Atlanta’s 1885 vote was the apogee of an era; its 1887 vote was the finale of that era. It is tempting to view these votes as referenda on the effectiveness of 20 years of temperance work among the freed people, but they were much more than that. They offer us a window into the evanescent racial world of 1880s Atlanta. The African American temperance movement continued in both its political/legal suasion (only briefly) and its social/moral suasion dimensions, but they would never again merge with the white temperance movement, because everything changed.
Both the black and white communities emerged from the 1887 contest licking their wounds and prioritizing race-based unity. In January 1888, 350 black men from across the state convened in Macon to assess the state of African Americans in Georgia. Among those present were Bishop Henry M. Turner, William Pledger, Smith W. Easley, Alonzo Burnett, and Antoine Graves. When Easley called for a committee on temperance, he faced opposition from those who feared the issue would divide the convention. Although Easley finally got his committee, and Turner and Graves served on it, they produced a brief, innocuous statement that simply reiterated their support for personal abstinence, something on which all could agree. Publicly at least, black leaders had reached a truce. Racial unity had trumped prohibition activism. Although in Atlanta’s 1888 municipal election the candidates presented themselves as prohibitionists and anti-prohibitionists, the issue only received sporadic attention in subsequent elections. White prohibitionists never called for another local option vote, fearing the city could not afford its divisiveness. In Atlanta politics, prohibition was dead.1
Undaunted, black principled prohibitionists continued their work, laboring on multiple fronts. Bishop Turner joined the newly organized Prohibition Party of Georgia and served as a delegate to its national convention in 1888, where he gave a brief address.2 But most activity was apolitical. In 1890 Wesley J. Gaines, recently promoted to bishop, wrote a history of the AME Church in the South, and included a chapter on temperance, without which he said the book would be “incomplete.” Gaines also addressed the World’s Temperance Congress in 1893. Atlanta’s Colored WCTUs kept up an active schedule for several years. New WCTUs were organized, and by February 1888 six colored unions operated in Atlanta. The West and East WCTUs each had more than 50 members and several departments. Alumni of Spelman Seminary and Atlanta University held offices in the city’s unions and in the statewide union. In the nineties, reformer and activist Ida Wells-Barnett challenged the national WCTU to oppose lynching, to little effect. The nineties also witnessed the rise of three major national evangelical youth organizations—the Young People’s Christian Endeavor Society, Baptist Young People’s Union, and Epworth League—all of which promoted temperance instruction by the mid-1890s, and prohibition soon thereafter. Atlanta’s black churches and schools sponsored chapters of these organizations, which remained active well into the twentieth century. The major African American Baptist and Methodist denominations continued to produce committee reports and publications endorsing personal abstinence and prohibition well into the twentieth century, in line with major white Protestant groups.
As long as they remained enfranchised, black principled prohibitionists remained active in city politics, but they pursued other, more attainable objectives. Moses Bently, Antoine Graves, and Smith Easley fought for an African American on the 1887 “Citizen’s Ticket,” but as usual they were unsuccessful. As blacks continued to jockey for influence they finally struck a deal with the prohibitionist candidate for mayor, John Glenn: if he received the black vote, he would build a school for blacks in the Fifth Ward. When one thousand black voters supported Glenn, the school board built the Gray Street School in 1888. Blacks made a similar agreement again in 1891, receiving the Roach Street School, which opened in 1892. Working-class whites eventually became frustrated with failed efforts to make political alliances with blacks and began pushing for the white primary for municipal elections.3 By 1893, in line with practices throughout the South, so many black Atlanta voters had been disfranchised that the number of remaining voters had become inconsequential.
At the same time African Americans were being disfranchised, Black Atlanta was experiencing increased internal stratification, fueled in part by values introduced through Northern-run missionary schools. The strengthening of social boundary lines was reflected in increasingly consistent patterns of behavior in such areas as residential housing, social networks, church life, and alcohol consumption. By the turn of the century, Auburn Avenue and Decatur Street starkly illustrated this divide. Both streets were in the Old Fourth Ward, a historically black-majority neighborhood, but that was all they had in common. Auburn Avenue’s growing nucleus of black-owned businesses, churches, and residences of the college-educated earned it the moniker “richest Negro street in the world”; black Atlantans called it “Sweet Auburn.” Sweet Auburn’s residents generally shunned Decatur Street, however, known for its “sporting houses,” “dives,” cheap boarding houses, gambling, and vaudeville houses. No less than 34 saloons graced Decatur Street in 1900. The Augusta Herald described the street as having an “unsavory reputation” because almost the entire street was “given over to low dives, cheap hand-me-downs and other like establishments.” Decatur Street was a neighborhood on the margins between three or four neighborhoods. Blacks, Jews, whites, and Chinese worked, shopped, and entertained themselves mixing on nearly equal terms. But it had not always been this way. Atlanta’s zoning and policing practices had gradually pushed these less respectable activities out of other neighborhoods, turning the street into what Kevin Mumford calls an “interzone,” a marginal area of interracial culture and vice.4
In addition to increasing internal stratification, de facto racial segregation spread to virtually every area of life. Wealthy residents on streets like West Peachtree stopped permitting their help to live in or to live in alleys near their houses. The quality of life in almost any black neighborhood was lower than in almost any white neighborhood. Black neighborhoods experienced “deplorable and inadequate” sanitation services, streetlighting, housing, roads, and sidewalks. In the Pittsburg neighborhood, the city so regularly dumped tin cans and other trash to fill the gullies that one section was nicknamed “Tin Can Alley.” City planners designed streetcar lines, sewers, and the public water system to bypass black communities. Such characteristics coupled with police neglect, unschooled children, unemployment, underemployment, low incomes, and high illiteracy created not only high crime rates but also physically unhealthy neighborhoods. The African American mortality rate rose to about 150 percent that of whites, with consumption and pneumonia being the biggest culprits. Illegal liquor selling (selling without a license) became a problem even before state prohibition began. In sum, ghettoization was well underway years before the city created the state’s first residential Jim Crow ordinance in 1913.5
Even entrepreneurial blacks withdrew from their white clientele. In the early years following emancipation, black professionals like dentist Roderick D. Badger and skilled workers like the merchant tailor William Finch had built their businesses and their wealth on white patronage. By the turn of the century, the growing black population, increasing racial segregation, newfound race pride, and popularity of self-help strategies led the rising black petit bourgeoisie to turn to the black masses for their customer base. Black Atlanta newspaper editor Benjamin Davis joined his peers across America in calling for readers to buy from blacks and to employ blacks. This was an integral part of becoming a proud twentieth-century “race man.”
Each race turned inward, only increasing the distance between them. W. E. B. DuBois observed that “despite much physical contact and daily intermingling, there is almost no . . . point of transference where the thoughts and feelings of one race can come into direct contact and sympathy with the thoughts and feelings of the other.”6 One black editor put it this way:
The Southern people know really very little about the Negro as he is. They see him on the streets, at railway stations, as porters at hotels, and on Pullman cars; but as a cultured lady and gentleman, in the church, at the fireside, in the school-room, on the platform, in the pulpit, and even in the editorial room, they know scarcely anything of us.7
The absence of lynchings and an active KKK did not accurately reflect Atlanta’s increasing racial hostility. During the 1890s Atlanta’s newspapers portrayed holiday binge drinking by blacks as an increasing problem. News stories increasingly exaggerated stories of drunken blacks being arrested for various crimes. Cartoonists began portraying blacks with ape-like features. This denigrating image coincided with the rise of Jim Crow laws throughout the South and scientific racism throughout the nation. The drunken “black beast” image stoked white fears, intensified white prejudices, and racialized the prohibitionists’ message. The nadir had arrived.
Deteriorating race relations established the ideal social and political conditions for prohibition in Georgia. In 1906 Georgians experienced a gubernatorial campaign characterized by race-baiting and a sensational and irresponsible Atlanta press that stoked public hysteria with false stories of rape. This election became a match on the tinder of racial hostility that Atlanta had become. When the saloons closed one September night and men filled the streets in various degrees of inebriation, just a few sharp words and an assault were all that was needed to spark one of the worst race riots in the nation’s history. In the wake of the riot many people, black and white, blamed the saloons. A year later, partly as a result of the riot and partly the result of many years of prohibition activism, the Hardeman-Covington prohibition law created statewide prohibition effective January 1, 1908. Georgia became the first former Confederate state to go dry years before national prohibition began.
Black Atlanta’s story was not an isolated one; rather, it blended seamlessly into the larger narratives of Southern temperance and black enfranchisement and should be interpreted as such. In 1887 Atlanta’s vote became the third horse in a trifecta of prohibition defeats, signaling the end to one era of Southern temperance. Between July and November 1887, Texas, Tennessee, and Atlanta had all rejected prohibition, and according to some white prohibitionists, it was the “fault” of black voters. This broader context makes it even easier to assess Black Atlanta’s reception of temperance and response to prohibition.
From the perspective of 1887 it seems clear that most 1885 dry black voters did not base their vote on a principled commitment to teetotalism. While upwardly mobile blacks at least practiced temperate consumption of alcoholic beverages for the obvious non-religious reasons, little evidence exists that large numbers of blacks outside the orbit of the evangelical reform nexus organizations had been persuaded to adopt the teetotal lifestyle, accentuating its fundamentally evangelical Christian character in the African American experience. Twenty years after emancipation, the structural adolescence of Black Atlanta meant it lacked the necessary resources, channels, and institutions to enable teetotalism to “break out of the movement community” and become a widely held value comparable to what had occurred among antebellum Northern blacks and New Englanders. The 1885 call for a local option election prematurely converted Black Atlanta’s social movement into a political movement, reducing temperance to prohibition, which, for many blacks, turned out to be little more than a pragmatic political tactic designed to improve race relations. Thus principled teetotalism was not the basis for the 1885 dry black vote.
It is now clear that the critical elements that created the dry victory in 1885 Atlanta were an exceptional degree of black clergy unity, the systematic and enticing blurring of racial etiquette, and most importantly, a black electorate unacquainted with life under prohibition. Each of these elements was absent from the 1887 votes in Atlanta, Texas, and Tennessee. With all due respect to W. E. B. DuBois’s youthful observation that “Perhaps never before was the Negro as generally recognized . . . as a man” as during Tennessee’s prohibition campaign, that campaign failed to bring together these three components. Although Tennessee’s campaign practices yielded its own commentary about “blurred racial lines,” its prohibition activists eschewed strong clergy alliances in the beginning, only joining forces with them as the campaign wore on. In Texas’s vote, from the beginning, the main Prohibition leaders were professionals and businessmen who feared clergy involvement and made a conscious effort to downplay the clergy’s role in the campaign. Texas drys exacerbated racial distrust by telling blacks that wets were “Negro haters” and then turning around and telling white audiences that wets were too cozy with blacks. This doublespeak only alienated black voters, removing any basis for hope that a vote for prohibition could improve race relations, their single most pressing concern. In 1887 some of Atlanta’s black pastors broke rank, either opposing or failing to speak up for prohibition, thus sending a mixed message. Although some contemporary observers thought Atlanta’s 1887 campaign witnessed a breakdown of racial etiquette comparable to that of 1885, Atlanta prohibitionist Wilbur P. Thirkield asserted that relatively poor race relations characterized their 1887 defeat: “There was no bond of moral union, no well-defined basis of cooperation, no fusion of the races, as before.”8
Finally, the degree of experience with prohibition prior to voting on it undoubtedly was a major factor in these prohibition votes. The promises of 1885 were incredibly tantalizing to black voters who wanted to believe the dry campaign’s seemingly new racial ethos could be made permanent by a dry vote. Nothing so gnawed at the sense of black manhood as their continued infantilization at the hands of white people. Whatever could make a white man call a black man “brother” and a white woman call a black woman “sister” demanded careful consideration, if not a vote. But the power of that argument was largely predicated on a lack of experience with prohibition, and presumably few Atlanta blacks had ever lived under prohibition because almost all of them had migrated to the city before the creation of dry counties throughout the state. Two years of prohibition thoroughly dispelled any notion that white prohibitionists sought a new racial paradigm. By the time Tennessee and Texas voted on state prohibition, many localities within those states had been dry for a while, so many black voters in those campaigns already knew how prohibition “worked,” and as in 1887 Atlanta, no amount of campaigning rhetoric or tactics could persuade them otherwise. For Atlanta’s black voters who had supported prohibition in 1885, the characteristically pragmatic African American worldview offered a ready-made ethical and existential framework with which to rationalize an opposite vote in 1887.
Prohibition voting was tricky at best for blacks, who often seemed to hold the balance of power in Southern elections. When blacks voted with prohibitionists they frightened the antis, who loathed the idea of having black voters settle divisive issues; and when blacks voted with the antis they angered the prohis, who charged them with being a force for unrestrained immorality. Since both sides were ultimately committed to white supremacy, neither could bear the thought of blacks comprising the swing vote on major public policy issues. When it was not yet certain whether black voters were responsible for making Atlanta dry in 1885, one wet editor opined, “wouldn’t it be an unfortunate condition of things to have such a law forced upon white men by negro votes?”9 But the trend among white voters was toward prohibition, and Bishop Turner accurately sensed this fact. Just prior to the 1887 vote he penned the following prescient, yet stern, prophecy:
We venture to predict, that if the Negro vote continues to defeat prohibition with all of the concomitant blessings with which it is freighted, there will be an effort made to disfranchise him in less than five years, and whenever the attempt is inaugurated by the better class of whites, it will succeed, for the white liquor sots will join with them.10
Although all of the “better class” of whites were certainly not the prohibitionists that Turner implied and race relations were rapidly heading downhill regardless of blacks’ prohibition voting practices, he correctly predicted that white wets and drys would lay aside their differences and unite to disfranchise blacks.11 Atlanta’s white primary began in 1892, and after that year black voter participation, although still permitted in general elections, became inconsequential.
But Black Atlanta’s experience with the temperance movement does more than expose turning points in the trajectory of Southern prohibition and black enfranchisement. It also suggests nascent intra-communal cultural boundary lines, reveals the limitations of nineteenth-century reform movements, and reaffirms what we have come to know about the hostility of Southern race relations in the 1880s. Freed people exposed to the intense teetotal message of Northern evangelicalism could accept its logic with some ease because of the intersections between Northern nexus theology and certain African elements of their African American worldview. However, their inability to diffuse these values to the masses increasingly made attitudes toward alcohol use a marker of class differences within the black community. Resilient and pragmatic African–rooted cultural orientations combined with the exigencies of poverty nourished by a racist environment and likely kept many from a commitment to teetotalism as much as it encouraged them to oppose prohibition in 1887. Although they voted Republican, the “personal liberty” plank of the Democracts resonated deeply with a people recently emancipated from centuries of slavery. The divergent reactions of black voters to the contradictions and hypocrisies of two years of prohibition lifted the veil on this emerging divide.
My research into nineteenth-century temperance and prohibition has been somewhat of a bittersweet experience because of my admiration for the reformers’ original vision, and because to this day I embrace key elements of their brand of Christianity. But no matter how noble the religious-inspired vision of nineteenth-century temperance reformers might have been, in the end their theology and praxis were held hostage by their culture (as all religious experience is), and the movement was a dismal failure as judged by its own criteria. When the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) pioneered twentieth-century political pressure tactics targeting elected officials, they achieved in a matter of years what moral suasion could not do in more than a century. But despite the approval of national prohibition by traditionally moral suasion–oriented organizations, the political tactics used by the ASL to secure prohibition differed substantially from the grueling face-to-face grassroots citizen work of organizations such as the American Missionary Association, American Baptist Home Mission Society, National Temperance Society, and AME Church. The nineteenth-century temperance movement makes it clear just how difficult it was to transform public sentiment from the bottom up before the late twentieth-century proliferation of mass communication technologies and institutions committed to generating and disseminating new knowledge and ideas. The most recent example of how rapidly social and political change can occur in the twenty-first century is the issue of same sex marriage. The subject went from virtual nonexistence in public discourse to affirmed legal status in several states in less than 25 years. Recent public opinion polls show a 26 percent swing in public opinion favoring same sex marriage within a decade. This is simply unprecedented in the history of social reform movements.12
The changing world of the postbellum South as revealed through the temperance movement also invites analysis in terms of the classic C. Vann Woodward thesis.13 The 1885 vote initially appears to have been a clear example of Woodward’s so-called missed opportunities in race relations. This study has argued that black voters did not reject prohibition on principle, but rather, the pragmatic worldview of African Americans predisposed most black voters—despite influences from principled prohibitionists—to assess it based on the degree to which it fulfilled its promise to ameliorate the strictures of white supremacy and undermine the practices that perpetuated it. White supremacy was so deeply engrained, and whites themselves were so divided, that those promises could never materialize; so in round number two, blacks rejected prohibition like their ancestors rejected priests offering ineffectual incantations. The reason contemporaries viewed the 1885 vote as a “most stirring and significant episode” was that race relations following Redemption were not the “unstable interlude” Woodward imagined. Instead, a discriminatory and demeaning racial etiquette were well-known and firmly established, and hence the behaviors and rhetoric of white prohibitionists were shocking to all concerned. The forces that converged on Atlanta were powerful enough to transcend that etiquette very briefly (for a few weeks), but the brevity of that moment only illustrates the hegemonic power of white supremacy in the period of supposedly “missed opportunities.” While black Atlantans largely failed to adopt teetotalism because of structural issues internal to their community, both their historic cultural orientation and factors external to their community converged to lead them to reject prohibition.