Chapter 6
O the conflict now is past, we have gained the day at last,
And we celebrate a glorious victory;
Let us heartily rejoice, and with thankful heart and voice
All the skirmishing is done, and the victory is won,
And a million homes with happiness are bright;
All the sorrowing is o’er, drink will crush their lives no more,
Praise the Lord for giving triumph to the Right.
From December 1885 to November 1887 Atlanta was the nation’s largest “dry” city. Hubris-filled prohibitionists announced that their slim electoral victory guaranteed sufficient public support for prohibition’s enforcement. In reality, voters and the newly elected city officials were so divided that enforcement was undermined every step of the way. It took almost a full year for the city to close all legal venues for selling liquor, and even then alcohol was still accessible to any Atlantan who wanted it. July 1886 was widely touted as the “real” beginning of Atlanta’s experiment because all the city’s saloons closed on June 30. Prohibitionists in the government were almost constantly under attack from anti-prohibitionists and from other prohibitionists who thought they were either too strict or too lenient in enforcing the law.1
The two-year experiment revealed that all along there had been two types of black prohibitionist voters in 1885: the opportunistic and the principled. Opportunistic prohibitionists had three basic characteristics. First, they viewed a vote for prohibition as a means to some other end. Their goal might be the promise of a government job or increased political leverage for black voters in city politics. Second, they understood temperance and prohibition as fundamentally different things. The former was apolitical, a personal matter, while the latter was a political idea that should be treated like other political issues, something over which to negotiate, bargain, and compromise and ultimately accept or reject based on pragmatic considerations. Third, they had little to no contact with reform nexus organizations.
Principled prohibitionists, on the other hand, conflated temperance and prohibition, accusing everyone opposed to prohibition of being for whiskey, for drunkenness, or for poverty. Even if they did not fully believe their own campaign rhetoric, their words nonetheless reflected their deep commitment to ridding society of liquor. Principled prohibitionists were likely to be teetotaling clergy or members of fraternal temperance organizations with relatively strong connections to reform nexus organizations. They assumed prohibition would lead to decreased drinking by removing the temptation of the saloon, which could only benefit blacks, most of whom were very poor. Even more importantly, principled prohibitionists viewed the reform as primarily a moral issue, and as such, no more subject to compromise than any other moral issue.
Opportunistic prohibitionists supported or opposed prohibition based on their view of what was the best tactical move for black people in terms of politics or race relations. Prohibition turned out to be a great disappointment to these men; they felt betrayed. Typical of the opportunistic prohibitionists was the aspiring Republican politician Jackson McHenry. Although he was a member of an AME church, he had received no formal education. In 1885 McHenry supported prohibition because of the benefits to the race he was sure it would bring. But after he witnessed the first few months of prohibition in 1886 he announced that the prohibition/anti-prohibition debate was a white man’s debate that blacks should ignore. Then, further observations led him to reverse himself again, and he served as a prohibitionist ward leader during the 1887 campaign. Bishop Turner praised him as a “staunch advocate” of ending the rum traffic. Among the other black leaders who changed their position on prohibition were mailman James B. Parker, discussed in the last chapter; barber and lunchroom owner Moses Bently; and Weekly Defiance editor Alonzo W. Burnett. Bently and Burnett both became drys in time for the 1887 campaign. Not products of Atlanta’s missionary schools, these four men’s decision making seemed more influenced by the situational ethics of African thought than by unchanging Christian principles.2
The smaller group of principled prohibitionists did not vote dry because of some political quid pro quo but because of a deeply held belief that prohibition was the next logical step following their commitment to total abstinence. Through their relationship with reform nexus institutions they became vested in the religio-cultural system that birthed and conflated temperance and prohibition, so they remained unmoved by the contradictions of prohibition or the hypocrisy of white drys. Bishop Turner, who perceived that prohibition was in America’s future, believed that if blacks wanted to become fully accepted in white society they had no option but to move in the direction the nation was moving, namely, toward prohibition. Smith W. Easley, Reverend Wesley J. Gaines, Reverend E. R. Carter, and Bishop Henry M. Turner are representative of this group.
“A Put-Up Job”: The Contradictions of Prohibition
Prohibition means banning the sale of alcoholic beverages, and so strictly speaking Atlanta never had total prohibition.3 The General Local Option Law, while banning the sale of any beverage “which if drank to excess will produce intoxication,” exempted domestic wines. At the time of the 1885 election people generally expected the law to close saloons because it prohibited the sale of distilled spirits by the drink, but previously issued liquor licenses had to be honored and this delayed prohibition for many months. The inherent complexity and inevitable contradictions arising from this state of affairs quickly soured blacks on prohibition.
Legal impediments delayed the introduction of prohibition until July 1, 1886, but even then all the liquor venues the law meant to shut down did not close until late October 1886. Immediately following the election, anti-prohibitionists mounted a legal challenge to the results, which was finally settled in favor of the prohibitionists on Christmas Eve. In addition, the city granted 12-month business licenses, and most retail liquor licenses took effect on July 1. There were about 100 saloons in Atlanta, but only about 30 closed down within three months of the vote. Upholding its obligation to these license holders, the city announced that current saloons could remain in business until their licenses expired on June 30, 1886. Although “wine rooms” were legal, only a few saloon owners announced plans to operate them after July 1; most thought they would be unprofitable. Those who purchased a wine room license contested the legal definition of “domestic” wines. Because Georgia’s wine producers pressured the legislature to create the wine loophole, some saloon owners thought they could only sell wines produced in Georgia. However, the city government announced that in accordance with recent judicial decisions it would define “domestic” to include wine produced in any state of the union. The wine room operators also announced that they would sell tobacco products and non-alcoholic “temperance drinks,” such as lemonade.4
Atlanta also had one brewery, the Atlanta City Brewery. The brewery announced that it would continue making and selling beer as usual. The brewery sold beer in large quantities by delivering directly to homes. To close the doors of the $150,000 facility, it explained, would cause a property devaluation of approximately 90 percent. Its legal counsel advised that closing the brewery would amount to the unconstitutional seizure of property without “due process,” conveniently exploiting a clause in the otherwise despised Reconstruction-era Fourteenth Amendment. On July 1, when Atlanta’s saloons finally closed, it appeared that wine and beer would be sold indefinitely.5
In addition to saloons and breweries, Atlantans could also continue to purchase alcohol at pharmacies, which the law did not close. In addition to providing alcohol in prescriptions, pharmacists also sold other alcohol-containing products such as bay rum, which was a popular ingredient for barbecuing. One pharmacist reported a significant increase in demand for bay rum after prohibition began, but he assured the reporter that because of the responsibility resting on a man in his position he did not sell it to known drunkards.6
July 1, 1886: “Real” Prohibition Begins
The press gave detailed reports on the last days and hours of wet Atlanta and the first days of dry Atlanta. At the end of June people bought thousands of jugs that saloons filled with their favorite distilled beverage. “Respectable” white businessmen who wanted to stock up but did not want to be discovered sent black employees to purchase their liquor. On the last night, the faithful—as well as the nostalgic—filled the saloons until barkeepers gave the truly “last call” and darkened the lights at midnight. Although local papers claimed it was a rather peaceful night in the city’s watering holes, the Augusta Chronicle, less concerned with boosting Atlanta, suggested it may have been a more raucous evening. The Chronicle reported that it was “safe to say there are more drunken men in Atlanta to-night than any night in a year past.” July 1 and 2 contrasted sharply with June 30 because the only sounds emerging from saloons were those of workmen breaking down counters and shelving.7
The contradictions and hypocrisy of “dry” Atlanta became apparent even before July 1. On June 30 the New York Sun published a report claiming that Mayor Henry Hillyer, an outspoken prohibitionist, was among those who had procured their own personal barrel of whiskey in the days leading up to prohibition. The rumor caused the NTS’s J. N. Stearns to write James Thrower, asking for an explanation. Thrower passed the letter on to Hillyer, who called it a “mere canard,” and the Atlanta Constitution published the story at Thrower’s request. Despite Thrower’s attempt to squelch the rumor, the moral clarity of the prohibition experiment and its leadership had been clouded. This would not be forgotten by anti leaders over a year later.8
Fig. 23—City Brewery (c. 1890). Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center
But the contradictions of prohibition soon transcended the personal and symbolic. Those with the financial means regularly found legal and quasi-legal methods for buying liquor, while blacks and poor whites were forced into illegal venues. On July 1 the Atlanta Journal reported that the wholesale liquor dealers received their licenses from the county instead of the city, and that those licenses did not expire until August or later. By the end of the first week of July one of the proprietors of the famed Kimball House saloon welcomed into partnership Miles J. Mabry, an individual whose county quart license (the minimum wholesale volume) did not expire until October 9. Added to its recently acquired wine room license, the Kimball House’s quart license shored up business from its white-only clientele, but customers were not permitted to consume their whiskey on the premises, although they could drink wine there. Before long, nine holders of quart licenses surfaced. Shortly afterward the police began filing charges against some of them for allowing customers to drink on the premises, including one saloon that sold quart measures in open buckets, allowing drinkers to pass them around until they were empty. The difficulties of enforcing prohibition immediately became apparent. The last quart license finally expired on October 26.
Although the police began tracking the Atlanta Brewing Company’s sales almost immediately, it took until late October before the right combination of legal and political maneuverings successfully closed its doors. Although the Atlanta Constitution claimed that prohibition was well enforced in the early weeks after July 1, the Macon Telegraph correctly reported that beer and whiskey by the quart could “be had on all sides” for several more months in “dry” Atlanta.9
Fig. 24—City Brewery’s interracial workforce (c. 1890). Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center
Although subject to repeated police investigations, prosecutions, and sporadic criticism from prohibitionists, wine rooms remained open after October 1886. Within four months after prohibition began, complaints arose about the 30-plus rooms in the city, because the word on the street was that drinks other than wine could be obtained there. Secret codes, gestures, and lists evolved to allow “regular” customers surreptitiously to purchase liquor and prevented detectives and others from procuring it. Because stories got out that wine rooms mixed wine with various types of liquor but still called it “wine,” a call spread for the authorities to submit wine room beverages to chemical analyses. Several fights also broke out in wine rooms, giving them an increasingly saloon-like aura. By the fall of 1886 one city official openly admitted that, since wine rooms were essentially the same as saloons, prohibition was a failure. “A man can go into one of them and get as drunk as he could when we had saloons and straight liquor.”
Critics called for indirectly outlawing wine rooms by creating a prohibitive license fee. This proposal divided prohibitionists, however, because some claimed that the original law had not been sufficiently tested and that the proposal unfairly altered the local option bill approved by the people. In December 1886, state representative Dr. Latimer Felton submitted a bill to the legislature for a $10,000 state wine room license fee. Fulton County’s representatives opposed the bill and the legislature rejected it. As the pressure on wine room proprietors increased, they decided as a group to stop permitting customers to drink on the premises, hoping that self-regulation might undermine the movement for the $10,000 license. But Felton resubmitted his bill in 1887, and it passed. The governor signed it into law in September. However, license holders were allowed to remain open until their licenses expired in January 1888. By that time Fulton County voters had overturned prohibition, making the bill’s provisions moot.10
Those who did not drink in public could purchase whiskey to consume at home through agents for companies based in wet Georgia towns such as Augusta, Griffin, Gainesville, and Macon. Atlantans were technically supposed to travel to these cities to make their purchase, but agents crisscrossed Atlanta taking orders for out-of-town liquor companies. Hundreds of jugs containing one or more gallons of whiskey arrived in Atlanta daily by train. Sometimes Atlantans participated in this “jug trade,” as it was called, in a group, buying a ten-gallon barrel and dividing it among themselves. They formed clubs in which they could communally enjoy the liquor they had collectively purchased. Few blacks seem to have purchased liquor jointly, probably because bulk purchases were cost prohibitive.11
Most blacks and poorer whites who wanted liquor during prohibition had two options: to buy some form of alcohol from a pharmacist or get it illegally from “blind tigers.”12 “Blind tigers” referred not only to the person doing the selling but also to the business itself; thus some were said to “run a blind tiger.” Blind tiger whiskey was frequently a cheap, mixed form of whiskey sometimes supplied by moonshiners. There were plenty of both black and white blind tigers, and they appeared immediately after prohibition began. On July 2 an arrested drunk claimed to have purchased his liquor from a blind tiger, but the first police prosecution of blind tigers came on July 20, when they charged four people with running blind tigers. Tellingly, the Atlanta Constitution gave the most attention to Lucy McCall, a 16-year-old black girl charged with being a tiger. The paper’s editor indicted her in the public’s eye with the article title “A Girl Runs a Blind Tiger,” only to have the judge exonerate her the following day, charging her instead with furnishing liquor to minors, which was a violation of a pre-prohibition law. During the nine months between July 1886 and March 1887, 43 separate times white individuals were charged with illegally selling liquor, and 13 times blacks were so charged. Some individuals were charged repeatedly, and several charges were dismissed for insufficient evidence. One controversial tactic the police developed to convict blind tigers was to arrest individuals who possessed whiskey to use them as witnesses against their provider, but it is not clear that this tactic increased conviction rates.13
It did not take long for blacks to respond to the obvious contradictions of prohibition, namely, that whites retained legal access to liquor but blacks had to use primarily illegal means. Within two weeks of the “official” start of prohibition, the Atlanta Constitution candidly reported that many blacks “all over the city . . . announced loudly their belief” that prohibition had been a trick on them. They said the fact that the Kimball House and Big Bonanza saloons only sold liquor to whites proved prohibition was purposely designed to keep liquor from blacks. The most pithy indictment came from an unidentified man who declared, “Prohibition’s a put up job by the democrats and these high-hat negro preachers.” The only attempt at an organized black response to prohibition came with the municipal elections in October. Several leaders gathered to nominate black candidates for city council. Atlanta’s blacks rarely nominated their own slate of candidates, but the tensions between white antis and prohis and the black sense of betrayal caused some to question the value of interracial cooperation. During their meeting several speakers spoke out angrily against both Democrats and white prohibitionists, expressing a strong sentiment that blacks should support their own candidates in the interests of the race. Former prohibitionist leader Jackson McHenry announced that he had only supported the drys out of a sense of spite, because blacks had been consistently denied retail liquor licenses and he wanted to deny the same to whites. He called on others to ignore the prohibition/anti-prohibition debate because it was only an attempt to use blacks. No preachers spoke at this meeting, suggesting that some secular leaders sought to distance themselves from the clergy and provide an alternative model of black leadership.14
Crime and Prohibition
But what about the much ballyhooed reduction in crime and public drunkenness predicted by prohibitionists in all corners of the country? Were the jails emptied and did the judges have to cancel court sessions? While most of the Police Court dockets from the eighties are nonexistent, complete records for the months of July 1886–March 1887 still exist. While these do not allow a pre and post comparison, one can see trends during the “real” prohibition period, some of which are almost stunning. The first thing the data show over time was a decline in the total number of individuals charged by the court, from the high to mid-400s per month to the low 300s per month. The extent to which this might have been a direct result of prohibition cannot be determined, but it is true that the police charged decreasing numbers of persons with crime as the months passed. While that statistic might seem favorable to the drys, the percentage of people charged with drunkenness actually showed no long-term decline. In fact, the percentage of charges for public drunkenness increased and then decreased, ending at about the same place—the low 20 percent range—where it began. Prohibition seemed to do little to keep alcohol from those who wanted it.
But the most striking statistic from the Police Court Docket is the percentage of charges, by race, for public drunkenness. As graph 3 shows, throughout this period, a much higher percentage of whites were arrested for public drunkenness than blacks. Monthly arrests for public drunkenness as a percentage of total white arrests ranged from three to almost seven times higher than that for blacks. While never more than one-fifth of black arrests were for drunkenness, for whites that number was never less than one-third, and more than once approached two-thirds. For all the difficulties blacks had with law enforcement officers and for all the prejudice whites harbored against them, relative to whites blacks either drank more moderately or they more frequently drank at home. Of all things that might be said of Atlanta’s streets, one could not say they were full of drunken blacks. This relative lack of black public drunkenness might account for the lack of “black beast” rhetoric, which characterized Atlanta’s and the South’s prohibition discourse by the early 1900s. There likely was not even a modicum of reality for people to exploit. In light of this data and the argument about blacks and alcohol presented in chapter two, it appears that white leaders such as Henry Grady and NTS president Theodore Cuyler, who claimed blacks needed prohibition because of their “special weakness” for liquor and the saloon, only revealed their prejudices and ignorance and the gulf that existed between the races.15
A Return to the Status Quo: Race Relations in Dry Atlanta
Compounding the contradictions of prohibition itself was the frustration and disillusionment experienced when race relations with prohibitionists quickly returned to their pre-campaign standards of inequity and exclusion in the interest of white supremacy. Blacks witnessed this in three areas: politics, religion, and law enforcement. Although blacks’ support for prohibition gave them marginally more influence in the 1886 municipal elections than they had ever had before, both groups of whites continued to prevent blacks from exercising any real political power. It was soon evident that white prohibitionists had only countenanced blurring the lines of racial etiquette for the short-term goal of gaining votes. No real change of heart had occurred, as some blacks had hoped and some whites had feared. The first evidence that white Atlantans had no intention of making real changes in the status quo of race relations came with the city’s fall 1886 elections.
Atlanta had not had a two-party political system since the early seventies. After the Republican Party collapsed, a variety of forces combined to destroy the coalition that was the Democratic Party. For several years municipal candidates had presented themselves directly to the citizens without party affiliation. Elites began complaining that this free-for-all system catered to the lower classes too much and encouraged the election of poorly qualified individuals. Beginning in 1884 Atlanta’s business and professional elites reformed the election process to assure that the city’s “best people” (themselves) would be elected and that there would be minimal opposition to their candidacies. The new process began with a call for a mass citizens’ meeting to select a committee that contained ward and at-large members. This committee then nominated a “Citizen’s Ticket” for councilmen, aldermen, and the mayoralty. The committee reported back at a second mass meeting, which then held a discussion and a ratifying vote. The hope was to gain widespread support for the ticket while carefully managing the selection of candidates, but local representatives of the Knights of Labor frequently protested the lack of workingmen on the ballot and sometimes nominated a competing slate of candidates. Blacks, too, sometimes nominated their own candidates. On several occasions white workers unsuccessfully sought to create an alliance with blacks. With the exception of 1890, Atlantans used the citizens’ mass meeting process through the 1891 elections. When combined with the issue of prohibition, this process empowered blacks to a greater degree than anything else in Atlanta city politics to that time. Nevertheless, blacks still could not elect their own to city government.
The first citizens’ mass meeting held during prohibition occurred on October 22, 1886. The chair announced the intention to unite all Atlantans behind one municipal ticket, regardless of how candidates stood on the issue of prohibition. This meeting convened several days after blacks had held their own separate nominating convention, but several blacks, including Reverend E. R. Carter and Reverend Wesley Gaines, Weekly Defiance publisher Alonzo W. Burnett, and lunchroom owner Moses Bently, attended this meeting. The continuing animosity between the prohi and anti camps caused the meeting leaders to divide the crowd into prohibition and anti-prohibition meetings so each group could select 25 men for the nominating committee.16
In the prohi meeting speakers stressed the necessity of cooperating with the antis and the importance of nominating “conservative” men. During the selection process one individual reminded the group how important blacks had been during the local option campaign and suggested that they should have some representation on the committee. Others agreed, so they put Reverend Carter and Reverend Gaines on the committee.17 This was the first time blacks had served on a nominating committee, and although they continued to serve in subsequent years they were never able to put a black man on the ticket.
Things were different in the anti committee meeting. The antis were militant, even hostile, toward the prohibitionists and dismissive toward blacks. The first speaker predicted that the bipartisan 50-member committee would not be able to agree on a slate of candidates and urged the antis not to make any concessions to the “fanatics.” Others argued, however, that since their side had enough public support to win on their own, if the cooperative effort failed they could afford, for the sake of the city’s unity, to try to be conciliatory. As blacks saw no interest in including them in the discussion or on the committee, they began leaving the meeting. When messengers from the prohi meeting arrived and read their list of committee members, the antis responded with derisive “shouts of laughter.” But the remaining black antis at the meeting noticed that the prohibitionists had included two black members, and Moses Bently asked for a similar addition, warning that otherwise blacks might vote dry. Two members agreed to resign, and Moses Bently and Alonzo Burnett were chosen to replace them.18
After two consecutive nights of wrangling, the equally divided committee of 50 finally produced a compromise slate of candidates known as the “fusion” Citizen’s Ticket. It was so evenly divided that both prohibitionists and antis claimed victory. A “balance of power” between the two camps was ostensibly created by nominating a wet mayor and a dry majority for the city council. Seeking public ratification, the committee presented the slate at a raucous public meeting on November 4. Several men addressed the crowd, but attempts by three blacks—the tailor William Finch, mail carrier C. C. Wimbish, and editor William Pledger—to speak were ignored. Speakers pleaded with the audience not only to accept the slate as given but to accept the spirit of compromise that it represented. Responding to a call to replace two prohibitionists with antis, Henry Grady argued that that would “cause a renewed fight among the citizens of Atlanta,” the very thing the “best” white Atlantans wanted to avoid at all costs. One man shouted out from the crowd, “Did the colored men on the committee of fifty ask for anything?” When the answer “no” came back from a white committee member, people applauded, and several cried out, “The colored men are for Atlanta! They don’t want a division among the people!” It may or may not have been true that the blacks asked for nothing, but what is certain is that whites, whether prohibitionists or anti-prohibitionists, refused to nominate blacks for elective office. That snub helps explain why blacks were so unexcited about the election. Only 471 blacks registered (16.5% of the total), and certainly less than that voted. The inclusion of blacks in the nominating committee caused the most prominent blacks to support the Citizen’s Ticket, and none of the independently nominated black candidates polled even three hundred votes.19
Like other municipal elections in the 1880s, the 1886 vote stirred little excitement, but more importantly for the city’s elites, it stirred little opposition.20 The Citizen’s Ticket won a large majority of both white and black votes, but only 20 percent of eligible voters bothered to register. The Atlanta Journal, which opposed the committee’s choice for mayor, supported the ticket anyway, candidly commenting that “From a personal standpoint the ticket is probably acceptable as a whole to very few citizens, but it must be admitted that with the very pronounced views entertained by each member of the committee the result of their labors is commendable . . . the interests of the city cannot suffer at their hands.” The ideas that the rule of “conservative” men was best for Atlanta and that both sides needed to compromise to heal the division over prohibition, served the cause of white supremacy not the best interests of all Atlantans.21
Social relations between the races also reverted to old patterns in religious affairs. In the spring of 1887 Bishop Turner claimed that every time he returned to Atlanta from a trip he received complaints that blacks were not being treated respectfully at white religious meetings. One example occurred on March 13 when two white Clark University teachers took ten of their black female students to a tent revival held by traveling evangelist Reverend J. L. Tillman. The teachers and students all sat together undisturbed until an usher asked the students to move to empty seats in the colored section because the white seats were all taken and several white ladies had no seats. The teachers asked what difference color made and refused to let the girls move. The usher brought in a policeman, who explained that Tillman did not want the races sitting together. The whole Clark group left the service in protest, while reminding the usher and the officer that they had been allowed to sit together when they attended Sam Jones’s tent meetings. Unfazed, the policeman reminded them that “In this section we have nothing like social equality and never will, in church or out of church.” Both Sam Jones and Sam Small put in appearances during Tillman’s revival, giving their blessing to the event, and were apparently indifferent to the return of segregated seating.22
The third area of race relations resistant to change was law enforcement. On at least two occasions before 1887 black Atlantans had sought to be employed on the police force, only to be ignored. Most blacks would have been happy with black police officers in black neighborhoods, as some other Southern cities permitted, but the fact that all police officers legally had authority over any citizen made even that idea anathema to white Atlantans. In 1887 the Board of Police Commissioners consisted of a slim majority of prohibitionists, and during its biannual restructuring the small majority removed anti-prohibitionist officers deemed to be too lax in their enforcement of prohibition. This action elicited a firestorm of criticism from anti-prohibitionists, who believed the commissioners exhibited a lack of “good faith.” Some blacks thought the existence of a prohibitionist majority on the Board of Police Commissioners created an ideal opportunity for them to secure a place on the police force. In March 1887 prohibitionists Jim Palmer and James Parker applied, as well as W. A. Pledger, even though he had opposed prohibition. Blacks felt they were owed positions on the police force, and white prohis knew they would need black support if another prohibition referendum occurred in the fall. But the political and racial implications of prohibitionists empowering Atlanta’s blacks with police uniforms and badges were enormous. The antis made it known that if the police commissioners appointed black officers they would charge prohibitionists with being fanatics who had overturned Atlanta’s entire system of race relations. Even though James Parker claimed prohibitionists promised him a police position as payoff for his support in the 1885 election, he, along with the other two black candidates, abruptly withdrew their applications. Parker wrote to the Atlanta Constitution that he withdrew because of the “racket” that had been made over his application and to prevent the anti-prohibitionists from making an issue out of his candidacy. But the Macon Telegraph reported that Parker was telling people around town that he had accepted a $200 payoff to withdraw his application. When Parker switched to the prohibitionist side during the 1885 campaign he claimed that previously the antis had been paying him off, and that he switched because he was losing his “better class” of black friends and his female companion had threatened to break up with him. Whatever really happened in the election and with his police application, both cases clearly reveal his keen-witted pragmatism. He was not interested in leading any “crusade.” The mechanics of white supremacy often required blacks to test its boundaries and to employ multiple approaches to find cracks in the system.23
One of the reasons blacks were so determined to get on the police force (they tried again in 1889) was the poor treatment they received from white police officers. Southerners designed postbellum urban policing to control the black population. As in other Southern cities, Atlanta’s police served as what historian Howard Rabinowitz called the “first line of defense” against the freed people and their supposed proclivity to disturb the peace of the city through petty robbery, vagrancy, and general “disorderly conduct.” Atlanta’s police arrested more people on the catch-all charge of “disorderly conduct” than any other single charge. As discussed earlier, incidents of excessive force against blacks were not uncommon, and blacks rarely had any recourse. When it came to enforcing prohibition, a particularly egregious example of disregard for black citizens’ rights stands out. Three detectives who had been assigned to work on cases of prohibition violation suspected an older freedman named Giles Moore of being a blind tiger. He lived in his own house, which he said was just outside the city limits but the detectives thought was within the city limits. On Saturday, April 2, 1887, the detectives searched his house for liquor and, in the process, admitted they did not have a warrant. The next day they went through his home again while he was in church, even having the temerity to take him from the church service to unlock a particular chest. Their efforts never yielded more than one bottle of wine. Moore was so angry that he had the detectives arrested for trespassing, and he told his story to an Atlanta Constitution reporter, who kindly printed it without trying to make the detectives appear innocent.24
Other ongoing abuses of police power also occurred. Officers began arresting blacks who possessed whiskey to hold them as witnesses against the seller, even though no law banned the possession of liquor. On one occasion when an officer crossed paths with a black man carrying a bottle of whiskey, he asked him to stop so he could talk to him. The man fled instead, dropping and breaking the bottle. The officer fired two shots at the fleeing witness and missed. The irony of the situation was not lost even on the white press, which questioned where the justice was in risking the murder of a possible witness to a possible crime. After all, the officer had not even determined whether, or where, the man bought the liquor. Actions like this suggested that at least some whites wanted prohibition to keep liquor away from blacks. Abuse from law enforcement only further soured blacks who had voted for prohibition in 1885.25
By the end of Atlanta’s prohibition experiment most blacks could point to little or no benefits from prohibition or their votes for it. The animosity between white prohis and antis remained as strong as ever, but they masked it whenever they wanted to exclude blacks. Whites had legal access to liquor that was not available to blacks, and blacks were now not just being arrested on the usual “disorderly conduct” charges, but for the new crime of being a blind tiger or for nothing more than to be held as a witness. Every time blacks looked for improved race relations, they only found disappointment and growing discontent, and they even spread stories of their discontent with prohibition to other areas of the South.26
Telling Their Story: Principled Black Prohibitionists
Although prohibition was riddled with inconsistencies and stagnated race relations, principled black prohibitionists were busy touting their campaign successes. Between the 1885 and 1887 votes, black and white prohibitionists started three short-lived newspapers to get their story out: The Conflict, Southern Recorder, and Herald of United Churches. Both white and black prohibitionists capitalized on the success of Atlanta’s local option vote by crisscrossing Georgia and the nation giving speeches to temperance organizations and in other prohibition campaigns. Senator Alfred Colquitt and Dr. J. B. Hawthorne were in great demand in both the North and the South. Although at least one speaker accused Hawthorne of not being a teetotaler himself, no one ever questioned the abstinence of the most outspoken black ministers—Carter, Gaines, and Turner. In early 1886 Reverend Carter spoke in Milledgeville, Georgia, and Gaines accompanied Sam Jones to the same city for a speech, sharing the platform with him. Carter not only traveled in Georgia but also brought the prohibition message to Virginia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, and Indiana. During Staunton, Virginia’s local option campaign, James Parker spoke for prohibition and William A. Pledger spoke against it. In 1887 Good Samaritan leader Smith W. Easley became business manager of a new Atlanta publication Herald of United Churches, a short-lived prohibition paper that represented both black and white churches. But the black leader whose words on the subject have been best preserved is Bishop Henry McNeal Turner. In addition to touring Georgia towns, Turner spoke in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Alabama, and gave 37 speeches in Texas as part of its statewide prohibition campaign in the summer of 1887.27
But Turner was more than an active speaker. In September 1886, he stopped contributing to Alonzo Burnett’s Weekly Defiance and began publishing and editing his own paper, the Southern Recorder, initially with assistance from Smith W. Easley and James B. Parker. The masthead read, “Devoted to Temperance, Religion, Justice, Industry, Economy, Education and African Civilization.” Suggestive of its first position in the motto, temperance was one of the most frequent topics in the early issues. In the first issue Turner delineated seven reasons why he decided to publish a new paper. Although his primary goal was the “material and moral advancement of the race,” his fourth point was about temperance: “we think a paper of a different tone upon the liquor issue still pending is in great demand.” Turner’s difference with Burnett over prohibition was a major reason for his leaving the Defiance. He said he could not “officially or conscientiously co-operate” any longer with the Weekly Defiance “while entertaining views so divergent upon the alcoholic question.” Turner enthusiastically used the Recorder’s pages to editorialize on the temperance and prohibition movement locally and nationally. He reprinted several articles from The Conflict, a white temperance paper that had begun publishing just a few months before the Recorder. Turner included a regular temperance column as did many other newspapers, which was a potpourri of poetry and anecdotal prose gleaned from a variety of temperance-minded periodicals.28
When prohibition candidates and prohibition itself suffered defeat, Turner seized those opportunities to reiterate his principled position. Speaking with his characteristically sharp tongue, he conveyed the intense spiritual passion of many prohibitionists. Atlantans not only elected municipal leaders in the fall of 1886, but they also elected state legislators from their 35th congressional district. The leaders of the Young Men’s Prohibition Club announced their endorsement of certain candidates for the election, but they did so without consulting their club members or members of the black prohibition clubs. Anti-prohibitionists were angry that prohibition had been dragged back into politics, but the move also created a backlash among those prohibitionists not consulted in the process. The Weekly Defiance chided Turner and the other ministers for cooperating with white Democratic prohibitionists who used blacks for their own purposes and then ignored them when convenient. Turner, never reticent when it came to criticism, quickly drew a distinction between the moral and the political to explain the clergy’s position:
We have only to say, the prohibition contest was a moral struggle, the other was political, the same thing white democrats did colored republicans could have done. . . . If the black men have no leaders politically, do not blame the colored ministers for trying to lead morally. The quiet of the Georgia negro, politically, is a disgrace. It shows he is weak in intellect, destitute of race patriotism, too big a coward to take a position . . . the men who have capacity to be leaders are too busy fighting for liquor.29
In calling prohibition non-political Turner, a former politician himself, was consistent with his 1885 campaign speech in which he said the “question was not a political one, but one of humanity and divineness.” Likewise, his assessment of the weakness of Georgia’s Republican Party was painfully accurate.30 The reference to effective black leaders supporting whiskey might have been a swipe at Burnett as much as at William Pledger. As it turned out, the candidates endorsed by the Young Men’s Prohibition Club lost. With complete consistency Turner opined that, although some men may have been defeated, “prohibition was not defeated.”31
When Texans rejected state prohibition after Turner’s extensive speaking tour, he pronounced judgment and prophesied eventual victory with all the anger and passion of an ancient Hebrew prophet:
Thousands of those who turned their backs on God, virtue, principle, honor and common sense, to extend the reign of liquor in Texas, will be cursed with premature deaths; will be stabbed, shot, hung, will die in jails, penitentiaries, in want, in disgrace, here and damnation in the everafter. . . . Liquor will as certainly go as heaven rules earth. The antis may rejoice and exult for a short time, but prohibition will come again and come ultimately to stay.32
Prohibitionists such as Turner willingly subjected themselves to charges of fanaticism and extremism, but their worldview prevented them from seeing things any other way.
In addition to the work of the clergy, the principled prohibitionist women continued their organizing. On March 10, 1887, some ladies gathered at Friendship Baptist Church to organize a second Colored WCTU for Atlanta. These ladies were not in competition with the older union because they organized on the west side of town and called their union the West Atlanta W.C.T.U. The Reverend E. R. Carter’s wife was the first vice president, and Mrs. Ella Pitts became the first president. In the early months they took time to read literature and educate themselves on the temperance cause, as well as carry out visitations of the sick and hold regular prayer meetings.33
Turner and other principled prohibitionists entertained strong strains of perfectionism and millennialism, showing their continued rootedness in reform nexus theology. A high license fee on saloons, which many people in the 1880s considered part of a reasonable or “conservative” approach because it reduced the number of saloons, could never satisfy these purists because it still was permissive of sin. As one prohibitionist explained, “a barroom protected by high license and a barroom under low license, is a barroom all the same, and the evil influences radiating from it are just the same.” A little evil sanctioned by the government was still evil in their eyes, but worse, because the government sanctioned it. As Turner said, “we can never boast of a perfect civilization while whisky saloons and grog-shops are counted by the hundreds and by the thousands all over this land.” Principled prohibitionists could neither compromise their position one iota nor be discouraged by electoral defeats or the contradictions of prohibition, for they were on a divine mission.34
Prohibition in Atlanta was like prohibition elsewhere in the United States. The citizenry was divided, even hostile at times, and this provided fertile soil for all sorts of incriminations and recriminations to fly back and forth between leaders. Despite all the dissatisfaction among blacks, no group was more dissatisfied or anxious than white anti-prohibitionists. They could hardly wait for the next campaign to begin. They began organizing as soon as “real” prohibition began in July 1886. The 1887 campaign was just as heated as the 1885 one, but the momentum had shifted because the turbulent years of 1886 and 1887 had removed the most important reasons opportunistic blacks used for voting dry. This time the wets had the wind at their back, and they were determined to make the most of it.
Prohibition is an awful flop.
We like it.
It can’t stop what it’s meant to stop.
We like it.
It’s left a trail of graft and slime,
It’s filled our land with vice and crime,
It don’t prohibit worth a dime,
Nevertheless, we’re for it.
—Franklin P. Adams