WEB Dubois, Souls of Black Folk, Essays on Alexander Crummel, Black Episcopal Priest, Sharecropping

Today we will study and reflect several essays published in the
“The Souls of Black Folk” by WEB Dubois on what life was like for
black Americans in the Deep South in the Reconstruction and
Redemption eras after the end of the Civil War.
When we reflect on the essay on the life of Alexander Crummel,
that will help us not only to understand black history before and
after Emancipation, but more importantly, it will also provide
inspiration to anyone and everyone who is facing trials and
tribulations in their life.

We will also reflect on his essay on what life was like as a
sharecropper in the Deep South before the invention of the
mechanical harvester, which made sharecropping obsolete. Was
sharecropping slavery by another name, a form of wage slavery?
At the end of our talk, we will discuss the sources used for this
video. Please feel free to follow along our PowerPoint script
posted to SlideShare. Please, we welcome interesting questions
in the comments. Let us learn and reflect together!

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LIFE OF ALEXANDER CRUMMELL, BLACK EPISCOPAL PRIEST
Alexander Crummell was a fellow civil rights leader who impressed WEB Dubois.
Along with Frederick Douglass, Crummel was a first-generation black leader before
the Civil War. He was born in 1819 in New York City, and like many prominent black
leaders, lived a long life, dying at age 79 in 1898. His paternal grandfather was
captured and sold into slavery in Sierra Leone, so he felt a real connection to Africa.
Both his parents were abolitionists, he was involved in the movement from a very
young age. After attending college, he decided to become an Episcopal priest, but
he was denied admission to the General Theological Seminary in New York City
because of his race. This was a problem faced by Father Augustine Tolton, the first
former slave priest in America, he was not admitted to an American Catholic
Seminary, he eventually attended a seminary in Rome. Crummell was more
fortunate, after attending another seminary in America, he was ordained in
Massachusetts.

The main deck of a slave ship, by P Oursel, 1700’s

Transatlantic
Slave Ship, by
Francis
Meynell,
1846

General
Theological
Seminary in
New York
City, and 1890
entrance.

https://tolton.archchicago.org/

How does WEB Dubois start his essay on the life of
Alexander Crummell? By how he confronted the
temptations and doubts that faced all talented black
men in a time when whites could not comprehend
that a black man could actually be a true intellectual,
that he could think independently of his white
overlords.

WEB starts his essay, “This is the history of a human heart,
the tale of a black boy who” “struggled with life that he
might know the world and know himself,” fulfilling the
instructions written on the Temple of Delphi so many
millennia ago. “Three temptations he met on those dark
dunes that lay gray and dismal before the wonder-eyes of
the child:
• The temptation of Hate, that stood out against the dawn;
• The temptation of Despair, that darkened noonday; and
• The temptation of Doubt, that ever steals away with
twilight.
Above all, you must hear of the vales he crossed:
• The Vale of Humiliation and
• The Vale of the Shadow of Death.”

WEB Dubois tells us his first impressions of Crummell, he
was “tall, frail, and black, standing with a simple dignity
and an unmistakable air of good breeding.” “I felt the
fineness of his character, his calm courtesy, the sweetness
of his strength, and his fair blending of the hope and truth
of life.”
Crummell attended the Oneida Institute in New York, a
hotbed of abolitionism. Many of his white classmates were
surprised at the intelligence of their black classmate. WEB
Dubois ascribes this deep emotion to Crummell: “there
came a new dawn of sympathy and inspiration to the
lonely boy. The shadowy, formless thing, the temptation of
Hate, that hovered between him and the world, grew
fainter and less sinister. It did not wholly fade away but
diffused itself and lingered thick at the edges.”

WEB Dubois continues, “A voice and
vision called him to be a priest, a seer
to lead the uncalled out of the house
of bondage.” WEB Dubois ascribes to
Crummell another feeling he no doubt
felt himself, “He saw the headless host
turn toward him like the whirling of
mad waters, he stretched forth his
hands eagerly, and then, even as he
stretched them, suddenly there swept
across the vision the temptation of
Despair.”

What did Alexander Crummel see as
his mission as an Episcopalian priest?
WEB Dubois tells us, “Deep down
below the slavery and servitude of
the Negro people he saw their fatal
weaknesses, which long years of
mistreatment had emphasized. The
dearth of strong moral character, of
unbending righteousness, he felt,
was their great shortcoming, and
here he would begin.”

Crummell was assigned a small black parish in
Providence, Rhode Island, where attendance was slim,
and he just could not bring life into this community. He
decided that he needed to transfer to a larger parish
where there were more freed blacks that he could bring
into his church.

His bishop agreed to bless his move and wrote a letter
of introduction he could present to Bishop Onderdonk
of Philadelphia. After pondering his request, the bishop
“slowly and impressively said, ‘I will receive you into this
diocese on one condition: no Negro priest can sit in my
church convention, and no Negro church must ask for
representation there.’” Crummell paused for a
moment, and then said simply: “I will never enter your
diocese on such terms.”
Crummell found a small chapel in New York City, and he
“labored in poverty and starvation; scorned by his
fellow priests. Half in despair, he wandered across the
sea, a beggar with outstretched hands.”

Like Frederick Douglass, he found comfort in his trip to
England, where he met the famed William Wilberforce
and other leading English abolitionists, raising funds for
his parish by delivering speeches to abolitionist
gatherings. He decided to stay for four years, earning a
degree at Cambridge.

Crummell decided to serve as a missionary to
Liberia, which he promoted as a destination for
American blacks. Although he influenced Liberian
intellectual and religious life, twenty years later he
returned to America when he felt his life was in
danger due to an insurgency. He was called to
pastor a parish in Washington, DC, and he then
founded the first independent black Episcopal
church in the city, St Luke’s Episcopal Church.

African Americans depart for Liberia, 1896.

St. Luke's Episcopal Church DC
WEB Dubois concludes, “Crummell did his
work nobly and well, and yet I sorrow
that here he worked alone, with so little
human sympathy. His name today means
little, few remember or emulate him.
Here lies the tragedy of the age: not that
all men are poor, as all men know
something of poverty; not that all men
are wicked, as who is good? Not that all
men are ignorant, what is Truth? Nay, but
that men know so little of men.”

Crummell faced many of the same frustrations that
Father Augustine Tolton faced as the first black Catholic
Priest in America. Like Crummell, he was shunned by
many fellow priests, and he faced another hurdle, a
white priest in a nearby parish forbade his parishioners
to financially support his black church, claiming that
each parish should only raise funds from only their own
parishioners, which forced Father Tolton to request a
transfer to the Diocese of Chicago.

In another chapter, WEB Dubois reflects on
SHARECROPPING: ON THE QUEST OF THE GOLDEN FLEECE
During the Civil War, the Union generals had seized vast
plantations and subdivided them among the freed slaves to
work as small homesteads, and some small farms, such as
those in the Outer Banks and the North Carolina coast, had
been harvesting crops for several years. But after the
assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the new President, Andrew
Johnson, a Southern sympathizer, soon ordered that all
confiscated property be returned to its former owners.

Battle of Spottsylvania, Kurz & Allison Art Publishers, 1888
Designed by John B. Bachelder and painted by
Alonzo Chappel, this work of art depicts those
who visited the dying president throughout the
night and early morning of April 14–15, 1865.
Lincoln’s wife, Mary, is pictured in the center, lying
across the president’s body. His son Robert stands in
the foreground to the right of the bed. Vice President
Andrew Johnson is seated at the far left.

All was not rosy for the landowner, the war meant financial
collapse, and the marauding federal, and Confederate troops,
had stripped many plantations of their farm animals, seed,
provisions, and even furniture. Remember how, in Gone With
the Wind, Scarlett O’Hara found that all the fancy furnishings of
her Plantation were gone, with only the thick curtains left? That
was the reality in much of the South where the fighting took
place. Also, England also discovered she could grow cotton in
India, she didn’t need Southern cotton. The price of cotton fell,
from fourteen cents a pound in 1860 to a mere four cents a
pound in 1898.

Now that slavery was abolished, how to pay the
freed slaves who worked the land? There was some
experimentation with paying them cash wages, but
the owners themselves were dead broke, and had no
cash to pay wages before the cotton or other crop
was harvested. Also, these white landowners wanted
a labor system that was as close to the old system of
slavery as possible.

Jigsaw puzzle: Southern Cotton Plantation, by William Aiken Walker, 1915

The new labor system
was sharecropping.
WEB Dubois argues that
the chief cause of this
predatory system of
labor was the
“carelessness of the
nation in letting the
slave start with nothing,
and the widespread
opinion among the
merchants and
employers of the Black
Belt that only by the
slavery of debt can the
Negro be kept at work.”
The Cabin, by William Aiken Walker, around 1900

Under sharecropping, the fields would be subdivided
in plots that individual families would farm. The
main advantage to the freed slaves is they would no
longer have to work in gangs under the whip of a
cruel overseer, they could work as a family at their
own pace. Soon after the Civil War, most
sharecroppers were black, but over time, more and
more poor whites became ensnared in debt accrued
under the sharecropping system.

The Cotton Wagon, by William Aiken Walker, around 1900

Field, by William Aiken Walker, around 1900
WEB Dubois notes that “the
sharecroppers are entirely without
capital, even in the limited sense of
food or money to keep them from
seed to harvest. All they furnish is
their labor; the landowner furnishes
land, stock, tools, seed, and house;
and at the end of the year the laborer
gets from a third to a half of the crop.
Out of the sharecropper’s share,
however, comes pay and interest for
food and clothing advanced him
during the year. Thus, we have a
laborer without capital and without
wages, and an employer whose
capital is largely his employees’
wages. It is an unsatisfactory
arrangement, both for hirer and
hired, and is usually in vogue on poor
land with hard-pressed owners.”

Since the sharecroppers were illiterate, and could not
figure, and since blacks had no recourse to the court
system, and since whites basically denied that blacks were
their equal in dignity, sharecropping was prone to abuse.
Although the sharecropper was more like a serf than a
slave, the sharecropper was definitely a wage slave,
trapped into a cycle of debt that could never be repaid.
After all, in a profitable year, the landowner needed only
to manufacture some new expense the sharecropper
would need to repay.

The Cotton Picker’s Family, by William Aiken Walker, 1915

Particularly cruel landowners could accuse the
sharecropper of fraud, and ask that the sheriff arrest
them, forcing them into peonage, which was a true
system of slavery, where they would be auctioned
off as convict labor.

Sharecroppers nearly always lived on the land they
worked, in cabins provided by the landowner. The
typical sharecropper one-room cabin in Georgia is
slightly better than the slave cabin described by
Booker T Washington in this slave autobiography, as
now free men do have some furniture, they no
longer have to sleep on the floor.

Cabin, by William Aiken Walker, around 1900

WEB Dubois tells us that the sharecropper one-room cabin
“is nearly always old and bare, built of rough boards, and
neither plastered nor ceiled. Light and ventilation are
supplied by the single door and by the square hole in the
wall with its wooden shutter. There is no glass, porch, or
ornamentation without. Within is a fireplace, black and
smoky, usually unsteady with age. A bed or two, a table, a
wooden chest, and a few chairs compose the furniture,
while a stray showbill or a newspaper decorates the walls.
Some cabins are kept scrupulously neat, with merry
steaming fireplace and hospitable door; but the majority
are dirty and dilapidated, smelling of eating and sleeping,
poorly ventilated, and anything but homes.”
Cotton Picker, by William Aiken Walker, around 1900

In another chapter, WEB Dubois discusses the
FORMER GLORY, AND POST-WAR DECAY, OF THE BLACK BELT
We remember how, in Gone With the Wind, the movie opens up with the
plantation house full of southern beauties swooshing about in their full-
hooped, sweeping gowns, how the ravishing Scarlett O’Hara flirted with
the dashing Rhett Butler in a sumptuous ball, but how after the war, all
the opulence had disappeared, gone with the winds of war. That part of
the movie is true, and WEB Dubois describes how the opulence and
prosperity of the Antebellum Deep South plantations contrasted with the
dilapidated big houses and run-down plantations after the war.

Nottoway Plantation, by Serge Ottaviani, 2014

WEB Dubois tells that, before the war, in prosperous west
Dougherty, Georgia, “a hundred and fifty barons commanded
the labor of nearly six thousand Negroes, held sway over
farms with ninety thousand acres of tilled land.” “Twenty
thousand bales of ginned cotton went yearly to England, New
and Old; and men that arrived bankrupt made money and
grew rich. In a single decade, the cotton output increased
four-fold and the value of lands tripled.”

WEB Dubois continues, “It was the heyday of the nouveau
riche, and a life of careless extravagance reigned among the
masters,” just like in the ballroom scene in Gone With the
Wind. “Four and six bob-tailed thoroughbreds rolled their
coaches to town; open hospitality and gay entertainment
was the rule. Parks and groves were laid out, rich with flower
and vine, and in the midst stood the low wide-halled ‘big
house,’ with its porch and columns and great fireplaces.”

Booker T Washington reflected that both masters and slaves faced hard
times during the war and the wartime shortages, although the masters
sometimes suffered more, for slaves were accustomed to not having
enough to eat. Booker observes that slavery really did cripple both
master and slave alike. After the war, the master and his family had no
marketable skills, since their slaves did everything. The wife did not even
how to keep her house without slaves or servants.
The slaves had never worked hard, there was no incentive to work hard,
they just did enough to get by and avoid the whip. On many slave
plantations everything was half fixed, half working. Nothing was freshly
painted, everywhere the paint was peeling.

After the war, as sharecroppers, the former slaves
still had no incentive to maintain the fields or their
cabins, and only slight incentive to maintain their
tools. Now the landowners, since they were often
absentee owners, also had less incentive to maintain
the property. The social life was gone with the wind,
why not let the big house go? Many big houses now
had the Spanish-moss musty dark and dank feel,
decaying as the decades passed.

Home on the
Mississippi,
Currier and
Ives, 1871

Home on the Mississippi, Currier and Ives, 1871
WEB Dubois remembers that
as he traveled through the
hills of West Dougherty,
Georgia, “through sand and
pines and glimpses of old
plantations, how there crept
into sight a cluster of
buildings, wood and brick,
mills and houses, and
scattered cabins, quite a
village.” As he drew nearer, he
saw that “the buildings were
rotten, the bricks were falling
out, the mills were silent, and
the store was closed. Only in
the cabins appeared now and
then a bit of lazy life.”

Home on the Mississippi, Currier and Ives, 1871
What had happened?
“An old ragged black
man, honest, simple,
and improvident, told
us the story.” An
absentee investor
from up North bought
the plantation, but
the agent running the
plantation stole all
the money, the
absentee owner
“refused to sell, and
let houses and
furniture and
machinery rust and
rot.”

We had previously discussed essays on WEB Dubois’ classic book, Souls
of Black Folk, in this video/blog. Several of these essays were
autobiographical, they give us as window on how black men strived in
the often-harsh years of Reconstruction and the Redemption Jim Crow
era. We reflected on his first teaching job in a modest one room black
schoolhouse that had no real furniture, and how his young son passed
away because the hospitals in Atlanta would not admit sick black people
due to segregation. We also reflected on his criticisms of the
accommodationist black leader Booker T Washington, the state of black
education, and spirituality of the Negro when facing the challenges of his
existence.

DISCUSSING THE SOURCES
We read the Souls of Black Folk, Dover edition, from Amazon.
You can probably find this complete work on the internet for free.
His language can be quite flowery at times, like he is trying to
coin a black Iliad.
We also found a wealth of paintings of sharecroppers by William
Aiken Walker, he was born in South Carolina and served in the
Confederate Army. He is known for his post-Reconstruction
paintings of poor emaciated black sharecroppers, capturing their
simplicity and poverty, and many of his pictures have Florida
palm trees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Aiken_Walker

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