging suffragists -- Simon Gilchrist, an 82-year-old mulatto laborer; George Roach, a 72-year-old black man who ran a boarding house; William Butler, a 76-year-old black laborer; and Henry and George Snyder, founders of
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5
SCHIN
Sawdust war in 1872
Blacks on sawmill crew
Bethune-Douglass Community Center (former Emery School)
UL MUSSINA
HARDWARE
Suffrage parade in 1872
Snyder Brothers foundry.
In another wagon, little girls sitting around the Goddess of Liberty waved flags bearing the names of states that had ratified the Fifteenth Amendment. Pairs of men and women carried banners which read "Equal Rights!" "Free Suggrage!" and "Virtue, Liberty, and Independence!" When the procession ended, three and one half hours later, speeches were given by E. W. Capron and Abraham Updegraff.
Capron stated, "We are here to celebrate a day when the Negro, freed and enfranchised, can hold up his head and say 'I am no longer a slave. I am a man. I can take the ballot in my hand and march to the polls, and there count as much as the president, or as any man in the world' ."
Updegraff followed: "Fellow citizens ... remember my dear friends the price with which this boon has been purchased." Following the speeches, a ball was held in Holden's Hall in Williamsport.
In many areas of the country, the vote gave blacks the balance of power, making them pawns in a political game to win their vote. Republicans and Democrats reminded blacks of the civil rights which they had been instrumental in gaining and demanded their support in return. Blacks in Lycoming County were aware that the promises of civil rights were only token concessions offered to win the black vote. In reality, the strength of de facto segregation in the latter part of the century actually set back the civil rights of blacks.
Angered by political manipulation and feeling powerless to / determine their direction nine black men from Williamsport banded together as publishers of the Informant, a weekly newspaper aimed at informing blacks about issues concern- ing them. In its first issue on November 9, 1889, the Informant vowed that blacks would never again be a mere "anatomized body to stuff ballot boxes .... If a Negro de- sires to be looked upon as a citizen, not as a mere voter, he must begin to think and act for himself."
The publishers were enraged when Republican politicians in Williamsport blamed their defeat in the November 1889 elec- tion on "the 'd niggers' of the city who did not vote as they wished them to." They resented the liberal and pa- tronizing use of the word "our" when referring to blacks. Though the number of issues published can not be determined, a single issue is evidence of the blacks' stand against political manipulation.
The publishers were: W. C. Henderson, Thomas Thornton, and William Thomas, all laborers; James Payne and Morton
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Puller, teamsters; George Thornton, coachman; William East, an engineer at the Park Hotel; Jackson Tyler, a butler; and John Straughter, whose occupation could not be deter- mined.
BLACKS AND FORMAL EDUCATION
In 1819, Henrietta Graham and Sarah Hepburn opened the Union Sunday School, an integrated, co-educational school spon- sored by the Methodist and Presbyterian churches in William- sport. Most of the fewer than two hundred blacks lived out- side of Williamsport but walked several miles to attend the school in the old Academy at the corner of West and West Third streets. Many children walked through fields and along little-used dirt roads from as far away as Blooming Grove in order to attend the school.
When the enrollment grew too large for the two women to handle alone, some men were persuaded to open a separate boy's school, but after only six months the school failed because the male teachers had lost interest in the school. The boys were so often without teachers that the women teachers at the Union School were obliged to take them back under their care. Daniel Grafius, the school treasurer, was so furious when he arrived one morning and found no teachers, that he called the boys outside and hurled the treasure box over their heads sending them scrambling after the scattered coins.
Wilson Finley, a black student who attended the boys' school around 1824, was later elected senator in Liberia, an African colony to many of the black Americans emigrating during the "back to Africa" movement of the early 1800's.
After seven years, sectarian rivalry split the Union Sunday School in separate Methodist and Presbyterian schools, leaving the black students without a school. To continue their education, Sarah Hepburn, Lucy Putnam, and Martha Grier taught them in the homes of various black families.
In 1834, Pennsylvania passed the Free School Act which pro- vided a tuition-free education to all students. Under the Free School Act of 1834, black students were to be accepted at any school at which they presented themselves; however, with mounting pressure from voters opposing the school tax, legislators hesitated to force integration lest they de- stroy the fragile school system. Rather than integrate the schools, black students were taught in rented rooms by teachers who sometimes knew little more than the students.
In 1850, blacks in Williamsport petitioned the school board to admit black students into the school system. The school board responded by hiring a teacher and granting
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twenty-one dollars for the rental of a school room. The teacher was required to accept all black students and to contract for the room, fuel, stove, and everything except benches. Although male teachers were paid twenty-five dollars a term, C. S. Gilchrist, a mulatto male, was paid the lower eighteen-dollar salary provided for female teach- ers. In 1869, Anne M. Watson taught a class of black stu- dents on Mill Street.
With the voters' opposition to the school tax increasing, the survival of the school system was uncertain. In order to ease the tension, the Free School Act of 1854 was passed which provided for separate schools for blacks and whites whenever possible. When fewer than twenty black students were enrolled in the schools, they were to be admitted to white schools.
By 1873, there was a sufficient number of black students in Williamsport to justify the construction of a black school. In that year, the Hepburn Street School was built between Canal and West Third streets. It operated until 1881 when a law was passed eliminating segregation in the schools of Pennsylvania. Several petitions had been sent to the Pennsylvania Senate from Williamsport urging the passage of the Act of 1881 and asking for the abolition of "all distinctions of race or color in the common schools of the state. "
Following the desegregation of Williamsport Schools, black students attended schools within their district. The black community fell primarily within the borders of the Curtin, Stevens, and Emery School Districts. In later years, the Emery School was unofficially called the "colored school. "
Though the students within the district were integrated, black teachers were generally not permitted to teach white students. In 1909, Lila M. Fisher began teaching black students at Transeau School in grades one through four. A room was set aside in the Emery School building for the black students and their teacher. In 1938, when Emery School closed due to declining enrollment, Miss Fisher was transferred to Transeau School where she continued to teach segregated classes one through four until her retire- ment in 1948-49. Segregation in the schools of Lycoming County ended with her retirement.
HOUSING
Following the Civil War the hundreds of blacks who had emigrated to Lycoming County began to settle in Williamsport in search of employment, housing, and security. The per- centage of Lycoming County blacks living in Williamsport
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rose sharply in the last half of the nineteenth century. In 1850, only 61 of the 364 blacks in the county lived in Williamsport. By 1880, 762 of the 897 blacks in the county lived in Williamsport.
Forced by segregation and economics, blacks settled along the Susquehanna River in older houses amid the saw mills and railroad yards. The settlement was not ideal in its location, but it did permit easy access to employment in mills, shops, homes, and city services. Blacks lived pri- marily on Mill, Filbert, Gilmore, Wilson, and East Jeffer- son streets. A few pockets of black families lived at Kaiser's Springs in what is now Duboistown and on Freedom Road, a mile north of Market Square.
On June 5, 1889, the flood which brought an end to the great lumbering era, also destroyed the black settlement. More than 150 million feet of lumber, set loose from the boom at Lock Haven, crashed into homes at the lower end of the city turning them upside down, ripping them from their foundations, and crushing many of them to kindling. Many people were stranded on rooftops and in trees. One black man from Newberry rowed in a boat for two days res- cuing stranded people in Williamsport. The devastation brought by the flood pushed the black settlement north of the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks at Erie Avenue.
Stymied by the strength of de facto segregation, the black community has remained solidly entrenched in the same area. A half century later, the increasing delapidation of the homes in the black community brought public concern. Homes on Cherry Street and Erie Avenue were particularly delapi- dated, many more than one hundred years old. Trains stopping to be stoked in the adjacent railroad yard spewed a thick blanket of smoke over the entire neighborhood. In 1951, houses on Cherry Street and Erie Avenue between Hepburn and Walnut streets were razed to make room for the Peter Herdic Housing Project, a thirty-six.unit complex. Although it provided badly needed housing, its location on the same site rather than in a white neighborhood, per- petuated segregation of the black community.
In 1971, in order to end the perpetuation of segregated housing, blacks protested the location of the Roundhouse Housing Project on Erie Avenue and Walnut streets. Blacks filed a complaint through the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, which charged that the city of Williamsport, the Planning Commission, the Redevelopment Authority, and the Housing Authority had "committed and continue to com- mit unlawful discriminatory practices with respect to planning, designing, approval, and construction" of the Roundhouse Project and the West End Project (Kennedy-King Manor) on Foresman Street. It was charged that the
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Mary Slaughter
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Mary Slaughter Home for Aged Colored Women
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Peter Herdic Housing Project
Site of Peter Herdic Housing Project
Housing Authority knew the location of the projects would result in segregated housing yet proceeded with the construction. Blacks protested that the Roundhouse in the black community would perpetuate segregation while the West End Project would be occupied by all whites. Questions were raised concerning the quality of materials and the density of population as compared with the West End Project. The Housing Authority was also charged with permitting the Peter Herdic Housing Project, located in the black community, to be occupied solely by blacks. The Authority argued that white tenants refused housing assignments to projects in or near the black community.
After numerous delays and public meetings, it was finally agreed that the number of units in the Roundhouse would be reduced and the racial balance between the Roundhouse and the West End Project would be maintained. Projects under the Lycoming County Housing Authority, including Peter Herdic, Michael Ross, and Penn Vale were also integrated by assigning a tenant to a project rather than allowing the tenant a choice.
THE BLACK COMMUNITY
In 1870, E. W. Capron, editor and publisher of the Daily and Weekly West Branch Bulletin and the Daily Evening Bul- letin, captured the attitudes of whites towards blacks in a speech celebrating the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment which granted blacks the right to vote. He said, "Ten years ago the colored men were all practically slaves. If those in the North did not feel the galling chain, they felt the weight of the distant links. It was not the color which made the degradation of the colored race in the North, it was the contemptible spirit of caste which held the race in degradation, because a portion of them were slaves .... "
In Lycoming County, this contemptible spirit of caste kept blacks locked into segregated neighborhoods along the Susquehanna River. Denied the services outside of the black community, black restaurants, barber shops, and even dentists and doctors offered services exclusively within the black community. Blacks had formed five churches by 1880 and numerous social clubs such as Masons, Knights of Pythias, and Elks. Until 1944, these social clubs were listed as "colored" in the Williamsport City Directory.
In the decades surrounding the turn of the century, blacks were hopeful of gaining new civil rights. The idealism of the Progressive Era soon became tainted by white backlash. Many whites were afraid that blacks would gain too many rights, become equal, or even gain political or social control in some communities. In Williamsport, blacks kept
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a low profile and in several incidents, they were beaten. In 1872, a ten-year-old black boy was beaten by white youths in front of the Ulman's Opera House. His eye was cut by a blow from a lead-tipped cane. In another inci- dent, blacks attacked a white couple at a festival. A slanted newpaper article in the Sun on October 31, 1872, re- ported that blacks "showed their agility with a razor." In 1906, Thomas Hughes, a black Williamsport policeman was attacked by a group of youths as he arrested one of their number for disorderly conduct outside of the Lycoming Opera House. As he made the arrest, the youths knocked him to the ground and kicked him. Before he could be res- cued by fellow officers, he had sustained serious internal injuries which resulted in his death nine days later. The youths were charged with disorderly conduct and ordered to pay fines. There was no further prosecution following the death of Thomas Hughes.
Lynching of blacks at the turn of the century, according to one source, had almost become a white sport in Ohio, and in 1894, the Pennsylvania National Guard was mobilized to prevent lynchings in this state. At a time when blacks were expecting to gain rights in the tide of Progressivism, the backlash actually brought a more deeply entrenched se- gregation.
In many parts of Williamsport, blacks could not enter a restaurant to buy a sandwich. Many theaters isolated blacks to one side of the theater. At least one theater in Williamsport prominently displayed a sign that read: "This theater does not cater to black patrons." Blacks continued to be kept at the most menial jobs except in professions which were catering specifically to the black community.
The violent backlash against blacks was closely followed by sympathy for blacks and an attempt by some to integrate them into society. Observing the gradual integration in 1923, Mary Slaughter cautioned, blacks "must move carefully. There is a line of color between the races and this cannot be overstepped."
The YWCA extended its membership to blacks in 1918 through the Walnut Street Branch, located next to the Shiloh Baptist Church. Though the membership was offered at a branch, the offer to blacks of membership in a white institution was unprecedented at this time in Lycoming County. Nearly every black social club met either at the Walnut Street Branch YWCA, the remodeled livery stable next to it, or the Temple Association next door.
In 1930, in the midst of the Great Depression, the main YWCA cut the Walnut Street Branch from its budget causing
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it to founder for several years. It reorganized into the Bethune-Douglass Community Center. The YWCA continued a struggle within its membership to admit blacks. In 1946, an interracial charter was adopted at the National YWCA convention. In 1973 the convention adopted an imperative for action "toward the elimination of racism." Bethune- Douglass continued as an interracial community center, and in 1978, it constructed a new center on Campbell Street with a $715,000 federal public works grant.
THE SAWDUST WAR
In mid-July of 1872, unrest among lumber men spread throughout the Williamsport mills. Grievances over long working hours had been lodged aginst the saw mill opera- tors who claimed the twelve-hour working days were neces- sary in the summer in order to cut all the logs before the river froze. A state law existed establishing the eight- hour working day, but it carried no penalty for noncom- pliance. In order to force a compromise, workers went on strike.
On the night of July 22, 1872, striking workers attacked mill workers and tried to force the closing of the mills. At 5 A.M. a mob of strikers marched en masse down the rail- road tracks leading into the mills, harrassed the workers, and ordered them to leave the mills. By the time the mob reached Filbert and Otto Mill, guards had been dispatched to stop them. Seeing the mill in full operation, strikers rushed the armed guards, pelting them with rocks, clubs, and crowbars. The strikers overran the mill scattering the workers among the stacks of boards.
Having stopped work at the Filbert and Otto Mill, the mob moved down the tracks to Brown and Early Mill where the powerless guards hardly resisted their entrance up the elevated railroad tracks. The Reading, Fisher, and Com- pany Mill offered no resistance either so the strikers broke up into smaller groups and scattered themselves among various smaller mills. Numerous injuries were in- flicted on workers at Tinsman's Mill, Starkweather and Munson's Mill, and Dodge Mill.
Rioting was so widespread, local authorities requested that Governor Geary dispatch the militia. Ten companies of soldiers, including Williamsport's all-black Taylor Guard, were stationed at the mills around the city. Five carloads of soldiers had arrived in the city during the night giving the city the appearance of being occupied. Camps were set up on the Courthouse lawn and at Herdic Grove, the present site of the Williamsport Hospital. Not since the Civil War had the marching of soldiers and the beating of drums echoed through the city's streets.
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In the morning there were sporadic outbreaks of violence across the city. A mob of rioters moved up Pine Street then west on Fourth Street, followed closely by the Taylor Guard. In front of the Singer Sewing Rooms on West Fourth Street, two strikers were beating a compromising "11} hour man" who had drawn a revolver. One shot was fired into the air before a fourth man was able to seize him from behind. In the excitement, several of the Guards fired their rifles into the air. The show of force by the militia soon dis- banded the rioters and ended the violence without a single death.
The uncoordinated mobilization of the independently com- manded militias emphasized such ineptitude during the riot that Governor Geary moved to organize them all under a single command, thus organizing the Pennsylvania National Guard. In 1874, the Taylor Guard was designated Company D, Twelfth Regiment of the Pennsylvania National Guard.
MARY SLAUGHTER
Mary Slaughter was born a slave on February 27, 1835, in Martinsburg, W. Va. When she was freed in 1865 at the age of thirty, she settled in Williamsport with her husband William, a blacksmith. They worked together as caretakers of various churches until her husband died. Having al- ready lost their three sons, Mary Slaughter poured her energies into caring for the children of sick mothers and working for temperance.
In 1897, she began to take elderly black women into her four-room home on Walnut Street. Two years later the Aged Colored Women's Home (unofficially called the Mary Slaughter Home) moved to larger quarters at 124 Brandon Place. The home was supported by donations until more room was needed, then the home was mortgaged. Needing steadier support, Mary Slaughter traveled to Harrisburg and pleaded before a Senate Legislative Committee for funds. The senate appropriated funds and paid the mortgage on the home which operated soundly until 1962 when state support to all non-profit homes ceased.
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