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“AND WHO HAS THE BODY?”
The Historical Signiﬁcance of African American Funerary Display

By

LaTrese Evette Adkins

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of History

2003

ABSTRACT

“AND WHO HAS THE BODY?”
The Historical Signiﬁcance of African American F unerary Display

By

LaTrese Evette Adkins

African Americans have consistently asserted their humanity. In so doing, they
have both preserved cultural connections to their African pasts and struggled to express
their unique ethnic identities within the United States. Consequently, identity formation, a
large part of that struggle, represents a constant in African American history. Historians
have investigated many cultural manifestations of African American identity formation.
However, Aﬁ'ican American funerary display remains a neglected area of research in
African American identity formation. In this study, African American funerary display
includes all familial interactions after the death of a community member from removal of
the physical remains, arrangements for the display of the corpse, and ﬁnal interment of
the body. This process of death care offers one history of Aﬁ'ican Americans’ identity
formation."0 The consistency of African American funerary display in US. history gives

evidence that African Americans chose funerals to symbolically express their ethnic

 

°° This study began as a graduate seminar paper for “The History of Black Professions in the 20th Century”
at Michigan State University with the John A. Hannah Professor of History, Darlene Clark Hine in Fall
1998. Dr. Hine had recently published her book, Speak Truth to Power: Black Professional Class in United
States History. (New York: Carlson Publishing, Inc, 1996). The paper grew from an attempt to redress the
neglected community roles and service relationships of African American funeral directors with their non-
elite clientele, Black families, into a call for historical revision.

identities. Therefore, the researcher contends that African American funerary display is a
historical record, a text of self deﬁnition.

This study revises African American historiography by claiming the centrality of
funerary display in African American identity formation. This study also incorporates
original methodology and an innovative conceptual model, community clients, to account
for how African American funeral directors and their community clients have negotiated
collaborative representations of Black identity via their funerary displays. Traditional
methods for historicizing the US. funeral industry and professional death care providers,
funeral directors, do not capture familial ﬁmctions within Aﬁ'ican American funerary
display. In ﬁmerary display, Black families and funeral directors could together “speak

truth to power.”

Copyright by
LATRESE EVETTE ADKINS
2003

To the memories of Emmett and Mamie Till—
Although their lives cannot be replaced nor our thanks heard,
There are still opportunities to

“. ..give what you have. . . ”
2 Corinthians 8:12

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The completion of this project is the result of assistance from various professional
and personal resources. Special thanks to the Graduate School of Michigan State
University (MSU) for awarding me several grants and fellowships; the MSU student
support services especially the ofﬁces of Dr. Decolius Johnson as well as the short-term
loan; the librarians and archivists at the University of New Orleans and New Orleans
Public Library; the Schlesinger Library at Harvard Radcliff; the South Carolina Historical
Society; and the staff at many public and university libraries, especially Detroit, for
access to their archives and manuscript collections; the encouragement and correction of
Detroit’s own Michigan Select Funeral Directors gave the perspective needed to ﬁnished
my work; and the faculty, staff and students of Lansing Community College and Western
Michigan University who all shared in the enthusiasm for new knowledge.

I owe immeasurable appreciation to my advisor, Darlene Clark Hine, John A.
Hannah Professor of History at MSU, for the perfect example of how to live the life of
the mind plus her permission and time to ﬁnd my own way into it. I also give thanks for
my dissertation committee: Harriette Pipes McAdoo, Richard R. Thomas, Christine
Daniels, and Bill Lawson. Thank you, friend and Mama, Mrs. Eppie L. Meadows, for
always teaching me that the women in Black families are remarkable and giving me a
biological family who continuously keeps me “rooted and grounded in love.” My love to
the church family at Union Baptist of Lansing. and also, Brandye and Kacy, (we just
sometimes need new names!) And, ﬁnally, I thank God for poor communities like my
‘hood, Sunny South Dallas, where smart Black girls feel neither threatened nor ignored,

but celebrated. Amen.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES .............................................................................. vii

INTRODUCTION
Work and Identity: Literature Review of Aﬁican American Family History. . . .1
Theoretical Syncretism: The Community Client Model for Historical Revision. . .6
Aﬁican American Funerary Display as a Process of Identity Formation ........ 20

CHAPTER ONE/Funerals and the Cosmology of Death Care in the Aﬁican Diaspora. . . ..28

CHAPTER TWO/Benevolence and Burial
Church and Charity: “Invisible Institution” to Post-Emancipation Communties..47
New Orleans, Funerals, and Jazz ........................................................ 65

CHAPTER THREE/Modernity and Masculinity

Migration and Identity .............................................................. 89.
Bourgeois Respectability ............................................................ 92
Southern Funerals as a Northern Industry ......................................... 99
CHAPTER FOUR/Case Study of Michigan African American Funeral Businesses .......107

CHAPTER FIVE/“And Who Has the Body?” The Child Murder of Mamie’s Baby ....... 132

CONCLUSION

African American Death Care and the Meaning of Freedom ................... 144

African American Family Studies in the 21$t Century ........................... 147
ENDNOTES .......................................................................................... 150
APPENDIX

Cole Funeral Home Correspondence, 1929 ................................. 204

Mid-Michigan funeral home surveys and respondent statistical data. . .209

BIBLIOGRAPHY .............................................................................. 212

vii

TABLEl:
TABLE2:
TABLE3:
TABLE4:

LIST OF FIGURES

HINESIGHT METHODOLOGY ............................................... 10
THEORETICAL SYNCRETISM: THE COMMUNITY CLIENT MODEL ......... 13
AP. BOYER ACCOUNT LEDGER FOR OCTOBER l896-JUNE 1899 ....... 74-76

PARTIAL LISTING OF NEW ORLEANS, BENEVOLENT SOCIETIES ............ 78

viii

INTRODUCTION

Work and Identity: Literature Review of Aﬁ'ican American History

Neither the ﬁrst group to be enslaved in the New World nor people who must
claim slavery as their initiation to the Western Hemisphere, the trans-Atlantic slave trade,
nonetheless, distinguishes the genesis of Aﬁican American identity.l Neophyte histories
of the African peoples dispersed throughout the United States unsurprisingly chose the
“peculiar institution” as the deﬁning and ubiquitous context of the African Diaspora in
the Americas. Provocative as much as problematic, these early studies, for example,
presumed naturalness of primary characters such as slaveholders. As a result,
presuppositions concerning control over slave labor became the historical axis of the
ante—bellum South. These narratives about subjugated Black bodies, exploitations of
enslaved workers, in the interests of powerful men marred the early stages of US. slavery
historiography. Such uncritical interpretations of the antebellum period made involuntary
or slave labor synonymous with being an African American person. In these historical
records, Aﬁican Americans’ work conditions came to represent African American people
generally. Consequently, classical histories of slavery in the United States created ﬁctive
African American identities.2

Historical reconstruction of the agency of African descendants in the United
States means correcting this fallacious collapse of work as ethnic identity. My study of
death care, for example, shows how enslaved people used funerals to transﬁgure enslaved
individuals into “symbols of freedom?” I argue that the history of African American
funerary display offers a transcript of self deﬁnition, new facts as well as ﬁctions of the

American past. The historical record of the African Diaspora within the United States

must be revised using similar information they provided themselves. Funerals reconstruct
their own ethnic identities.

To be fair, at least one writer of early U.S. slavery historiography analyzed the
agency and humanity of the bonded labor force. The scholarship of W.E.B. DuBois,
particularly his 1896 publication about the slave trade in colonial America, certainly
argued the genesis and signiﬁcance of ethnic identities of the Aﬁican Diaspora in the
United States. However, most classical interpretations of US. slavery probably still
consider the 1918 publication of U.B. Phillips’ American Negro Slavery: Supply,
Employment, and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime as the
ﬁrst scholarly account of US. slavery. According to Southern historian Eugene
Genovese, this premier text has suffered ﬁom mistaken neglect because of the undeniably
racist assumptions of its author. That is to say, Phillips embraced a ﬁction concerning
White supremacy. Phillips presented the slaveholders’ power in the form of a Grand
Narrative, a master narrator. Genovese tried to defend the empirical value of Phillips’
contribution and reclaim its legitimacy by explaining that Phillip was a social
consequence of Jim Crow, Southern roots. Born in 19th century Georgia, Phillip held a
romantic view of his region’s past glory and therefore, described slavery in the
paternalistic rhetoric which plantation owners repeated to themselves. Understandably, of
course, the plantation owners’ human property escaped Phillip’s idyllic reconstructions as
the complexity of slave culture eluded him along with their persona. Phillip’s history of
White ruling classes, wealthy plantation owners with power over Black bodies, eclipsed
the agency and humanity of the enslaved individual. This hegemonic story seemed to

deny the very existence of African American families as well.4

Emerging from the ethnocentrism of Phillip’s grand narrative, the master text of
White privilege and ruling class interests, that fanciful indulgence of American
exceptionalism and her myopic consideration of attendant human atrocities, historians
began to completely rewrite the history of US. slavery, challenging this obsession with
control over Black bodies or labor as the lead story of the ante-bellum past. For example,
the centrality of Black identity or consciousness as a dimension of involuntary servitude
revised the historiography for this time period. Historicizing Aﬁican identities as they
took shape throughout the Diaspora, scholars reconnected the memories of enslaved
people of Aﬁican descent. Such scholarship also matured the intellectual appreciation of
slavery beyond investigations of labor coercion. Historians shifted their “angle of vision”
from discussions of African American bondage as a characteristic feature of the
slaveholder’s world and function of colonial society to the enslaved people who survived
those systems.5

The post-modern historiography of the African American experience began with
the primer of Black history, John Hope Franklin’s From Slaver to Freedom ﬁrst
published in 1947. Ten years later, Kenneth Stampp also turned different historical lenses
or angles of vision onto the period of African American enslavement. While Franklin
wrote the history of Black America emphasizing citizenship and contributions, Stampp
looked at slavery and plantation production through the lens of slave resistance. Like
Franklin, Stampp’s 1957 description of Southern slavery, possibly the earliest hint of the
shift from a focus on coercion, seemed to conﬁrm a transition into studies of

identiﬁcation among African American people however affected by bondage. In The

Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, Stampp exposed Southern

patriarchy as a dramatic facade between slaveholders and the enslaved, the idyllic self-
portrayal of plantation owners. In painting a picture of what he called the “American
tragedy,” Stampp suggested that the actual history of US. slavery have not ever be fully
recaptured.6 That is to say, primary sources, i.e., the historical records, contain a ﬁction
of White control as well as the actual continually recreated or negotiated power
relationships between them and the enslaved. Stampp’s presentation of slave resistance
vis a’ vis White domination, perhaps an unconscious segue from slavery studies,
inaugurated the Black identity dialectic of domination and resistance. Stampp did so by
acknowledging the multiple tasks of the enslaved in dealing with the patriarchy as well as
hypocrisy of Southern men in the latter’s roles as father, citizen, and employer. Followed
by the 1968 publication of Winthrop Jordan’s White over Black: American Attitudes
Toward the Negro, the intellectual preoccupation with controlling the labor of enslaved,
Black men found an academic companion scholars’ focus on the Black man as he had
been constructed in the minds of his White, 19th century masculine counterpart.

Historical reclamation of Black bodies, scholarly articulations that critiqued the
US. master as the deﬁnitive character in US. slavery historiography, also analyzed the
objectivity and applicability of the master narrative as well. That is to say, while Phillip’s
1918 publication did offer a captivating vignette of the American South and its
benefactor, DuBois, Franklin, Stampp, Jordan and other historians countered with a
watershed caveat: the “peculiar institution” had a more nuanced ancestry than that of the
White ruling class. However, Phillip called this truth in response to White power, i.e., the
resistance, insurrections, and conspiracies belonging to the African American

communities, slave crimes. Resistance to the dehumanization of slavery, especially the

impetus to maintain or reconstitute the sacredness of familial type bonds, became an
important avenue for documenting the human identity of so-called chattel. Speaking
“truth to power,” historians uncovered resistance to enslavement as well as racial and
cultural hegemonies as a way to articulate and expose how the seemingly powerless gave
meaning to their own lives. Imbuing acts of deﬁance with political meaning, historians
reconstructed the dialectical dynamics that had given rise to deﬁance, putting the
memories of the enslaved into a more accurate, historical context of resistance (truth) and
power (domination). In the evolution of slavery studies, social and cultural historians
experimented with slave resistance as an expression of both identity and politics.
Consequently, the historiography shows how scholars “squeezed and teased” primary
sources in order to get behind the mask of Black male subservience and the veil of Black
female dissemblance.7

Just as a focus on African American identity redressed emphases of coercion and
control, the topics of slave families and communities also checked the interpretive fallacy
of Southern hegemony and White totalitarianism. John Blassingame’s 1972 publication
of The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, in 1974, Peter Wood’s
Black Majority: Negroes in colonial South Carolina ﬁom 1670 through the Stono
Rebellion, Ira Berlin’s Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South
in 1975, in 1977, Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina
During Reconstruction by Thomas Holt, Daniel Littleﬁeld’s Rice and Slaves in 1981, the
1984 appearance of Charles Joyner’s Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave

Community, Barbara Field’s 1985 Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground, and Gary

Nash’s 1988 publication about the formation of Philadelphia’s free Black community laid

the foundation for a US. slavery historiography that went beyond discussions of labor
control, accounting for identity formation by using speciﬁc regional or case studies as
their historical bases.8

Most importantly, slavery studies by the late 19703 described families within the
quarters of the enslaved, the tenuous positions of free Blacks, and the tensions between
slaveholding people of color and those whom they held in bondage. Family as a unit of
social analysis for slavery studies, for example, made it possible to see “within the
plantation household,” the private spheres of Black and White communities in the slave
South, and the “stolen childhood” of slave youth. As a result of the reclamation of family
as a unit of analysis applicable even to those in bondage, the historical literature
concerning African Americans’ post-emancipation experiences also reﬂected an
increasing complexity. By referencing the efforts of African American churches,
historians brought identity and politics from the discourse on US. slavery into
discussions of the post-emancipation period. These historians referenced the previous,
path breaking contributions to US. slavery studies, complicating historical concepts such
as identity formation and politics. Historians also began to examine the “world,” i.e., the
US. civic and cultural societies, that enslaved and free Black people had created it.9
Theoretical Syncretism:
The Community Client Model for Historical Revision

Historical promulgation of slaveholding hegemony has gone out of vogue. More
SOphisticated models have replaced totalitarian descriptions of power to control labor.
The historical method of the domination and resistance dialectic, for example, has

provided glimpses into the inner lives, thoughts, and needs of the enslaved population.

Among other interpretive beneﬁts, this method facilitates a shift in the researcher’s
“angle of vision” to Aﬁican American institution building. At least two institutions
deserve credit for our understandings of African American identities beyond racial
hierarchy and involuntary subjugation. Reclaiming the complexities of enslaved
experiences from the hegemony of labor control, tedious research and revision involving
the Black church and the African American family emerged. The 1976 release of Herbet
Gutrnan’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom followed by several of Jacqueline
Jones’s book length studies about Black women, work, and migration, the confrontation
of a US. ﬁction of master classes over subservient people by the revisionists’ complex
and nuanced glimpses into “ambiguous” Blackness both enslaved and free had come of
age. The Black Church of the 18th century garnered a signiﬁcant number of
investigations, especially its northern beginnings among the free people of color in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The historical record of the Black church through the 19th
century community provided evidence of self-help strategies on behalf of newly freed
Southerners. Historicizing this institution for the 20m century, researchers highlighted
how those traditions of autonomy and community agency became an institutional
apparatus. The Black church launched the civil service careers of historical ﬁgures such
as Fannie Lou Hammer, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Adam Clayton Powell.
Serious attention to the relationships, functions, and demographics of Black churches also
helped correct the fallacy that coerced labor and racial domination fully represented the
historical memories of Aﬁican Americans from slavery to ﬁ'eedom.10

Unlike the documented leadership of the Civil Rights movement, however, the

history of Aﬁican American death care was neither readily apparent nor available. In

reconstructing African American identities using their funerary displays as primary
source material, I collapsed several theories of difference to uncover these rich, cultural
histories. I devised an original methodology called theoretical syncretism. The
methodology fulﬁlled its purpose as it led to the creation of a new historical
conceptualization, community client. Collapsing theories of difference, my theoretical
syncretism yielded a new historical conceptualization, the community client model, for
studies in African American family history.

Theoretical Syncretism represents a revisionist methodology because it challenges
traditional paradigms, i.e., conventional analytic methods, in order to ﬁll gaps and voids
within existing historical canons and research agendas. As a method of revision,
theoretical syncretism functions as a method for synthesizing existing analytic theories
and historical explanations to create new historical models. The resultants of this method
of historical inquiry are innovative conceptualizations that make it possible to refute
powerlessness. Therefore, theoretical syncretism functions on the basis of a few
presuppositions. First, the existing theories selected for the revisionist process must
reﬂect thorough knowledge of published historical scholarship within the area of the
desired revision. A thorough understanding of African American history in my own
study, for example, grapples with both fact and ﬁction, isolating the concepts of
hegemony and resistance. Secondly, the potential revision should create or contribute to
the emergent theories that currently relate to the area of historical inquiry being
considered for revision. I designed theoretical syncretism by comparing existing
historical methods of several revisionist historians. Theoretical syncretism as an analytic

method for revising historical scholarship in African American studies rests on my

introduction to theory making, HineSight Methodology, a creation I named after the
revisionist historian whose training and example inspired its creation. HineSight
Methodology shows what the revisionist historian should grasp before she can create new
historical models for historical inquiry by synthesizing research tools. It functions as the
way to ﬁnd the “silences,” or gaps and voids in current historiography while theoretical
syncretism offers a method for ﬁlling them.ll My analytic method, theoretical syncretism,
is a blend of several other analytic methods, i.e., historical theories. I began with the
culture of dissemblance, a theory of Black women’s resistance to rape and sexual
exploitation alternative constructions of race, class, and gender to historicize Black
experiences.12 (See Table l: HineSight Methodology).

Understanding existing historical methods in the reconstruction of African
American history must precede the creation of alternate historical conceptualizations,
theory making and new models. HineSight Methodology makes it possible to identify
historical differences resulting from social constructions like race, class, and gender.
HineSight Methodology helped the researcher ﬁnd the “silences,” gaps, and voids in the
published scholarship concerning African Americans in US. history. That is to say, the
record of African Americans in US. history can be reconstructed as more truths are
uncovered. Finding more truth about African Americans in US, according to HineSight
Methodology, involves historical mastery, ingenuity, clarity and acuity. Surely, ﬁlling the
record of African American histories with accurate descriptions about the working Black
woman, her political culture, and myriad subtleties of her ancestral past prove the

signiﬁcance of historical revision. In the case of African American history for the

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post-modem era, however, revisionist historians accidentally accomplished something
else besides the discovery of more truth. In reconstructing the experiences of African
Americans following World War II, revisionist Aﬁ'ican American historiography does
not adequately contextualize class privilege. Consequently, the reconstruction of post-
modern US. history (1945 to the present) has focused on the social mobility, leadership,
and struggles of the Black middle class vis a vis their social, political, and economic
gains from the Civil Rights movement. Black preachers, lawyers, educators and doctors
captured the attention of revisionist historians who only knew to look at men in order to
gauge strength, survival, and change. As historians took note of the obvious inequity in
retelling those stories, Black women nurses, social workers, and teachers appeared at the
center of many analyses, an inclusion that corrected the myopic obsession with validating
Black masculinity.

Preparing to ﬁll those voids with reconstructions meant looking at the nuanced
foci other scholars whose work reﬂects a revisionist model. For example, Tera Hunter’s
scholarship on Black washerwomen, Robin D.G. Kelley’s analyses of Black working-
class consciousness, and Dwight A. McBride’s unveiling critique of slave testimony as
the tool of the abolitionist movement all represent the inherent principle of HineSight
Methodology. Like HineSight Methodology, my revisionist method can work beyond its
current purposes. Theoretical syncretism helped identify the gaps in historical literature
about African American identity formation. However, community clients came out of this
revisionist method that can function in much the same way for any historical void.
Theoretical syncretism makes such reclamations possible by facilitating the breakdown of

the Black respectability paradigm, uncovering the agency of non-elite Black families.

11

Hine’s theory of dissemblance, Kelley’s “hidden transcript” of Black “infrapolitics,”
historian Earl Lewis’ “overlapping Diasporas,” and the community building process of
historian Richard Thomas were collapsed using theoretical syncretism.13
I combined several theories found in African American historical literature as a
way to correct the marginalization of non-elite, Black families in post-modem African
American historiography (See Table 2). Hine’s theory of dissemblance always leads to
questions about what happened behind what she called the curtain or veil, i.e., the masks
that African American women donned to function within inequitable differences of a
social construction based on power, i.e., racism. Kelley’s theory of “infrapolitics” helped
me see how Black women in urban landscapes found safe places to take off their masks,
unveil, and draw back the curtain. And the community building process that historian
Richard Thomas uses to describe urban landscapes show how Black people collaborated
in their “infrapolitics” across time and place. The very strategic manifestations of Black
women, their inner lives behind the veils, prove that they knew when and with whom it
was safe to publicly be and to express themselves. The “infrapolitics” in “overlapping
Diasporas” or dispersed communities looks at historical subjects accounting for human
experiences like death care and funerary display. The investigation of these subjects helps
deconstruct power, hegemony, and silences. Table 2 visually represents how the resultant
model, the new historical conceptualization of African American families as community
clients was produced Reconstruction and revision lead to spaces where self-deﬁnitions of
African American identities become evident. However, historicizing self-deﬁnition

neither reconciles nor refutes differences in African American identity formation.

12

TABLE 2— THEORETICAL SYNCRETISM

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Historian Revision Theoretical Synthesis Reference
Community Clients
The metaphor of Paul Ask questions that “Rape and the
Lawrence Dunbar’s peel truth (resistance) Inner Lives of
Darlene Clark mask for greater from power (silence, Black Women:
attention to the silence domination or Thoughts on the
Hine female gendered hegemony) Culture of
resistance Dissemblance”
The dissonance of class Look for spaces where Race Rebels:
Robin D.G. consciousness within truth (resistance) has Culture, Politics,
African American subverted silence, and the Black
Kelley history that challenges domination and/or Working Class
the hegemony of Black hegemony; historical
bourgeois subjects are active and
respectability not dissembling
African American Both truth (resistance) “To Turn as on a
Earl Lewis history as and silence (power) Pivot: Writing
multipositional must be placed in the African
(opposed to a singular, context of US. ethnic Americans into a
social reconstruction) diversity as well as the History of
inﬂuenced by and African Diaspora Overlapping
inclusive of multiple, Diasporas”
dispersed communities
Life for Us is
Self-help and social Differences and What We Make It:
Richard Thomas responsibility of Black dialectics catalyze Building
communities African America Community in

 

uninterrupted by
distance or time

 

community building

 

Detroit, 1915-
I945

 

The history of the preservation and presentation of the Black corpse simply

conceptualizes their dissimilarities. Using theoretical syncretism to investigate African

American funeral display, my historical conceptualization community clients

contextualizes at least one method in the history of Black resistance, the politics of

respectability. For while funerals do reveal the ethnic identities of the less powerful, they

13

 

also reveal intra-racial prejudices and class preferences among African Americans. That
is to say, more dissimilarities or differences in U. S. history than the obvious Black to
White, free to bondage, and rich to poor become evident when the “angle of vision” shifts
from simple resistance to ﬂuid and constant reclamations. My study of funerary display
represents such a historical reconstruction.

Historical reconstructions based on new theories of African American identities
uncover the dissimilarities in these histories. Perhaps the dissimilarity that a study of
African Americans funerals reveals can best be described as the 21St century version of
Black folks’ double consciousness. For while DuBois identified the color line as the
deﬁning problem of the 20th century in African American consciousness, African
American history has been written on the bases of resistance versus reclamations. This
double consciousness has emphasized the tension between Blackness or the African
legacy and the American dream. My study of funerary display, however, moves the idea
of double consciousness into the next millennium. In my theoretical syncretism this dual
consciousness of African American identity has less to do with tensions based on ﬁxed
racial boundaries and more with the reclamation of the past despite the conditions of the
present. A 21St century critique of double consciousness in US. culture, the indelible
indicator of African American identity according to DuBois, shifts the center of this
history from race relations and resistance to a constant renegotiation of past with present.
My decision to study death care resulted from a change over time in my own double
consciousness. Focusing on the tensions of past to present, funerary behavior unveils how

Black folk simultaneously felt

14

about their pasts and their present conditions as they displayed themselves to their
communities. Yet, differences occurred even in their negotiated funerary displays,
especially after emancipation and migration to larger urban centers. Therefore,
dissimilarity versus monolithic characterizations of resistance to race oppression is the
consequences of historical reconstructions based on my theoretical syncretism.

For example, a study on African American consciousness and racial identity as
they are revealed in funerary display deconstruct the hegemonic paradigms like the
ﬁctions of White Southern supremacy and the hegemony of slaveholding power. Most
importantly, this new area of historical inquiry for African American identity formation
also provides a historical conceptualization, community clients, to check the hegemony of
one model of Black resistance, the so-called politics of respectability. The history of
African American funerary display dispels this myth of a cohesive universality in African
American resistance and its civic leadership.

The subject of African American funerary display permits historians to construct
more accurate descriptions of African American identities. Death care accounts for these
Black families’ individual choices with respect to their collective pasts. In Black funerals,
speciﬁcally, Black families (regardless of their socio-economic status or relationship to
material resources) have signiﬁcantly contributed to the creation, support, and expansion
of their communities. In their patronage of Black service professions like the family-
owned funeral home, poor, African American families can be demythologized by a
corrective descriptor, community clients. However, this historical analysis of the
relationship between Black morticians leaves much of what has been said about the social

responsibility, self-help, and institution building of the Black

15

middle class in tact. °‘ In fact, within their racially segregated communities, both
undertakers and insurance agents collected money from working-poor, Southern Black
families. However, there is a need for more mining of Black church records, especially
their productions of the earliest Black community newspapers, to see how the mutual aid
associations eventually grew into industrial insurance ventures that facilitated the rise of
Black undertakers as business professionals. Historian Carter G. Woodson (1929) and
other early, 20th century scholars noted the success of industrial insurance businesses
among African Americans. Black insurance agents solicited rural Blacks and this
clientele produced the largest corporations owned and operated by Black people in
modern US. history.14 Death care became a skilled occupation through the purchase of
burial insurance by Black families. African American people believed in funerals. Their
patronage of this service offers self-disclosure of their thoughts about the past, their
relationships in the present, and their dreams about the future.

However, when non-elite Black people merited historical attention, prior to the
revisions of scholars like Hine, Hunter, Kelley, Thomas and other social and cultural
historians, these Black families appeared as victims trapped by urban decline,
joblessness, residential segregation, societal isolation, inadequate education, and, most of
all, inescapable poverty. In The Centennial Review: Economic Narratives and

Postmodern Culture, Bill E. Lawson contributed an article, “Conceptual Frameworks,

 

°° The most common title to refer to those persons who are licensed in the funeral industry is funeral
director. The term undertaker comes from the antebellum period; embalmer was in use during the post-
bellum period; morticians indicate the modern era, and funeral directors had replaced all of the previous
designations and gained prominence by in the post-modem, US. society. However, historians have used
them interchangeably. I make no exception.

16

The Black Family, and Public Policy,” that echoes the call of Black family scholars to
“demythologize” the negative stereotypical views promulgated by the public policies,
media, and literature within the majority of society. Lawson laments the presupposition
of poverty as a deﬁnitive characteristic of most Black families as a resultant of their slave
past. He exposes this presupposition as he demonstrates how it has pej oratively shaped
U.S. social policies concerning African American families. Harriette Pipes McAdoo,
editor of the anthology, Black Families, currently in progress for its 4th edition, urges
scholars to keep abreast of the dynamic debates generated by challenges such as that
mounted by Lawson. McAdoo urges explorations of diverse conceptualizations to combat
the tendency of relying on poverty and discrimination to fashion federal policies affecting
Black families. 15 In answer to this call for more diverse conceptualization of Black
families, I blended several theories to create my historical conceptualization of African
American families, community clients. Theoretical syncretism yielded the historical
conceptualization of community clients. Therefore, a study of the historical signiﬁcance
of African American funerary display functions as a revision of post-modem African
American historiography. African American death care responded to functional needs of
Black families or community clients. Sadly, positive functions of non-elite Black families,
have not been given enough scholarly in the research of African American social and
cultural historians. Rather, public policy makers, sociologists, welfare reformers, and
urban/labor historians have grappled with the changes over time in post-modem Black
families or the “underclass.”

African American funerary display is historically signiﬁcant because it discloses

the experiences of work, identity, and politics as they were articulated by the masses of

17

Black bodies. That is to say, the Black body redeemed from the “world that the
slaveholders made,” reclaimed from antebellum abolitionists’ appropriations, and revered
in the process of African American death care must take center stage in describing
change over time in African American identity formation. For example, African
American funerary display in the historical literature of the Aﬁican American experience
can extend discourse on Black community building and class formation. Michael Plater,
for example, committed an entire chapter to trace the history of the connection between
Aﬁican American ideas of death and three industries: funeral service, insurance, and
banking. He showed exactly how death beliefs, “not only nourished a successful
profession in the African American community, but are also responsible for the
development of the two largest African American industries” of the modern era, banking
and insurance.16 However, as important as decent bmials, death beneﬁts, and family
cohesion were to Black people from the antebellum South before to the post-modem
period, cultural historians have leﬁ the slave funerals, mutual aid societies, benevolent
associations, and undertaking businesses in the periphery of their discussions about
Aﬁican American families, migration, and community building, and urban decline.
Consequently, from the end of the institution of slavery to the last century there remains
another “egregious void;” a corruption of African American memories resulting from the
historical marginalization of their funerary display. 17 In life, although enslaved,
impoverished or otherwise dishonored, in death African Americans, especially poor
Black families, have yet to have their say.

Fortunately, researchers and scholar-activists of Aﬁican American history are just

recently attempting to place Black families in proper historical context. However, cultural

18

and social historians are the trained revisionists who can liﬁ the Black family from the
shadows of poverty studies. These historians can offer alternative models for studying
Black families. Conceptual models like community clients deconstruct hegemonies such
as “underclass” and middle-class respectability, i.e., the ﬁctional, normative mainstream
of both White and Black cultural politics. In the end, innovative conceptualizations such
as community client and sophisticated interpretive frameworks like theoretical syncretism
will prove to be the best way to include the poor without creating stereotypes and
ahistorical memories of them. An emphasis on the relationship between the Black ﬁmeral
business and its patrons rescues the working poor and lower class members of Black
urban communities from the historical shadows of middle-class, Black ministers, nurses,
civil rights attorneys, teachers, and social workers. Although these elite race men and
race women gave leadership to Black communities, the human experience of death levels
the historical plane and mines the somewhat marginalized voices of poorer African
Americans. Consequently, the historical conceptualization of poor Black families as
community clients shows how death in Black urban communities and those who cared for
the dead are missing pieces of Black family studies. My reconstruction of the Aﬁican
American identity formation as a history of community clients reﬂects one way to:
conceptualize Black family studies without relying on the poverty paradigm; revise
African American urban and labor historiographies; challenge the “politics of
respectability” as the dominant paradigm of Black resistance; and study a human
condition that deﬁes U.S. class, race, and gender constructions, i.e., the decision of what

to do with dead bodies.

19

A ﬁ'ican American F unerary Display as a Process of Identity Formation

Non-elite, Black families represent an underserved community in the traditional
ﬁeld of Aﬁican American history. While public policy makers, sociologists, welfare
reformers, and urban researchers have highlighted the Black underclass, these scholars
are only recently attempting to place these analyses in historical context. However,
revisionist historians are the trained academicians who can mine Black family histories
from the shadows of poverty studies. Scholarly discussions about Black people in funeral
businesses are found in either dated albeit empirical, journal articles or reviews of Blacks
in business that have been written by economists or labor/business historians versus
social or cultural historians. Recent treatments and commentaries on the topic of Black
people and death care have also come from sociologists, literary theorists, novelists, and
anthropologists. Karla Holloway deserves praise for her most recent publication about
African American funerary rituals. The traumatic loss of her ad0pted son compels her to
reconcile the reality of premature death, violence, and culturally-driven, mortuary
practices among African Americans. Although Holloway provides a poignant and
personal description revealing how African American racial identity and community
structure absorbs the impacts of premature death in US. society, this is not a book length
description that tells the social history of African American mortuary practice.18
Although, Holloway did discuss the community roles of Black morticians whose labor of
love entailed preservation and presentation of embalmed bodies to their Black families,

we are still awaiting empirical studies such as journal articles, monographs, and

20

anthologies describing the functions and negotiations between Black families and their
communities’ funeral establishments.

The historical signiﬁcance of funerary display connects the relationship between
non-elite, Black people and their community institutions from the “peculiar institution” of
ante-bellum slavery to the Black church, benevolent societies, modern undertaking
business, and the post-modem funeral home. Robert Farris Thompson’s detailed analysis
of the grave decorations in slave cemeteries, Newbell Puckett’s studies of Southern
superstitions concerning death and Charles Joyner’s work on cultures of the Sea Islands
are examples of how work and identity coalesce as cultural politics. Even more recently,
Michael A. Gomez plainly concluded that slave funerals, despite the pain of death,
became the way that the enslaved came together and moved toward a “corporate
identity.” In coming together, Gomez believed, “they made the collective statement that
they belonged to and were afﬁrming each other. They were becoming a single
community.”19 Gomez’s deﬁnition of identity as a collective or communal action, i.e., the
meaning of slave funerals for African American people, coincides with Dwight A.
McBride’s Impossible Witness, the slave testimony of abolitionist literature. McBride
made it clear identity for Black people under slavery, never an individual’s prerogative,
was “. . .not just about being in the body but about the body being in the world.”20 When
scholars Barry Schwartz, David Kertzer, Gary Laderrnan examined the response to the
martyred body Abraham Lincoln, the ﬁrst assassinated president of the United States,
using cultural theories they all conﬁrmed that funeral rituals have provided opportunities

for articulating (even changing) the meaning of someone’s life or in other words

21

reconstructing the relationship between lived experiences in the world and what people
will remember.2|
Schwart, Kertzer, and Laderman conclude that the funerary display of Lincoln’s

body transformed the collective memory of his life. In other words, Lincoln’s funeral
elevated him to a sacred national symbol. Both the body and memory of this murdered
national leader “became the focus of unprecedented celebration, commemoration, and
memorialization [sic].”22 The ﬁmeral rites afforded the body of the slain man established
Lincoln’s civic legacy, solidiﬁed the collective memory of his life, and symbolized
values such as integrity and freedom that would be associated with him in the writing of
US. history.23 The funerary display of Lincoln’s body transformed Lincoln, a
controversial president, into a sacred national symbol because

Although people disagreed intensely about Lincoln’s worth

as president, their common participation in his funeral expressed

and reinforced their common identiﬁcation with the nation. . .It

would be more precise to say that controversial objects, like the

memory of Lincoln, promote solidarity only on the condition that

they represent noncontroversial [sic] realities whose sacredness all

recognize, ultimate realities on which fundamental consensus rests.24

Kertzer’s analysis of rituals highlighted its political power to build community

and collective consciousness. Laderman’s explained the process by which this ritual
created such cultural or national consensus. “In the weeks after the assassination,”
Laderman wrote, “Lincoln’s corpse became visible and accessible to the nation; from the
moment he was shot until the interment in Springﬁeld, Illinois, his body was considered
public property, given to the citizens who made up the Union body politic.”25 Schwartz

surmised that there are three ﬁrnctions of funeral rites in US. civil society, by examining

the relationship between American history and Lincoln’s body. First, funerals can

22

transform the negative and controversial into ﬁgures that actually embody the most
commonly shared values. Secondly, funeral rituals can transform and enhance status.
Last, an elaborate funeral can reconstruct a life and make a symbol.26 Michael Plater’s
words best capture the cross-cultural applicability of Schwartz analysis to African
American funerary display. “The African American community,” explained Plater,
“transformed individuals upon death into symbols of freedom and, through the large
funeral expenditures, economic prosperity.”27

Although the cultural history of American funerals has been the subject of inquiry
for at least one historian, Gary Laderman, conceptualizing the history of African
American funerary display as a record of ethnic identity formation necessitates the
incorporation of difference. For example, Laderman severely limited his treatment of
death care in speciﬁc ethnic contexts. In fact, Laderman’s most recent work gave only
three pages to discuss the speciﬁcs of death care in African American communities.
Furthermore, he based all of his observations about the history of African American
funerals on a secondary source, the biography of an African American man who owned a
Virginia-based undertaking business written by Michael Plater.28 Thankﬁrlly, Plater’s
conclusions about African American funerary behavior rooted these death rituals against
a backdrop of African cosmology. However, Plater relied heavily on the experiences of a
solitary ﬁgure, a Black man in the undertaking business. Plater’s decision to create a
biography versus a cultural history did not permit the full disclosure and critique of
African Americans’ decision-making processes in removing, adorning, arranging,
viewing, and interring the bodies of their family and community members.

Consequently, neither a scholarly example of cultural studies concerning American

23

funerals nor a case study of an individual African American funeral director includes all
familial interactions after the death of a community member from removal of the physical
remains, arrangements for the display of the corpse, and ﬁnal interment of the body.
Plater examined the ritual behavior of death care or African American funeral traditions.
He agreed with Lawrence Levine that the dynamic details of African American culture
reﬂect a dialectical process of interactive and ﬂuid adaptations, creative responses “to the
realities of a new situation.” Unfortunately, relying on “elite writing and legal
documents” lamented Plater, those dynamic details are lost, however. Scholars who rely
on conventional historical methods are blindsided by the dissemblance or “hidden
transcripts.” Lifting these masks over African American identities requires documenting
the death care negotiations in the African American past. Dissemblance, consequently, is
one theory of difference which must be an essential function for any study of African
American funeral behavior. Dissemblance or masks, myriad manifestations of silences
and powers conceal the truth of African American familial resiliency, for example. Plater
concluded that only organic research tools such as folk expressions, music, and material
culture allow African Americans from the 18th and early 18’h century to “become more
historically articulate.” For this reason, African American funerary display, the
negotiation between undertakers and their clientele, Black families, lifts the veil of
dissemblance from the lived experiences of poor Black families. In their historical
patronage and attention to their communities’ death care they leﬁ their stories and
memories.29
My historical reconstruction of African American identity formation highlights

emergent class consciousness by chronicling their struggles to give meaning to their

24

humanity, freedom and citizenship. In chapter one, I discuss how enslaved Africans
Americans had to reconcile their inabilities to control when and where they dealt with
death. Under the “peculiar institution,” i.e., the personal prerogatives of the slaveholders’
pecuniary power over Black bodies, the “invisible institution,” i.e., slave religion rooted
in an African-derived cosmology, maintained a continuity of community even in death.
Chapter one also includes some comparative histories that incorporate the funeral rituals
and death care practices of New World Africans in both Brazil and the Caribbean Islands.
Chapter two speaks to the signiﬁcance of Aﬁican American institution building to gain
even greater control for honoring and remembering their dead. Black preachers,
morticians, business women, community leaders, and secret society members used
funerals as social capital and status symbols. Chapter three begins with a discussion of
Southern Blacks’ migration to the urban north. With the migration of Southern
sharecroppers, city dwellers, and domestic workers, a distinctive funerary behavior came
to the urban centers of places like Detroit. Chapter three explores how middle-class
African Americans living in northern US. cities attempted to use their community roles
as entrepreneurs and civic activists to reform the funerary displays of their Southern
kinfolk.3O This chapter shows how the study of Aﬁican American funerary display brings
non-elite Black families to the center of historical analysis. Chapter four comes from
several interviews with owners of African American funeral homes in Michigan. In
chapter four, I provide an example for writing the history of Aﬁican American
professionals within the context of “overlapping,” Diapsoran communities. Chapters
three and four combined attest to the historical agency of working-poor Black families

via their use of community “intrapolitics.” These chapters with full details document the

25

historical signiﬁcance of funerary display conceptualized their power as community
clients. Chapter ﬁve recalls one particular example of African American community
collaboration of Black identity via a mother’s business negotiations with an African
American undertaker. Chapter ﬁve revisits the murder of young Emmett Till. More
speciﬁcally, this chapter deals with his mother’s decision to share her pain with the
nation through her decision of an open casket funeral. I use my community client model
to reinterpret the public display of his mutilated corpse in terms of African American
identity formation. With my incorporation of identity and politics in the expressive
memories of the past, I prove African American funerary display as a viable record of
identity formation. A research agenda concludes my study. My concluding chapter also
highlights the need to incorporate African American funerary display in the history
literature about the meanings of freedom to Black people. For example, Eugene
Genovese saw the acquiescence of slaveholders’ to enslaved Southerners’ cultural
demand for burial or funerary rites as a check of supposed hegemonic authority. Slave
funerals, in this view, are historical examples of mediated concessions, a negotiation that
occurred somewhere between work, identity, and politics."

A study of African American funeral display
permits the poor to speak in the historical record. The historical lens of African American
death care provides a different angle to their collective pasts other than poverty,
domination, and exploitation. Poor Black people in the post-modem historical record
deserve reconstructions that actually reﬂect the ways in which they spoke truth to power.
And their identities as represented by the elaborate displays of their dead despite the

travesty of slavery and the urban crises of poverty do them justice. The Black body of the

26

post-modem era is a source of truth. Or, taking words from both Michael A. Gomez and
Dwight A. McBride, exchange marked the Black body, whether it was an exchange of

one country for another, scarring that conﬁrmed belonging to those which disﬁgured or
transference of rhetorical propaganda for live testimony. For Black families, however, a
historical reclamation must return their bodies to themselves, an “authentic, irreducible,

material sign [that] cannot but tell the truth.”32

27

Chapter 1

FUNERA LS AND THE COSMOL 06 Y 0F DEA TH CARE IN THE A FRICAN DIA SPORA

In his book about an African American mortician, Michael Plater asserted African
American funeral rites should be studied in order to have historical understanding of
American-bom Africans living in Diaspora. Plater studied the pecuniary success of one
man, R.C. Scott, as evidence of how African Americans paid for funerals in order to
proclaim their humanity, preserve their traditions, and protect their collective
consciousness. In Plater’s View,

...funeral rituals had more direct connections to Africa

than any other African American tradition. The community
searched for ethnic identity in African culture and the
African connections they found highlighted a very distinct
African American idea of death. . .the African American idea
of death is an African transplant.I

Like Plater, several cultural anthropologists, historians, and other scholars of the
African American past reference the death care practices that would lay the foundation
for African American identity formation. Michael Gomez, however, provides the most
succinct description of African American funerary display. In this book, Exchanging our
Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum
South, Gomez explained that

when a Black person died, the body was washed
and shrouded in white, tasks mainly performed by

women and occasionally by an individual or group
designated for such a responsibility. The shrouded

28

body was then usually placed upon a ‘cooling

board,’ a table also covered with a white cloth;

sometimes, however, the body was placed

directly into a cofﬁn. At this point, the ‘settin

up’ or wake began, which always lasted through

the night. The wake was a sacred moment for

Black folk, in which elements of grief, despair,

recollection, consolation, and consideration of

the hereafter were all combined.2

Gomez stressed the cultural signiﬁcance of Aﬁican American funerary display in

terms of a process, a community ritual. The Aﬁican Diaspora integrates the people of
African descent who were forcibly dispersed from the Continent by the trans-Atlantic
slave trade. Although surely not the only human story of dispersal or involuntary
migration, historical accounts of experiences with enslavement in the New World are
now compared in order to argue for this cosmological or cultural connection, i.e., the
Aﬁican Diaspora. The African Diaspora is as much reconstructed memories as it is
historical consequence. That is to say, the dispersal of African people as a result of the
trans-Atlantic slave trade deﬁnes the Diaspora. However, scholarly attempts to describe
the changes over time in the life experiences of those people also constitute Diaspora.
The African Diaspora, consequently, is both conceptual and consequential. This chapter
explains the African Diaspora as belief system using death care to mark change over time
the mutual responsibilities and expectations between the living and the dead. The
mention of funerals and similar acts of humanity in the work of scholars David Roediger,
Albert Raboteau, David Barry Gaspar, Rachel Harding, Hilary Beckles, and David
Roediger provide comparative examples of death and display in the African Diaspora.

A Southern historian, David Roediger, in his article, “And Die in Dixie: Funerals,

Death, & Heaven in the Slave Community 1700-1865,” Roediger portrayed “the funeral

29

as an institution deriving its impetus from the strength of the slave community,” despite
the criticisms those rituals would later engender.3 According to Roediger, slaveholders
supported colonial legislation that regulated slave assemblies on all types, including
funerals. “As early as 1680,” Roediger reported, “colonial legislators asserted that ‘the
frequent meetings of considerable numbers of Negro slaves under the pretense

of. . .burials is judged dangers’ and moved to institute a strict pass and patrol system.”4 By
1687, the Northern Neck region of Virginia had legislated to make public funerals for
slaves illegal. Roediger asserted that the both civil authorities and slaveholders continued
their “careful scrutiny of slave funerals” on into the national period of US. history.
Gabriel organized his plot during a child’s funeral. The point here is that some White
people perceived the dangers of slave funerals because of its community organizing
power. They feared the slave funeral’s potential for overt subversion of White authority.
They fought against its proven identiﬁcation as a source of African pride and afﬁrmation
of their humanity.

Slaveholders in the antebellum South also realized that there were distinct
differences in meanings or cosmological purposes of slave funerals versus their own.
Albert Raboteau in his book on the religion of the enslaved, for example, pointed to Great
Awakening, a religious revivalism that spread across the British North American colonies
in the 17403 as a possible explanation for the ethnic differences between American slave
funerary display and the African-based funerary rituals in other parts of the Americas. As
African Americans had participated in conversions to Christianity in increasing numbers
after the latter half of the 18th century, their African gods, died.5 Although in Haiti, Brazil

and Cuba, conversely, religious syncretism allowed African cosmology to blend with

30

Catholicism to a greater extent, resulting in the Voodun, Candomble, and Santeria. A
debatable issue, certain elements in antebellum African American funerary behavior did
outlive the African gods who inspired them. In fact, the ﬁrst chapter in Raboteau’s book
on the “invisible institution” of the enslaved, he entitled, “The African Diaspora.” The
most frequent mention in this ﬁrst chapter concerning the inﬂuences of African
cosmology on slave funerals dealt with the importance of the ancestors. Although the
slaves’ superstitions about “improper or incomplete” burial rites did not fully mature to
the extent of long-lived “cult of the ancestors” witnessed in Afro-Brazilian and Afro-
Caribbean slave communities, death care for Black bodies was important to American
slaves because through death, the dispersed generations reconnected to their lost
homeland.6

Gaspar explained that in Antigua during the 18th century, civic authorities were so
intent on a comprehensive subordination of the island’s enslaved population that they
even regulated slave funerals. Gaspar referenced an Antigua act from 1757, proving that
civic authorities had attempted to regulated slave funerals. The act stated that either
“through too great Indulgence of Masters, Mistresses, Owners, Renters, and
Overseers. . .or the Ambition of the Slaves themselves,” the enslaved frequently had
“pompous and expensive” funerary displays supposedly in imitation of the ruling class.
As a corrective measure, this regulation authorized the Antigua’s citizens to seize
enslaved people who buried the dead in any other container than “a plan Deal-board
Coffrn,” those Africans who covered or ornamented the dead, and any bond people who

wore “any Scarfs or Favours at any of their F unerals.”7

31

Gaspar also cited the following letter dated December 8, 1787. The story from
this letter testiﬁes about the importance of funerals in the enslaved community. Gaspar’s
inclusion of this primary source allows them entry into the historical record. Thirty years
after the Antigua act, according to a late 18‘h century observant on the island:

Negro ﬁinerals particularly such are [sic] of old Creole families, or in
esteem among their fellows, are numerously attended. . .The body

is mostly inclosed [sic] in a wooden shell or cofﬁn, which during

the procession to the grave, is covered with a sheet, by way of pall,
and such as have it in their power, bring liquor, fruit, etc, to the
house of their deceased uncle or aunt, brother or sister (the

common appellations, whether related in consanguinity or not),
which are consumed by the company while things are getting

into readiness.8

Whether enforcement (or punishment) concerning the regulation had lapsed, three
generations later, in 1787, saw a sheet draped over a wooden cofﬁn in a slave procession
on its way to a familial repast. Gaspar did not neglect to note the subversive quality of the
letter’s observation. Gaspar concludes “. . .that slave cofﬁns were covered with sheets,
suggests that it may not have been easy to enforce these laws that were meant to maintain
a social distinctiveness even in death between whites and blacks.”9 Precisely, the
interpretation of a scholar who has studied slave resistance, Gaspar leaves room for other
eyes to ﬁnd yet another nuance in the letter. The fact that the observer noted that “during
the procession to the grave, [the cofﬁn] is covered with a sheet” could mean that the sheet
was added only when the enslaved had moved beyond the gaze of the masters’ civic
authority. The enslaved community violated the 1757 act in their funerary display.
Although colonial legislation attempted to control Africans’ funeral rites, nothing kept

the slave community from the practice of celebrating death as a journey; as a return to

freedom; as a promotion to power, i.e., an ancestor; and as an occasion to rejoice in the

32

cycle of life with dancing, singing, and refreshment. The research of Roediger, Raboteau,
and Gaspar can conﬁrm the importance of funerals in African American community’s
identity. Roediger’s article brief by deﬁnition and Raboteau’s book length reconstruction
obviously offered greater details such as

‘The living never forget that they are trustees of the dead. The dead

are always watching to see that the living preserve what their forefathers

established. And since the dead have power to bestow either blessing

or adversity. . .the welfare of the dead is felt to be bound up with the

faithful performance of ancient custom.’ ’0

It may have been that honoring the memory of their deceased demanded greater
acquiescence than the island’s statue. At any rate, the observer noted their choices for
proper funeral rites. And Gaspar made note of how this deﬁance was one among many
ways that the enslaved rebelled against attempts to strip them of their cultural practices
and human needs. The funerals on Antiguan slaves reveal this persistent identity.
The grave site or burial and the procession to this sacred space may have given way to
other forbidden death expressions and funeral practices. Gaspar did say that an 18’h
century cleric in Nevis, the Reverend William Smith, reportedly witnessed that, “slaves
sang at burials, got drunk and. . . [were], ‘calling out to the Dead Person and asking him,
Why he died, when he wanted nothing the World could afford, to support Nature?’ ”H
Given the signiﬁcance of slave resistance emanating from capture at the West

African coast, transport across the Atlantic and seasoning in the Caribbean, Booker T.
Washington’s statement that Black people, those African descendants in the United
States, “have always” valued ﬁmerary display might be veriﬁed by ﬁnding stories about

civil disobedience in slave funerals. The investigation of the Rebellion of 1800 led by

Gabriel (Prosser) in Richmond, Virginia and the Virginia legislature’s response to Nat

33

Turner’s Rebellion both legitimized White paranoia regarding the subversive
environment that could be fostered at Black funerals. After the preacher Nat Turner
revolted in 1831, both African American preachers and public funerals with an exception
of those which occurred under the supervision of a white ofﬁcial were banned.12
In addition to the slave funeral as a site of conspired resistance in its function of identity
formation, the importance of funerals in African American identity can also be teased
from White citizens’ complaints about how enslaved people reveled beyond both their
status and means in displaying their dead. There are also documented descriptions of
collaborative familial or ﬁctive relations in response to a death. And some of these
historical reports include stories about mourners who continued to have conversations
and maintain connections with their deceased community members. In fact, an article
about contemporary Aﬁican bereavement salutations recognized the continued bond
between the deceased and the living has continued as an inﬂuence in funerary traditions
among the Yoruba of Western Nigeria. “This is very important to the Yorubas who do
not let go of their relationship,” Kemi Adamokekun elucidated, “with the deceased as
they believe in ancestral spirits. These spirits are even consulted from time to time to
assist in the decision-making process. There is scientiﬁc evidence that people alter and
then continue their relationship with the dead person.”l3
Yet, before making strides to discuss African American or Black funerals in the
ante-bellum South, more needs to be said about funerary display in the Diaspora.
Although not addressing death and display directly, Rachel Harding’s work about
Blackness in 19th century Bahia, Brazil provides the proper historical context to support

the reconstruction of African American funerary rituals from a Diasporan approach.

34

Harding quoted Brazilian historians who investigate the African Diaspora as having to
contend with the reality that there are “precious few of their own words” (i.e., primary
sources from enslaved populations.) However, Harding’s informants offer this recourse,
“we do have many accounts of what slaves did. . . [and] if we are perceptive and open
enough (and adequately prepared), those actions can suggest their meanings to us.”'4
Harding accomplished this challenge of historicizing “what slaves did” by examining
how an indigenous syncretism of faith, the religion of Candomble articulated the
aspirations and beliefs of enslaved Afro-Brazilians.

Harding’s work, however, helps other investigators of the African Diaspora as
well. For example, an account for “what slaves did” permits the observer’s letter and the
Antiguan act regulating slave funerals to be submitted as evidence of identity formation
among the island’s enslaved inhabitants. Hilary Beckles retold this account in the
conclusion to his 1989 publication, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black
Women in Barbados which attested “the emotional and spiritual closeness the community
of [enslaved] women displayed at the death of a intimate members; in this case it was the
funeral of Jenny.”15 Lifting this story about a Barbadian community’s funerary display of
an enslaved woman from an 1809 account, Beckles recounted

The corpse was conveyed in a neat small hearse, drawn by one horse.
Six boys, twelve men and forty-eight women walked behind, in pairs
as followers. . .The females were neatly clad, for the occasion, and
mostly in white. . .Instead of weeping and bewailing, the followers
jumped and sported, as they passed along, and talked and laughed,
with each other, in high festivity. . .They had full faith in Jenny’s
transmission to meet her friends, at her place of nativity; and their
persuasion that death was only a removal from their present to

their former home—a mere change from a state of slavery to a

state of freedom—did not barely alleviate, but wholly prevented

the natural grief and afﬂiction arising from the loss of a friend.
They conﬁdently expected to hear from poor Jenny, or to know

35

her inﬂuence, in the way they most desired,. . . '6

Most 21St century scholars of African American history acknowledge the African
Diaspora construct.l7 In order to analyze the lived experiences of these descendants from
the Continent, they use African Diaspora to account for both diversity and continuity.
One way of verifying whether or not African Americans or Black people “have always”
valued funerary display, for example, would be to examine whether or not their ancestors
had passed on cultural cues concerning death and burial ceremonies. In his article “And
Die in Dixie,” David Roediger did just that. Roediger’s essay on the historical
signiﬁcance of Aﬁican roots in the death care practices of enslaved Southerners pointed
to several possibilities. Roediger’s introduced his interpretation, “The Afro-American’s
views on death and heaven from deep African roots, gained a paradoxical strength and
resilience from the horrors of mid-passage, and ﬂowered in the slave ﬁmeral, ...a value-
laden and uni/ﬁling social event which the slave community in the United States was able
to preserve from both physical and ideological onslaughts of the master class. ’8
(emphasis added)

Roediger claims that the slave funeral was “a value-laden and unifying social
event” because he has studied the historical record of “what slaves did” in the ante-
bellum South. In this way, Washington’s statement that Aﬁican Americans “have
always” regarded funerary display as “special and peculiarly important” has even more
validity. Herein we also see the basis for Harding’s theoretical methods for historicizing
enslaved Afro-Brazilians according to their actions in the absence of their written
records. In this way it is also apparent that funerals are in fact primary source material for

the processes of identity formation among enslaved Aﬁicans in the New World.

36

Africans in Diaspora observed communal responses to death, African-inﬂuenced
behaviors. Slave mourners in antebellum America, Roediger alleged, for example, often
took part in interring the cofﬁn as each slave approached the grave with handfuls of dirt
to throw on top of the cofﬁn, a gesture of farewell; each man also took turns with the hoe
to make sure that they had contributed to the ﬁlling of the grave. In Barbados, the
enslaved believed that grave dirt represents the Divine Power of the ancestors’ spirits. For
example, enslaved people could testify in legal proceedings involving other enslaved
people or freed Barbadians, but for the un-baptized enslaved witness, an oath sworn “by
grave dirt” signiﬁed the civil recognition and cultural power of African death rituals in
that society. . .both master and servant classes; the preference of grave dirt over the Bible
as a civic authority with power to extract truth rested on the belief the “Divine Power” of
the departed souls of African ancestors; in African cosmology dead people negotiated
rewards and punishments for the living. The dirt from their graves symbolized their
power.19 Perhaps this is the reason why the enslaved in Antiguan gave more respect to
their funeral traditions than to a legislative edict. Everything in the funerary display of the
people in Diaspora, surmised Roediger, was a “highly traditional activity” aimed at
expressing and preserving “a sense of family ties” despite the oppression of slavery.20

The roles of Black women in funerals made them the social gauge and spiritual
conduit of a good funeral. Some slave funeral crowds in antebellum America, Roediger
stressed, seemed reminiscent of African women in certain Akan societies, who, Roediger
noted, “were particularly given to such displays, often crying, shouting and singing as the
preacher spoke.” Some women were so intense in their public funerary displays of

singing, shouting, and hand-clapping that they actually drowned out the preacher. On

37

some occasions, women overcome with grief and emotional frenzy had to be physically
carried away from the burial. Roediger quoted the African American theologian, Howard
Thurman, to give some context to female funerary demonstrations in the slave
community. Such an excited state at hearing a good funeral sermon, Thurman is reported
to have asserted, showed that the slave’s “contact with the dead was immediate,
inescapable, dramatic?” Or at least, there is evidence that Black women’s funerary
behavior reveals that while they may not have led the service, they were neither invisible
nor silent in communal activity of funerary display.

Other African funerary customs that remained a part of Black death care,
according to Raboteau, included the belief that a person’s spirit may wander when they
are asleep as well as when they die. The African custom of grave decoration also
survived a common feature across the rural South. However, cautioned Raboteau,
searching for Africarrisms or cultural retentions in Black religious expression in the
United States should not degenerate into the Melville Herskovits-E. Franklin Frazier
debate about African survivals. Raboteau gave credit to Herskovits, declaring that his
“theory of reinterpretation as a factor in cultural contact is an advance over the notion
that a people’s beliefs, values, and behavioral patterns simply disappeared in the face of
systematic oppression.” However, Frazier’s objection to the exaggerations and excesses
in Herskovit’s argument made sense to Raboteau as well. “Frazier was also right,”
Raboteau explained

in posing the question of African survivals in terms of
signiﬁcance or meaning and in keeping sight of the real
differences between Afro-American cultures in the United
States and elsewhere in the hemisphere. If he tended

to undervalue instances of African survivals in the United
States, he did maintain that the new situation was important

38

in inﬂuencing slaves to develop a new world view and a
new culture. While it is true that Africa inﬂuenced [B]lack
culture in the United States, including [B]lack religion, it
is also true that African theology and African ritual did
not endure to the extent that they did in Cuba, Haiti, and
Brazn.22
One helpﬁil methodological tool for asking and answering questions about how
the Diaspora has changed and inﬂuenced African American culture comes from
Afrocentric literature. Afrocentrism as a paradigmatic construct deﬁes oversimpliﬁcation.
For example, for the students of Afrocentrism at Temple University in Philadelphia, the
African centered perspective can not be simply categorized as anti-European. Rather, the
Afro-centrist scholar considers all human life as equally valuable, i.e., the organic dignity
of all of humanity. However, Afrocentricity as a paradigm for studying the African
Diaspora carries a political imperative as well. Any investigation that involves African
culture or behavior (including their descendants living in Diaspora) “must use African
ideals and values as the way of life and expression.” 23 The obligation to adopt a scholar-
activist approach to human knowledge reﬂects an “essential assumption” of any
Afrocentric study concerning the experiences of Aﬁican people. The Afrocentric
perspective in relation to Black Americans, for example, acts as a “liberating
discipline. . . [because]
the speciﬁc purpose of the knowledge generated is to
empower Black people to effect positive social change
and to describe Black life experiences as determined by
Black people’s understandings, interests and experiences;

ﬁnally, the researcher (scholar) must always maintain a
dialogical relationship with the subjects?"

39

There is no question about the historical signiﬁcance African American funerary
display and community identity. Given the importance of historicizing “what slaves did”
at funerals in the Caribbean islands and Brazil. Enslaved African’s funerary display had
African cosmological basis. Death was as transﬁguration from slavery to freedom and the
hope that the deceased, the ancestors, would be a benevolent inﬂuence in the community
life that they had left behind. Enslaved Americans in the rural US. South believed in the
importance of good and decent funerals. Historical, anthropological, and ethnographic
data all conﬁrm the emphases placed on decent burial as well as funeral ceremony and
reunion in the death care practices within the Aﬁican Diaspora. But while most scholarly
investigations of African American funerary rites has focused on the question of African
retentions, e.g. the cosmological signiﬁcance of Southern Black grave decorations and
burial ground, Gomez told the primary importance of paying less attention to the
Diasporan connections in slave funerals and more to the impact of funerary rites on
African American community relations.25

Roediger chose to quote Booker T. Washington as an introduction to his historical
overview of the enslaved communities’ funerary behavior. However, Roediger did not
repeat Washington’s 1907 commendation of successful African American undertakers.
Rather, Roediger chose to repeat Washington’s lamentation about how Black people dealt
with death. Roediger, quoting Washington, restated,

‘The trouble with us is that we are always preparing to die. You
meet a white man early Monday morning and ask him what he is
preparing to do. . .he is preparing to start a business. You as a
colored man. . .he is preparing to die.’26

Without citing the date on which Washington supposedly made this statement, Roediger

left room for historians to question an obvious ambivalence in Washington’s analyses

40

about African American funerary behavior. According to Roediger, Washington
purportedly “lamented” how much time and energy Black men spent talking about and
planning for their demise. Roediger explained that, “. . .the Tuskegee educator thus
counseled [B]lack Americans to downplay their traditional Afro-Christian concern for
death and afterlife, so that they might more fully share in the Protestant ethic. . 3’27
However, at least in his 1907 publication, Washington had congratulated Black men who
worked in death care, recognizing the undertaking profession as a “prosperous business.”
The tension between Washington’s lamentation and commendation concerning African
American funerary behavior almost certainly makes sense to those who understand the
priorities of Booker T. Washington. Washington may have had little value or interest in
the cultural signiﬁcance which motivated such African American funerary displays. Yet,
when Black pe0ple preferences funerary displays gave birth to a “prosperous business,”
undertaking it merited serious attention from Washington. Otherwise, what accounts for
the glaring contradiction between Washington’s comment comparing Black men’s
aspirations regarding death care and his 1907 commendation of Black undertakers’
commercial success? Washington always favored ﬁscal strategy over approval (or
condolence) a propos Black people’s acceptance of “the Protest ethic.” Although
Washington undeniably protested what he thought inappropriate, Black behavior, perhaps
Roediger missed the more probable explanation that Washington revered the Protestant
work ethnic; the Tuskegee Machine grieved anyone’s corruption of that principle
especially if they were already economically vulnerable.

Some slaveholders did, however, performed some “grand gestures,” as Roediger

called them, like attending slave funerals and weeping openly or purchasing stone grave

41

markers if a one of an elite or special group of slaves passed away. However, the
enslaved received more common contributions from their masters like nails to construct a
cofﬁn, a covering to decorate the wooden box, and a white cloth to dress the body.
Although some slaveholders tolerated or encouraged slave funerals, the paternalism of
special allotments of food, mm or whiskey did not represent wide spread affection or
romanticized sentiment for their human property.28 To be sure, few slaveholders granted
time off from work for attending slave funerals. As a result, more often than not, night
burials and Sunday wakes or funeral services occasioned the death of a slave. Night
funerals avoided work stoppage. Furthermore, Sunday funeral services and wakes
avoided missing work hours. The slaveholders’ restrictions regarding the logistics of
slave funerals reﬂected the capitalist interests that the latter had invested in Black
bodies—a dead slave was no longer proﬁtable and their living kin and friends although
bereaved were still unfree laborers. The African American community, however, used the
cover of night to gather in virtual privacy. Beckoning friends and relatives from other
plantations, if permission had been granted, slave funerals articulated a particular
meaning for end of life. “The cover of darkness,” Plater stated, “allowed slave funerals to
be closer to the slaves’ African-based funeral customs.” 2” The slave community would
then bid farewell to its deceased member with an impressive, solemn and mystical
funeral, the darkness of night funerals veiling their “eerie ceremonies.” Labor
requirements on the plantations may have controlled the length of time between interring
the body and performing the rites, but nothing kept the slave community from observing
their communities’ death care practices. Enslaved Southerner revered their elders

because respect for older people helped preserve the memory of the dead and the elderly

42

were chronically closer to the ancestors than they. The transition from elder to ancestor,
physical death, in traditional African cosmology, according to Raboteau, called for,
“long, complex, and expensive” funerary displays that “it would be a great disgrace for a
family not to observe the proper rites, even if they must go in debt to do so.”30
If a slave funeral lasted through the night, the procession to the grave started

around midnight. Roediger discussed the funeral procession to the slave graveyard. If
allowed to sing, they paced themselves by slowly singing hymn in an effort “to avoid any
inauspicious mishaps during the graveyard march.” 3 ’ Raboteau included this slave
testimony about the procession and slave graveyard

‘de slaves had dere own special graveyard an’

us’d make de cofﬁns right on de place dar.

When someone died, he was taken in an ox

cart to de grae, wid all de slaves a-walkin’

‘long behine de car singin spirituals,..’32
Genovese believed that the processional to the slave graveyard, “. . .especially the use of
those drums which were so reminiscent of Africa,” proves the historical continuity and
inﬂuence of Aﬁican cosmology in African Americans’ distinctive funerary display in the
ante-bellum South.33 Gomez provided an even more poignant inscription, using
Roediger’s estimates of slave mourners who participated in funeral processions, Gomez
commented, “the average funeral procession ranged from three hundred to seven hundred
people; obviously all of these people were not related, nor could they have all known one
another. But they all came together anyway, and in their coming together they made the
collective statement that they belong to and were afﬁrming each other. They were

. . . , 4
becoming a srngle communrty.’ 3

43

The slave graveyard, the procession’s destination, provided a poetic conclusion
for a life lived under racial subjugation, a segregated space where the “dead bodies of
slaves never mingled their dust with that of the sovereign race.”35 A second hand
documenting of mortuary customs and beliefs of South Carolina slaves conﬁrmed the
prevalence of night burials and graveyard processions. One late 19’h century ethnographer
cribbed the following story about slave superstitions regarding death care from an article
originally published in the “Atlanta Constitution,” a Southern circular:

In former times the burial took place at night, and a long procession

of friends and relatives, bearing lighted torches, escorted the corpse

to the graveyard. After the interment a funeral feast was held, and

every one was expected to bring from the graveyard and lay before

the door a clod of earth, as proofs that he had really been to the

burial, on pain of being haunted by the ‘spirit’ of the deceased...

the colored people do not exactly fear death; on the contrary, they

invest it with a kind of solemn religious exultation. . .36 (emphasis added)

Nevertheless, slave funeral services required White permission, regardless of how
much a decent burial and solemn ceremony meant to Black people. Some slaveholders
and slave traders purposefully refused to bury the dead bodies of recalcitrant, rebellious,
or runaway slaves. Fatality reprimanded. The enslaved understood threat of violence, the
severing of communal rites, and possibilities of like condemnations. Several slave
narratives as well as interviews collected by the WPA ethnographers, for example,
mentioned children deprived of attending the burial of their parents or spouse. Some
slaveholder did not allow Black bereavement, so there was no option of stopping work to

attend a slave funeral, regardless of relation. In The Narrative of Henry Watson, A

Fugitive Slave, Wastson sketched this form of cruelty using the following description of

the manner in which some slaveholders disposed of deceased slaves. Watson gave
conﬁrmed that at the death of a slave he was sent by his master

to the overseer, requesting him to send two boys

to the house. On their arrival, he would order them

to the hospital, or sick-house, as it is generally

called, and they would take the body, fasten it in

the blanket on which he had died, put it on the

hand-barrow, and carry it to its place of burial.

This was generally done very hastily,. . .without

minister or cofﬁn, or permitting husband, or wife,

or mother, to see the last disposal of that which had

been dear to them on earth.3
Another child’s life-long memory of the ﬁnal moment with his enslaved mother was even
worse than denying a ﬁnal viewing of the body. Shot by their master for lagging behind,
she fell in the same place where he had shot her, the slave mother dying right in front of
her little boy; her dead body left in the open.38

Roediger’s sole purpose in recounting such atrocities entailed a rebuttal. His

evidence refuted a claim that slaveholders were responsible for the “vitality” of funerals
within slave communities. His investigation of the compromised and mixed “record of
the master class” required recollection of both their generosity and barbarity. As far as
who was responsible for the “vitality of the institution” of slave funerals Roediger’s
articles leaves no question that the slave community, enslaved Black families, were the
ones responsible for this community function. Therefore, Booker T. Washington was
right about the interest in and importance of the corpse for African Americans. And

Roediger’s article provides evidence not only that enslaved Southerners gave priority to

attending their dead, but also the similarities of funerary behavior of African Americans,

45

Antiguans, and Barbadians. The grave processional, the importance of mass attendance,

and culinary fellowship following interment all illustrate continuity in African Diaspora.

46

Chapter 2

BENEVOLENCE AND BURIALS

Church and Charity: “Invisible Institution ” to Post-Emancipation Communities

Black people who were not enslaved during the 18th century, free people of color
in the North and the South, also provided for the funerals in their communities. In 1787,
for example, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones organized the free African Society, one
of the ﬁrst mutual-aid or benevolent associations organized by African Americans. The
members pledged to provide for each other in sickness and death with special provisions
for widows and children of their deceased members. The society’s members also
purchased some land to use as a burial ground, an act of protestation against the prejudice
of burying Black bodies in other cemeteries. Hundreds of like associations followed as
Northern Blacks of the ante-bellum period combined their community needs with
organizational Opportunity. Free Blacks in Northern cities like Philadelphia adopted the
practice of pooling their resources to secure and ﬁnance decent burials and funerary
tributes. Church relief societies became the chief form of African American self-help
beginning in 1787, the same year for which Gaspar documented the esteemed and
“numerously attended Negro funerals” among enslaved Antiguans.l

The “elite writing and legal documents” of White people during the American
colonial period substantiate Gaspar, Roediger, Raboteau, Plater, and other scholarly
discussions about how White people feared the consequences of Black bodies

congregating because of a corpse. However, White people interested in freeing those

47

bodies, ardent abolitionists, sensationalized their polemical appropriations of brutalized
Black bodies. For example, Dwight McBride, in his book Impossible Witness: Truth,
A bolitionism, and Slave Testimony, provided a literary critique of abolitionists’ political
purposes for Black bodies. According to McBride, abolitionists put Black bodies on the
stage so that former slaves could “bear witness to their authentic experiences of slavery.”
Authentication by a Black body testifying on stage, contended McBride, “was somehow
more truthful than the word of white abolitionists, who were mere witnesses one step
removed, as they were not themselves slaves.”2 But, in appropriating the testimony of the
Black body, argued McBride, abolitionists denied the individual humanity of the witness.
The body became “the referent, the signiﬁer, the site of contestation” because it was used
both “in the pro-slavery advocacy and rearticulated in the abolitionist texts.” In this
sense, the Black body did not belong to a human person, but rather to a complex and
conﬂicted White psyche. The slave witness, explained McBride, represents collective
evidence or proof because whether or not other slaves are present on stage with, “the
slave who is witnessing in the narrative, they are a part of a collective slave body by
condition.” In abolition, the cause of freeing Black bodies, exacts the cost individual
identity. “This logic goes far toward explaining why white bodies can signify
individuality,” McBride elucidated, “and why Black bodies—with their limited access to
the category of the individual—almost always signify as representative bodies. . .the
collective Black body under slavery.”3

For this very reason, African American funerary display must be fully
historicized. That is to say, Southern slave funerals reclaim the Black body from an

identity that is overpoweringly “context bound,” the rhetorical property of the abolitionist

48

crusaders and the human property of the slaveholder. Gomez also argued that slave
funerals are in fact both resistance to the context-binding vis a vis the other, i.e., White
authorities,

The passing of a fellow, whether enslaved or freed, was of great
signiﬁcance to Black folk. . .it was not necessary for the deceased
to have been a relative or even a personal acquaintance. What
mattered was that someone of like fate had passed on, and it was
vitally important that she or he be remembered. It was important
that the person be remembered by the community, because ‘the
world’ would not remember. It would not have mattered to most
white folks that the deceased had ever lived; her life was of no
special signiﬁcance in the overall scheme of things. So it was
crucial that Black folk pay respect to their own. It was essential
that as many as possible come out, for in honoring the deceased,
they validated their own worth.4

Enslaved Southerners primarily neither slaveholders nor free people of color
assumed the care and nourishment of the sick that the plantation did not afford them.
Enslaved people nursed their community members until they return to health and buried
them when they died. The enslaved used their communal bonds to heal each other. There
is at least one empirical study that found although prohibited to assemble, forbidden to
congregate, restricted in their movements, and largely illiterate and moneyless, enslaved
Black people still managed the clandestine organization of society memberships.
Poignant and spectacular, enslaved African Americans, according to Harry Joseph
Walker’s 1937 thesis, Negro Benevolent Societies in New Orleans: A Study of Their
Structure, Function, and Membership,

resorted to an ingenious method of carrying on

their organizations. A slave, preferably one who could
read and write and who was trusted by his master,
was selected secretary. He kept all the books, and on

speciﬁed days, ‘the slaves, one by one’ would go to
his cabin and ‘call their number and leave their

49

payment with the secretary who recorded it in his
book that was usually kept covered on the bed.’5

The secretary, who enjoyed more freedom of movement because of the favor to the
plantation owner, notiﬁed the society’s membership when another member died. The
society would assemble at the church on the appointed day to hold the funeral, if their
masters had given permission for holding and attending the service. In the death of a
society member, although the “slave funeral” may have been at the mercy of a master, the
assembly of mourners identiﬁed the deceased by another record, a name and number
which had been prepared for this signiﬁcance event. Culminating the funeral services of
church with procession, the society members, “formed in a column, and singing moumful
dirges followed the corpse to the graveyard.”6

Important before the Civil War, nearly all African American benevolent societies
“stated that their purpose was to furnish sickness and death beneﬁts.”7 The South
American corollary, the Afro-Brazilian irmandades, or sisterhoods or fratemal societies
of Salvador, Bahia, performed the same function in the mid 19th century. Rachel Harding
found that in the 1850s, every Bahian whether enslaved or free probably belonged to one
or more irmandades. For the Afro-Bahian, irmandades assumed care for sick members,
managed resources towards manumission, provided fellowship, conferred status, “and,
especially, assured a decent burial?8 Membership in Afro-Bahian irmandades was not
based on accumulated wealth, however, but rather skin color, social class, racial
parentage, and, sometimes, occupation. Therefore, “within any particular Afro-Brazilian
lay association,” Harding clariﬁed

a slave could feel himself the equal of a small businessman

and both could fulﬁll the same responsibilities. Also, through
the irmandades, Afro-Brazilians enjoyed. . .funeral services

50

as extravagant as those of elite whites, and display

themselves with ‘with brilliance and grandeur in [their]

religious processions...’9

Historian Carter G. Woodson wrote that within the US, especially large cities in
the North like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati, these mutual aid
organizations or benevolent fraternities “reached a stage of unusual inﬂuence in Black
churches and sometimes expanded into secret associations, a thing which could not be
done in slave territory.”l0 In the South, the restrictions placed on the enslaved regarding
their mobility, assembly, and liberty forced their communities to deal with death via their
“invisible institution,” slave religion and night funerals. However, free Southern Blacks
in large cities like New Orleans, Charleston, and Richmond took advantage of their
tenuous freedom by establishing benevolent societies with the same fervor as their
counterparts in Northern areas such as Philadelphia.ll For example, the Brown
Fellowship Society, a funeral society started by a group of free Blacks in Charleston, SC
in 1790 had, by 1794, bought land that became their society’s personal cemetery; and the
Humane Brotherhood, another group of free Blacks who bought a lot next to the Brown
Fellowship plot “the desire for proper funerals provided the vehicle for these early
African American social organizations. Therefore, death customs provided an important
foundation for the construction of an autonomous African American community.”'2
Still, there is also the possibility that Black people responded to the corpse in

culturally distinctive ways because they are African Americans, i.e., descendants whose
roots belong to the African Diaspora. Gomez attested to the fact that both enslaved and

free African Americans as well as country born and Creole shared the same mourning

rituals or responses to death in their respective communities. “Both the African- and the

51

American-bom mourned, and that together,” Gomez explained. Going further into his
explanation, he added,

They surely reﬂected not only upon their individual plights

but also upon the circumstances visited upon them collectively.
The source of lamentation was the suffering and mistreatment
of the slave and his freed cousin. But beyond all of this, they
mourned the waste and destruction of potential and creativity.
The deceased would never know what could have been. This
was, and remains, the greatest tragedy of the African American.13

The testimony of an itinerant preacher, an enslaved man by the name of John
Jasper discloses how antebellum Black communities dealt with the tragedy of destruction
and waste. The slave preacher and funeral sermons are an undervalued source of this
historical articulation. The presence, prestige, and power of the slave preacher connect
White concessions to the cultural demand for decent burials, African-based cosmological
ideals concerning death care, and the primary symbol or shared value of slave death, i.e.,
freedom. Slave funerals are the genesis of the African American preacher. Plater argued,

“Funerals provided a mechanism for constructing social
organizations, and established the role and relevance of
the African American preacher. While the African
American funeral in the antebellum period was a
white-sanctioned religious ritual, the funeral as a

social event, cultural builder, and pageant may be

the more signiﬁcant aspect of this antebellum
American ceremony. The opportunity to come
together, conduct a ritual according to their own

ideas, and share this experience with an extended
group 0 their peers made this occurrence a unique

and signiﬁcant event for African Americans during
slavery. Funerals gave slaves an opportunity to
establish a cultural identity. They instilled personal
values beyond the reach of slave owners. Within their
strictly dominated environment, death customs

offered the slaves one realm where they controlled
their fate?l4

52

John Jasper started preaching in 1839, twenty-ﬁve years before his own
emancipation. Born on July 4, 1812 in F luvanna County, Virginia, and the youngest of
twenty-four children, Jaspar had worked a cart boy, house servant, table waiter, gardener,
and hired hand before his conversion in 1839. And for a quarter of a century, Jasper
ministered to the enslaved as a community member. He was no stranger to either work or
bondage. According to William E. Hatcher, Jasper’s biographer responsible for the 2nd
edition publication of Jasper’s biography in 1908,

There was one thing which the [N]egro greatly insisted upon, and

which not even the most hardhearted masters were ever quite willing

to deny them. They could never bear that their dead should be put

away without a funeral. Not that they expected, at the time of the

burial, to have the funeral service. Indeed, they did not desire it,

and it was never according to their notions. A funeral to them was

a pageant. It was a thing to be arranged for a long time ahead.

It was to be marked by the gathering of the kindred and friends

from far and wide. It was not satisfactory unless there was a

vast and excitable crowd.15
And, Hatcher added, the slaves “demanded” that a Black preacher must “preach the
funeral.”'6 Proper Aﬁican American funerary display required the participation of a
preacher. The slave community venerated the funeral preacher, conferring upon him the
only true and organic elite status within their community, a status that did not depend on
White acknowledgement, dehumanizing servility, or involuntary subjugation.l7

The slave funeral, i.e., the funerary sermon or eulogy delivered by the slave

preacher, need not have occurred immediately preceding or following the actual burial or
interment. In fact, it was somewhat common for the funeral sermon to be separated from

the burial by several days, weeks, and even months. Sometimes several funerals were

preached at one time. Plater gave details to support the preacher was the principle or

53

central character in the “drama” of African American funerary display in antebellum
slave communities. In the absence of the dead body, the preacher was the focus slave
funerals. The slave preacher had the responsibility of dignifying the loss of the
community member, comforting those bereaved of their kin or friend, and rectifying the
travesty of stolen humanity, creativity, and potential. No wonder Plater reasoned, “only
the best African American orators and preachers received speaking invitations.” He
continued,

The presence of a well-known African American

preachers showed the status of the deceased and the

slave owner. For the slave owners, having renowned

African American preachers come to their plantation

reﬂected on the slave owner’s social prestige.

African Americans expressed the general conditions

of their lives through their death customs. An emotional

and spectacular commemoration of death served as a form

of communal catharsis in African American culture. During

the ceremony, participants ecstatically appealed to spirits of

the present and past. It was the preacher’s role to incite the

mourners’ emotions and achieve this catharsis. Night funerals

with torches, grave site dancing, and ﬁres were vital elements

in the drama and pageantry.18
The “drama and pageantry” that characterized the funerary display of the enslaved,
elaborate social functions negotiated with and conceded by those in authority, perhaps
redeemed the mourners’ cosmological obligations to the deceased. The lengthier
postponements of unsolicited weeks for slave funerals afforded the enslaved more time
for planning. ‘9

The funerary displays of enslaved African Americans reﬂect their ethnic beliefs

concerning community cohesion. In their cosmological views, death itself did not disrupt

the roles and responsibilities of community members. Therefore, how less could the

temporal prerogatives of controlling slaveholders interrupt their funerary rituals?

54

Raboteau gave testimonies from both the slave community and outsider opinion to
explain how the enslaved dealt with involuntary delays in death care. Citing a White
minister who noticed that Sundays were usually the time of the week set aside for slave
funerals, Raboteau quoted the cleric as having acknowledged that there was no
immediate chronological sequence between a slave’s death and the funeral gathering.
Recalling a freedmen’s comment on the lag between death and the funeral service,
Raboteau conﬁrmed that some enslaved people met in church for the funeral sermon
maybe half a year after the burial. Whereas, the former bondmen explained, “ ‘De
[W]hite folses had all dier funeral sermons preached at de time of buryin.”’20
An essential feature of the sorrowful yet exciting event of a slave funeral entailed
the participation of what Hatchet called “the ofﬁciating brother. . .one of their own colour
[sic], and a man of reputation.” Hatcher explained that the preacher who ofﬁciated a slave
funeral was responsible to “plough up their emotional depths [because the enslaved] must
have freedom to indulge in the extravagancies of their sorrow.”21 Raboteau portrayed the
slave preacher as a somewhat privileged character in comparison with other bondpeople.
The slave preacher was usually male, clever, and eloquent, although often illiterate. He
presided over slave baptisms, funerals, and weddings. He was the “leader of the slaves’
religious life and an inﬂuential ﬁgure in the community.”22 Jasper’s biography classiﬁed
his oratory speech as “tempestuous, ungrarnmatical eloquence.”23
Conceivably, Jasper’s fame as a preeminent funeral orator of the Richmond,

Virginia slave community began in this way: he preached a funeral at which women

fainted, men shouted, and a thrilling and ﬁery eulogy all attested that the deceased and

55

their enslaved family both had been adequately honored. Hatcher’s depiction of a slave
community attending funeral suggested such a conclusion.

A [N]egro funeral without an uproar, without shouts

and groans,. . .with pictures of triumphant deathbeds and

the judgment day, and without the gates of heaven wide
open and the subjects of the funeral dressed in white and
rejoicing around the throne of the Lamb, was no funeral at al
(emphasis added)

1. 24

Unparalleled in importance, there are no questions regarding the ethereal
authority of the Black preachers in African American community building. Enslaved
Southern Blacks solicited these earliest death care professionals in order to access proper
burials. In additional, though impoverished and largely illiterate, also enslaved
communities embraced church membership, secret societies, and burial associations in
order to negotiate “decent burials” for their deceased loved ones and themselves. By the
end the ante-bellum period, preachers and church sextons or grave diggers had begun to
charge individual families for funeral services. In the fall of 1864, a yellow fever
epidemic in New Beme, North Carolina, recalled Captain Horace James, Superintendent
of Negro Affairs for the North Carolina district, conﬁrmed the community function and
indispensable aid of both Black preachers and undertakers. Captain James’ annual report
showed that although more Black people died of the small pox epidemic later that winter,
nearly a fourth of the white population of New Beme had died of yellow fever earlier that
fall. Describing the need for death care, the captain reported

The town, deserted, forsaken, shut out from intercourse with
the world, unprovided [sic] with things essential to the comfort
of the sick or the sustenance of the well, all business suspended,

except the undertaker’s,..Brig. Gen. Harland. . .summoned the

colored troops to so guard duty in town, and attend the burial
of the dead. 5

56

James’ Annual Report of 1864 accounted for the lack of sufﬁcient “white people enough
in the state of health to inter its own dead with the forms of Christian burial.” He went on
to say that, “As it was, not a few were left to die alone, and were carried to the grave
without a friend to follow the hearse, or listen to the service.” 26

Laderman stated much more bluntly just how status-free removal of disease
stricken corpses could be. He showed that “the only periods that exhibited a degree of
egalitarianism in burial practices were those seasons of severe and brutal epidemics.”
When societies faced “intermittent breakouts of yellow fever and smallpox,” Laderman
concluded, the color of the dead victim’s skin did spare “social chaos, collective misery,
and a multitude of corpses.” Disposing of the bodies, Black people witnessed the abilities
of their White neighbors to respect life regardless of what ancestry inﬂuenced hue. And
in death at the times of such catastrophic diseases, poverty determined the ﬁnal
destination of fallen victims more so than status or ethnicity. 27 Epidemics necessitated
expedient and practical forms of physical removal and afforded a somewhat macabre
manifestation of equality.

Captain James observation about Black people attending to White bodies stroke
this witness because in Laderman’s words, Black people at the “margins of society,” who
would have been denied access to the same burial spaces because of color, status, or
condition of servitude had assumed responsibility for disposal. An anonymous,
communal graveyard with lime and dirt awaited the remains of anyone who died during
an epidemic who did not have a way to secure a more respectable removal. African

Americans provided decent burial for people who probably under normal circumstances

57

would have denied them even the right to have the same. Before concluding his report,
however, Captain James made note the stark contrast of the Black community in terms of
ministerial intercessors and spiritual guides. He found it necessary to state, “The colored
people will raise up and support their own preachers. There is no lack of ministers among
them.”28
By September 1865, J. W. Alvord, the General Superintendent of Education of the

Freedman’s Bureau Schools, had received his appointment. Originally called the
inspector of schools, Alvord’s tasks required him to make reports to Major General 00.
Howard, including the ﬁrst general report to the F reedmen’s Bureau schools ﬁled January
1866.29 Still on the job four years later, Alvord’s periodic letters to General Howard,
especially one dated January 21, 1870, conﬁrm the symbiotic relationship between
preachers and death care in the US. South alter emancipation. The following excerpt
comes from Alvord’s letter to his boss written from Atlanta, detailing a subject Alvord
listed as “Comparative morality among [W]hites and [B]acks.”

Dear General: I may perhaps write oftener than you wish, but

You desired of me short letters rather than one lengthy report

at the end of my tour. My impressions at the moment are also

more distinct and accurate than they would be after delay. I am

carefully collecting statistics of industry, mortality, crime, &c.,

as well as general information. City clerks and chiefs of police

do not hesitate to answer all of my queries;. . .I consult also the

colored preachers and sextons, who of course attend all burials.30
Inspector Alvord’s “short letter” afﬁrms the presence, power, and position of the preacher
as well as the Black preacher’s civic and spiritual corollary, a death care provider.

S.A. Martha Canﬁeld kept a diary during her three year tenure at the Memphis

Colored Orphan Asylum. Col. John Eaton Jr., the General Superintendent of Refugees

58

and Freedmen, also received a letter from Mrs. Canﬁeld, dated March 1, 1865 from
Colored Orphan Asylum in Memphis, Tennessee. Looking at both of these documents,
Mrs. Canﬁeld tried to capture the familial atmosphere which the asylum attempted to
foster for Black orphans. One particular journal entry deserved particular attention:

“Jan. 30m—Buried Joseph Boone. Uncle Morris ofﬁciated,

and the services were quite impressive. The remains were

carried in a wagon, and most of the children followed

in procession to the grave?31
The children of deceased slaves and soldiers had not lost their cultural lessons in Black
funerary behavior. Mrs. Canﬁeld had unwittingly documented a generation of
anthropological research in her simple entry. “Uncle Morris,” the venerable appellation
for elderly Black people especially those who had important community roles like funeral
preachers; good attendance at the funeral; and following in procession to the grave were
all displayed under slavery. The amazing continuity of death care and funerary display at
the orphanage may suggest that despite even the ultimate disruption of the Black family,
the death of both parents, there were certain ways of dealing with death that had to be
representative regardless.

Interestingly, the surprise of some ofﬁcials and civil servants working for the

F reedmen’s Bureau in response to Aﬁican Americans’ request for burial assistance
disclose their lack of preparedness to deal with the poor, dispossessed freed people within
their own cultural context. In a letter written from Vicksburg, Mississippi on January 31,
1865, Colonel J .H. Weber, a Provost Marshal of Freedmen reported that of all the
business, transactions, and services which his post provided to Black people, one

particular need request was difﬁcult to meet, i.e., assistance for burials in the Black

community.

59

During the winter a great many applications have been

made by the poor for cofﬁns, etc., to bury their ﬁiends;

but as there was no fund which could be used to defray

such expenditures, nothing could be given; and the friends

or relatives were compelled to make shift for themselves.

In many cases people have not been decently inferred [sic]

and often without cofﬁns; But a contract has been made

with a responsible party, a colored man, to inter the poor

on orders from this ofﬁce; his bills being paid out of the

fund derived from the tax on permits.32

Weber’s letter told how freed people of Vicksburg, Mississippi asked him to
provide coffins for the Black community because not only did these former slaves still
believe in funerals, but they also associated charity and benevolence with burial
assistance and funeral expenses. In fact, historian August Meier posited that the sheer
number and massive impact of mutual beneﬁt or benevolence societies and their activities
“reﬂect the thinking of the inarticulate majority better than any other organizations or the
statement of editors and other publicists.”33 Weber, however, resolved to defray the
former slaves’ funerary costs using the Bureau’s purse under the most only under the
most extremely desperate circumstances. “Care, of course is taken,” he assured Colonel
Samuel Thomas, Provost Marshal General, “to give orders for the burial of those only
whose friends are unable to pay the expense themselves.”34
Weber seemed to have overlooked two very important, cultural assumptions of

the former slaves. Largely poor, vulnerable, and illiterate, Aﬁican American people dealt
with the uncertainties of their lives, lacking the security of health care or life insurance,
with mutual helpfulness. Woodson commended, nonetheless, the rescue attempts of

Freedmen’s Bureaus and Freedmen’s Aid Societies. Explaining the vulnerability of

newly freed people, Woodson highlighted the ubiquitous and culturally-proven belief in

60

Black self-help to make sense of the Bureau’s shortcomings. Referencing the efforts of
the Bureau, Woodson opined
these agencies could not reach the whole body of the
needy; and, at best, their ministration was temporary.
The Negroes in the ﬁnal analysis had to learn to look
out for themselves. The deep-seated idea of solving
a social and economic problem through benevolent
societies, then, seemed more practical than ever.35
Carter G. Woodson, understanding the connection between death, slavery, and
community function, saw the “invisible institution” of the ante-bellum South and
historicized “the handmaiden of religion,” the benevolent society. One researcher
candidly called benevolent societies,. . .” the only means the poor people had of insuring
themselves and their families against the great handicaps that result from sickness and
death.”36 Historian Jacqueline Jones echoed,
neighborhoods sought to compensate with a tight work of both
formal and informal secular and church-related social welfare
services. Kin and community could help,. . .to ﬁll a gap left by the
death or departure of a household wage earner.37
After the Civil War, Southern Black churches institutionalized the “invisible
institution” of slave religion. Slave religion in its overt, post-bellum practice, the Black
church, was the natural extension of agency and mutual aid; emancipation provided the
freedoms to solidify its organizational and institutional infrastructure. “After the
emancipation of the whole group,” Historian Carter G. Woodson clariﬁed, “the [Black]
church in its new freedom gave ample opportunity for the unlimited development of
benevolent societies among Negroes.”38 Still illiterate and propertyless, Black people’s

interdependence, fostered under slavery and extended by an acceptance of charitable

resources from more privileged slaves and also free Blacks, transitioned into the

61

widespread development of benevolent societies. In the US. South, post-emancipation
benevolent or burial societies captured a cultural legacy that extended back to US.
slavery, the belief in reclaiming the Black body as part of the community. Both primary
and secondary sources point to the “invisible institution” of slave religion and the slave
community’s efforts at mutual aid as the genesis of Southern benevolent societies of the
post-emancipation era. In fact, community aid or self-help cooperatives had become a
cultural expectation or norm among in Southern cities like Richmond, Atlanta, and New
Orleans, especially, according to historian Carter G. Woodson, “wherever Negroes had
their own churches.” 39 Post-emancipation Black churches in Alabama, according to CA.
Spencer, in Alabama, for example, “naturally assumed leadership in the formation of
benevolent societies.” Spencer reasoned, Black churches, “provided religious and moral
guidance and much needed sense of belonging—in other words, group afﬁliation and
social acceptance.” With the close supervision and power paranoid of White Christians
having been terminated by the post-emancipation of Black congregants’ newly
established, racially homogenous places of worship, both free and freed Blacks could
more fully embrace the functions of the benevolent society.40

Spencer case study of benevolent societies in post-bellum, Mobil, Alabama is a
detailed account of Aﬁican American self-help. Flooded with signiﬁcant numbers of
destitute people, both Black and White, late 19th century Alabama was the perfect place
for organizing mutual aid or “cooperative” associations. Spencer’s article presented the
organizational history of Black benevolent societies in Alabama as a point of departure
for tracing the evolution of Alabama’s ﬁrst Black insurance company. Spencer believed

that these self-help cooperatives did not issue individual policies or certiﬁcates to its

62

members. Therefore, the society’s constitutions and by-laws, according to Spencer,
served as a contract between the societies and its members. The “contract,” i.e., the
members’ acceptance of the society’s functions and rules, speciﬁed that certain “beneﬁts”
should offset familial insecurities caused by sickness, disability, or death. Spencer argued
that the contract between benevolent society and its members foreshadowed the life
insurance policies that would be sold to Black families when the ﬁnancial instability of
benevolence society itself became too unbearable."l

Plater’s opinions about the importance of African American funeral directors in
their communities conﬁrmed Spencer’s review of the destitution and insecurity faced by
poor Black families in the post-emancipation period. Plater insisted that important before
the Civil War, the signiﬁcance of sickness and burial societies to freed African
Americans drastically increased across the post-bellum South and the ranks of potential
membership soared. In Plater’s biography of Virginian mortician R.C. Scott’s impact on
Richland’s African American community, Plater argued the importance of Scott’s
connection to his social organizations. Scott’s funeral business was successful because he
understood that there were few large-scale, African American businesses with access to
cash with the exception of those monies paid to church societies in the forms of
membership dues and burial insurance premiums. In fact, as Plater outlined, even the
African American church depended on the services and ﬁnancial support of the funeral
industry for their survival."2

“Church relief societies,” Plater, Hughes, Butler, Spencer, Walker, and other
scholars all have documented,

were the earliest organizations to provide insurance
[stability and security] for African Americans. In their

63

early form, mutual aid societies also served as centers

of worship. The community and economic responsibilities
of church relief societies increased as their insurance
systems became more sophisticated. African American
organizations [church relief and fraternal beneﬁt societies]
provrded security against the cost of drsabrlrty and death.

Ex-slaves in the post-emancipation period believed that freedom had brought no
disruption in their value of funerary display or expectation of community support to
adhere to it. However, there were some signiﬁcant changes. The “invisible institution” or
slave religion gave way to the freedom of assembly in Southern, Black churches. As a
result, the tradition of self-help and mutual aid ﬂourished. Enterprising Black men with
the support of Black women combined their membership in Black churches and
benevolent societies to capitalize on the Black communities’ belief in funerals. The
“society undertaker” became an ofﬁcial occupation, a service sustained under slavery,
transformed by freedom into a viable trade for death care and ultimately, industrial
insurance. This explains why, in his 1907 publication, The Negro in Business, Booker T.
Washington connected Black people’s “demand for solemn and decent and often
elaborate burial services” to a “prosperous business,” undertaking. In doing so,
Washington emphasized that African Americans “have always " valued ﬁinerary
display.44 The historical signiﬁcance of this claim begs an overview that connects death
care as a “special and peculiarly important” event for Blacks of the US. ante-bellum
South to the premier African American community building efforts of the post-
emancipation burial and benevolent societies.

The change over time from African American bondage to the abolition of slavery

also marks a cultural transformation from a cosmological preoccupation with death, a

64

feature of African American life which Washington detested. In freedom, death care
became a lucrative trade and as such redressed Washington’s assaulted Blackness. Thus,
by the time of Washington’s 1907 publication, the funeral business had become worthy
of professional recognition by the quintessential Black businessmen of the 19th century
and president of the National Negro Business League, the Tuskegee Wizard, Booker T.
Washington. The consistency of Southern Blacks’ funerary displays blossomed from
support of self-help associations into full of locally-owned funeral homes in their
respective communities. Therefore, the patronage of poor, Black families transformed the
preservation of Black bodies from a collaborative ritual to that of a service occupation.
By the modem-era, one researcher’s survey accounted for over one hundred and thirty

benevolent societies in New Orleans, Louisiana alone.

New Orleans, Funerals, and Jazz

In 193 7, Harry Joseph Walker reported his anthropological ﬁndings about New
Orleans’ Black benevolent organizations to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Walker’s examination weaved ﬁeld research and survey results into a historical narrative
that proved the intimate familiarity and traditions of mutual aid, Black identity and death
care. With testimonies from old society founders, interviews with 19th century members
still alive in 193 7, and examinations of societies’ and members records, Walker’s case
study offers a unique peel of truth from power.

Walker’s research conﬁrmed the connection between slave religion, the function
of mutual aid, and the emergence of benevolent societies. Walker believed New Orleans’

societies to be evidence of earlier “mutual helpfulness” that characterized enslaved and

65

free communities during the antebellum period. He noted that the history of “a great
many of these societies developed around the church which was in itself an agency
looked to for aid when misfortune overtook a person.” Walker’s study conﬁrms that the
African American church was a direct product of the “invisible institution,” the religion
of the enslaved that deﬁned burial as a community’s business and obligation.45

The membership of many of the societies reﬂected settlement patterns. For
example, speciﬁc groups of freedmen and women residing in a particular neighborhood
often purchased lots in an existing cemetery or a different site in which they established
burial plots for members use only. Walker and other researchers conﬁrmed the
exclusivity practiced by society members. Marcus Bruce Christian, for example, a
businessman, writer, poet, teacher and an ethnographer of the “Colored Project” of the
Louisiana Federal Writers’ Project (F WP) at Dillard University from 1936 to 1943
compiled 19‘h century newspaper clippings, personal papers, historical and literary
writings. Christian collected this story in the November 11, 1873 edition of The New
Orleans Republic to protect the history and elitism of one society, the Benevolent
Daughters of Louisiana. Founded near the second half of the 19th century, this social
organization celebrated its 25’h anniversary with a gala event that merited that a Republic
journalist covers the occasion. Those who followed New Orleans’ society columns were
no doubt impressed with the guest list at this gathering. Most notably, the reporter
dropped the names of US. Senator Pinckney Benton Stewart (P.B.S.) Pinchback and his
mother, calling Senator Pinchback just “one of the honored quests,” but also, “the
undoubted idol of the colored people.” Senator Pinchback had also served as lieutenant

governor of Louisiana following the mysterious death of Lt. Governor Oscar James Dunn

66

in 1871. The impeachment of the state’s governor, Henry C. Warmouth, in 1872, resulted
in Pinchback’s six week stint as acting governor of Louisiana. At the same time, US.
Representative Pinchback had already won a seat in Washington DC. And by 1873,
Pinchback was elected to the US. Senate. Not only was the Senator and his mother in
attendance, but the name dropping journalist also mentioned the presence of the widowed
Lt. Governor [Mrs.] O.J. Dunn and the wife of his successor, Lt. Governor Antoine. 4"
The Benevolent Daughters of Louisiana, however, was as much a charitable
society as it was a high proﬁle association that merited the favored presence of such
distinguished quests. Incorporated by the state of Louisiana in 1848, the society focused
on “benevolence including deeds of kindness toward their fellow beings in sickness and
suffering, even unto the grave.” This particular group of Black women was prominent
enough to “have a very ﬁne vault in Greenwood Cemetery, wherein they bury their
dead? This property held communally by the Benevolent Daughters marked their
association’s status among many such organizations. The vault also provided “a time
honored custom” as members made an annual visit as a “pious observance [to] the tombs
of their departed friends.” Alter their visit with their deceased members, the Benevolent
Daughters hosted a soirée for their society ofﬁcers, members, and invited quests. In this
venue, the journalist from the Republic was a participant. The impressions of the reporter
provide primary witness of how funerary display was combined with both charitable
organizations and societal prestige. That is to say, membership in the Benevolent
Daughters certainly had its privileges. Perhaps the most socially signiﬁcant one was

being identiﬁed with such esteemed community leaders such as national politicians.

However, by far the most culturally resonant advantage was the Greenwood Cemetery

67

vault that belonged to these society women. Fortunate enough to be buried in this space,
no one would doubt the signiﬁcance of the deceased and at least on the night of the big
party someone would get by there to pay homage to their memory. That is to say, the
identity of the death would not cease to exist as long as they had people who would
remember them. Such a powerful part of identity formation, ownership of burial property,
made it possible that the Benevolent Daughters had “ﬂourished through all the changes
and vicissitudes of a quarter of a century.” The funerary display practiced by the Black
women in this volunteer organization had fomented their communities’ opinions. The
general reputation of the society “wherever charity and kindness are appreciated in the
city” made it possible for the joumalist’s public declaration in this New Orleans’ paper.47

The racial separation enforced by White prejudice made way for a competitive,
high society complete with namedropping, hobnobbing, and grand standing. For while
Black church societies aided the destitute whose freedom from bondage was not
accompanied by viable options for subsistence, the status of membership in certain
benevolence agencies meet other social needs like parties with high-ranking government
ofﬁcials and secure burial plots at prestigious cemeteries. Before the Black women’s club
movement, African American women whose family and ﬁnancial status permitted
coalesced for good works in societies primarily concerned with decent burials and
funerary memorials. That is to say, one of the ﬁrst concerns in Black communities for
race women was the signiﬁcance of adequate death care including funerary displays that
afﬁrmed the status of certain community members.

At times, Black preachers, “the natural leader in organizing” benevolent societies

even restricted membership in speciﬁc benevolent societies to a speciﬁc church or group

68

congregations. Just thirty years after Washington published his commendation of Black
undertakers, Black-owned funeral businesses had become so customary across the South
that in New Orleans, Louisiana many benevolent societies established contracts with
local funeral directors. These business partnerships ensured that the society members’
burial beneﬁts and their funeral arrangements would be handled by death care
professionals intimately familiar with the traditions of African American funeral display.
Whether a “Black” family in New Orleans may have spoken English, French, Cajun
French, or other Creole dialect with surnames and complexions similarly distributed,
those who joined benevolent associations expected their funeral arrangements to include
a mode of transportation, plenty of mourners and band music. In New Orleans,
membership in certain societies created not only competition, but also a peculiar New
Orleans funerary behavior complete with patronage, and popularity, and pageantry.48
The most prevalent expectation of society members regarding the funerary

products provided to them by their funeral directors dealt with appearances or what
Hatcher referred to as a pageant.49 Plater argued that even the Jim Crow railroad
companies at the turn of the century “catered to the fratemal societies” because of the
impressive parades, displays, and crowds which the benevolent societies generated.

These trains transported whole communities to distant

cites on excursions sponsored by different fraternal

societies. They might travel from city to city, but

usually the trains brought people from the rural

sections of the South into large cities. Excursions

typically began early in the morning; participants

enjoyed the festivities all day, and returned late

in the night. In addition, communities judged the

status of individuals by the number of fraternal

societies represented in their funeral procession,

or in other words, how many societies they had
joined.50

69

New Orleans, a large Southern city, provides an opportunity to historicize how “the
social functions of fraternal societies contributed to their popularity and their spectacular
growth?“

Curiously, however, even in Southern cities like New Orleans where embalming
procedures had been available since the 18503, neither the dead body nor its container or
cofﬁn was the center of African American funerary display during the antebellum and
post-emancipation eras.52 During the antebellum period, the slave preacher, funeral
sermon, and grave yard procession were the center of African American funeral display.
In the decades of the post-emancipation period up until the modern era, poor African
American families who preserved the bodies of their kin and loved ones long enough for
elaborate funeral rites that centered on the physical remains were in the minority. Not
until the post-modem era, did embalming become a widespread option or preference of
American families, regardless of the family’s region, ethnicity, or social status, in the
modern era.53 In fact, American families without regard to social constructions had few
reasons to choose this mystic procedure for preserving their dead at the turn of the
century.

For African American Southerners, perhaps the slave past played a role in the
detachment from the physical bodies of their dead. That is to say, slave communities
often funeralized or grieved their dead sometimes a few weeks or months after they had
buried the bodies. The church service, eulogy, attendants, procession, and food made a
good funeral, not the aesthetic appearance (or availability) of the dead body. After

emancipation and secondary migration to Southern towns, Black families, who wanted

70

their kin embalmed as a part of the funeral arrangements, had to patronize White funeral
homes; White embalmers had the chemicals, equipment, and training necessary for
embalming dead bodies. Therefore, Southern White undertakers, from the turn of the
century until after World War I, serviced Black families’ requested embalming services.
Some of these establishments gave their Black customers the customer-centered
deference expected of any business owner. Others attempted to Jim Crow the dead with
dark, back alley entrances, night funerals that were no longer politically correct, odd
colorations and inadequate cosmetics for the Black corpse.54 Shut out by Jim Crow, most
Black families did not even explore the availability of embalming, being cognizant of not
only the costs involved for the procedure but the obvious possibility that prejudiced
embalmers would not be able to respect the Black body as “sacred remains.”

The trauma of Southern lynching although copiously documented by the
Progressive-era crusader and “princess of the Black press,” journalist Ida B. Wells-
Barnett, remains a curious silence in the history of Aﬁican American undertaking. A city
the size and age of New Orleans, for example, could not have been too unlike
Philadelphia or Memphis, cities in which mob rule and lynching had been utilized to
frighten and coerce freed communities. W.E.B. DuBois reprinted an entire article from an
October 1871 issue of a Philadelphian, African American community newspaper, the
Tribune to document how both Black and White Philadelphians’ memorialized the
martyred Octavius V. Catto in protest to his brutal slaying. The White civil authorities
detested Black political participation and the encroachment of Republicans upon the old
network of Democratic authority. Catto, however, refused to be intimidated by the

climate of racial hostility. He openly voted, a civil act that spoke volumes about both

71

Catto’s citizenship as well as his Black masculinity. Catto did not renounce his 15th
amendment right. A lynch mob shot Catto, a respected community member and
schoolteacher, in front of the police station. This is what historian Michael Gomez called
“the source lamentation” for African Americans, not natural death, but rather the
deliberate destruction of our potential. The travesty of lost potential, the “lamentation” of
Ida B. Wells—Bamett concerning the 1892 lynching of Memphis-area grocers, Thomas
Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart are also examples of the wicked cruelty
exacted upon Black male bodies who refused to compromised the Constitutionality of
their ambitions and the dignity of the masculinity.55

The author of the Tribune article, “an eye-witness, Mr. W. C. Bolivar,” publicized

"‘

Catto’s lynching some twenty year prior to Wells crusade for justice,” or anti-lynching

campaign. However, like Well’s memoirs, journal articles, anti-lynching pamphlets,
addresses, letters, club activities, and international organizing, Catto’s murder along with
his sacred remains became historical records about the reclamation of post-emancipation,
Black body.

On the sixteenth of October the funeral occurred. The body lay in
state at the armory of the First Regiment, Broad and Race streets,
and was guarded by the military. Not since the ﬁineral cortege of
President Lincoln had there been one as large or as imposing in
Philadelphia. Sympathetic public gatherings were held in many
cities, with the keynote of condemnation as the only true one.
Here in Philadelphia a meeting of citizens was held, from which
grew the greater, held in National Hall, on Market street, below
Thirteenth. The importance of this gathering is shown by a list
its promoters..[and]..speeches. . .all breathed the same spirit, the
condemnation of mob law and a demand for equal and exact
justice to all. This is but a mere glance backward at the trying
days of October, 1871, and is written to refresh the minds of men
and women of that day, as well as to chronicle a bit of sad history
that this generation may be informed. And so closed the career of a
man of splendid equipment, rare force of character, whose life was

72

so interwoven with all that was good about us, as to make it stand
out in bold relief, as a pattern for those who have followed after.56

DuBois added his own memorial to Catto, “The outward expression of this was a great
mass meeting, attended by some of the best citizens, and a funeral for Catto which was
perhaps the most imposing ever given to an American Negro.”57

Yet, the primary source documentation from and about New Orleans’ African
American funerary culture has not revealed how the horrors of mob rule and lynching
impacted their communities’ care of the Black body. One 19th century account ledger of a
New Orleans “society undertaker,” the AP. Boyer ﬁrm does prove the historical
signiﬁcance of African American funerary display. The other primary source, Walker’s
ﬁeld study of modem-era New Orleans’ Benevolent Societies also supports the historical
continuities in a communal or cooperative approach in African American death care.
Neither source mentioned the truth of lynching, but rather focused on their communities’
expectations regarding funerary display. The prerequisites for a ﬁnal rite that would make
a lasting impressible and social statement about the identity of both the deceased and
their kin resolved less around the corpse or cofﬁn and more so around the funeral
carriage.

The widow, Mrs. Albert (Jane) P. Boyer, undertaker, lived at 520 North Rampart
and split the operations of her family’s funeral business between her private residence
and the property at 518 North Rampart.58 The ﬁrrn’s ledger for October 1896 to June
1899 lists over thirty benevolent societies with accounts at A.P. Boyer. Many of those
societies advertised their organizations in an appended supplement at the back of the

1896 city directory, Soards’ Ofﬁcial, Society and Church Guide. (See Table 3.)

73

Table 3—A.P. Boyer Account Ledger for October 1896-June 1899 ‘°°"°'""°" °" ”‘9' 7"
(with author's cross-references for benevolent associations also listed in the New Orleans City Directory for 1896)

 

Account Number

Firm/Benevolent Association

Appears on These Dates

 

81-83

91

134
163
151
205
221
234/254
237
263
278
281
288
294

' Also listed in the Soards' 1896 New Orteans City Directory “Appendix. Ofﬁcial,

Frantz 8 Schoen‘ **

E. Dufreche" **

Daughters of Zion Business Association"
A.P. Boyer (2 carriages/$6.00)*

Salvador Business Association"
Laudumiey" **

Orleans Manufacturing Co.

Friend of Charity

Ladies Viadalia Business Association
Ladies Olive Branch

Ester Chapter #1

Old Folks Home

Ladies Corporation Business Association
Young Men Vadalia Business Association"

Society and Church Guide. Vol. XXV. 1898'

“ White-owned funeral parlors that rented carriages from AP. Boyer

Sources: AP. Boyer, Undertaking (New Orleans, LA), University of New Orleans, Earl
K. Long Library, Louisiana and Special Collections; Soards’ 1896 New Orieans City

Directory “Appendix. Ofﬁcial, Society and Church Guide. Vol. XXV. 1898'

10/96; 10/96; 10/96; 11/96;
12/96; 1/97; 2/97; 3/97; 9/97-
9/98; 1/99; 2/99; 3/99; 4/99;
7/99

10/96; 10/96; 10/96; 10/96;
11/96; 12/96; 1/97; 2/97; 3/97;
4/97

1 1/98

6/99

2/99

2/99

10/96

1/97

4/98

2/97; 3/98; 4/98; 7/98; 3/99

3/98

10/96; 1/97

4/99

12/96; 1/97; 4/97; 4/98; 6/98;
8/98; 11/98; 1/99; 3/99; 5/99

The Boyer ledger also documents the ﬁrrn’s business dealings with several other New

Orleans’ funeral ﬁrms, F rantz & Schoen and Dufreche. These ﬁrms belonged to families

of European not African ancestries. Frantz & Schoen, for example, German Americans,

loaned and borrowed funerary equipment, primarily carriages for the burial procession, to

the “Widow P. Boyer.”59 Cross referencing Boyer and Schoen’s account ledgers, the New

Orleans’ city directories, Walker’s 1937 surveys, and the ethnographic data in the Marcus

Christian collection, changes over time in the Southern African American funeral, family

and their collaborative functions become evident. In fact, a synthesis of this sufﬁcient

primary permits a somewhat detailed case study of one funeral home business. In the

74

years prior to the Boyer account ledger, Mrs. A.P. Boyer had done so much business with
the Schoen family, German Americans that the latter kept record of their business
dealings with a more meticulous system than a daily log Of their transactions with the
Boyer undertaking ﬁrm. Instead Of a daily listing that referenced individual accounts,
Schoen listed Boyer in an alphabetical directory preceding his ledger. Placed under the
“AD” tab, the Schoen accounts’ registrar simply updated the account for “Boyer, P.
Wid.,” by adding the page number in the ledger on which business with the Boyer ﬁrm
had most recently been transacted. The page numbers under Boyer’s name corresponded
with dates when the two ﬁrms had rented, borrowed, or exchanged carriages. According
to the Schoen record keeper, the “Widow P. Boyer” borrowed their funeral carriages
quite frequently to service the African American families and society members who
patronized the Boyer undertaking ﬁrm. 6° Schoen’s fastidious bookkeeper made two
columns for each family, organization, or funeral ﬁrm that had an account with the
Schoen business ofﬁce. In the left column the accounted recorded “Frantz & Schoen
from...” and in the right, “To. . .from F rantz & Schoen.” In addition to the record of
lending and borrowing between funeral establishments, the Schoen accountant took note
of the when and how much money was applied to the Boyer and other accounts with their
ﬁrm. All loans and exchanges with the “Widow P. Boyer” were marked “paid” or
“settled.” The “Widow P. Boyer” was never referred to by her Christian name, Jane. The
“Widow P. Boyer” only borrowed or rented Schoen carriages. However, at least by 1896,
Mrs. A.P. Boyer was providing her own documentation that her ﬁrm did return Schoen’s

professional courtesies (See Table 3).

75

Table 3—A.P. Boyer Account Ledger for October 1896-June 1899 (“mm "°’" ”‘9‘ 7‘)
(with author's cross-references for benevolent associations also listed in the New Orleans City Directory for 1896)

Account Number

295
299

304
306
308
310
317
317
322
329
332
335
336
339
340

341
343
348

348
349
350
351
352
357
362
362
363

" Also listed in the Soards' 1896 New Oﬂeans City Directory “Appendix. Ofﬁcial, Society

Firm/Benevolent Association

Young Friends of Hope‘
Ladies Equal Justice“

Daughters of LA‘

Young Men's Charity'

Young Vidalia, Jr.‘

Crescent Lodge #1646*

P. Gallegher (1914 Conti)

Alfred Laboste (Roche & Caroudt)
Coachmen Business Association
Lutheran #1 Business Association
Young Veterans

Beneﬁcial Business Association
Lutheran #2 Business Association

Young Men's Progress Business Association"

Ladies Providence”

Mt. Zion Business Association"

Young Veterans St. Louis 1837*
Perserverance Business Assoc. Passive
member*

Ladies lndependent‘

Le Dames Natives“

Ladies of Hope"

Ladies of Hope"

St. Eulalie Business Association“

Les Dames Esperauce Business Association*

Berry
Albert Martin
Mrs. Thompson

and Church Guide. Vol. XXV. 1898”

“ White-owned funeral parlors that exchanged, rented, or loaned carriages to AP.

Boyer
Sources: A.P. Boyer, Undertaking (New Orleans, LA), University of New Orleans. Earl

K. Long Library, Louisiana and Special Collections; Soards' 1896 New Orieans City
Directory “Appendix. Ofﬁcial, Society and Church Guide. Vol. XXV. 1898'

Appears on These Dates

10/96; 12/96; 1/97
8/98; 12/98; 2/99; 3/99;
4/99; 6/99

1/97

4/98

3/97; 2/99

1/97

10/96

10/96

2/99

2/99

4/98

8/98

1/97

12/96; 3/98; 8/98

1/97; 2/97; 3/97; 3/98; 7/98;
8/98; 12/98; 2/99; 3/99
3/97; 4/97; 11/98; 3/99
1/97; 4/97

4/99

4/97; 4/98
7/98

3/99

12/96; 9/98
7/98

8/98

10/96

1 0/96

1 0/96

According to Boyer’s ledger, their carriages carried Schoen’s customers

beginning October 1896 to July 1899. Boyer assigned the German American-owned ﬁrm

of Frantz & Schoen account numbers 81, 82, and 83. Every date on which this Schoen

accounts numbers appear shows that funeral carriages were being borrowed or rented

76

(See Table 3). Finally, the Boyer ledger appears to be both an itemized account for the
ﬁrm’s transactions with individual families and clients as well as their contractual
relationships with other undertaking and funerary establishments. And the majority of
Boyer’s monthly charges were either for carriages or the package deal of carriages and
cofﬁn or funeral hearse. 6'

The almost three dozen benevolent societies which utilized the Boyer undertaking
ﬁrm followed the same pattern. The majority of Boyer’s charges to the benevolent
societies’ accounts were for either carriages or the combination package, a carriage and
cofﬁn, i.e., the funeral hearse as well as carriages to transport the bereaved and the
community from the funeral service to the grave site, i.e., the funeral procession. In 1937,
Walker conducted a survey of New Orleans’ benevolent societies.

While Harry Joseph Walker canvassed the city for histories of these associations,
Marcus Bruce Christian continued his ethnographic ﬁeld research on behalf of the
Federal Writers’ Project (F WP) of Louisiana at Dillard University. Their ﬁndings
together with the Boyer account ledger peel the true signiﬁcance of African American
funerary display from a very speciﬁc place and time (See Table 4).

The sheer number of the benevolent societies that Walker surveyed in 193 7,
totaling over 130, does not actually account for all of the mutual aid associations in the
city. Walker’s list compiles only those associations which he actually surveyed. Historian
Jacqueline Jones explained that, “Benevolent and mutual aid societies that were in
evidence throughout [Southern] rural areas ﬂourished in urban areas where people had
more cash and greater access to central meeting places.”62 The Benevolent Daughters of

Louisiana may serve as the best example of this distinction between the self-help

77

initiatives of poor, rural African American communities of the post-emancipation South
and their urban and more afﬂuent counterparts. The membership, sisterhood and charity
of The Benevolent Daughters of Louisiana predate both the Black women’s club

movement and the Black Greek-lettered organizations of the urban South.63

Table 4—Partial Listing of New Orleans’ Benevolent Societies Surveyed in 1937
(author’s cross-referenced compilation of extant associations with A.P. Boyer accounts,
1896-1899)

 

 

Boyer Account Number F irm/Benevolent Association Alternative Spellings used
by Walker

134 Daughters of Zion Business Association NIA

237 Ladies Vidalia Business Association N/A

263 Ladies Olive Branch Lady Olive Branch

288 Ladies Corporation Business Association Lady Cooperators

295 Young Friends of Hope N/A

304 Daughters of LA Benevolent Daughters of
Louisiana

306 Young Men's Charity N/A

308 Young Vidalia, Jr. Vidalia (Jr.)

332 Young Veterans N/A

340 Ladies Providence New Ladies of
Providence

341 Mt. Zion Business Association Mr. Zion

348 Ladies Independent Lady independent

Sources: A.P. Boyer, Undertaking (New Orleans, LA). University of New Orleans, Earl K.
Long Library, Louisiana and Special Collections; Harry Joseph Walker. Negro Benevolent
Societies in New Orteans: A Study of Their Structure, Function, and Membership.
Nashville. Tennessee: Fisk University, 1937. “Appendix: Partial List of Benevolent
Organization in New Orleans”

However, the historical literature on African American fraternal orders,
benevolent societies, and mutual aid associations reﬂects two trends. First, if the
discussion centers on labor or other pecuniary relevant topics, researchers have focused
on Black men. Secondly, if the discussion centers on community building or other non-
topics, researchers have focused on Black male preachers or middle-class Aﬁ'ican
American reformers. When scholars remembered that African American woman were

present in the history making the Black church was one of the ﬁrst places the record was

78

corrected. In addition to the religious activities of Black church women, several of them
were also civic leaders and the work of Black women historians has judiciously
documented these contributions. Given the proliﬁc scholarship in African American
women’s history, the gap in literature reﬂects a class versus gender bias, however. That is
to say, the institution building and community organizing of middle-class Black people
(including women) have been the center of much historical discussions. Even with foci
on poor families, destitute people or working-poor folks, the interventions of middle-
class reformers most often take center stage. Only a few studies maintain the organic
organizational and survival strategies of the poor in post-emancipation African American
history. The historical signiﬁcance of funeral display offers a point of reclamation of a
speciﬁc piece of African American identity formation. It reclaims the community
activism of Black women prior to the middle-class reform movements of the modern era.
Funerary display also bridges the artiﬁcial distance between middle-class reformers and
the targets of their improvement campaigns, poor families. Decent burials were mutual
concerns and death itself a prOper equalizer in African American communities in both the
north and south. (’4

For this reason, Walker’s research in New Orleans makes an especially beneﬁcial
contribution to a study of African American funerary display. Although he did not list all
the individual members’ names, the fact that the Benevolent Daughters of Louisiana
made Walker’s community inventory testiﬁes to the strength of this community
organization which predated African American emancipation by at least 17 years. Marcus
Christian, for example, placed the sisterhood in the historical record with his preservation

of The New Orleans Republic article of November 1 1, 1873. At the time this article was

79

written, the Benevolent Daughters of Louisiana celebrated their 25“1 anniversary. The
sisterhood must have been founded in 1848, almost two decades prior to the end of the
Civil War. This date, the location, and the longevity of the association all conﬁrm that
African American urban communities possessed both opportunity and means for more
organized and stable self-help initiatives. When Walker took note of their existence in
193 7, the Benevolent Daughters of Louisiana was almost 100 years old.

In 1873, the Benevolent Daughters of Louisiana boasted that their members
included state senator’s mothers, the wives of successful business men or civil servants,
as well as spouses and widows of other elected, governmental ofﬁcials. And, by 1896, the
Benevolent Daughters of Louisiana, operating at that time for almost half a century, had
an account at the A.P. Boyer Undertaking ﬁrm. The Benevolent Daughters were still
around when Walker conducted his ﬁeld research in 193 7. The Widow A.P. Boyer was
what Walker called a “society undertaker.” Plater credited the benevolent society for the
unparalleled success of African American funeral directors. Plater believed

The popularity of burial associations produced many

beneﬁts for the African American funeral director. Since

the associations set the guidelines for their members, [so that]

the funeral director could concentrate on the technical aspects

of the funeral. In addition, the association relieved the

funeral director from making assessments and negotiating

payments because each person joined an association that

ﬁt his or her ﬁnancial and social status needs."5
While the business of burying the dead in urban African American communities of the
post-emancipation South, especially those African American families who requested

embalming, went to some White undertaking ﬁrms, by the turn of the century, Black

undertaking ﬁrms like A.P. Boyer had positioned themselves as entrepreneurial

80

contenders for Black bodies. Marcus Christian posited that the self-help community
activism of benevolent societies explains the ﬂourishing of funeral establishments across
Louisiana because they “encouraged or promoted the foundation of undertaking parlors
throughout the state.”66 Walker’s contemporary investigations concur. “It is signiﬁcant
that the undertakers, who had the greatest number of funerals under the direction of
benevolent societies were those, without exception, who had membership in large
numbers of these associations. A considerable numbers of the [society] undertakers felt
that it was necessary to belong to the organizations in order to hold their business.” In
fact, Walker is quite thorough in his deﬁnition of the “society undertaker,” because

they are under contract with the benevolent associations

to provide funerals for deceased members at a ﬁxed rate.

It is usual for the benevolent society to elect its undertaker,
or undertakers, at the regular annual election. Prior to the
election, the candidates for election as ‘society undertaker’
present in writing their ‘bids’ to the association. For an
undertaker to contract with a large number of benevolent
associations to bury their deceased members, was a
reasonable assurance, in the long nm at least, of a
considerable amount of business.67

Thirty years before Walker’s study of New Orleans’ benevolent societies, writing in
1907, Booker T. Washington similarly noted,

A prominent feature of the secret organizations, which
have sprung up and become extremely popular

in recent years among the colored communities, has
been the provision of sick beneﬁts and burial expenses.
This demand and these organizations have created a
special business opportunity for Negro business men
of which they have very largely taken advantage.68
(emphasis mine)

Washington made a point of gendering the undertaker as male. However, Marcus

Christian complimented Mrs. Jennie Daigre-Gilbert as “the most successful Negro

81

mortician of Baton Rouge” at the turn of the century. And Schoen’s ledger reﬂected a
volume of business with the “Widow P Boyer” that was unmatched by any other ﬁrm
holding one of their accounts.69 In fact, it could be that Black women, quite comfortable
in their traditional roles of nurturer, comforter, and charitable servant, joined associations
like the Benevolent Daughters of Louisiana. Veiling themselves with the titles from their
husbands and capitalizing on their social connections, these entrepreneurial women built
a reputation based on African American funerary display, expanding their family’s
undertaking business via the truth that Black people believed in funerals.

To be fair, Washington did not have the beneﬁt of sophisticated theories about the
social constructions of sexuality, however, he still mistook the success of turn of the
century Black undertakers as the fruits of male agency. A slight “squeeze and tease” of
his own evaluation of the undertaking business reveals the fallacy. In chapter ten of his
1907 publication, for example, Washington commends the wife of the undertaker, Rev.
Preston Taylor from Shreveport, Louisiana. In the closing sentence of Washington’s
chapter, “The Negro Undertaker,” Washington acknowledged, “In all his [Rev. Taylor’s]
efforts he has had the aid of his wife, formerly one of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers,
and a woman of strong sympathies, and invaluable to her husband.” How could
Washington have missed the obvious appeal of having a former Fisk Jubilee Singer, the
internationally known performers of slave songs and spirituals, possibly render for status-
conscious people of color? 70 Then again, the Fisk Jubilee Singers were not compensated
entertainers, but fundraisers. Therefore this very pragmatic Protestant, the epitome of its
work ethic, probably did not consider Mrs. Taylor’s talent as a job." Also, in chapter

eleven, “James C. Thomas, Undertaker and Business Man,” Washington dedicates his

82

closing statements to the wife of the former. “In 1884, Mr. Thomas was married to Miss
Ella Rollins, of Richmond, Virginia, and she has been of great assistance to him in his
business, having entire charge of the work in his absence. They have seven children, all
of whom are being educated, in addition to their school training, in their father’s
business.” Now, if Mr. Thomas trusted Mrs. Thomas to take care of the family business
while he was out of town, who would have been had charge of their children, but the
same woman who was running the ofﬁce?72

Washington’s faulty representations of Black women contradict the reality of
females in undertaking businesses prior to the modern era. The changes over time that
may account for the claim that Black funeral directors became “kings of their
communities” include the decline of benevolent associations and the emergence of Black
industrial insurance ﬁrms. That is to say, the instability of the benevolent societies made
it possible for Black men with cash and connections to establish insurance businesses.
The rise of the Black insurance industry hailed the end of the benevolent societies, those
familiar spaces of female activism protected by the conventional acceptance of charity
work as a woman’s role. Although the majority of Black preachers and ministers were
men, the leadership of the post-emancipation Black churches, the “handmaiden of
religion,” was a woman and member of a benevolent society. The industrial insurance
companies which replaced her were built by traveling salesmen who sold insurance
policies. The mobility and danger involved in this work, gendered male, displaced Black
women as primary negotiators of African American funeral display. For example, Walker
clariﬁed,

Negro undertakers of New Orleans also commonly enter
into similar contracts with insurance companies [as those

83

with the society] which offer policies with provisions for

medical care and burial. These companies appear to be

rapidly displacing the benevolent institutions as a form

of health and life insurance.”
In a chapter of Roberta Hughes Wright’s Lay Down Body, one she entitled, “Burial
Societies and Lodges,” the connection between death, post-emancipation benevolent
associations, and industrial insurance of the modern era are made quite clear. Burial
societies and lodges served as the precursors to modem-day insurance companies for
America’s [B]lack communities, ﬁlling the important gaps in security and peace of mind
created by racial discrimination. Although many benevolent societies also supported
schools for Black children as well as the social and religious center of the community via
its connection to the church the most important among all the activities, “they contracted
to guarantee a proper funeral and burial for their dues-paying members. ‘Without a doubt
their major concern was the death beneﬁt; making sure their members received not only a
decent but a special burial.’ ”74

There is little debate that the Black church was the center and scene of post-

emancipation Black life, including social activities. Aﬁican American funerary display,
however, within those organic institutions needs to be historicized in terms of their
socializing functions. John Jasper, for example, the itinerant preacher with eschatological
genuis, “was best at funerals,” captured William H. Pipes in the book, Say Amen,
Brother! Old-Time Negro Preaching: A Study in Negro Frustration, where, Pipes
continued, J asper’s “vivid and spectacular eloquence resulted in an uproar of groans,

shouts, fainting women, and people who were swept to the ground to lie in a trance-like

state sometimes for hours.” Now, this funeral display occurred most of the time without

84

the physical presence of the Black body, as most slave funerals did not coincide with the
burial of the body because of work stoppages and slaveholders’ prerogatives.75
The appearance of the dead body at post-emancipation funeral services, rarely

embalmed, but deﬁnitely available, escalated the opportunities for dramatic display. The
availability of Black “sacred remains” for both display and transport accounts for the
“pageantry” and spectacle of post-emancipation funerary display. Woodson, Walker,
Marcus, and other scholars supported Hatcher’s historical description of African
Americans funerary behavior as public display of their communal values. A funeral to
them was a pageant. 76 It was a social event that had to be arranged for ahead of time. An
African American was meant to be occasioned by the gathering of kindred and friends
from far and wide. In fact, a funeral regardless of the status of the deceased was not
satisfactory unless there was a vast and excitable crowd. Walker, quoting Carter G.
Woodson’s assessment, repeated

The idea of the parade appealed especially to the freedmen.

They liked beautiful regalia, and as most of these uniforms

[those of the benevolent societies] were oriental like the

Negroes themselves, the color of the freemen harmonized

With that of the festive attire. Thousands of freedmen who

otherwise would not have joined these societies came into

them for mere display.77
The Widow A.P. Boyer needed to contract carriages from the German American owned
ﬁrm because her community clients, African American families, believed in funerals to
much that the procession from the church, the place of male leadership and female
emotional, to the grave was the opportunity to extend their funerary display. Walker

concluded his 1937 study of New Orleans’ benevolent societies noting the negative

consequences when benevolent societies lessened, changed or terminated their

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endorsement or beneﬁts for these elaborate social displays. They declined in
importance.78
One ﬁnal feature of African American funerary pageantry, however, exhibited
across the rural and urban South also bears mention. The funerary music whose
syncopated pulse paced the procession was New Orleans’ or Dixieland jazz. Popularized
in Harlem night spots, clubs whose patrons were White and workers Black, jazz bands
originated around New Orleans and played parades and funerals—both social functions
of the benevolent societies. Much mysticism and superstition surrounded the march to the
grave. Both Roediger and Raboteau blamed African cosmological beliefs about the spirit
of the deceased being malevolent to mourners who failed to adhere to the proper funerary
behavior. Whatever the genesis, the funerary music of New Orleans was obeyed and
copied. Pipes cited one author who compared the power of Black preachers to that of the
jazz musician in terms of their affect on the emotions. “What is true of the Negro
preacher and his swaying congregation, of the jazz-band leader and his cavorting
man. . .What they do. . .is seldom not alive and active.”79
The pageantry, activity, and liveliness of funerary music, New Orleans’ jazz,

would have been reason enough to “pay up” society dues, ensuring that an association
member was in good standing. In “Where Jazz Was Born: The Funeral,” jazz music was
the reason why everybody looked forward to their own funeral.

When jazz was very young in New Orleans, ‘round the turn

of the century, everybody who was nobody looked forward to

his own funeral. This odd outlook was due in part to the fact

that a funeral was treated as a major celebration. As sort of the

honored guest at his own ceremonial departure,.. the deceased

was the cause of attention in death as he never had been in life.

He went “in style,” with plenty of mourners attending. For once,
everyone knew HE was passing by. His funeral would be the

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biggest event in his life. It was something to live for!80

The paying of dues to benevolent societies permitted the hiring of bands to play at society
members’ funerals. Benevolent societies also collected dues to pay for fancy burial
clothes or “robes,” as they were itemized in the Boyer account ledger, and refreshments.
The more money the deceased had paid into the benevolent society or saved on their own,
the more elaborate the funeral; the greater the number of on-looking mourners; the better
the drarnatics of fainting women; and the bigger and noisier the graveyard processional.81

One ethnographer, a researcher from The University of Michigan at Flint, in the
early 19903 published an article in a Parisian journal about New Orleans’ funerary music.
Stressing the Africanisms of New Orleans Jazz funerals, It was from the African tradition
of African-American benevolent societies and clubs that the funeral procession and its
use of band music began in the New Orleans African-American community.”82 The
African roots of the funeral procession to the gravesite from slavery to the post-
emancipation period included the “zigzag” or non—direct route, ritual dressings,
celebratory parading, burial rites, bearing of items for grave decorations, ceremonial
dances, and, of course, singing and dancing—to band music. Whereas the enslaved may
have accompanied the singers and dancers with banjos, pipes, ﬁfes, or violins. The jazz
bands played brass, reeds, and drums. 83

New Orleans jazz funerals typify the historical signiﬁcance of African American
funeral display. However, the attempts to appropriate certain Southern features of
funerary behavior like, for example, huge funeral processionals, band music, and

uncontrolled emotional outbursts met with some resistance after the mass migration of

Southern Blacks to the urban North in the modern era. Stein, however, believed funerary

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behavior to be proof of the African Diaspora in the United States, a distinctly African
American, not only Southern, celebration. “The ritual celebration of the jazz funeral,” he
concluded, “is perhaps unique to New Orleans and can be traced to its Aﬁican and West
Indian roots. If it managed to integrate elements of European Christianity, it is still
informed with African beliefs and practices, with African performing styles—with a

. . . . . 4
spirit of resrstance to. . .domrnatron. “8

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Chapter 3

MODERNITY AND MASCULINITY

Migration and Identity

Resistance hallmarked African American experiences prior to the modern era. By
the middle of the second decade of the 20th century, the modern era, the formerly
enslaved had not only survived human bondage, but inadequate federal interventions,
lynching atrocities and mainstream ostracism as well. Resistance undeniably
characterized African American ethnic identity because of these events that occurred
during the time period that historian Rayford Logan has called the nadir. Resistance to
White domination and Jim Crow oppressions had armed Southern freed people with a
contradistinctive superiority, i.e., a belief in the power of their own moral goodness.

To document African American ethnic identity formation, a study of funerary
display conﬁrms characteristic features such as resistance. Despite their migrations to
bigger and busier urban centers, the technological developments in mortuary science, and
the consequent creation of the funeral industry, Southern Blacks resisted drastic changes
to some death care traditions. For example, Black Southerners continued their adherence
to African-inﬂuenced beliefs such as proper burials and decent funerals as familial debts.
African American communities resiliently continued to prize their methods of insuring
this important societal obligation. Southern Blacks also persisted in their belief that
funerals must be well attended and that neither distance nor ﬁnancial difﬁculties should
be given as excuses for neglecting the customarily large gatherings and reunions

occasioned by the death of kin or friends. Finally, Southern Blacks did not readily

89

succumb to the bourgeois expectations of their northern counterparts. Middle-class mores
fueled well intended African American reformers in northern cities like Detroit. But, an
alternate and historically charged Southern identity answered them. Surprisingly,
Southern stubbornness turned out to be more than the passive resistance of economically
destitute, illiterate, and unsophisticated newcomers. Centuries of domination had made
survival less a matter of color confrontation and more a distinguishing ethnic
characteristic. Consequently, some migrants ignored bourgeois interventions in their
Southern death care traditions. Black Southerners’ funerary displays derived from an
African-based cosmology concerning funerals as homage to inﬂuential ancestors. By the
modern era, Southern Blacks had transformed their funerals from ancestral tributes to
distinctive representations of their own culturally driven identities. In the Southern
Diaspora created by the migration of freed people and their descendants out of their
former land of bondage, expectations of public familial grief, preferences for jazz band
funerary music, and acceptance of ecstatic female mourning indelibly documented that
resistance had migrated to northern cities.

By 1915, hundreds of thousands of Black Americans (numbering almost 1.5
million by 1925) had left the South. This human tide continued throughout the ﬁrst
World War and beyond the depression years ﬁnally receding around 1940. Interestingly,
the tide turned in succeeding decades. Blacks traveled back across the Mason-Dixon line
via return migration to the South. Sufﬁce it to say, as historian Darlene Clark Hine
explains, “The signiﬁcance of temporal and spatial movement to a people, deﬁned by and
oppressed because of the color of their skin, among other things, deﬁes exaggeration.”1 In

fact, the change over time from emancipation to the Civil Rights Era is characterized by

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freedom movements, both political and physical. As a result, migration becomes a very
signiﬁcant subject in American history because it moves the narrative of Black history
forward.2 Migration also serves as a major informant of Black urban history. The massive
relocation of people partially explains the growth of northern metropolises. Yet, the topic
of migration concerns more than a few major industrial centers. Migration studies
contribute not only to a broader understanding of industrial change and development but
also to subsequent changes in social and political practices.

Moving from Southern rural areas and some changing their minds about Southern
cities too, most of these migrants needed connections to both material and social
resources once they reached their destinations. Therefore, the community agency and
mutual aid associated with the historical journey from slavery to freedom certainly had
some Northern counterparts, primarily the Black church. In chapter four The Negro
Church in America, “Negro Religion in the City,” E. Franklin Frazier described the inﬂux
of largely poor, industrially unskilled, illiterate, agrarian mass as a “crises.”3 Frazier’s
characterization only echoed what DuBois and his staff of researchers had already
described in their 1899 case study, The Philadelphia Negro.l The thesis of this book
reﬂected the purpose of DuBois’ research. Commissioned by the sociology department of
the University of Pennsylvania, this work sought to answer the mounting concerns of race
relations at that time. Therefore, DuBois framed his study around a series of questions
regarding the conditions of Black migrants. He wanted to analyze the inﬂuence of the
urban experience upon the migrants as well as any relevant preparation they received
before their arrival. The most signiﬁcant contribution of this work (in terms of the actual

migration process) pointed to the primary migratory patterns or precise geographical

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origins and destinations of early migrants. A metaphor for the subtext, however, could
certainly have been “crises.”4

Awkward as it may be to talk about people as “crises,” the reality of the migrants’
economic desperation and attendant vulnerability propelled many urban Blacks into
action. The social responsibility of stabilizing the residentially segregated neighborhood
in which they all were forced to live, prompted the more afﬂuent and bourgeois members
of Black communities into action. In addition to the logical self-interests involved, many
middle-class Blacks were also held over, Progressive-era reformers. For example, the
Black women’s club movement, ﬁrmly established over twenty years prior to the Great
Migration, had already made good on their motto, “Lifting as We Climb.” Modernity and
migration then did ﬁnd receiving Black communities unprepared for the challenges of
mutual aid. Teasing out why DuBois and Franklin characterized the needs and demands
of their Southern-bom community members provides the historical context how Black

Aﬁican American funerary display created not only another dispersed community, the

Southern Diaspora.

Bourgeois Respectability

The patronage and popularity of post-emancipation benevolent societies attested
the importance of African American funeral display, but it was ﬁmeral pageantry that
became the enduring feature which survived the relocation of one and a half million
migrants. Before World War I, benevolent societies had allowed individual community
members to preplan funerals to ensure burial preferences according their member dues

payment. From the post-emancipation era into the modernity of US. society following

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the Great War, the African American insurance industry replaced sickness and burial
societies. Some benevolent societies continued to function within African American
communities. In New Orleans, for example, even modernization in mortuary science and
the emergence of Black insurance companies failed to replace those annual social
activities afforded by associations such as the “pleasant party” of those “hospitable
ladies” in the Benevolent Daughters of Louisiana.5
The transition from community self-help via the “handmaiden” of the benevolent
society, the advent of the modern era practice of embalming also removed ﬁrnerary
display from the hands of Black women. Herein lays the gendered dynamic of the change
over time in African American funeral display. In the post-emancipation South where
benevolent societies provided communal security and stability to support the historical
belief in funerals, African American women held prominent and visible roles. Death care,
gendered female was cooperative, nurturing, and afﬁrming of the Black families’ need.
With the onset of modernity, the funeral home as business became a male domain.
Modernity brought an attendant assertion of African American masculinity to the
traditions of African American ﬁrnerary display. Modern Black families without the
beneﬁt of the former benevolence functions of the societies began to surrender their
decision making power to professional funeral directors. In fact, Plater concluded that
Black families became increasingly dependent on their communities’ morticians as he
gradually took control over all death care details. According to Plater, the Black funeral
director by the modern era had become the “a prime cultural leader and purveyor of the

African American community identity.”6

93

Reﬂecting their modern times, African American funeral directors gradually
abandoned the designation of community “undertaker” to mark their transition from an
essential trade in removal and burial to a profession called mortuary science. Secondly,
the requisite training to become a licensed mortician became quite popular in urban areas
both in the North and South during the modern era in afﬂuent communities, Black and
otherwise.7 However, in northern cities like Detroit, professional morticians still served
Southern expatriates. These transplanted communities practiced their traditional funerary
displays despite their physical relocation to northern cities. And while northern Black
churches extended supports and protections those migrants readily identiﬁed and
accepted as customary community aid, the reform minded interventions of northern
Blacks also contained some bourgeois intolerance for Southern-based funerary displays.

African American pastors, for example, like the Reverend Dr. R.L. Bradby of
Detroit set up committees to meet trains at Michigan Central. He wanted Second Baptist,
the oldest Black church in the state, to be proactive in its ministry of housing and
employment assistance to the newly arrived migrants.8 Although, Pastor Rev. Dr. Bradby
went as far as to hire an assistant pastor to give leadership to Second Baptist’s
benevolence on behalf of Southern migrants, no group had more inﬂuence, according to
cultural historian Victoria W. Wolcott, than Black church women, especially those of the
middle—class?’

However, criticized Wolcott, the majority of scholars who have studied Detroit
has been labor historians and social scientists. The community building model of
historian Richard W. Thomas an exception, most researchers overlooked the Black

female leadership of America’s city, the center of the Rust Belt, and ring seat for the

94

heroic struggles between capital ownership and industrial labor. With this lack of
attention on the culture of Detroit, the gendered biases of what is considered work and
thereby noticeable and important left Black Church women and their expressions of
resistance or truth behind veils and curtains of silence. It may be that the “crises” which
Frazier and DuBois saw coincided with the chance that Black women had to polish and
professionalize what both their gender and racial stereotypes had given them permission
to do—cleaning up for other people. Interestingly, the chance to help poor migrants,
especially other women, brought African American women who were already the “bone
and sinew” of their race further to the center of the civic responsibilities assumed by their
local congregations. ’0
The respect afforded Black Christian-activists ironically account for two
simultaneous developments. First, the race work of Black church women, whose class
status afforded them the social mobility to do make reform a personal priority, created an
alternative transcript via their activism so that cultural and social historians would be able
to unveil the “hidden complexity” of industrial Detroit, the site of “crises” for some and
the chanced of others. However, these middle and professional class women who
belonged to Black churches, clubs, and associations that promoted reform of poor
people’s culture as legitimate race work failed to appreciate the difference between
mutual aid and bourgeois behavior. In doing so, these women set the standards for
respectability and Black femininity, taking their gender approved chance of leadership to

create yet hegemony. These attempted to redeﬁne the funerary behavior of Southern

- 1
migrants. ’

95

For example, in a letter written to Reverend Dr. R.L. Bradby dated November 7,
1925, Black clubwoman and Christian-activist Nannie Helen Burroughs congratulated the
former on his 15th anniversary in pastoral ministry at the historic, Second Baptist Church
in Detroit, Michigan that was published in a souvenir booklet dedicated to this occasion.
As a leader and spokesperson of the National Baptist Convention’s Women’s Auxiliary,
it was an appropriate gesture for such a letter to be both requested and published. ’2
Interestingly, Burroughs took this opportunity to reveal her “detest” of obituaries. The
traditional of eulogizing among African Americans as a celebration of life was apparently
irritating to Virginia born, Washington, DC. resident, Burroughs. This sentiment may
have stemmed for Burroughs’ own outspoken, uncompromising attention to gender
equity and social responsibility. Capturing the center stage of the Black Christian world
at only twenty-one years of age, Burroughs had delivered her famous address, “How the
Sisters Are Hindered from Helping” at the annual conference of the National Baptist
Convention. The founder and longtime president of Washington, D.C.’s National
Training School for Women and Girls, Burroughs is also credited for with the motto,
“We specialize in the wholly impossible.” An elite grouping of Progressive era, Aﬁican
American female reformers, Burroughs was afﬁliated with the National Association of
Colored Women, an affiliation of local and state organizations included such race women
as Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Margaret Murray Washington of Tuskegee, Mary McLeod
Bethune, and Mary Church Terrell.l3

Burroughs had a fellow clubwoman who shared her critique of African American
funerary behavior, Cora Reid MacKerrow of Boston, Massachusetts. Having served as

Called held civic and community roles such as president of the Harriet Tubman House

96

and vice president of the Women’s Service Club, MacKerrow’s interviewer identiﬁed the
MacKerrow, as a “digniﬁed gentlewoman,” for the readers of the Boston Globe.
MacKerrow was a licensed mortician who had owned and operated the Modern Funeral
Home since 1926. The ﬁrst African American to “ride up front in a hearse, and. . .direct a
funeral” in the Boston-area, MacKerrow told her interviewer that she frowned on
ﬂamboyant funerals. She thought that bands, blaring music, and dancing in the streets
were all “atrocious and a desecration to the dead.” She said plainly, “I wouldn’t allow
them.”14 Obviously, like Burroughs this successful entrepreneur and Black women’s club
leader also detested some expressions of African American funerary display. The fact
that she recalled speciﬁc manifestations of it after almost ﬁfty years in the funeral
business serving African American families proves both continuity and power of
community clients. In the end, the more reﬁned and bourgeois members of Black
communities resigned themselves to the fact that Southem-born African Americans, poor
Black families, believed in funerals.

The community clients, poor Southern migrants, who had transformed a service
rendered to them via a segregated market into a viable business and structured profession
had also transplanted that patronage and power. In doing so, poor Black families proved
across both time and place that they believed in funerals. Indeed, Black families alone
have kept their funeral traditions alive, simultaneously facilitating the community
leadership, socio-political mobility, and wealth building of African American morticians.
These entrepreneurial, small business owners were the “kings of the Black community,”
from the late19203 through the post-modem era. Plater accredited the source of their

authority in the African American community to

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was their unique ability among the African American

merchants to demand and receive cash instead of credit.

The inability of African American small business owners

to grant credit drove many out of business. A shortage

of money forced patrons to bypass African-American

owned stores and shop where there was sufficient credit

available. Funeral directors not only had most of their bills

paid in cash or goods up-front, but received compensation

for high ticketed items and service. Among merchants and

professionals, including doctors and lawyers, the funeral

director was the rare merchant whose stature and type of

service made up-front payment an unquestioned canon

of the community.l

As a result of their ﬁnancial advantage, Black undertakers sometimes buried

community members at no charge to the family. They often loaned money to Black
families in other, non-funeral related times of ﬁnancial distress as well. In places like
Chicago, Black morticians sponsored radio stations, variety shows, and community
newspapers. Urban undertakers even opened bars, speakeasies, and other clandestine
establishments for extralegal activities such as gambling and number running. ’6 In both
Detroit and Chicago, making money from both dead and living Black community
members meant exploring all avenues of capitalist venture. Especially popular were the
entertainment and recreation affordable to the numerous working-poor, Black migrants,
an indulgence which of course drew the criticism and correction of the more bourgeois
and conservative, middle class. In fact, only a decade after World War II, the belief in
Black funerals had enabled death care providers of Black communities to use their status
and connections to enter local, state, and national politics. For example, a name to drop in
late the 19408 to 19505 if in Detroit would have been Charles Diggs, in Phoenix Lincoln

Ragsdale, and if in Memphis, Eugene Ford.” All of these men were both civil servants in

representative government and funeral directors. Other Black men from central cities like

98

New Orleans, Washington, DC, Charlotte, Charleston, Dallas, Atlanta, Philadelphia,
Boston, and Chicago also earned recognition and notoriety from their successful

mortuary practices.18

Southern Funerals as a Northern Industry

The practice of embalming Black bodies by Black men and the attendant under
representation (or exclusion) of Black women from formal training and professional
certiﬁcation apparatuses available in mortuary schools gave Black men opportunities to
emerge as “kings of their communities.” True, the practice of mortuary science had
gained some polite respectability since its inaugural public service during the US. Civil
War. However, most families still used some combination of cooling techniques to
preserve dead bodies, especially families living in rural districts?9

Black morticians, inheriting a more professional designation than undertaker
because of their formal training and certiﬁcation in embalming and mortuary science,
saw an increase in community patronage and a burgeoning professional respectability
during the modern era as Southem-bom, Black families continued to alter the urban
landscape of American Diaspora. That is to say, the Southern Diaspora converged with
the presence of Old and New European Immigrant in the northeast and mid-west. No
longer terrorized by the racial hostility and rural isolation of their Southern backgrounds,
poor Black families did alter their death care habits. For example, German families in
Milwaukee abandoned several of the culturally distinctive, funerary behavior. Kuhm

lamented the loss of his childhood experiences with death that were both German-focused

99

3,

and clan speciﬁc. Death in the family, according to Kuhm was “as natural and intimate
as home birthing in his Milwaukee childhood. He concludes,

With time the seemingly perdurable tribal customs that orchestrated

the protocol of the clan funeral in my childhood gradually

fell by the way. Their loss tolled the death knell of the clan.

As morticians became more concerned with the business

of death, intimate family involvement inversely diminished.

Although beneﬁts were gained, the comforting aspect of clan

cohesion was lost.20
Although, African American community clients, the migrant Black families, stubbornly
held on to their belief in Southern funerals. However, middle-class, urban Blacks did try
to eliminate the embarrassing emotions and demonstrative bereavement of Black
Southerners exhibited at their funerals. Therefore, the class tensions between newly
arrived, Southern migrants and the existing Black communities of the North also disclose
the distinctive, funerary behavior of African American families. Regardless of the class
tensions, however, most African American funeral directors still “performed elaborate
funerals whenever possible because their personal reputations and business viability
depended on lavish display” which produced “competition for the initial possession” of
Black bodies.2|

African American funeral directors, or male undertakers of the modern era,
succeeded in competing for Black bodies because they had become professional
promoters of African American ethnicity. They had emphasized their willingness and
ability to provide the “lavish display” culturally demanded by the historical signiﬁcance
of African American funeral display. Their emphasis on the unique and distinctive ways

that African Americans preferred to display their grief “created a barrier that African

American families were not willing to cross.”22 In other words, African American men

100

had transformed their communities’ traditional funerary rituals into an exclusive
entrepreneurial enterprise, safeguarding their market niche with a legacy: a cultural
standard of service excellence that most non-community morticians were incapable of
providing. As a result of this orchestrated understanding of differences between African
American and non-community death care services, African American men in the funeral
business separated themselves from everyone else in the funeral industry and thereby
guaranteed their prestige, power, and cash payments.23

In the modern era, as insurance agencies attracted and employed the formally
educated, Aﬁican American men of Black communities, licensed and board certiﬁed
African American funeral directors joined them in a co-opting death related services. As
“kings of their communities,” Black morticians provide almost every social need to their
communities. The Black man at the funeral home could read mail for the illiterate,
intercede in schools on behalf of their patron’s children, and endorse candidates running
for public ofﬁce, signaling which way the community should vote.24 There are also
testimonials of Black funeral directors who fed Black families at Thanksgiving with free
turkeys and can goods.25 As charismatic as a classy, Black preacher, as trusted as the
Black doctor or dentist, as visible as the Black school teacher, as reliable as the
community barber, and as savvy as the Black lawyer, funeral directors were indeed,
“kings of their communities.”26 To be sure, these service professionals and poor families
represent a ubiquitous and quintessential survival story in African American family
history, or the signiﬁcance of African Americans’ belief in funerals. Death care translated
into mobility and status for several African American men. The historical signiﬁcance of

African American funeral display proves community clients as an accurate and

101

responsible conceptualization for Black families; and the funerary traditions of those poor
families secured a provider role with major decision making power for Black men at a
time when Jim Crow systematically conﬁned them to what US. society considered
inferior residential and occupational spaces.

By 1924, under the leadership of RR. Reed Aﬁican American men in the funeral
business were able to organize their own professional organization, the Independent
National Funeral Directors Association (N FDA). At one point, Black funeral directors
had been meeting with Booker T. Washington’s National Negro Business League.
However, between the 1907 publication of Washington’s The Negro In Business and the
1924 breakup, “funeral directors were not able to develop their full potential in the
Business League because it was made up of general business groups.” In 1926, NFDA
members changed the name of the organization to the Progressive National Funeral
Directors Association.27

R.R. Reed, the founder of the NF DA, operated out of Chicago. From this
Northern city to which Southern migrants were drawn, Reed sponsored several
periodicals dedicated to propagated the bourgeoning respectability of the Black death
care business and promoting the “full potential” of its professional practitioners.
Shedding the more provincial title of “undertaker,” a job that was as humble as a sexton
or church yard grave digger and as lucrative as a Washingtonian business, modernity
encouraged men whose livelihoods depended on the traditions of Aﬁican American
funerary display to turn the trade that became a business into a full ﬂedged profession.
One of the magazines dedicated to this end, The Colored Embalmer (1927-1932),

contained both news of NFDA members’ mortuary work across the country, articles that

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would be of interest to those in death care, and achievements of its members who
received local, state or national recognition. After the demise of The Colored Embalmer,
The Progressive Negro Funeral Director (1939-?) and The Acomisinc Bulletin 1942-?)
became ofﬁcial organs of the Black funeral profession, both published by the Atlanta
College of Embalming and Mortuary Science. However, librarians and archivists from
the National Funeral Directors Association in Brookﬁeld, Wisconsin to the National
Funeral Directors & Morticians in Atlanta explain that there are no manuscript
collections or depositories of records for African American funeral history. Most of the
leadership at the national and state levels either neglected or removed their documents as
they changed ofﬁce. Over the 20th century, there has been no effect to glean what is
available, no attempt to search the attics, basements, Bibles, etc. those places where
social and cultural history seem to retreat. Yet, the inability to fully document, cross-
reference, and corroborate evidence about Black morticians’ organizational activities
does not preclude historicizing the signiﬁcance of African American funerary display.
The very possibility that this occupation service, the removal of human remains, evolved
from a trade to a business and then a professional despite the poverty and presumed
powerlessness of those people whose bodies were at one time valued, i.e., because of the
uncompensated work extracted from them, and then violated by Jim Crowism, is proof
enough.28

The only other source of information about the history of African American
funeral directing, other than individual case studies or biographies of speciﬁc funeral
directors, are the assessments of the profession by business professors, labor historians,

and economists. For example, Juliet E.K. Walker in The History of Black Business in

103

America: Capitalism, Race, and Entrepreneurship gave some history as to how several
18‘h century trades such as carpentry, cabinetry, and upholstery coalesced as cofﬁn
makers. Walker moved forward in time by connecting their 19’” century counterparts’
occupational mobility like livery stable owners who removed dead bodies and catered in
the families’ funerary meal.29 John Sibley Butler’s third chapter, “ ‘To Seek for
Ourselves’: Benevolent, Insurance, and Banking Institutions,” focused on the benevolent
societies founded by free people of color in Northern communities like Philadelphia
before drawing his conclusions about the beginnings of Black insurance and banking
enterprises. Walker skips right over the mutual aid initiatives of the freed people of the
post-emancipation South and does not even mention the service artery which ﬂowed
between the benevolent societies and the emergence of Black insurance agents and
industry, African American funeral practices.30 Plater, for example, proved that insurance
businesses evolved from mutual aid societies, the community effort to help Black
families adhere to the historical belief in funerary display. The benevolent societies were
pragmatic strategies to pay the undertaker. But the modernization of the undertaking
business facilitated the abandonment of the communal practices of the benevolent society
and the embrace of the insurance industry. In so doing, Black men who sold insurance
policies locked down on the prosperity of Black communities by supporting the funeral
industry.31 The coalition of Black men in funeral service and the insurance industry made
them “kings of the community,” but it rested on the historical signiﬁcance of African
American funerary display.

Perhaps Butler drew his historical understanding about the activities and

importance of benevolent societies from reading E. Franklin Frazier. Frazier, a modern

104

example of those Black urbanites who saw the need to reform the cultural mores of
migrants, had this to say about the organizations and self-help initiatives of recently
freed, poor, and transient Black people:

These associations for mutual aid which were

generally known as beneﬁcial societies. These

‘sickness and burial’ societies should distinguished

from the fraternal organizations which played an

important role in early economic cooperation

among Negroes.32 (emphasis mine)
To be sure, Frazier did root the existence of the less “important” mutual aid societies to
the Black Church, the premier racial cooperative to ameliorate the living conditions of the
freed people. However, Frazier may have slighted the agency not just of the poor, but of
the funeral profession. That is to say, the “kings of the community,” survived as an
economic occupation because of their cooperation with the less “important” benevolent
associations. The modernization of mortuary science and the power of its male
practitioners seemed to have silenced the truth. The legacy of their modern funeral
business was in Southern cities like New Orleans where the post-emancipation and turn
of the century “society undertaker” did not snub her noise at the business they received
benevolent societies. Bourgeois respectability, modernity and masculinity became a
hegemony that challenged the traditions of the Southern Diaspora, the historical
signiﬁcance of African American funerary display. However, the Cole family of Detroit,
Michigan, the oldest funeral business of the Motor City, however, did not share in this

conceit. And when James H. Cole died the wealthiest, Black Detroiter in 1907, his will

left monies and properties to his sons, James and Charles, the latter which founded the

105

Cole Home for Funerals with a clientele of Southern migrants and an acceptance of the

ways that they expressed their belief in funerary display.

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Chapter 4

CASE STUDY OF MICHIGAN AFRICAN AMERICAN FUNERALS BUSINESSES

While the Dr. Rev. Robert Lewis Bradby of Second Baptist Church enjoyed the
public maneuverings of masculinity like rescuing poor women from prostitution or
arranging jobs and homes for migrant men and their families, the credit for this Black
preacher’s status and prominence belong to James H. Cole. The 15th anniversary booklet
of Detroit’s Second Baptist conﬁrmed that it was, “. . .reasonable to assume that it was
partly through the good ofﬁces of the Cole family that Rev. Robert Lewis Bradby was
offered the position of Pastor of SEC [South Baptist Church].”1 Dying prior to his son’s
establishment of Detroit’s oldest African American family-owned funeral business,
Cole’s business acumen, community status, and social connections transferred to his
progeny. A review of Cole’s personal history may help explain how his own avoidance of
bourgeois elitism could be the reason why his son James was able to embrace the
funerary behavior of the poor masses, including those from the Southern Diaspora.

James H. Cole, according to their family genealogist, the late Leontine Cole
Smith, born in 1838 on a plantation in Yazoo County, Mississippi, received his freedom
from his White father after James had demonstrated an ability to provide for himself. In
preparation of his emancipation, James trained and handled horses from his early youth.
Eventually quitting his father’s place, a man who reportedly owned thousands of acres as
well as approximately 150 enslaved workers, when at age 15, his father “considered him

mature enough to make his own way” and manumitted him.2

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The Yazoo county of Cole’s birth, situated near the Mississippi River, borders the
states of Tennessee and Kentucky. In 1853, Cole followed the river north, traveling on
foot, sometimes hitching a ride along the way, stopping to work in exchange for funds or
food. Arriving in Detroit around 1856, the young James had already lived in several
states, held several jobs, one of which was in Salem, Kentucky where, said his great-great
granddaughter, Leontine Cole Smith,

he met a beautiful young girl, Mary Belle Thompson.

He fell deeply in love, but felt he could not declare

his affection because of his ﬁnancial plight and her

tender years. When he was ready to depart the

Thompson[s], he vowed when Mary Belle was

grown and he could ﬁnancially care for a wife,

he would return to Kentucky and claim her as

his very own.3
With a personal goal in mind and a transferable skill, Cole settled in Michigan, a free
state since 1837, without too much concern of being absconded as a supposed fugitive
and with the geographic advantage of Canada’s safety and freedom. Shortly after his
arrival in 1856, Cole joined the Second Baptist Church, a place where both free Blacks
and fugitives, those who chose not to continue on the Underground Railroad via the SBC
station, received assistance with transitioning from the rural South to the urban North. A
delightful depiction, Cole’s great-great granddaughter believed that, “the ladies of the
church took special interest in him. They showered him with motherly aid and comfort in
adapting to his new life in this strange new city.”4 Black church women helped Southern
migrants prior to emancipation, before the Great Migration, and preceding the modern

male infrastructures and bourgeois women’s clubs attempted to reform them.

When the Civil War began in 1861, James tried to enlist in the Union Army. He

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was initially refused because “colored” troops were not accepted. Rejected by the Union
Army, James noted the bitter hostility aimed at Black Detroiters, blamed for the Civil
War by area Whites. Committing to another kind of protection, i.e., Washington’s work
ethic for ﬁnancial security, James took care of horses, a trade he had learned while
enslaved, a skill which he had used for survival during his previous stages of migration.
James would build two barns and also negotiate a contract with the US. government go
stable the horse of the First Calvary and Artillery quartered in mid-Michigan. James
found a way to make his contribution of Aﬁican American freedom. And on September
23, 1863, this determined Black man who seemed to consistently accomplish whatever he

” 5 The rest of Cole’s extraordinary

had a mind to do, “married his adored Mary Belle.
history deserves retelling here

[his] efforts during the war were the beginning of the

Cole fortune. His credo was ‘Just work and lay by’---

a rule he always followed. Thus by continued hard work

and thrift, judiciously investing in property. . .he was able

to accumulate public halls, stores and dwellings. He later

added a moving business in which his sons were employed?5
Booker T. Washington would have approved.

After Cole’s death in 1907, the Widow Mary Cole became the executrice of the

Cole estate. James and Charles Cole decided to use his inheritance, training in
transportation, and social connections to the historical Second Baptist Church to segue
into the funeral business. The brothers’ undertaking ﬁrm started in 1917 split up because
of a differential preference in base clientele. Charles “Charlie” became the favorite of the

Detroit’s afﬂuent bourgeoisie, progress minded African Americans. James took on the

needs of the poor.

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James H. Cole, Sr., the son of a former slave, opened his funeral business in 1919
on the lower east side of Detroit, a community of less “respectable” working class
urbanites and newly arrived migrants, known as the Black Bottom. The earliest
documentation available from his grand daughter, Karla Green Cole, the current owner
and operator of Coles Home for Funerals in Detroit, include an itemized bill of funeral
costs, receipt of payment installments, and a personal letter from James H. Cole, Sr.
asking his client to make good on the balance.7 Certainly, the tone of this letter reveals
the humility and genuineness of a business man more concerned with serving people than
trying to reform their habits (See Appendix: Cole Funeral Home Correspondence, 1929).

By 1944, men like James Cole, Sr., the son of an enslaved migrant who had
worked his way North to Detroit, had obtained professional status through licensure and
certiﬁcation at mortuary schools across the country. Chicago had the most prestigious
mortuary school in the modern minds of aspirting African American morticians. The
Windy City, for example, home to RR. Reed as well as Robert A. Cole, began the
birthplace of the ﬁrst fraternity solely dedicated to training the death care professional,
the Epsilon Nu Delta Mortuary Fraternity. Epsilon Nu started as a study group at
Chicago’s school of mortuary science. After World War II, Epsilon Nu renamed its
student afﬁliates “Horus clubs,” expanding and restricting its membership to only
licensed embalmers and morticians. Therefore, from the modern era in which Black male
masculinity had subverted the female gendered traditions of mutual aid in dealing with
the dead, the change over time in the organizational structure of their own professional
fraternity proves that the post-modem consolidation of their power of African American

funerary display was even greater exclusivity.8

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While Cole (and later, his son James, Jr. and grand daughter Karla) earned the
most funerary patronage, doing the largest volume in death care of any Aﬁican American
funeral home at that time or since, the approachable and recognized personage of Charles
Diggs, the only child and inheritor of the family funeral business, The House of Diggs,
the congressman whose tenure as a US. Representative from the State of Michigan began
in 1955 and ended in 1971 , provides an historical example of how African American
funeral display, modern masculinity, community service, and respectability could be
reconciled.

Charles Coles Diggs, Sr., another transplanted Mississippian farm boy, founded
the family business, the House of Diggs Funeral Home in 1921, two years after the
establishment of the James H. Cole Home for Funerals. By 1938, the House of Diggs had
relocated several times in Detroit’s Black communities, ﬁnally settling at 689 Rowena
Street (later renamed Mack Avenue). The House of Diggs on Mack Avenue was the site
where this modern mortician’s family business ﬂourished for one reason: the funeral
home was directly across the street from the Brewster Housing Project.9 This location put
the House of Diggs conveniently at the doorsteps of poor African American families;
people who believed in funerary display and had come to rely on Black men to ﬁll their
funerary needs. DuBose collected two testimonies that conﬁrm the interdependence of
the Diggs’ family-owned funeral home and the Brewster community: the Cadillac ﬂeet
with which the Diggs’ announced its ability to provide the historically signiﬁcant
funerary display of poverty dissemblance and the fact that “people in need could count on
‘Mr. Diggs’ for ﬁnancial assistance. He was a practical man in such matters. Helping

others was a trait he passed on to his son.”’0 The cultural and ﬁnancial advantages of

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servicing funerary displays and status needs of poor African American families were not

the only legacies that Diggs, Sr. left to his son.

At its peak, the House of Diggs employed ﬁve hundred
people. In addition to the funeral home, there was a ﬂorist
that was called The House of Diggs Flowers. There was also
a burial insurance company called the Metropolitan Funeral
System, the only burial insurance company in Michigan. Its
name was later changed to Detroit Metropolitan Insurance
Company, due to a newly created state law.ll

Diggs, Sr. began selling Metropolitan Funeral System policies door-to-door in 1942. He
acted, presumably, DuBose, wrote, “after discovering that people were so poor they could
not pay for their funerals.”l2
However, despite the fact that the Michigan Compiled Laws of 1948 disrupted the

methods that modern Black men, Digg’s and Cole’s father, had used to turn the historical
signiﬁcance of African American display into lucratively legacies, The “Road That Led
to Congress” was paved by the patronage of a Southern Diaspora of poor families who
believed in funerals. Representative Clarence F. Graebner, an insurance agent, sponsored
the bill that became this public act to prohibit the Black communities’ access to burial
insurance via the hands of their modern morticians. This bill eventually became The
Insurance Code of 1 95 6, solidifying the illegality of simultaneously holding interests and
ownership of funeral businesses and life insurance companies. Obviously, the
representative legislature of Michigan saw some conﬂicts in selling life insurance and
burial services. DuBose saved some rich commentary from Diggs regarding the matter.

In later years, Diggs contended that the new law

had been racially motivated. As he put it, ‘The

Republican majority legislature, in Lansing, feared

the growth of the burial insurance ﬁrm would threaten
the viability aspects of the mortuary market.’13

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Apparently, poor Black families and modern men who strategically had
positioned themselves to take care of their communities’ gendered needs from jobs to
housing to displaying their dead.’4 Yet, DuBose does not neglect a little anecdote from a
former Diggs’ insurance salesman.

Even after [Diggs] changed the name from Burial Society,

to one that met insurance laws of the state,. . .when I would

go their homes, the old folks would come to the door and

ask, ‘You the Diggs burial insurance man?’..[they] still

referred to it as Diggs burial insurance.lS
Neither Northern migration, masculine modernity, bourgeois respectability nor the
Michigan legislature could change the fact that poor, Black families believed in preparing
for their burial and funeral displays. And the Diggs’ family advantageously responded to
the “infrapolitics” at work in Detroit’s Black communities.

In his biography, Carolyn P. DuBose credited the Diggs family for many changes
in Detroit. For example, Diggs, Sr. opened the Detroit Memorial Park Cemetery for
Black people.

People were impressed by the Diggs family as a whole.

They were pioneers in business and community activists.

The essence of their efforts was to improve people’s lives.

Their success as morticians was the result of hard work and

commitment to the community. ’6
DuBose repeated one informant’s opinion that, “Whatever they did in Detroit, it was
news—even in the white community. They were leading citizens. The Diggs family
belonged to the creme of the crop.”17

DuBose, press secretary of US. Representative Diggs during his last year in

ofﬁce, declared “Diggs is a very famous name in Detroit.” ’8 As proof, DuBose

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chronicled the political career and entrepreneurial activities of Diggs’ father, Charles
Coles Diggs, Sr. The senior Diggs served as the ﬁrst Black Democratic senator in the
Michigan legislature, the only Black state senator at the time. Diggs took his seat in 1937.
In his ﬁrst year as a Michigan state legislator, Senator Diggs sponsored a bill called
“Diggs Law,” enforcing anti-discrimination in Michigan’s public places. ’9 According to
DuBose, Diggs, Sr. “was an articulate man [who] helped people understand how their
votes could change things. More practically, people trusted his judgment. Many of them
had grown up in the South where trying to vote could cost them their lives.” The fact that
Diggs, Sr., was a licensed embalmer with a successful, modern mortuary practice in a
bustling city with a sizable Southem-bom population all account for the generational
fortune of the Diggs’ family in both business and politics. The Diggs’ family prominence
cannot be accredited to the conventional “ﬁrst Black” diatribe, however. The Reverend
Jesse Jackson spoke the truth about how African American leaders such as the Diggs’
men achieved community power. Jackson confessed, “Most Black people [who] had a job
at all, worked for White people. But, the one guy in the community who. . .was vocal,
oftentimes educated, articulate, paid by Black people... for a long time, the preacher and
the funeral director were the two freed voices in the Black community.”20
No wonder urban historian and native Detroiter Richard R. Thomas called the
elder Diggs, a “symbol of an age.” As a “symbol,” for example, only Diggs could be
convicted of graft in 1944, receive a three to ﬁve year sentence, and serve prison time
from 1948 to 1950 only for Detroiters to re-elect him in November 1950 for another seat

in the state senate. Although the Michigan Senate, folding from pressures exerted by a

majority its Republican members, refused to seat Diggs by a 22 to 6 vote in January

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1951, Charles Coles Diggs, Jr. won elections to the seat that had been refused to his
father, in April 1951. The Diggs saga does seem to volumes about the power of Black
community, the “intrapolitics” of its poorer members, and the ways dissemblance in
Black culture does not preclude symbol making.

The “intrapolitics” of Charles Coles Diggs community retailed his leadership
despite the fact that he was neither a model nor perfect citizen. Electing an ex-con to
public ofﬁce, Black Detroit created this “symbol of a age.” The patronage and votes of
poor Black families facilitated the ﬁscal and political successes of the Diggs’ family.
Regardless of his criminal record, Black voters as community clients endorsed both the
Diggs’ business and their political careers. The Diggs’ men could not be displaced even
by the strong arm of the law. The “intrapolitics” protected them from such civil
deﬂowering. If the truth were told, outsiders’ attempts to discredit such Black male
leadership tended to backﬁre. The “intrapolitics” of disfranchised Black people often
caused them to rally to protect one of their own men. Detroit’s “intrapolitics” seemed
especially hard at work in this case. The Diggs’ family was one of the precious few
whose wealth, learning, and connections had not converted them into typical reform-
minded bourgeoisie. The community clients served by House of Diggs and the
constituency represented by these politicians did not get messages that their lifestyles
were inappropriate, manners too crude, or behavior unsuitable.

Charles Coles Diggs was a Southern migrant, modern mortician, turned politician
intimately familiar with the source of his power, but openly accepting their status needs
to have him be the “creme of the crop.” That is to say, the “symbol of a age,” Diggs was

the dissemblance or mask of his vulnerable and poor community clients. A community

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that couldn’t protected itself from forced relocation, Detroit’s redevelopment and their
neighborhood removal, could protect its symbol, the source of community pride and trust
which had been invested in the Diggs’ family name.2|
By 1990, in fact, the Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Census of Population
and Housing indicated that Black funeral directors represented about 9% of the total
funeral directors in Michigan. According to this EEO census data, one hundred and
thirty-four Black funeral directors survived (at some point) Michigan's rigorous training
standards for licensed, funeral directors. Considering that Black people represented about
14% of Michigan's population in 1990, Black funeral home directors commanded a
proportionate presence within their profession.22 However, many people appear to be
quite unconcerned about death until it impacts their lives in some way. Therefore, the
"very existence" of the funeral director's occupation serves as a constant reminder of the
universal, everyday reality of death.23 My research establishes the historical connections
between Black funeral directors the consequences of an unavoidable market, i.e. the
death experience, and Black, urban communities in mid-Michigan. In this discussion, I
use sparse second literature on the US. funeral industry in order to contrast a traditional
critique of capital/consumer tensions versus the communities of Black-owned ﬁineral
homes and other Black institutions, indirectly, e.g. Black families and churches. With
primary data such as personal interviews with contemporary, state-licensed morticians
and state licensing personnel as well as US. Department of Commerce economic and
population statistics. I argue that an urban, community-based construction of Black,

professional class includes these formally trained and state licensed service providers.

The seminal work on the US. funeral industry, Jessica Mitford's 1963 The

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American Way of Death, begins with a deﬁnition of the occupation's work ethic. In the
forward to her third edition, Mitford establishes that an ethical funeral home director
"adheres to a prevailing code of morality, in this case one devised over the years by the
undertakers themselves for their own purposes the code of their calling."24 Similarly,
Vanderlyn R. Pine also recognizes the heavy handed emphasis on sensitive service within
the funeral director's occupational code. In a sociological study on the subject of death,
Pine explains that funeral directors operate within a regulated code of ethics in order to
protect the community. The formal authority of the code entails the acceptance of a
professional oath. For example, funeral directors swear adherence to their occupation
when admitted into the profession. In short, a professional code of ethics reﬂects an
organizational attempt to monitor the behaviors within the profession.25 Therefore,
certain practices contradict the image of Pine's dedicated, service professional, the ever
ready, service professional. In fact, I propose that the contradistinctions of Pine's
professional behavior and Mitford’s ethical conduct are probably the two sides of the
same coin. Mitford lists particular acts which surely would qualify as unprofessional
comportment. For example, a few of those practices include: unscrupulous contracts with
coroner's ofﬁce to obtain business, bribery of hospital personnel to inﬂuence recently
bereaved families, illegal reuse of cofﬁns, and fraudulent "double charges" for welfare
cases (when an account is paid by both the government as well as an individual family.)26
However, Mitford’s leftist sentiments in the post-McCarthy U.S. (she was more than a
Communist sympathizer—she went on to join the party, but recanted before her death)
informs her solutions to these ethical dilemmas. Mitford advocated low cost, funeral

providers to redress the abuses with the funeral industry. However, over thirty years later,

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the realization of Mitford’s ideal reform, i.e. low cost providers, has had some disturbing
affects on Black institutions including the Black church and Black-owned, funeral
establishments.

The thesis from Pine's monograph involves two paradigms which he uses to
further distinguish between funeral home directors. The personal service model
dominates funeral directing. In this framework, funeral practitioners respond to the
"social relationship" which exists between their job performance and the communities
they serve. Within a speciﬁc "institutional complex," i.e. the funeral home, customers
receive specialized, individual service. In the personal service model, customers receive
direct and personal communication from the funeral home director, although, according
to Pine, there is no other connection.27 In contrast to this concept, the bureaucratic model
carries a negative connotation. People expect a host of inefﬁcient, unnecessary,
complicated, frustrating, and practically unavoidable issues. In this model, an extensive
division of labor organized around an hierarchy of ofﬁces governs the ways in which
families are treated. In the bureaucratic approach to funerary needs, the undertaker makes
a clear distinction between personal and business matters.28

In addition to the emphasis on the two models, Pine plainly presents a working
deﬁnition of professionalism which highlights the connection between funeral home
directors and their communities. Pine explains that the very nature or meaning of
professionalism concerns the technical complexities which structure modern societies.
Caught up in the need to catalog, count, and characterize, modernity commonly causes
people to divide occupations into groups. Consequently, sociologists and other scholars

consider speciﬁc attributes as markers of the professions. Brieﬂy stated, most professions

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posses: an underlying systemic body of knowledge and theory which is acquired through
long training in professional school; a high degree of authority and judgment with which
they tell peOple what is " good or bad;" a sense of honor, respectability, and prestige; an
architectural history that pre-dates the client's appointment (for example, a new doctor's
ofﬁce is not created each time someone gets sick and funeral homes exist before people
die); a level of expertise as well as success (for example, the difference between a
professional and amateur golfer); and a type of job in contrast to other kinds of
occupations (for example, the "white collar workers" such as bankers and insurance sales
associates, "blue collar workers" such as plumbers and mechanics, and professional
careers such as law and dentistry). Furthermore, a profession contains a "special culture";
particular values and norms with accompanying signs and symbols that announce the
occupation's professional activities.29 Most importantly, professions carry the "sanction of
community." This means that the community approves of and gives power to
professionals through agencies such as licensing boards. In addition, conﬁdentiality also
represents a form of community sanction. Clients or customers often disclose sensitive
issues to people protected by laws regulating professional immunity.30

As a result, claims of professionalism constitute what I call a transferable
resource. Allowing for regional prejudices such as skin color, accent, and gender
preferences, professionals ﬁnd demands for their talents across the country. Funeral
directing provides no exception. I cite Pine's work to show that people seek to improve or
enhance the public conception of their occupation by claiming the mantle of
professionalism. For example, according to Pine, funeral directors hope to overcome their

societal stigma as "caretakers of the dead" by promoting their professionalism.31

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By the twentieth century, federal and state governments regardless of whether or
not they were welcomed or invited began to “help” this occupational transformation by
enforcing certain regulations. The signiﬁcance of this change over time conveys the
message that this particular occupation was important enough to receive standardized
evaluations. In addition, the regulation of the funeral industry caused the birth of
licensing boards and the retention of appropriate staff to manage them. All of this means
that the funeral industry made enough money to merit spending public dollars to insure it
contributed safely and legally to both the society and the economy.

However, individual states control the strict laws governing the licensing of
funeral directors. A comparison of the US. Department of Labor research and a recent
telephone interview with the State of Michigan Mortuary Licensing Board Administrator
offers an interesting look at change over time in this process. In 1939, all states in the
Union required that embalmers possess a license or certiﬁcate as proof of their eligibility
to practice mortuary science. Potential funeral practitioners secured this approval by
completing an accredited course at a mortuary school, prescribed apprenticeship at a
funeral establishment, and an ofﬁcial examination. During the 19305, admittance to most
mortuary schools necessitated a high school degree and a minimum age of 18 years old.
The curriculum demanded that students commit anywhere from 3 weeks to nine months
in subjects such as anatomy, chemistry, funeral directing, pathology, histology,
physiology, and restorative art.32 Besides these qualiﬁcations, certain moral qualities
deﬁned embalmers and undertakers of the 19303. "Called upon to talk with families of
deceased persons," the Department of Labor reported, "they should be tactful and

sympathetic, and able to inspire conﬁdence in their patrons."33 Conducting themselves

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with thoroughness and industry, the embalmer and undertaker impressed their families
with business minded, yet personal attention.34

Today, for example, a successful applicant to Wayne State University's School of
Mortuary Science, the only accredited, university-based mortuary school in Michigan,
needs to have completed at least sixty hours of liberal arts curriculum. While often the
sixty college hour requirement comprises the completion of a B.A. or B.Sc. degree, all
successful applicants to mortuary school possess the minimum instructional hours if not a
degree.35 While the option of attending a proprietary mortuary school remains, Wayne
State University (WSU) offers Michigan's future funeral directors a diploma in mortuary
science upon completion of its one year program. A Bachelor of Arts Degree in Mortuary
Science belongs to only those students who complete the traditional, four year tenure at
wsu.36

Upon graduating from an accredited mortuary school, two additional years of
preparation await the potential, Michigan funeral director.37 He or she also completes a
one year residency at an accredited funeral home under the sponsorship of a licensed,
funeral director.38 This full year of mortuary training simulates the experiences of the
occupation. The funeral director trainee performs speciﬁc tasks or skill sets during this
time.39 The time invested in education and preparation for a career in mortuary science
totals four years.

However, three other barriers stand between the trainee and ofﬁcial certiﬁcation.
If the trainee passes both state and national examinations, he or she enters the last phase
of becoming a licensed, funeral director in the State of Michigan.40 The ﬁnal obligation

mirror the personality evaluation of funeral directors from the 1930s. The State of Board

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of Mortuary Science insures the congeniality of Michigan's funeral directors by licensing
only those of the " good moral character?“

Interestingly, the four interviews I conducted in urban cities across mid-Michigan
all address some aspect of this curious brand of professional respectability, available to
funeral home directors. Taken over the course of three months, these information sessions
gave me an inside look into the professional lives of licensed funeral directors.

As calm, serious people worked cooperatively and intensively throughout the
multiple story building at 2624 West Grand Boulevard, I waited for an audience with
Mrs. Karla Cole on September 23, 1998.42 Peaking her head into the comfortable
director's ofﬁce overlooking the main street, Karla afﬁrmed her presence and my
importance. Initially, Karla's attention to practically every detail of postmortem
arrangements seemed counterproductive for a person in her position. During the next
ninety minutes, however, this business minded and energetic woman clearly explained
her methods of operation through the history, philosophy, and longevity of the Cole
Funeral Home. Started by her grandfather during 1919 in Detroit's "Black Bottom," Cole
Funeral Home grew from a small establishment in a segregated community into two
locations serving the Detroit metropolitan area. As the owner and operator of a family
owned, Black business, Karla's inheritance also includes work related demands or
sacriﬁces.

Karla's legacy includes the philosophy espoused by her father. Before his death
in 1991 , Karla's father told her that when the time came, she should "push his body over

in the corner and get to it later." He stressed to his daughter the immense importance of

what he called "my families." Constantly interrupted once we were able to begin the

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interview, Karla's commitment to this principle clariﬁed her omniscient managerial style.
As the tape recorder snapped ﬁnished the ﬁrst, forty-ﬁve minutes, I turned the tape over.
Karla spent the rest of the time patiently elaborating on one of the ﬁrst lessons of her
work and the funeral industry as a whole.

The primacy of Cole's bereaved families dictated Mr. Cole's life. His wife and two
daughters understood his priorities. They also knew the unpredictable nature of death.
Death indiscriminately interrupted family dinners, much needed rest, and scheduled
activities. Mr. Cole's "families" required his immediate attention. Karla accepted
leadership of the family business with her eyes open. The interesting differences between
Mr. Cole and Karla's administration allows for a gendered comparison of their
occupational roles.

Mr. Cole's periodic absence from the nuclear family freed him to attend the losses
of other families. In so doing, he acted as the household provider and friend of other
Black fanrilies.43 Her father's periodic absence from their nuclear family freed him to
attend the losses of other families. In so doing, he acted as the household provider. Mrs.
Cole remained in the home. Karla also described the tensions between the death care
industry, the family business, and her own household."4

As a wife and mother, Karla retained the family name for the sake of professional
consistency. Well aware of the demands in her chosen profession, present domestic
strains mirror some of the pressures Karla witnessed in childhood. However, when Karla
stays late at the ofﬁce, wakes up to help out in a crisis, or misses a family meal, the
traditional ﬁgure of comfort and stability in Black families also steps away from home. In

addition, the stereotype of women who neglect their husbands and children through

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worldly preoccupation or "busy work" also taunts professional women in traditional
settings. Adhering to the philosophy of the Cole Funeral Home while actively taking care
of her current household constantly challenges the equarrimity of this career woman and
professional service provider.45 At this same time, however, such unquestionable loyalty
to Black families also insures the ﬁnancial security of her immediate family. Equally
important, Karla's priorities also earn the conﬁdence and continued patronage of Detroit's
Black families.“ As generations after generation receive the Cole's dedicated, fairly
priced, and professional service, the family maintains their relationship with Black
families and underwrites the economic health of Cole Funeral Homes.

Karla also takes on other community roles. Once she hosted a group of medical
students from Wayne State University. After the livery attendants (the ambulance service
from the funeral home) transports the body from the morgue, the family's next
institutional interaction occurs in the ofﬁce of the funeral director. Karla gave them a tour
of the Cole facilities. She shared with these burgeoning medical professionals the other
side of human health, that is the death experience.

She explained that many doctors and head nurses face families with the news that
a loved one has died without concrete ideas about what will happen next. Releasing the
body to the hospital morgue breaks the connection between the family, the medical staff,
and the hospital.

The visit to Cole Funeral Home brought clarity to the other scenario of patient
care, the question of what happens without recovery. Karla addressed a family's ﬁnal
decisions concerning deceased patients. In this educational role, Karla simultaneously

achieved two ends. She furnished future Cole's families with more informed and

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sensitive health care providers. Second, this volunteer service also facilitated a much
needed and neglected dialogue between two related, yet hitherto estranged, professional
service institutions.

Yet, prior to completing the live interviews on November 13, 1998 with James R.
Riley, Jr., the owner and director of Riley Funeral Home in Lansing, I still needed to
succinctly describe and empirically explain what I believed to be a familial approach in
this community-based, Black business in order to achieve a more inclusive deﬁnition of
urban, professional class. For while the personal interviews supplied the histories of a
few, mid-Michigan funeral establishments, only some sort of marketing research would
ensure an adequate measure of Black funeral directors socio-economic and cultural
standing in Black communities.

Teasing out the contours of Black community, a cross section, community survey
proposed a possible method of analysis. This approach allowed me to see that particular
connections between funeral home establishments, funeral directors, and Black families.
Marketing analysis, as an assessment tool, indicates how funeral directors constitute a
professional class as well as extended members of the Black family.47 Beyond race, class,
and gender considerations this research permits an interdisciplinary study of the mid-
Michigan funeral industry.

I chose Lansing as the site for this marketing analysis for a speciﬁc reason. Riley
Funeral Home at 426 West St. Joseph remains the only family owned, Black funeral
home in Lansing. Since April 1957, pastors, factory workers, wives, and local celebrities
made their last public appearance with the assistance of Riley Funeral Home. Because

Riley continues as the only choice of Black customers with a cultural or community

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preference, an objective appraisal seemed to be in order. Responding to a community
survey, proﬁles of customers and potential customers in the Lansing area suggest reasons
for the duration of Black funeral homes. (See Appendix G.)

James Riley. Jr. operates the establishment at 426 West St. Joseph in Lansing,
Michigan. This address marks Riley Funeral Home since construction of Interstate 496
required its relocation in the early 19605. Founded by Riley's father in 1957, Riley
Funeral Home remains as Lansing's only family owned, Black funeral home. Riley
Funeral Home enjoys a competitive edge with racialized spending power. Black people in
the Lansing area who consciously patronize businesses according to phenotypic and
cultural association chose Riley Funeral Home for their mortuary needs. However, James
Riley, Jr. pointed out other results of this "small town" conditions.

That is to say, in Riley's view, his business both beneﬁts and depends on the
community's preferences. He works hard to attend not only to the immediate needs of
Riley families, but also the perceptions of community leaders such as pastors, teachers,
and other small business owners. Riley went to public school with several of the school
board members. He sends his son to community charter school that emphasizes academic
and cultural preparedness for children of color. He encounters Riley families in the
grocery store, the barber shop, and diverse places. That is to say, when Lansing sees
James Riley, Jr. they see Riley Funeral Home.

However, according to Betts, Moon's multi-million dollar expansion of the
establishment currently prohibits such benevolent actions. In fact, some families
complain of the resultant price changes since the capital improvements. Betts tries to

reassure his clientele that the comfortable and tranquil enhancements comprise the cost

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adjustments. In addition to this tension, increased competition from what Betts identiﬁes
as "acquisition groups" also fuels customer criticism. Most notably, the British
Columbia-based conglomerate, Loewen Group, Inc. (NYSE: LWN), initiated a local pilot
program targeting Black church members in May 1997. Through a local sales
representatives or “funeral counselor” Black churches in Detroit offered “pre-need”
funerary services to their members. This means that members of Detroit’s Black churches
could purchase graves, vaults, tombstones, and mausoleum crypts without patronizing
traditional funeral homes such as Cole, Brown, and Browne."8

Offering what one Canadian magazine coined as "bargain priced burials,"
corporations like Loewen Group, Inc. launched aggressive acquisition campaigns which
simultaneously gave consumers more options and absorbed community-based funeral
establishments. According to Betts, corporate competition in what another Canadian
periodical called the "death-care business," created more informed, yet somewhat
unrealistic customers. Armed with prepaid burial plots and mass marketed caskets, some
Black customers come to Betts with the tail end of their mortuary needs—embalming and
displaying of the body. Betts tells these consumers that their itemized demands corrupt
the professionalism of his craft. Although he understands the advantages of bargaining,
Betts also sees the cheapening of funeral services through such corporate practices. Most
importantly, Black funeral homes lose revenue as a result of direct competition with
international organizations.49

For a more in depth look at this development and speciﬁc responses see: Ian
Portsmouth, "The Trial of Ray Loewen: F uneral-home mogul Ray Loewen built an

industry giant by expanding almost effortlessly into the US. Then he was blindsided by a

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legal and cultural gap he never knew existed," Profit: The Magazine for Canadian
Entrepreneurs, Vol. 15, no. 1 (February/March 1996): 24-32; Ross Laver, "Bargain
priced burials," Maclean's (Toronto Edition), vol. 110, no. 28, (July 14, 1997): 38; author
not cited, "Takeover ﬁght livens up death-care business," Financial Post, vol. 90, no. 38,
(September 21/23, 1996): 78; Jennifer Hunter, "Taking on the giants: a consumer
revolution is shaking things up in the funeral business," Maclean's (Toronto Edition), vol.
1 10, no. 40, (October 6, 1997): 62. The Loewen Group, Inc. listed their company on the
New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in October 1996 under the symbol LWN. As of
Friday, May 14, 1999, their earning per share reﬂected -8.50 loss. Since its initial public
offering some ten years ago, according to The Loewen Group web site, the company
grew ...”from owning 47 funeral homes and one cemetery to its position today of owning
and operating over 1,100 funeral homes, 500 cemeteries, and 50 crematoria.” In addition,
The Loewen Group, Inc. home page claims that the company “. . .is the world’s second
largest publicly held funeral service and cemetery corporation in terms of revenues and
assets. The Company employs some 16,000 people and owns and operates. . .funeral
homes. . . [and] cemeteries in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.” In
addition to falling stock prices, Loewen faces a particular stumbling block in the state of
Michigan. To counter monopolies in the funeral industry, Michigan enacted an anti—
combination law which prohibits one company from holding both cemeteries and funeral
homes.

In short, my research of mid-Michigan Black funeral homes establishes the
historical connection between funeral directors and Black, urban families. Furthermore, I

argue that an urban, community-based construction of Black, professional class includes

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these formally trained and state licensed service providers. Simply, Black frmeral
directors attend, patronize and socialize with Black churches, local barber shops, and
certain prominent community leaders. Therefore, within these behaviors, we can pull out
the basis of the relationship between the Black funeral home director and their
communities. My historical conceptualization, community clients, exists between the
Black funeral director and their communities or customers versus a linear, clear cut and
unquestioned business relationship. However, the loyalty and patronage of the Black
community underwrite the very existence of the Black-owned funeral home. The
bottom—line business mentality/orientation or what Pine sees as the "bureaucratic model"
of the occupation, would bankrupt a traditionally run, Black-owned funeral home. The
linear, closed-end business idea, Pine's "bureaucratic model," structures the organization
and operation of the funeral establishment based on the function and the customer's
ability to pay for services. This strict allocation of time and effort contradicts the focus of
a symbiotic dependency. A symbiotic relationship occurs when different organisms live
together in close association, particularly for mutual beneﬁt. This symbiotic function of
the community client model maintains that relationships between funeral directors and
Black families continue even beyond a speciﬁed business transaction.

The community client relationship demands a consistent level of professionalism
or personal service to all customers, regardless of their income level. This factor dictates
how funeral home directors deliver their services. The existence of Black funeral homes
rests on an understanding of their community. These businesses function in relation to the
Black community. For example, Karla Cole's business sense recognizes the power of the

Riley's "small town" or the symbiotic dependency factor of the community client

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relationship. She admits the real necessity of constantly delivering indiscriminate, quality
service to each and every family within the Black community regardless of any previous,
current, or anticipated additional pecuniary power.

I conceptualized the symbiotic relationships within the Black community to
describe what Mr. Riley's called the "small town" thesis. My historical conceptualization
of Black families as community clients is obvious in and conﬁrmed by the lack of
aggressive marketing strategies for most African American owned ﬁrneral
establishments. The live interviews with four, Black funeral directors reveal very
minimal advertising budgets. In short, a logical question uncovers the inapplicable piece
of Pine's proposition. If the advertising budgets of personal service model, funeral home
directors remain nonexistent, how are they communicating with their customers?

The answer lies in the funeral director's word-of-mouth marketing strategies. This
time-tested and trusted advertising approach also repudiates a part of Pine's report. The
connection between the Black funeral directors and their customers extends beyond the
business transition. As additional proof, the traditional promotional items employed by
funeral home directors also reinforce their communal or collective identity within the
Black community.

For example, along with the greeting cards and other seasonal correspondence
sent by relatives and ﬁiends, Riley's annual "holiday calendar" ﬁnds its way into Lansing
homes as well. The "holiday calendar" reminds the household of the year, days, and
months. The "holiday calendar" also reminds them of a physically absent, but readily
accessible "family" member. The warmth, tenderness, and comfort of the Riley family

come with the colorful monthly planner just as surely as with any well wishes from a

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neighbor in a "small town." The Black community interacts with the funeral director as a
professional person. They also interact with this service professional outside of their
mortuary needs. They attend some of the same churches, frequent similar stores, and
share aspects of their private sphere with the funeral home through promotional,
household items. In fact, the funeral director's accessibility and communal identity causes
the community to respond with loyal patronage. Generations of Black folks continue to
patronize Riley and other Black-owned funeral homes not because of some catchy,
sophisticated consumer marketing campaign, a constant memoir of the community client
relationship. My conceptual model community clients accurately capture the historical
signiﬁcance of Black families’ funerary display, their traditional dependence on African
American funeral directors as service-oriented leaders, and the political as well as
cultural consequences of this consistent, ethnicity driven patronage. This ethnic belief in
the funeral as an indicator of familial, communal, and individual identity has been traced
from enslaved preachers of the ante-bellum period through the post-emancipation burial
societies and the modern afﬁliations with Black funeral homes.

One ﬁnal critique of the community client model necessitates a ﬁnal application of
this historical conceptualization. Ethnographer Hylan Lewis supplied the context for this
last case study when he recorded the questions that community clients typically asked the
family of the deceased. The two questions Lewis recorded suggest the centrality of
African American funeral display in contextualizing the loss of community members.
“To which church did the deceased belong?” and “Whom do you want to preach the
funeral.”50 However, the quintessential question was, as Karla F.C. Holloway, later

explained, “And Who Has the Body?”5 I

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Chapter 5

“AND WHO HAS THE BODY?” THE CHILD MURDER OF MAMIE’S BABY

Historically, almost all political, cultural, anthropological and ethnographic
research about Emmett Till’s murder overlooked the question, “who has the body?” as a
salient illustration of African American identity formation.] The emphasis on Mamie Till
Bradley’s response to the child murder of her son has never been placed on the role of the
funeral home she selected. In this chapter, the concept of community client emphasizes
the customary negotiations between Black families and their funeral directors to
reconstruct the infamous events that ended the life of Emmett Till. In addition, this
historical revision also includes an analysis of Mrs. Bradley’s anticipation of collective or
communal sympathy. Together, these neglected foci in the history of the Emmet Till
murder document the functions of funerary display within African American ethnic
identity formation.

Historical understanding of how African American communities across the
United States responded to the murder of Emmett Till must account for his mother’s
decision to publicly display his mutilated body. Mrs. Bradley insisted that the owner of
AA. Rayner & Sons arrange an open casket funeral. However, Mr. Rayner’s
acquiescence regarding the display of Emmett Till’s body dishonored a speciﬁc
stipulation for having the body shipped from Mississippi.2 Therefore, in deferring to the
mother’s preference, the funeral director negotiated reclamation of her control over a
child who had been stolen by an unwarranted sentence of death. Speciﬁcally, Rayner’s

focus on the mother’s familial power concerning what to do with Emmett’s body

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documents a particular historical function of African American funerary display. The
mother’s insistence on publicly displaying her child’s corpse for, “all to see what they did
to my boy,” became Rayner’s most important professional duty. This often repeated
quotation explains why Rayner reneged on his prior consent to the Mississippian
mortician’s speciﬁcation. 3

Marnie Bradley Till would later confess that she had not really wanted her son to
vacation in Mississippi. Yet, after repeated lessons about the racially charged fragilities
which characterized the lives of Southern Black folk and doubtless minutes in prayer,
Mamie consented.4 On August 20, 1955, Mrs. Bradley took her baby to the 63rd Street
train station. She booked him a southbound passage for his visit to the rural homestead of
her uncle, Moses Wright, in Money, Mississippi. Emmett had only been visiting their
relatives down South for a week prior to his murder.

Trial record, newspaper features, magazine articles, and personal interviews
provide the details of Emmett’s murder. Although some versions diverge, the facts situate
Mamie’s son in a small store tended by the young wife of a local, White grocer named
Roy Bryant. Bryant’s wife, Carolyn, tended the family’s store alone whenever her
husband went out of town. On such occasions, Mrs. Bryant’s sister-in-law, Juanita
Milam, would often come and sit in the back of the store.s In the company of these
unattended Southern White women were the Bryant and Milam children. Supervised by
their Aunt Juanita and protected by a .38 Colt gun under the seat of Milarn’s car, the 21
yr. old mother was able to concentrate on her duties as a shopkeeper’s wife without
neglecting her job as a mother.6 The afternoon of August 24, 1955, Carolyn Bryant’s

children were safe with their babysitter when Mamie’s baby entered their family’s store.

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Emmett was not alone that day. Six other teenaged boys and one local girl
accompanied him. He and this group of Black youngsters had borrowed 1946 Ford and
driven into town together. He had only been visiting a few days. But, Emmett’s vacation
in the Southern hamlet of Money, Mississippi had brought more intrigue than his male
peers could handle and his personal safety could control. Emmett had a wallet with the
picture of a young White female who he claimed was one of his Chicago conquests. His
brag about a romantic relationship with a White girl led to the dare which ultimately cost
Till his life.

One of the boys edged him to show off his charm to the “pretty little white
woman” behind the store counter. Whether Emmett propositioned Mrs. Bryant, tried to
fondle her, spoke suggestively or simply whistled are all speculative points of
contention.7 His mother said Emmett may have whistled, but the sound he made would
not have been that notorious “wolf whistle.” She claimed that Emmett had a slight speech
impediment for which she had taught him the ﬁnesse of whistling his way through any
difficult communication he encountered. Whatever transpired, Emmett’s behavior
traversed the social etiquette expected of Black men in relation to White women in the
South. Carolyn Bryant took offense, ran to the back of the store, alerted her nanny of a
problem, and went to retrieve Milam’s gun. By the time Carolyn Bryant had reappeared
with that gun, the Chicago visitor was gone. 8

“Bo,” the familial appellation by which Emmett was also called, probably let this
encounter drift into the background of his out of town adventures. For example, the very

night Mrs. Bryant’s husband and his half-brother, J .W. Milam, confronted Till about his

inappropriate advances to Bryant’s wife, Emmett had just returned from an earlier outing,

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passing the evening with some of the same entourage of teenagers who hade also joined
him in the previous excursion. So, when Bryant and Milam came looking for Emmett the
morning of August 28, 1955, the adults in the Wright household were already aware of
the store incident. While Emmett’s Uncle Moses thought it better that Emmett should
return to Chicago or at least leave town, his wife, Aunt Elizabeth, believed Emmett’s
childish prank would not engender serious consequence. That is to say, Mrs. Wright did
not anticipate anything more than the uncomfortable paranoia that Southern Black life
had continually been for those folk who had chosen to stay there.9 Emmett surely was
reprimanded. Whatever his aunt may have said to him, however, could not have arrested
the egotistical folly manifested in the Bryant’s grocery store days earlier. Bo’s family
knew the risks and provocations of hosting a vacationing, fourteen year old boy. His
mother had tried to indoctrinate the societal taboos under which her Southern kinfolk
lived their lives. But, away from his only real authority ﬁgure, his Mama, Emmett had no
real prohibition from indulging his pubescent male ego.10 Emmett either forgot his
mother’s instructions or had no inclinations to obey. However, by the time his aunt had
asked him what had happened in the store; Emmett had already begun acting out his own
version of young Black masculinity. Emmett’s identity, however, was devoid of the
dissemblance and subservience that had come to characterize the survival of non-migrant,
African Americans in the South. The story that Milam and Bryant sold for $4,000 to
journalist William Bradford Huie supports my analysis that Emmett Till was murdered
because of what he believed about himself. Till’s kidnappers told Huie that they had gone
to look for “the nigger who did the talking.”ll

Five months after Milam killed Emmett, in the January 24, 1956 issue of Look,

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the brothers disclosed to a public readership that they had kidnapped Mamie’s child.
However, a boy “who did the talking,” stood almost 5 feet 5 inches tall, and weighed 160
pounds was hardly a child in their opinion. ’2 The most outspoken and least intimidated of
the two men, Milam, admitted his utter astonishment at failing to terrorize Till into the
customary cower expected of Black people when confronted by angry or accusatory
Southern Whites. In fact, not once did Bo attempt to escape his captors, although there
were several opportunities to slip away from them.” In the end, Milam shot Mamie’s
baby because Bo deﬁned himself from a place of self-exclamation that saw neither
sacredness in White skin color nor supremacy in their brutality. That is to say, Bo was
not murdered for being fresh to Milam’s sister-in-law, Mrs. Carolyn Bryant. Her husband
and his half-brother kidnapped Emmett and beat him as a punishment for that
transgression. No, Emmett died because of his unﬂinching assertion of his Aﬁican
American identity.

In the paid confession for Look readers, Milam chronicled in gory detail his
thought processes that prompted him to kill Emmett Till. Just before shooting Emmett in
the head with his Army .45, Milam asked Bo two questions: “You still as good as I am?”
“You’ve still ‘had’ white women?” Even in the face of certain destruction, Mamie’s baby
would not acknowledge himself as less than a White man or unworthy of human
interactions such as romantic attractions, ﬂirtations, and friends, regardless of color. And
neither kidnapping, pistol whipping, stripping the child butt naked, nor pointing a gun to
his head resulted in the posture which Milam expected. But, Milam had convinced
himself that uppity Negroes from the north like this young boy should be broken down.

However, the deﬁant calm and unaffected stoicism of the Black youth’s demeanor

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infuriated Milam to the point that he would end Till’s life. Therefore, when Bo answered
yes to both of Milam’s questions, Milam shot B0 in the head near his right eye as his
reply. He tied a cotton gin fan around Bo’s neck and threw his body in the Tallahatchie
River to punctuate that response. Milam’s admission of this truth has been neither
theorized nor deduced here. It was divulged, a tragedy that eventually became
international news. ’4

Uncle Moses identiﬁed Bo’s body after it had been recovered from the
Tallahatchie River on August 31, 1955. Mamie Bradley had her son returned to Chicago.
By the time she claimed his body at the Chicago rail station, she was already drawing on
both spiritual and community powers to deal with her loss. The picture taken that day at
the Chicago terminal of Till’s nailed down casket is ﬂanked by his mother, Bishop Louis
T. Ford, the pastor of St. Paul Church of God in Christ (C.O.G.I.C.) and Bishop Isiak
Roberts, pastor of Roberts Temple C.O.G.I.C. In fact, in almost every photograph of his
mother thereafter she is near or with at least one or more Black men. One poignant
snapshot that speaks to the importance of the community’s empathy is one in which Mrs.
Bradley is walking into Roberts Temple C.O.G.I.C. for her son’s September 3, 1955
funeral. Neither her own mother nor any other relative is at her side. Mr. Rayner, the
funeral director, escorted her to her seat?5

Many of the images from the Till “child murder lynching” as the Black press
called the homicide were those of his mother’s devastation and the Black communities’
ancillary anger and sympathy while supporting her. Possibly the most far reaching
coverage was that of the multimedia Johnson Publishing Company. The September 15,

1955 issue of Jet magazine made this mother’s pain into a spectacle for all those inclined

137

to witness what had happened to this woman’s baby. The most hauntingly graphic photos
were those of Emmett’s Till’s corpse, so badly disﬁgured (almost beyond recognition)
and too grotesque for some of Jet ’s readership to ever forget.

Sports celebrities, entertainers, scholars, activists, children, and working people
contributed their memoirs of the Emmett Till murder. For example, Carolyn C. Dillon of
Pittsburg, Norma Johnson of Fishers, Indiana and Carl Grimes of Washington, DC. all
recalled their ﬁrst impressions of the murder. Dillon remembered, “the lines—the long
long, LONG lines outside the funeral home, the pictures of Emmett’s bruised, beaten,
battered body. All the grown ups were very happy that Emmett’s mother let the world see
what White America did to Black people when she let the Rayners show Emmett’s
body.” Johnson’s and Grimes’ families had weekly subscriptions to Jet magazine.
Remembering “the center or near centerfold of the small magazine. . .picture of the young
Emmett Till lying in the casket” fueled their later political activism. Darlene C. Hill was
eight years old and a Chicago elementary school student. Mamie Till Bradley was her
third grade teacher. When Hill saw the article in Jet magazine, she “brought it to show
the other children and was fussed at by the other children. They were afraid it would hurt
our teacher’s feelings?”6

Many of the memoirs submitted on-line to the PBS American Experience website
for the Till documentary were written by people who were school age children in 1955.
However, the September 24, 1955 issue of the Chicago Defender publicized
contemporary reactions of city youth. The article, “Teenagers Give Meaning to Money:

It’s the Worst,” clariﬁed:

There’s a great deal of correspondence being written
from Mississippi these days relative to the lynch-murder

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of Emmett Till, the trial there and the way natives feel
about the incident which disgraced a nation. Normally,
when racially explosive events take place, the school
children and teen-agers take only cursory notice. During
their young lives, they have acquired a sort of cynical
immunity to these things... Not so with the Till case.
Chicago’s youngsters show deep concern about this
case. . .the killing of a child with whom they can

identify more closely seems to heighten the starkness

of the drama in their youthful minds (emphasis mine). ’7

Along with the children’s voices, celebrities and community leaders also added
their memoirs of Till.l8 While James Forman and Mrs. Medgar Evers included the
inﬂuence of the Till killing in autobiographical formats, Muhammad Ali and Anne
Moody shared their memories of Emmett’s murder on-line and in their autobiographies.
Muhammad Ali remarked: “His mother had done a bold thing. She refused to let him be
buried until hundred of thousands marched past his open casket in Chicago and looked
down at his mutilated body.” Historian James Horton confessed, “The need to understand
encouraged my graduate study of Southern history.” Attorney Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr.,
said that the Till murder made him, “want to do everything I could to make sure this
event would not happen ever again.””

Just as there was disagreement regarding what had actually transpired between Bo
and Mrs. Bryant, reporters could not agree on how many mourners viewed Till’s body.
The Chicago Defender claimed 250,000 people witnessed the “saddest funeral in
history.”20 The most conservative estimate came from the Washington-Aﬁo-American at
10,000 mourners. The New Amsterdam News reported 50,000 and the Pittsburg Courier
doubled that ﬁgure in its headline claiming “100,000 View Battered Body of Lynch

Victim.”21 However, when the kidnapping and murder trial of J .W. Milam and Roy

Bryant opened in Sumner, Mississippi two weeks after the open casket funeral, African

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Americans were not able to visit the courtroom in any such numbers. Aﬁican American
communities around the country relied on television coverage, newspaper articles and
radio talk shows for information. Once the not guilty verdict had been rendered, Black
people stepped up their protest of “approved killing in Mississippi.”22

Going beyond arming themselves with information, for example, the NAACP.
mounted a letter writing campaign as well as launched a membership drive fueled by
Till’s “lynching.” At the same time, Emmett’s mother hit the lecture circuit determined to
do more than just grieve.23 Thousands of dollars and signiﬁcant numbers of recruits were
the response to the partnership between Mrs. Bradley and civil rights leaders. US.
Representative and Detroit funeral director Charles Diggs, Jr., with all the conviction and
courage of a 20th century Ida B. Wells-Barnett, had even ﬂown to Mamie Bradley’s side
as afﬁrmation of this woman’s right to seek justice over the “lynch” murder of her baby
boy.

The use of the word “lynching” in reference to the murder of Mamie’s child,
unleashed however, a great hue and cry just as the denial that he was, in fact, actually a
child. Whatever the height and weight of Mamie’s boy, Emmett was her only child, her
only son. Aﬁican American mothers have used the endearrnent of “baby” in reference to
their children regardless of numbers or birth order. That is to say, the “baby” of a family
can mean the last child born, the only girl or boy, and even the most favored or indulged
regardless of age.

Letters which made their way to the desks of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover,

Attorney General Herbert G. Brownwell, his assistant, Warren Olney, III and even

President Dwight Eisenhower (often reprinted or mentioned in media like the Chicago

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Defender) reﬂected knowledge of the confession, the trial and the verdict. These letters
demonstrate an outrage of US. communities regardless of race.24 White citizens as well
African Americans were seeking some ofﬁcial denouncement of the wrong that had been
done in Mississippi. Sadly, the Justice Department failed to assuage these citizens’
despair.25 Investigations of possible civil rights violation yielded no grounds on which to
ﬁle a federal case against the child murderers. Regardless of the writer, origin, or
addressee of the correspondence, all governmental respondents answered the same: there
was no legal basis on which to pursue a civil rights violation. To add insult to injury,
Black communities were confused even more when on November 9, 1955, a LeF lore
County grand jury in Greenwood, Mississippi refused to indict Milam and Bryant on
kidnapping charges, a crime to which they had previously confessed.

No politician’s ofﬁce or particular civil servant who wrote back believed Mrs.
Bradley’s story of tragic loss justiﬁable, necessarily. Rather, binding themselves to the
letter of the law alone, politicians also tied their hands to comfort not only Marnie Till,
but all those communities within US. society who sympathized with her.26

Although Till’s mother had already been informed of everything that had
transpired up to the kidnapping of her son, she would not know of the ﬁnal moments of
her child’s life until the account had been made public knowledge by Look magazine. 27
Historian Robin D. G. Kelley gave an interview for the PBS American Experience
documentary confirming the reputed bravery of Till’s mother. An echo of the memoir
contributed by Ali, Kelly’s comment, labeled “Open Casket,” opined: “Mamie Till
Bradley ’s decision to have an open-casketﬁmeral was incredibly courageous and, in

fact, it was the thing that was—even more than his murder—an emotional catalyst for

141

many people who were drawn to this incident, largely because she made the decision to
allow the world to see what these white supremacists did to her son, and it became an
international event, and that image of his face was marked on just about every single
Black person, of that generation, let alone people in Europe and Aﬁica and Asia who saw
the same images.” (emphasis mine)28

Much like her son’s uncompromisingly clear sense of self in the face of death,
Mrs. Bradley’s refusal to quietly suffer loss as a Black mother also epitomizes the
historical signiﬁcance of funeral display as a function of African American identity
formation. In fact, this mother’s decision to show the world what had happened to her
child is exactly “the source lamentation” for African Americans, not natural death, but
rather the deliberate destruction of our potential. The travesty of lost potential was the
“lamentation” of late 19‘h century anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett and,
unfortunately, the same dirge of succeeding generations. Emmett Till’s murder was in
fact a lynching. Therefore, he became a martyr, another Black male body that refused to
compromise the self-determined dignity of his masculinity.29

African Americans, especially Southern born Black folks, understood lynching as
an extralegal appropriation of violent force against their people. Lynching meant mob
rule, brutality, and death. Lynching was a public act of hatred by private individuals
against the Black race. Lynching a mother’s child, however, was the last sacred sacriﬁce
Black communities were willing to make. Poet James A. Emanuel memorialized the slain
young man. Emanuel entitled his soulful sonnet, “Emmett Till.”

I hear a whistling
Through the water.

Little Emmett
Won’t be still.

142

He keeps ﬂoating
Road the darkness,
Edging through
The silent chill.

Tell me, please,
That bedtime story
Of the fairy

River Boy

Who swims forever,
Deep in treasures,
Necklace in

A coral toy.30

143

Conclusion

African American Death Care the Meaning of Freedom

In the antebellum era, enslaved African Americans used funerals to reconnect
their cosmological beliefs regarding the intercessory power of the deceased. Some
scholars argue that the transformation in the observance of ancestral rites represents a
form of African retention in the Diaspora. To be sure, the process of African American
ethnic identity formation in the United States does reach back to the period of our
enslavement. However, the real root is in Aﬁica. Our expressive death care ceremonies
and taboos prove that even bondage had not broken Africa’s inﬂuence. In fact, funerals
became a fugitive cosmology. And in their death care, African Americans transﬁgured
chattel people from slavery into symbols of freedom. Aﬁican American funerary display
translated dead slaves from this world in order to retain their traditional practice of the
veneration of the dead.. In so doing, the enslaved gave themselves an unfettered
deﬁnition of freedom, an ancestor with power that even slavery could not chain.

Of all the things I have learned about change over time in African Americans’
funerary display, I cherish our refusal to skimp on funerals. The truth is that people of
African descent invest in the continuity between death and life by taking care of
ancestors. While on the continent of Aﬁica ancestors received tangible tributes such as
shrines, libations, and progeny naming ceremonies, living within the African Diaspora of
the United States, however, we have adapted our cosmological investment in ancestors by
pouring our hearts and pooling our resources into their funerals.

In addition to the adaptation of traditional veneration of African ancestors, the

leadership of the “invisible institution” of the antebellum South, slave religion, also

144

appropriated funeral display in the formation of their identities. Speciﬁcally, Black
preachers like John Jasper, although an illiterate and enslaved man, established himself as
a funeral orator. His reputation as a speaker and consequent preferential status among the
enslaved as well as White population rested on his ability to preach a good funeral
sermon. Within this role, the identity of John Jaspar was not conﬁned to his condition of
servitude. In fact, his identity as a consummate eulogist had freed him from that stigma.
When emancipation came to John Jasper and the other four million Southerners
who had been held in bondage, the status of Black preachers and their churches also
changed. One very signiﬁcant change over time was the abundance of associations
established to meet the death care needs of Black communities, especially those who
were poor and lived in Southern cities. Unlike the invisible institution of slave religion
and the need of secret societies of mutual benevolence during the antebellum period,
these post-emancipation associations tended to be both open and numerous. Most
notably, the female composition and leadership of such associations welded them into the
fabric of Black community life. Membership in local churches, for example, coincided
with membership in certain associations. Particularly, Aﬁican American female identity
in the post-emancipation urban South reﬂected the inﬂuences of charity as an indicator of
both social status and service. Whether recently free or having never been enslaved, the
organizational activities of associations concerned with funerary display such as the
Benevolent Daughters of Louisiana attest to the collapse of status, service, and African
American femininity. Finally, whether they verbalized it or not, an Aﬁicanism, a
cosmological carry over, compelled emancipated African Americans to join the mutual

aid associations and benevolent societies that predate the burial policies provided by

145

Black industrial insurance businesses.

The move to the urban north and the transition from the post-emancipation period
into the modern era brought other signiﬁcant changes to in African American funeral
display. Modern funerals meant the presence of a new masculinity, the emergence of the
educated Aﬁican American mortician. Shedding his earlier trade designation, the
undertakers, these Black men exercised freedoms that had been quite rare in Black
communities of earlier times. Most remarkably, they had cash money. Black families
regardless of their own poverty held burial policies. They paid their insurance premiums
in cash just as they had paid their previous membership dues into church societies. As a
result, Black morticians joined the rank of the preacher as African American families
across the United States signed over their policies to men in the south like R.C. Scott of
Richmond, Virginia as well as men in the north like Robert A. Cole of Chicago’s
Metropolitan Funeral System Association to pay for their funerals. Black families
regardless of their status in the community paid for funerals in cash, the most precious
commodity in negotiating new freedoms in the modern area. Their investments in African
American funerary display simultaneously built the Black insurance industry, ﬁnanced
the modernization of the communities’ death care services, and facilitated the rise of one
of the most inﬂuential forces in the formation of African American identity—the Black
mortician. Modern Black men like Scott and Cole built their small fortunes and fame on
the foundation of African American funerary display.

In the post-modem era, the years following the second world war, African
Americans witnessed the most dastardly attack on their collective identities and the

conﬁrmation of a civil rights attorney’s prophesy, the purposeful targeting of their

146

children. Attorney Charles Hamilton Houston had prophesied that the battle against Jim
Crow could be won if it was fought for our children. Hamilton died before the Supreme
Court ruled on the land mark 1954 Brown v Board of Education case.l But, he had been
right. Black people who had dealt with slavery, rape, theft of their lands, labors, and
families, disfranchisement, Jim Crow, poverty, job discrimination, housing crises,
inequities in public accommodations, and even the loss of their own ancestral gods did
not tolerate the destruction of their children, in school or on summer vacation. In the
December 17, 1955 edition of the Chicago Defender, Fred Poindexter, sent a letter to the
paper’s, “What people say,” column to enlighten those who doubted how they should
respond to the situation. Poindexter wrote, “Dear Editor: here is some advice I would
appreciate your printing. Negro mothers and fathers must stop sending their kids down
South on vacation. . .(down South) by not saying ‘Yes, Sir,’ and ‘No, Sir,’ is [considered]
sufﬁcient reason for the uncivilized white man to lynch our kids.”

Whether the murder of Emmett Till should be remembered as the catalyst for the
Civil Rights Movement or not, the funerary display of Till’s open casket funeral horriﬁed
Black and White communities across the United States. However, for this singular
reason, some cite the tragedy of the Till family as the catalyst of the Civil Rights
movement. Yet, a theoretical analysis of the child murder of Emmett Till that synthesizes
the responses of Black communities does prove at least one point in the historical
signiﬁcance of his funerary display. As an undeniable historical moment in African
American ethnic identity formation, the Civil Rights agenda was irrevocably inﬂuenced

by a mother’s choice to publicly display the body of her martyred child.

African American Family Studies in the 21“" Century

147

Elected ofﬁcials, civic leaders, and social agencies have sought prescriptions to
the needs of poor, Black families from the late nineteenth century through the
penultimate decade of the last century and the present day. Only since the late 19805,
however, has the work of historians been seriously discussed vis a’ vis the options of
poor, Black families in urban centers. Yet, the enduring dependence between social
engineers and social scientists conﬁrms their mutual interest in social reform.
Unfortunately, social policies are often devoid of accurate, historical conceptualizations

,9 6‘

of Black families. Thus, problematic conceptualizations such as “underclass, welfare
queens,” and “baby daddy,” had already taken root by the time historians took their
rightful place at the conference table concerning race and poverty. Only in the last two
decades have labor and urban historians began to reclaim their academic voice to
correctly describe the interactions of poverty and familial functions.2
Therefore, positive functions of non-elite, post-modem Black families, must be
given much more scholarly attention in the research of African American social and
cultural historians. That is to say, cultural and social historians are the trained revisionists
who can lift the Black family from the shadows of poverty studies. These historians can
offer alternative models for studying Black families. New conceptualizations such as
community client will prove to be the best way to include the poor without creating
stereotypes and ahistorical prescriptions for them. This possibility is the reason why
scholars and researchers of African American families must provide historical
conceptualizations that complement social prescriptions. Community clients, for example,

refute myths and misconceptions about the functions of African American families in

US. society.3

148

An emphasis on the historical signiﬁcance of African American funerary display
is just one way to correct societal misunderstanding about Black families. The history of
our funerary display helps contemporaries recognize the extraordinary value that we
place on community cohesion, mutual accountability, and status making. In writing the
history of African American funerary display I have also tried to argue for some
methodological shifts and historiographical revisions by placing the funeral industry in
the context of family and community. In the evolution of Aﬁican American death care
from a community service—the undertaker to a licensed professional—the funeral
director, there was one constant: poor, Black families’ patronage. Whether the death care
providers were women or men, “society undertakers,” urban embalmers, modern
morticians, or post-modem ﬁineral directors, their community clients continually
patronized funeral businesses. By placing more focus on the people for whom they
worked, poor Black families, as opposed to the work that they did, i.e., the
professionalization process, African American biography, family case studies, and post-
modern social prescriptions avoid the fallacy of trying to talk about poor Black people

without their historical context.

149

 

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

’ Europeans in the New World enslaved Native Americans initially, i.e., Africans ﬁrst

worked in the New World as sailors, soldiers, etc. not slaves.

2 For an introduction of so-called slave psychology in order to historicize the ﬁction of
Southern slaveholding, please see: Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “The mask of obedience :
male slave psychology in the Old South,” in Society and Culture in the Slave South. J.
William Harris, ed. New York: Routledge, 1992. For book length discussion of the

 

female stereotypes applied to enslaved Aﬁican Americans during the antebellum see:
Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I A Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New
York: Norton, 1999. To appreciate the change over time in the literature on slave
personalities or “psychology” beyond the ﬁction of totalitarian control via labor
exploitation compare the above treatments of the topic with the pioneering research of

Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life.

 

Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1959, ﬁrst edition.

3 Michael A. Plater. African American Entrepreneurship in Richmond, 1890-1940: The
story of RC. Scott. New York: Garland, 1996), 87.

 

 

4 Ulrich Bonnell Phillips. American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment

 

and Control of Negro Labor As Determined by the Plantation Regime. (New York: D.

 

Appleton and Company, 1918); W.E.B. DuBois. The Suppression of the African Slave-
Trade to the United States, 1638-1870. (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1896).

 

 

S The phrase “angle of vision” is a metaphor for historical revision, especially the

reconstruction of the US. past. It comes from Darlene Clark Hine. “An Angle of Vision:

150

 

Black Women and the Constitution, 1787-1987,” Speak Truth to Power: Black
Professional Class in United States. (New York: Carlson Publishing, Inc., 1996), 129.

 

 

6 When Stanley Engerman and Robert F ogel released their 1974 attempt to “understand
what really happened,” during American slavery, Time On The Cross: The Economics of

American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little Brown, 1974), Kenneth Stampp responded with

 

his own monograph to correct their revision of the US. ante-bellum period which they
had based on mathematical methodology or cliometrics. Stampp’s book length critique,
Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of Time On the Cross (Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois, 1975) as a good example of how the scholar’s angle of vision

reveals issues of truth and power.

7 Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women: Thoughts on the
Culture of Dissemblance,” in HineSight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of

 

American History (New York: Carlson Publishing, Co., 1994); Bertram Wyatt-Brown.
“The Mask of Obedience: Male Slave Psychology in the Old Sou ”in Society and
Culture in the Slave South. J. William Harris, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1992) , 128-
161. The Black “mask,” i.e., the metaphor taken from Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s poem,

 

 

“We Wear the Mask” that represents the double consciousness of oppressed people of
color living in the United States. I think Hine may have used veil for its feminine
connotation or at least mask had been so appropriated by male gendered theories of
differences that veil or curtain, two metaphors which Hine used to get at silences in the
historical records about African Americans in the US. are more inclusive of women. The
“squeeze and tease” method of historical data collection is Hine’s advice for
reconstructing histories from thin documentary sources. For an example of this see:
Darlene Clark Hine, “Lifting the Veil, Shattering the Silence: Black Women’s History in
Slavery and Freedom,” in The State of Afro-American History: Past, Present, and Future,

 

Darlene Clark Hine, ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986).

8 John W. Blassingarne. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Peter H. Wood’s Black Majority: Negroes

 

151

 

in colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Knopf,
1974); Ira Berlin Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New
York: Pantheon, 1975); Thomas Holt. Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in
South Carolina During Reconstruction (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1977);
Daniel C. Littleﬁeld. Rice and Slaves Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South

 

 

 

 

Carolina (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981); Charles Joyner. Do__w_n
by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 1984); Barbara J. Field. Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland
During the Nineteenth Centug (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985);, and

 

 

 

Gary D. Nash Forging freedom : the formation of Philadtﬂphia's Black community, 1720-
1840 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).

 

9 Willard B. Gatewood. Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920 (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 1990; James Horton. In Hope of Liberty: Culture,
Community, and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997); Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in 19'h Century

 

 

 

America (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997). For more historical works in
the literature about African American families, see also: Andrew Billingsley. Climbing
Jacob’s Ladder: The Enduring Legacy of African-American Families (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1992); W.E.B. DuBois. The Negro American Family (New York: Negro

 

 

Universities Press, 1969); and the books by Jacqueline Jones: The Dispossessed:

 

America’s Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present. (New York: Basic Books,

 

1992); Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family From

 

Slavery to the Present. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995); American Work: Four
Centuries of Black and White Labor. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998); and A Social
History of the Laboring Classes: From Colonial Times to the Present. (Malden, MA:
Blackwell Publishers, 1999).

 

 

 

 

’0 Anthony B. Pinn. The Black Church in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Orbis
Books, 2002); Rupe Sims. The Politics of Accommodation and Resistance in the Black

Church: A Grarnscian Analysis (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen, Press, 2000); Janet Duitsman

 

 

152

 

Cornelius. Slave Missions and the Black Church in the Antebellum South (Columbia,
SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999); Samuel G. Freedman. Upon This Rock:
The Miracles of a Black Church (New York: Harper Collins, 1993); Evelyn Brooks

 

 

 

Higginbotham. Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist
Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); C. Eric Lincoln.
The Black Church in the African-American Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1990); James H. Cone. For My People: Black Theology and the Black Church
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984); James H. Cone. The Black Church and Marxism:
What Do they Have to Say to Each Other (New York: The Institute for Democratic
Socialism, 1980); E. Franklin Frazier. The Negro Church in America (New York:
Schocken Books, 1974); William Jacob Walls. The African Methodist Episcopal Zion
Church: Reality of the Black Church (Charlotte, NC: A.M.E. Zion Publishing House,
1974); William L. Banks. The Black Church in the US: Its Origin, Growth,
Contributions, and Outlook. (Chicago: Moody Press, 1972); Albert B. Cleage. M
Christian Nationalism: New Directions for the Black Church (New York: Morrow, 1972);
Hart M. Nelson. The Black Church in America (New York: Basic Books, 1971).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1’ The author developed HineSight Methodology by examining a theory of difference
called the “culture of dissemblance.” Darlene Clark Hine theorized dissemblance as one
way of explaining why Black women behave in different ways. Nineteenth century Black
women used dissemblance as a strategy for preserving their sanity and sanctity in the face
of sexual exploitation and vulnerability. Historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham refers to
Hine’s theory, the culture of dissemblance as “politics of respectablility.” The culture of
dissemblance refers to “. . . the behavior and attitudes of Black women that created the
appearance of openness and disclosure but actually shielded the truth of their inner lives
and selves from their oppressors.” This response to assaults upon Black womanhood
promoted a coping mechanism that allowed Black women to function and survive. Hine
also draws connections between dissemblance, migration, organizational protest, and
institutional protection. The need for safety prompted hundreds of thousands of Black
women to leave the South between 1915 and 1945. The same need motivated the

formation of thousands of women’s clubs. The dangers faced by newly arrived Black,

153

 

female migrants were checked by working-girls associations and community households
such as the Phyllis Wheatley Association. And because the primary employment of
migrant women continued to be domestic service (with attendant economic and sexual
vulnerability), Black women utilized their “culture of dissemblance” in the North as well.
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “Aﬁican American Women’s History and the
Metalanguage of Race,” in “We Specialize in the Wholly Immssible”: A Reader in Black
Women’s History, Darlene Clark Hine, Wihna King, and Linda Reed, eds. (Brooklyn,

 

 

New York: Carlson Publishing, Inc., 1995). For Hine, dissemblance examined the
feminized version of the African American “mask,” i.e., the metaphor taken from Paul
Lawrence Dunbar’s poem that represents the double consciousness of oppressed people
of color living in the United States. The author created HineSight Methodology as an
adaptable tool for ﬁnding other historical differences, especially topics that should gender
the processes of Black urban and labor histories. The culture of dissemblance is one
avenue towards re-constructing American history, particularly urban and labor histories
via Black women’s experiences. However, the question of the method or process for this
historical reclamation still remains. The author constructed this conceptual framework
using the theory of dissemblance and the historiography of Black women’s history.
HineSight Methodology recognizes the life work of Black women’s historian, Darlene
Clark Hine. The theoretical strength of my conceptualization rests on its relevance to the
reclamation of Black women’s history. It honors the work undertaken by Black women
historians in the 19705, 19805, and the present. HineSight Methodology is a process for
Black women’s historical reclamation. It is constant interplay on four levels of
intellectual inquiry—exploration, interpretation, application, and appropriation.
Consequently, HineSight Methodology is both a thought process and a research tool. The
culmination of the process is scholarly re-constructions of American history. It is possible
to diagram Hine’s methodological approach for re-constructing American history with
respect to Black women. This chart is a structural conceptualization of Hine’s fourteen
essays found in the volume for which the methodology is named. (See Chart One:
HineSight Methodology) For additional theory and difference: Elsa Barkley Brown,
“‘What Has Happened Here’: The Politics of Difference in Women’s History and
Feminist Politics,” in “We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible”: A Reader in Black

154

 

Women’s Histm. Darlene Clark Hine, Wilma King, and Linda Reed, eds. New York:
Carlson Publishing, 1995.

 

’2 Darlene Clark Hine. “Culture, Community, and Consciousness”; a paper delivered to a
group of historians that opened my eyes to the need to identify institutions and practices
that symbolically represented all three of Hine’s proposed, alternative constructs, i.e.,
death care as a collaborative reconstruction of Black identity via the negotiations between
Black families and funeral directors is quintessential African American Culture,
Community, and Consciousness. Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black

Women: Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” in HineSight: Black Women and the

 

Re-Construction of American Histog (New York: Carlson Publishing, Co., 1994). For
other works that use the concept of community consciousness or slave culture to

historicize African American experiences, see: Lawrence Levine. Black Culture, Black

 

Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1977); Sidney W. Mintz. The Birth of African-American
Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976); and Sterling

 

Stuckey. Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and The Foundation of Black America (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

” Hine, “Rape,” 37-48; Robin D.G. Kelley. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics,and the Black
Working Class. (New York: Free Press, 1994); Richard Thomas. Life For Us is What We
Make It: Building Community in Detroit, 1915-1945 (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana

 

 

University Press, 1992); Earl Lewis, “To Turn as on a Pivot: Writing African Americans

into a History of Overlapping Diasporas,” in Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History

 

of Black People in Diaspora. Darlene Clark Hine and Jacqueline McLeod, eds.

 

(Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1999).

’4 Andrew F. Brimmer. “The Negro in the National Economy,” In The American Negro
Reference Book (Yonkers, NY: Educational Heritage, Inc., 1966); Michael A. Plater.
“African American Insurance Enterprises” ch. 5 in Plater’s African American

Entrepreneurship in Richmond, 1890-1940: The Story of RC. Scott (New York: Garland

 

 

 

155

 

Publishing, Inc., 1996); Juliet E. K. Walker. The History of Black Business In America:

 

Capitalism, Race, Entrepreneurship (New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1998);

 

John Sibley Butler, ‘To Seek for Ourselves’: Benevolent, Insurance, and Banking
Institutions,” chapter 3 in Butler’s Entrepreneurship and Self-Help Among Black

 

Americans: A Reconsideration of Race and Economics. (New York: State University of

New York Press, 1991).

” Bill E. Lawson, “Conceptual Frameworks, The Black Family, and Public Policy,” in
The Centennial Review: Economic Narratives and Postmodern Culture, Harriette Pipes
McAdoo, Black Families, 3rd Edition (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1997).

 

’6 Plater, African American, 89.

'7 The terminology “egregious void” is used by Darlene Clark Hine to lament the ongoing
need to reconstruct or revise US. history vis a vis the experiences of African American
women. See: Darlene Clark Hine, “Black Migration to the Urban Midwest: The Gender

Dimension, 1915-1945,” in The Great Migration in Historical Perspective, Joe William

 

Trotter, Jr., ed. (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1991), 127-145.

’8 Karla F.C. Holloway. Passed On: African American mourning stories: A memorial.
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).

 

’9 Michael A. Gomez. Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of Aﬁican
Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, NO: The University of
North Carolina Press, 1998) 277-78. Robert Farris Thompson. Flash of the Spirit: African
and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1983); Newbell
Puckett Niles. Popular Beliefs and Sujﬁstitions: A Compendium of American Folklore
(Boston: G.K. Hall, 1981); Charles W. Joyner. Down By the Riverside: A South Carolina

Slave Community (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1984). See also Joyner’s:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folk Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois

 

Press, 1999); and also, Margaret Washington Creel. A Peculiar People: Slave Religion

 

156

 

and Community-Culture Among the Gullahs (New York: New York University Press,
1988); and Guy Carawan. Ain’t You Got a Right to the Tree of Life?: The People of
Johns Island, South Carolina—Their Faces, Their Words, and Their Songs (Athens, GA:
University of Georgia Press, 1989).

20 Dwight A. McBride. Impossible Witness: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony.
(New York: New York University Press, 2001 ), 12. For an introduction to a body of
historical literature about identity formation, power, resistance, the “other, ” i.e.,
discursive subjectivity and contextuality in multiple discourses see: bell hooks. M
Looks: Race and Representation (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992) bell hooks. §s_t_er_s
of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1993);

 

Lawrence W. Levine. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk
Thought From Slavery to Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977: Paul Gilroy.
The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

 

University Press, 1993); Timothy Mitchell. Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988); Sharon Patricia Holland. Raising the Dead: Readings of Death
and (Black) Subjectivity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Janet L. Abu-

Lughod. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1989); Edward W. Said. Orientalism (Penguin, 1995 reprint);
Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak. Selected Subaltem Studies (New York:

 

 

 

Oxford University Press, 1988); Benedit Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reﬂections

 

on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991); James C. Scott.

 

Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1990); Eric J. Hobsbawm. Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms

 

of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th centuries (Manchester, England: University

Press, 1959).

 

2' Barry Schwartz. “Mourning and the Making of a Sacred Symbol: Durkheim and the
Lincoln Assassination,” in Social Forces 70(2), 343-364; David Kertzer. Ritual, Politics

 

and Power. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988; Gary Laderman. Sacred
Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799-1883. New Haven, CT: Yale

157

 

University Press, 1996; Michael A. Plater. African American entrepreneurship in
Richmond, 1890-1940: The story of RC. Scott. New York: Garland, 1996).

 

22 Laderman, “Lincoln’s Hallowed, Hollowed Body,” in Sacred Remains, 158; Plater,

African American, 86.

 

 

23 Kertzer. Ritual; Plater, African American, 86.

 

2“ Schwartz. “Mourning,” 360-61.

25 Laderman, “Lincoln’s Hallowed, Hollowed Body,” in Sacred Remains, 158. None of

 

those scholars questioned what Lincoln’s life and body may have meant to the “nation
within a nation.” That is to say, US. history contains a constant silence regarding the
truth of Black people as Americans. Any historical explanation of how “AMERICANS”
think, feel, respond, etc. is virtually incomplete without accounting for or incorporating
the myriad communities which comprise the country. For example, in their theoretical
treatments of how rituals either transform societies or how societies use rituals as tools of
conformity, no where in those discussions about the political power of public rituals do
they consider what Lincoln’s assassination meant to the freed people. I would argue that
the man who entered Richmond, Virginia in the eyes of those African American who
witnessed Lincoln’s triumphant moment as the leader of the conquering nation, the
Union, may testify of him as a hero or symbol of their freedom. Contrary to the
conclusions reached by the other scholars, Lincoln’s death, at least for African Americans

who associated Lincoln with their personal liberty, elevated him from symbol to saint.

26 Schwartz. “Mouming,” 360-61; Plater, African American, 86-87.

 

27 Plater, African American, 87.

 

28 Gary Laderman. Rest In Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in
Twentieth-Century America. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 161-163.

 

158

 

29 Lawrence W. Levine. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk

 

Thought From Slavery to Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977; Michael A.
Plater. Aﬁican American entrepreneurship in Richmondg 890-1940: The story of RC.
Scott. New York: Garland, 1996).

 

3° The author criticizes the activist-scholarship of social and cultural historians from the
Black Studies movement as more of a race-conscious evolution of educated African
American people who capitalized on their the post-modem Black middle class and their
generation’s demand for more inclusive and diverse representations on college and
university campus as well as knowledge about and deconstructions of traditional
hegemonies that skewed the historical roles of people of color in US. history. However,
this generation of social and cultural historians were so preoccupied with reclamation of
their African pasts and infusing a neo-Afrocentism into their own contemporary cultures
that it failed to continue the previous generation’s real “race work,” the stimulation of
traditions of self-help and agency that connected leadership to the most vulnerable of
oppressed people in the US, the urban poor Black families and their children. She ﬁnds
that of the notable exceptions to this trend among social and cultural historians,
Jacqueline Jones most consistently acknowledged the non-elite of the African American
past up to the post-modem era, providing historical conceptualizations of the Black poor
to compete with the theories of Black families’ presupposed pathologies and give context
to urban and labor historians’ Black family poverty studies. See Jacqueline Jones: th
Dispossessed: America’s Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present. (New York:
Basic Books, 1992); Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the
Family From Slaveg/ to the Present. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995); American Work:

 

 

 

 

Four Centuries of Black and White Labor. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998); and _A_
Social History of the Laboring Classes: From Colonial Times to the Present. (Malden,
MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999).

 

 

31Eugene Genovese. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1976 ed.), 194-202.

 

159

 

32 McBride. Impossible Witness , 8.

 

CHAPTER ONE

' Michael A. Plater. African American etrepreneurship in Richmond, 1890-1940: The
story of RC. Scott. New York: Garland, 1996).
87.

 

 

2 Michael A. Gomez. Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African
Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of
North Carolina Press, 1998) 275-76 passim; Newbell Puckett Niles. Popular Beliefs and
Superstitions: A Compendium of American Folklore (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1981), 82;
David R. Roediger. “And Die in Dixie: Funerals, Death, & Heaven in the Slave
Community, 1700-1865” in The Massachusetts Review v22nl (1981), 168-70; Catherine
I. Godboldte. Ancient African Traditional Funeral Ceremonies and the Funeral

 

 

 

Ceremonies of the Historic African American Church. (Temple University, 1995), 131.

 

3 Roediger, “And Die in Dixie,” 163.

4 Roediger, “And Die in Dixie,” 164.

5 Raboteau, Slave Religion, 86.

 

6 Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Religion” in the Antebellum South
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), ,13, 30-31, 44-45, 83.

 

7 David Barry Gaspar. Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in

 

Antigua. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985), 145.

8 Gaspar, Bondmen 144-45, n.38 on p. 298.

160

 

9 Gaspar, Bondmen, 145.

'0 Raboteau, Slave Religion, 230; Also see: John W. Blassingame. The Slave

 

Community: Plantation Life in The Ante-bellum South. (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1972), 13, 45.

H Gaspar, Bondmen, 145.

‘2 Roediger, “And Die in Dixie,” 164; Eugene Genovese. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World
the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976 ed.), 194; Michael A. Plater. Am
American entrepreneurship in Richmond, 1890-1940: The stog of RC. Scott. New York:
Garland, 1996), 108.

 

 

'3 Kemi Adarnolekun, “Bereavement Salutations Among the Yorubas of Western
Nigeria,” in Omega: Journal of Death and Dying. V39n4(l999), 277-285.

14 Rachel Harding. A Refuge in Thunder: Candomble’ and Alternative Spaces of
Blackness. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000), 21.

'5 Hilary McD. Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in

 

Barbados. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 176.

'6 Beckles, Natural Rebels, 176, 182.

 

'7 Frazier, E. Franklin. The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1939); E. Franklin Frazier. The Negro in the United States (New York:
Macmillan, 1949); E. Franklin Frazier. Black Bourgeoisie: The Rise of a New Middle
Class in the United States. (New York: Free Press, 1957); M.J. Herskovits. The Mﬂh of
the Negro Past (New York: Harper & Row, 1941).

 

 

 

 

 

161

 

'8 The suicide of captive Africans aboard Atlantic slave ships has been inconclusively
linked to a spiritual belief that death would return them back to Africa. However, DuBois
laid to rest any hope of making decisive deductions in this area of slavery studies because
of the paucity of documentation regarding the attitudes of early 18th century, enslaved
Africans. As a result, “. . .the impact of longing for Africa on slave attitudes toward death
cannot be conclusively determined. Quoted from: David R. Roediger. “And Die in Dixie:
Funerals, Death, & Heaven in the Slave Community, 1700-1865” in The Massachusetts
Review v22nl (1981), 163, 177.

'9 Plater, African America; 108; Handler and Lange, 207-208.

 

20 Roediger, “And Die in Dixie,” 172.

2‘ Roediger, “And Die in Dixie,” 169, 172-73.

22 Raboteau, Slave Religion, 86.

 

23 One of Asante’s graduate students presented this working deﬁnition of Afrocentrism in
the methodology section of her doctoral dissertation which was directed by him at
Temple University. See: Catherine I. Godboldte. Ancient African Traditional Funeral
Ceremonies and the Funeral Ceremonies of the Historic Aﬁican American Church.
(Temple University, 1995). p.19. For an introduction to the motivations and interests of
these intellectuals examine the works of the following authors: Cheik Anta Diop, John
Henrik Clarke, Maulana Karenga, Naim Akbar, Josef Ben-Jachanon, Francis Cress

Welsing, Raymond Winbush, and Tony Martin.

24 Godboldte, Ancient African, 28-29.

 

25 Gomez, Exchanging, 274-7 8.

162

 

2” David R. Roediger. “And Die in Dixie: Funerals, Death, & Heaven in the Slave
Commrmity, 1700-1865” in The Massachusetts Review v22n1 (1981), 163. Also quoted
by Roberta Hughes Writing in her “Introduction” to Lay Down Body: Living History in
African American Cemeteries (Detroit: Visible Ink, 1996), xxv.

 

 

27 Roediger, “And Die in Dixie,” 163.

28 Guion Griffis Johnson reported a story of a slave funeral in 1850 Salisbury, North
Carolina. The master actually sent out notices advertising the funeral of his favored
bondwoman. The masters and mistresses of the invited mourners loaned their horses and
vehicles to provide transportation to the funeral of such a special slave. It was estimated
that hundreds of people attended the funeral. In fact, “It was not unusual for domestic
servants to ‘consider themselves as forming part’ of the master’s family,” especially if
genuine affection and mutual respect were combined with the cash income of a faithful
and skilled slave whose per annum as a shoemaker, tanner, cooper, confectioner, distiller,
seamstress, etc. contributed to the “family.” C. W. Harper, “Black Aristocrats: Domestic
Servants on the Antebellum Plantation,” in Phylon v46n2 (2nd Qtr. 1985), 123-135.

29 If permission could not be obtained, Raboteau stated, distant community members
“might steal away to pay last respects.” Plater, African American, 107-08; Raboteau,
Slave Religion, 230.

 

 

3O Raboteau, Slave Religion, 13.

 

31 Roediger, “And Die in Dixie,” 170. For a thorough ethnographic discussion of the
history in African American graveyards, see: Roberta Hughes Wright. Lay Down Body:

 

Living History in African American Cemeteries. (Detroit: Visible Ink, 1996); and Robert

 

Farris Thompson. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy.
(New York: Random House, 1983).

 

32 Raboteau, Slave Religion, 230.

 

163

 

33 Genovese, 1976 ed., 194-202.

34 Gomez, Exchanging, 277-78; Roediger, “And Die in Dixie,” 169-170.

35 Roediger, “And Die in Dixie,” 170.

36 Mary A. Waring, “Mortuary Customs Among South Carolina Negroes.” Journal of
American Folklore. v7 (1894), 318.

37 Henry Watson. Narrative of Henry Watson, A Fugitive Slave in From Slavery to
Freedom: The African-A merican Pamphlet Collection, 1824-1909

 

http://memory.loc.gov/cgibin/queryD?rbaapc:12:./temp/~ammem IvIV::

 

38 Roediger, “And Die in Dixie,” 168.

CHAPTER Two

1 David Barry Gaspar. Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in
Antigua. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985), 144-45, n.38 on p. 298; Plater,
African American, 130.

 

 

2 Dwight A. McBride. Impossible Witness: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony.
(New York: New York University Press, 2001), 4-5.

3 McBride. Impossible Witness, 10-11; 61 -62. Nell Irvin Painter also critiqued polemical

 

appropriate of the Black body in her theoretical analysis of White feminism and the

abolitionist leader, Sojourner Truth. See: Nell Irvin Painter. Sojourner Truth: A Life, A

 

Symbol (New York: Norton, 1997); But, symbol making or collective appropriations of

Black bodies has also been historically depicted as racial stereotypes. For an example of

164

 

 

 

racial stereotyping and slave women, see: Deborah Gray White. Ar’n’t I a Woman?

Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985); and for an example of

 

racial stereotypes being transformed into consumer products or material culture symbols,

see: Kenneth W. Goings. Mammy and Uncle Moses: Black Collectibles and American

 

Stereotyping(Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994).

 

4 Michael A. Gomez. Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African
Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of
North Carolina Press, 1998), 276; McBride. Impossible Witness, 12.

 

 

5 Harry Joseph Walker. Negro Benevolent Societies in New Orleans: A Study of Their
Structure, Function, and Membership. (Nashville, Tennessee: Fisk University, 1937), 35.

 

6 Walker, Negro Benevolent, 35.

 

7 Michael A. Plater. African American entrepreneurship in Richmond, 1890—1940: The
story of RC. Scott. New York: Garland, 1996), 119.

 

 

8 Harding, A Refuge, 122. In Brazilian Portuguese, the English word sister, is “irrna” and
brother is “irrnao.” But the term irmadades can be translated as brotherhood, sisterhood

or fraternal society.

9 Harding, A Refuge, 122-23.

'0 C.G. Woodson. “Insurance Business Among Negroes” in Journal of Negro History
v14n2 (April 1929), 202. For an in-depth study of Philadelphia’s Black community and
its organizational activities see: Gary G. Nash. Forging Freedom: The Formation of
Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720-1840. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1988) and Julie Winch. Philadelphia’s Black Elite: Activism, Accommodation, and
the Struggle for Autonomy, 1787-1848 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).

 

 

 

 

165

 

H Leslie J. Pollard. “Black Beneﬁcial Societies and the Home for Aged and Inﬁrrn
Colored Persons: A Research Note,” in Phylon v41n3 (3rd Qtr. 1980), 230—234; Harry
Joseph Walker. Negro Benevolent Societies in New Orleans: A Study of Their Structure,
Function, and Membership. (Nashville, Tennessee: Fisk University, 1937), 30-33. C.G.

 

Woodson. “Insurance Business Among Negroes” in Journal of Negro History v14n2
(April 1929), 202. For an in-depth study of Philadelphia’s Black community and its
organizational activities see: Gary G. Nash. Forging Freedom: The F orrnation of
Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720-1840. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1988) and Julie Winch. Philadelphia’s Black Elite: Activism, Accommodation, and
the Struggle for Autonomy, 1787-1848 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).

 

As early as the 17905, free Blacks in the South just as their Northern counterparts in cities
like Philadelphia began to organize mutual aid societies to fulﬁll their obligations to the

their communities and their dead.

'2 The ﬁrst sickness and burial organization was the “free Aﬁican society” started in
Philadelphia in 1778 by Richard Allen who founded the AME and Absalom Jones. Plater
A_fn£_a_n_ American,109, 119; W.E.B. DuBois. The Phildelphia Negro: A Social Stud .
(Philadelphia: University of Pennslyvania, 1899), 222; Roberta Hughes Wright. L_ay

 

Down Body: Living History in African American Cemeteries. (Detroit: Visible Ink,
1996), 267-290.

'3 Gomez, Exchanging, 277.

1" Plater, African American , 109.

 

'5 William E. Hatcher. John Jasper: The Unmatched Negro Philosopher and Preacher

 

(New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1908). 36-37. For a biographical encyclopedia
of other self-educated race leaders, a little used reference is: The College Life or
Practical Self-Educator, A Manual of Self-Improvement for the Colored Race: Forming

an Educational Emancipator and Guide to Success, Giving Examples and Achievements

166

 

of Successful Men and Woman of the Race as an Incentive and Inspiration to the Rising
Generation..Embracing Business, Social, Domestic, Historical and Religious Education.
Originally published in 1895 by Chicago Publication and Lithography Co.) Reprinted,
Miami: Mnemosyne Publishing Inc., 1969.)

'6 Hatcher, Jasper, 37-38.

'7 Plater, African American, 109.

 

'8 Plater, African American, 109-10 passim.

 

‘9 “It is difﬁcult to say,” confessed Raboteau, “whether this practice reﬂected an African
system of multiple funerals or was simply a necessity dictated by the uncertainty of
permission and the lack of time available to the slaves to attend such [funeral] service.”

Raboteau, Slave Religion, 230.

 

20 Raboteau, Slave Religion, 230-31.

 

2‘ Hatcher, Jasper, 37-38.

22 Raboteau, Slave Religion, 231-32.

 

23 Hatcher, Jasper, 38.
24 Hatcher, Jasper, 37-38.

25 Horace James. Report of the Superintendent of Negro Affairs in North Carolina, 1864

 

in From Slavery to Freedom: The Aﬁican-American Pamphlet Collection, 1824-1909
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/queryD?rbaapc:12:./temp/~ammem IvIV::, pp. 1 0-1 1.

 

26 James, Report of the Superintendent, 47.

 

167

 

27 Gary Laderman. Rest In Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in

 

Twentieth-Century America. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 40-41 passim.

 

28 James, Report of the Superintendent, 47.

 

29 James Anderson’s volume conﬁrms the instrumental role of the Black church in Black
literacy. Copious and meticulous documentation like Alvord’s annual reports are just one
set of data. For example, from Alvord’s ﬁled reports and ﬁeld notes, Anderson
reconstructs the essential contributions of “native schools,” self-taught teachers and tutors
among the freed people, Sabbath schools, [B]lack church operated schools, all “. . .such
local activities by ex-slaves that spurred the establishment of widespread elementary and
literary education and provided the grassroots foundation for the educational acitivies of
northern missionary societies and the Freedmen’s Bureau. James D. Anderson. ﬁg
Education of Blacks in the SouthL186O-1935. (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North
Carolina Press, 1988), 6, 13, 15.

 

30 J. W. Alvord, January 21, 1870 to Major General 00. Howard in From Slavery to
Freedom: The Aﬁican-American Pamphlet Collection, 1824-1909
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/queryD?rbaapc:12:./temp/~ammem IvIV ::

 

3 I S.A. Martha Canﬁeld. Colored Orphan Asylum and Extracts from Mrs. Canﬁeld’s
Dia_ry. in From Slavery to Freedom: The Aﬁican-American Pamphlet Collection, 1824-
1909 http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/queryD?rbaapc:12:./temp/~ammem IvIV::, pp. 11,
15, 20

 

32 J .H. Weber. Pass System at Vicksburg. January 31, 1865 letter to Colonel Samuel
Thomas, Provost Marshal General in From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American

Pamphlet Collection, 1 824-1909
http://memory.loc.gov/cgibin/queryD?rbaapc:12:./temp/~ammem IvIV::, 24, 27.

 

168

 

33 August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of
Booker T. Washington (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1963), 130.

 

 

34 Weber, Pass System, 27.

35 CG. Woodson. “Insurance Business Among Negroes” in Journal of Negro History
v14n2 (April 1929),” 203.

36 Harry Joseph Walker. Harry Joseph Walker. Negro Benevolent Societies in New

 

Orleans: A Study of Their Structure, Function, and Membership. (Nashville, Tennessee:

1
. 1

Fisk University, 193 7), 306. C.G. Woodson. “Insurance Business Among Negroes” in
Journal of Negro History v14n2 (April 1929), 202.

37 Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family From Slaveg

to the Present. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 127.

 

38 CG. Woodson. “Insurance Business Among Negroes” in Journal of Negro History
v14n2 (April 1929), 203. For a comparative analysis of church-based social services in
the 18th century, Aﬁican Diaspora See: George Liele, Stephen Cooke, et.al., “Letters
Showing the Rise and Progress of the Early Negro Churches of Georgia and the West
Indies,” in Journal of Negro History, vlnl (Jan. 1916), 69-92.

39 Woodson. “Insurance Business,”, 202. For an in-depth study of Philadelphia’s Black
community and its organizational activities see: Gary G. Nash. Forging Freedom: The

Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720-1840. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1988) and Julie Winch. Philademhia’s Black Elite: Activism,

 

 

 

Accommodation, and the Struggle for Autonomy4787-1848 (Philadelphia: Temple

 

University Press, 1988).

40 CA. Spencer. “Black Benevolent Societies and the Development of Black Insurance

Companies in Nineteenth Century Alabama,” in Phylon v46n3 (3rd Qtr., 1985), 256.

169

 

4' Spencer. “Black Benevolent,” 251-261.

42 Plater, African American, 119. Although focusing on the undertaking enterprise of

 

Richmond, Virginia’s R.C. Scott from the turn of the century to 1940, Plater’s
conclusions about the impact of Black families’ patronage of funeral establishments is

applicable across both time and place.

43 Direct quote comes from Plater, Aﬁican American, 128-130 passim.

 

44 Booker T. Washington The Negro in Business. (New York: AMS Press, 1907, 1971
ed.), 94.

 

45 Harry Joseph Walker. Negro Benevolent Societies in New Orleans: A Study of Their

 

Structure, Function, and Membership. (Nashville, Tennessee: Fisk University, 1937), 28.

 

There seems to be only two copies of this invaluable ethnographic study and ﬁeld survey,
the only organic and primary examination of the post-emancipation benevolent societies.
One copy is at Fisk University and the other is held by the New Orleans Public Library.
The researcher kindly thanks Greg Osborne, the specialist in the African American
collections at the New Orleans Public Library for access to Walker’s study. None of the
historical investigations or references to benevolent societies published by scholars to

date have made use of this material.

4" The New Orleans Republic, November 11, 1373, Page 3, Column 2 Marcus Christian
Collection, University of New Orleans, Earl K. Long Library, Louisiana and Special
Collections. Lt. Governor Dunn died on November 22, 1871 , exactly two year prior to
“pleasant party” which made news in the Republican. Dunn’s death brought scandal and
gossip on top of the competition inherent in civil service. It was rumored that he had been
murdered. Speculations abounded about his supposed murder by poisoning. Just two year

earlier, the undertaker, G. Cassanave, threatened to have the body of Lt. Governor, Oscar

170

 

James Dunn, the fugitive slave who “lifted himself” from slave society to state politics,
exhumed for a post-mortem examination. Cassanave, who had charge of the funeral,
interred the lieutenant govemor’s body in his private vault, “where it was deposited
according to the Masonic ritual.” Ironically, the “pleasant party” in 1873 concluded their
evening at the home of one of Dunn’s successor, Lt. Governor Antoine. Mrs. Oscar
James Dunn must not minded neither going to the incumbent ofﬁcials home nor
socializing with Senator Pinchback, a man whose “habits, temperament, and character”
publicly conﬂicted with those of her late husband. Unlike her husband, Pinchback was
neither a fugitive nor freed. He was a mulatto, born in Macon, Georgia to a former slave
who had been freed by his father, a wealthy white planter. His other See: A.E. Perkins,
“James Henri Burch and Oscar James Dunn in Louisiana,” in Journal of Negro History
v22n3 (July 1937), 321-334; A.E. Perkins, “Oscar James Dunn,” in Phylon v4n2 (2"d
Quarter 1943), 102-121.

Here is a verbatim transcription of the 1873 Republic article about the Benevolent
Daughters of Louisiana:
Benevolent Daughters of Louisiana
We had the pleasure yesterday of participating in the closing
exercises of the above named most worthy association, on the
occasion of one of their anniversary celebrations. The society
is organized for works of charity and benevolence including
deeds of kindness toward their fellow beings in sickness and
suffering, even unto the grave.
They have a very ﬁne vault in Greenwood Cemetery,
wherein they bury their dead, and it is a time honored custom
with them to visit the tombs of their departed friends the second
Monday in November, being the day designated for this pious
observance. At the close of the day it is the pleasant custom for
the ofﬁcers and members of the society to meet together in
social intercourse with each other and invited friends, and

partake of a collation provided for the occasion. It was in the

171

 

latter that we were so fortunate as to be a participant.

Down in the fourth ward, at Turner Hall, we found
a ﬁne spread of eatables, with something to wash them down,
and hospitable ladies to welcome their guests. After cordial
greetings, due attention to the wants of the inner man and a
complimentary toast in honor of the society, Senator Pinchback,
who was one of the honored guests, returned thanks in a very
well timed, practical speech, which was well received by the
hospitable hostesses.

The Benevolent Daughters of Louisiana Society
was duly incorporated under the laws of this State about
tvventy-ﬁve years ago, and has lived and increased and
ﬂourished through all the changes and vicissitudes of a
quarter of a century. This name and good deeds are familiar
wherever charity and kindness are appreciated in the city, and
they bid fair to go on in their works of usefulness in the long
years to come. . ..

Among those present yesterday, including members
and guests, we noticed Senator P.B.S. Pinchback, who is the
undoubted idol of the colored people;. . .And the ladies:
Mr[s]. O.J. Dunn, Mrs. Lieutenant Governor Antoine,
Mrs. Pinchback, the mother of the Senator. . .The pleasant
party adjourned at an early hour to pay a surprise call at the house
of Lieutenant Governor Antoine. But an inexorable duty called our
reporter away, he could only follow them in spirit to where he hopes
they passed the rest of the evening in the enjoyment of the new

occasion.

47 The New Orleans Republic, November 11, 1873, Page 3, Column 2 Marcus Christian
Collection, University of New Orleans, Earl K. Long Library, Louisiana and Special

Collections.

172

 

48 Spencer, “Black Benevolent,” ; Walker, Negro Benevolent, 29. Woodson,

“Insurance,” 202-03.

 

49 Hatcher, John Jasper, 36-37.

’0 Plater, African American, 134.

 

5 I Plater, African American, 134.

 

57' Wood cofﬁns, was the original container used for dead bodies in American society.
The container more commonly used today, the casket, is much more durable and

expensive.

5" Matthew JeckerByme. Dealing With Death: Problems and Responses in American

 

Funeral Practice. (New York: City University of New York, 2000); Karen Lee Krepps.

 

Black Mortuary Practices in Southeast Michigan. (Detroit: Wayne State University.
1990); Eliza Ames Littleﬁeld. Occupational Stress Among Funeral Directors: An

 

Exploratory Study. (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. 1987);

 

H. Joan Michaelson. The Funeral Director: A Qualitative Study of Family-Operated

 

Funeral Homes. (University of South Dakota. 1995); Nancy L. Watterson. In the mix:

 

Emergent Identities of an African American Business Woman: A Dissertation in Folklore

 

and Folklife. (University of Pennsylvania. 1995); Regina Graham. I Have A Testimony:

 

A Perspective on Death, Grief and Widowhood in Aﬁican American Culture. The
(Greensboro, NC: University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2002).

 

54 Karla F.C. Holloway. Passed On: Aﬁican American mourning stories: A memorial.

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).

 

173

 

55 DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro, 40-42 passim; Gomez, Exchanging, 277; Miriam
deCosta-Willis, ed.. The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995),
2.

 

 

56DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro, 40-42 passim.

 

57 DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro, 40.

 

58 The New Orleans’ directory for 1896 and 1897 had both residential and business listing
for the Boyer’s family. See: Soards’ 1896 Directory, “TYP-UPH, 1018”; Soards’ 1897
Directory, “BOW-BOY, 141” The city’s directories are available on microﬁlm. US. City
Directory for New Orleans, Louisiana, 917.631, N528, Reel 8. The Boyer account ledger
has been preserved in the manuscript collection at University of New Orleans, Earl K.

Long Library, Louisiana and Special Collections

59 The University of New Orleans, Earl K. Long Library, Louisiana and Special
Collections also owns the account ledger for of the Schoen undertaking ﬁrm. The Schoen
ledger covers June 1, 1888 to May 31, 1897. Initially, the author wished to cross
reference Schoen’s account ledger with the Boyer account ledger for the time period
which their coverage coincided, i.e., October 1896 to May 1897. But, the last entry in the
Schoen ledger donated to the Earl K. Long archives was in 1895. The additional two
years of Schoen’s coverage may have been in a second book which is not a part of the
manuscript collection. The 1896 city business directory gave several addresses for Frantz
& Schoen: 3013 and 3014 N. Peters and 527 Elysian Fields Ave. Very likely, the family’s
residence was separate from the funeral parlor whereas the majority of African
Americans in the funeral business from the turn of the century to the post-modem era
either lived above or next door to their funeral establishment if not actually in the
“ﬁineral home” proper. Part III gives a more detailed, historical account of this

distinction.

174

 

6° The page numbers, i.e., all corresponding to dates from 1889 through 1895, on which
the Widow Boyer borrow, rented, or exchanged carriages with the Schoen family ﬁrm:
pages 15, 40-41, 80-82, 128-129,146-149. There was a note written next to the last page

number under Boyer’s name: “New Ledger 8”.

6' Livery stables were among the related business activities of entrepreneurial
undertakers. The keeping of horses and carriages was a sensible investment given the
need to transport bodies, cofﬁns, families, and catered foods. Consequently, the funeral

hearse was often the property of a livery stable owner.

62 Jones, Labor or Love, 126.

 

63 The National Federation of Afro-American Women and the National Colored
Woman’s League merged in 1896 to form the National Association of Colored Women
(NACW). Undergraduate women at Howard University in Washington, DC. established
the ﬁrst Aﬁican American Greek letter organizations, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority,
twelve years later in 1908, and Delta Sigma Theta in 1913. Darlene Clark Hine, William
C. Hine, and Stanley Harrold, The Aﬁican-American Odyssey, Combined Volume.
(Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2003, 2nd edition), 374, 378.

 

64 See, for example, the chapter on fraternal orders in: Joe William Trotter, Jr., Coal,
Class, and Color: Blacks In Southern West Virginia, 1915-1932. (Urbana, Illinois:
University of Illinois Press, 1990). Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of
Philadelphia 's Black Community, [720-1840. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1988.. See: Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women 's
Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920. (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1993). See for example: Stephanie J. Shaw, What a Woman Ought to be and to Do:
Black Professional Women Workers During the Jim Crow Era (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996); Deborah Gray White, T 00 Heavy A Load: Black Women in
Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999); Wanda A.
Hendricks, Gender, Race, and Politics in the Midwest: Black Club Women in Illinois.

175

 

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Rosalyn Terbor-Penn, Aﬁican American
Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1998); Adrienne Lash Jones, Jane Edna Hunter: A Case Study of Black Leadership,
1910-1950. (Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, 1990); and Darlene Clark Hine, Black
Women in White: Racial Conﬂict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1 890-1 95 0.
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black
women, Work, and the Family From Slavery to the Present. (New York: Basic Books,
1985) and Tera Hunter. To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women ’s Lives and
Labors After the Civil War. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).

6" Plater, African American, 121.

 

6" Marcus Christian, “Business and Professions, 1900-1930” Marcus Christian
Collection, University of New Orleans, Earl K. Long Library, Louisiana and Special
Collections. Manuscript Collection #11, Chapter 40, p. 12.

67 Walker, Negro Benevolent, 299-304 passim.

 

 

68 Washington, The Negro in Business, 94.

69 Marcus Christian, “Business and Professions, 1900-1930” p. 12. Also, see author’s
Tables 3 and 4. The advent of the modern era for Black undertaking ﬁrms facilitated the
rise of Black men as “kings of their communities,” i.e., Black morticians. Morticians
versus “undertaker” became the preferred professional label as the requisite training in
mortuary science became quite popular in urban areas both in the North and South. The
practice of embalming Black bodies by Black men and the attendant under representation
(or exclusion) of Black women from formal training and professional certiﬁcation
apparatuses available in mortuary schools gave Black men opportunities to emerge as

“kings of their communities.”

70 Washington, The Negro in Business, 103. Hine, Aﬁican American Odyssey, 356.

 

 

176

 

7'Then again, this is the same man who married several women whose fundraising
activities on behalf of his Tuskegee machine took such a toll that the two of the three
actually died without seeing the maturity of neither their own children nor the institution
itself. See: Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery. (New York: Signet, 2000 ed.), 102,
139.

 

72 Washington, The Negro in Business, 109.

 

73Woodson. “Insurance Business,” 202; Walker, Negro Benevolent, 304. “Conclusions,”

 

316-326. Brimmer, “The Negro in the National Economy” J .H. Harmon, Jr. “The Negro
as a Local Business Man,” in Journal of Negro History, v14n2 (April 1929), 116-155;
August Meier, “Negro Class Structure and Ideology in the Age of Booker T.
Washington,” in Phylon v23n3 (3rd Qtr., 1962), 258-266.

74 Roberta Hughes Wright. Lay Down Body: Living History in African American
Cemeteries. (Detroit: Visible Ink, 1996), 267-68 passim.

 

75 William H. Pipes. Say Amen, Brother! Old-Time Negro Preaching: A Study in
American Frustration. (New Yor: The William-Frederick Press, 1951), 65.

 

 

76 William E. Hatcher. John Jasper: The Unmatched Negro Philosopher and Preacher
(New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1908). 36-37.

 

77 Woodson quoted in Walker, Negro Benevolent, 29; Simon Ottenberg analyzing the

 

functions of faith and socialization in a coastal Georgia town of the 19508, argued in his
anthropological that, “almost all adults belong to at least one society, and many belong to
two or more.” Ottenberg’s article historicized the male leadership of Black churches and
Black men’s roles in founding benevolent societies as examples of non-kin socialization.
He did not attempt to do a gendered analysis in order to accurately contextualize Black

masculinity as well as the ways in which female leadership in Black churches and

177

 

benevolent societies were conventionally constructed. See: Simon Ottenberg,
“Leadership and Change in a Coastal Georgia Negro Community,” in The Phylon
Quarterly. V20n1 (1st Qtr., 1959), 13.

78 Walker, Benevolent Societies, 315, 324.

 

 

 

79 Roediger, “And Die in Dixie,”; Raboteau, Slave Religion; Hine, African American

Odyssey, 357; Pipes, Say Amen, 196 n11.

80 n.a. “Where Jazz Was Born: The Funeral” article taken from the vertical ﬁles of the
Wayne State School of Mortuary Science.

81 “Where Jazz Was Bom,”; Leo Touchet. Rejoice When You Die: The New Orleans Jazz
Funerals. (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1998); Sybil Kein. “The
Celebration of Life in New Orleans Jazz Funerals,” in Revue ﬁanocaise d ’aetudes
amaericaines. n51 (February 1992), 19-26. Also see Walker’s section on “Delinquency in

Dues,” in Negro Benevolent, 68-69.

 

82 Kein, “The Celebration,” 21.

83 Where Jazz Was Bom,”; Touchet. Rejoice When You Die; Kein. “The Celebration,”

 

24-26 passim; Hine, African American Odyssey, 357. If allowed to sing, they paced

 

themselves by slowly singing hymn in an effort “to avoid any inauspicious mishaps

during the graveyard march.” Roediger, “And Die in Dixie,” 170.

84 Where Jazz Was Bom,”; Touchet. Rejoice When You Die; Kein. “The Celebration,”

24-26 passim; Hine, African American Odyssey, 357. Whereas the enslaved may have

 

 

accompanied the singers and dancers with banjos, pipes, ﬁfes, or violins. The jazz bands

played brass, reeds, and drums.

CHAPTER THREE

178

 

' Darlene Clark Hine, "Black Migration to the Urban Midwest: The Gender Dimension,
1915-1945," in The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race,
Class, and Gender, Joe William Trotter, ed. (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University

Press, 1991), 127.

 

2 This historical pattern of freedom seeking or migration also characterizes much of the
African Diaspora. To the extent that a noted political theorist, Comel West remarked,
“The fundamental theme of New World African modernity is neither integration nor
separation but rather migration and emigration.” Quoted in Farah Jasmine Grifﬁn, “ﬂhp
Set You F lowin’?”: The African American Migration Narrative. (New York: Oxford,
1995), frontispiece.

3 E. Franklin Frazier. The Negro Church in America. (New York: Schocken, 1963, 47-67.

4 The ofﬁcial organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

(N .A.A.C.P.), edited by DuBois, was given the title, The Crisis.

5 Harry Joseph Walker. Negro Benevolent Societies in New Orleans: A Study of Their
Structure, Function, and Membership. (Nashville, Tennessee: Fisk University, 193 7),
324; New Orleans Republic, November 11, 1873, Page 3, Column 2 Marcus Christian

 

Collection, University of New Orleans, Earl K. Long Library, Louisiana and Special

Collections.

6 Michael A. Plater. African American entrepreneurship in Richmond, 1890-1940: The
story of RC. Scott. New York: Garland, 1996), 122-23 passim.

 

 

7Catherine I. Godboldte. Ancient Aﬁican Traditional Funeral Ceremonies and the
Funeral Ceremonies of the Historic African-American Church. (Temple University,
1995); Matthew J eckerByme. Dealing With Death: Problems and Responses in American
Funeral Practice. (City University of New York, 2000); Karen Lee Krepps. Black

179

 

Mortuary Practices in Southeast Michigan. _(Wayne State University, 1990); Eliza Ames
Littleﬁeld. Occupational Stress Among Funeral Directors: An Exploratory Study.
(Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, 1987); H. Joan Michaelson. The Funeral
Director: A Qualitative Study of F amily-Operated Funeral Homes. (University of South
Dakota, 1995); Nancy L. Watterson. In the mix: Emergent Identities of an African
American Business Woman: A Dissertation in Folklore and F olklife. (University of
Pennsylvania, 1995); Matthew Corey Whitaker. Western Resistance: Lincoln and
Eleanor Ragsdale and the transformation of the black ﬁeedom struggle in the American

West. (Michigan State University, 2001).

8 Victoria W. Wolcott. Remaking Respectability: Aﬁican American Women in Interwar
_D_e_t39_i1. (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 65. Meeting
trains at the city’s station was an intervention strategy also used to protect young, female
migrants from being entrapped into prostitution. Jane Edna Hunter, the founder of
Cleveland’s Phyllis Wheatley Home, received at least one migrant woman, Charlotte,
who was directed to the door of the Home by a Black minister. See: Jane Edna Hunter.

Jane Edna Hunter, A Nickel and A Prayer (Cleveland: Elli Kani Publishing Co., 1940).

 

9 This is the way Wolcott contextualizes the impact of the Detroit Housewives’ League,

for example. See: Wolcott, Remaking Respectabiliﬁ; For more historical descriptions

 

about the group, also see: Darlene Clark Hine, “The Housewives’ League of Detroit:
Black Women and Economic Nationalism,” in HineSight: Black Women and the Re-

Construction of American History (New York: Carlson Publishing, Co., 1994), 109-128.

 

 

'0 Several African American women historians have written books that provide gender,
class, and race analyses of acceptable work as well as labor activism in situations of
Black female resistance to neo-slavery and because of their traditional dependence upon
domestic work. For how color and class shaped the aspirations and consciousness of
educated, Black women in the modem or Jim Crow era, see: Stephanie Shaw. Why
Women Ought to Be and To do: Black Professional Women Workers During the Jim
Crow Era. (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1996). For an understanding of how

180

 

labor organization became the choice of some post-emancipation, Southern domestic
service workers, see: Tera Hunter. To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives

After the Civil War.(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); The expression

 

 

“bone and sinew” is an historical metaphor for the indispensable contribution of working-
class, Black women to the existence and survival of their families and communities.
Carole C. Marks, “The Bone and Sinew of the Race: Black Women, Domestic Service,
and Labor Migration,” in Families on the Move: Migration, Immigration, Emigration,
and Mobility, Barbara H. Settles, Daniel E. Hanks III, and Marvin B. Sussman, eds. (New
York; The Haworth Press, 1993), 156-159. Carole Marks, F arwelL We’re Good and
Gone: The Great Black Migration (Bloomington: Indiana University, Press, 1989.

 

 

 

H Wolcott, Remaking, 1,4; John B. Reid, “A Career to Build, a People to Serve, a
Purpose to Accomplish: Race, Class, Gender and Detroit’s First Black Women School
Teachers,” in “We Specialize in the Wholly Immssible”: A Reader in Black Women’s

 

Histogy. Darlene Clark Hine, Wilma King, and Linda Reed, eds. (New York: Carlson
Publishing, 1995), 303-320.

'2 The author uncovered this document in a copy of the Second Baptist 15th anniversary
souvenir booklet that had been preserved by the Fred Hart Williams Genealogical Society
and archived as the Leontine Cole Craig Smith at the Burton Historical Collection,
Detroit Public Library. For a complete historical description of the connection between
the Black Baptist church and the activism and reform of its female leadership, see:
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the
Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993);

For an appreciation of Burroughs’ personal sacriﬁce, organizational dynamism, and

 

spiritual pragmatism, see: Sharon Harley, “Nannie Helen Burroughs: ‘The Black Goddess
of Liberty,’ in “Journal of Negro History. v81n1/4, Vindicating the Race: Contributions
to A frican-American Intellectual History” (Winter-Autumn, 1996), 62-71.

'3 Dorothy Salem. “National Association of Colored Women,” in Black Women in

 

America: An Historical Encyclopedia, Darlene Clark Hine, ed. (New York: Carlson,

 

181

 

1993), 842-851; Stephanie J. Shaw. “Black Club Women and the Creation of the National

Association 0 Colored Women, “ in Hine, King, et.al. “We Specialize..”, 449-486.

 

'4 Sarah Mary King, “Cora MacKerrow ties easy chair: After 80, its good to relax,” in
Boston Sunday Globe, February 7,1971, 2(A).

‘5 Plater, African Americap 122.

 

‘6 Robert A. Weems,, Jr. “Robert A. Cole and the Metropolitan Funeral System
Association: A Proﬁle of a Civicminded African-American Business Man,” Journal of

Negro History, 78(1), 1993, 1-15; Robert A. Weems,, Jr.. Black Business in the Black

 

Metropolis : the Chicago Metropolitan Assurance Company, 1925-1985. (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 1996); Wolcott, Remaking.

'7 Richard Thomas. Life For Us is What We Make It: Building Community in Detroit,
1915-1945 (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992);, 265-69; Carolyn P.
DuBose. The Untold Story of Charles Diggs: The Public Figure, The Private Man.
(Arlington, VA: Barton Publishing House, Inc., 1998); Whitaker. Western Resistance,
2001.

 

‘8 Graham, I Have a Testimony, 2002; Darlene Clark Hine. Black Victory: The Rise and
Fall of the White Primary in Texas. (Millwood, N.Y. : KTO Press, 1979); Michael A.
Plater. African American Entrepreneurship in Richmond, 1890-1940: The story of RC.
S2911. (New York: Garland, 1996).

 

 

 

 

'9 Gary Laderman. Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799-1883. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.

 

2° Herbert W. Kuhm.“When Black Crepe Hung on Milwaukee Doors,” Milwaukee
Histog 3(4), 1980, 112-116. Chinese American Studies are show how to take death care

and funerary culture as subjects of identity formation, ethnicity, nationalism, and class,

182

 

see, for example: Juwen Zhang. Falling Seeds Take Root: Ritualizing Chinese American

 

Identity Through Funerals. (University of Pennsylvania, 2001.)

 

2‘ Plater, African American, 126.

 

22 Plater, African American, 126.

 

23 Plater, African American, 126.

 

2“ Graham. 1 Have a Testimony, 2002; Plater, African American, 128.

 

 

25 Wavelet S. Johnson, “Proposal for a Mortuary School at Grand Valley State
University,” unpublished survey, 1997.

26 This is a contemporary, self-description of the Michigan Select Funeral Directors

Association, the state organization of the National Funeral Directors Association.

27 Staff writer. “A History of the Independent Funeral Directors Association,” in National
Funeral Director and Embalmer, reprinted from the Washington Aﬁ'o-American, August
8, 1961. This brief history is also available on the NFDMA website. See: “National
Funeral Directors & Morticians Association, Inc.”< http://www.nfdma.com/history.html
> March 27, 2003.

28 “National Funeral Directors & Morticians,” There are only two sources for extant
copies of The Colored Embalmer, 1927-1939, Fisk University in Nashville and Howard
University in Washington, DC. Howard only has one issue. Fisk has several. The author
found references to the periodicals for the Black undertaking professional by conversing
with librarians and archivists at several locations including the Archives of Labor/Urban
Affairs, Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University, the NF DA, NFDMA, and
James P. Danky at the Wisconsin Historical Society. The only sourcebook that proved
helpful was. James P. Danky. African-American Newspapers and Periodicals: National

 

183

 

Bibliography. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Danky’s compilation

 

excites historical research with its exhaustive listing, but when the author called and
contacted several of the depositories, majority of which are Historically Black Colleges
and Universities (HBCUs), few libraries had digitized their 19th century sources.

According to the Harvard Guide to African American History, Evelyn Brooks

 

Higginbotham, Leon F. Litvvack, and Darlene Clark Hine, eds. (Cambridge: Harvard
University, Press, 2001), one large, mainstream institution, Emory University has
archival records of an African American funeral ﬁrm founded in the early 19205, the
Hanley Undertakers Company. Unfortunately, the research librarian responded to my
request for access with a process date of late December 2004 or possibly the following

year. The Harvard Guide also listed another Southern source of primary source material,

 

the Lucy Crump Jefferson papers supposedly located at the Jefferson Funeral Home in
Vicksburg, Mississippi. I spoke to her grandson, James Jefferson, several times on the
telephone. He was not able to recall any historical records relevant to documenting his
family’s business in terms of a scholarly endeavor. As a result of paucity in primary
source material, the only other source of information about the history of African
American funeral directing, other than individual case studies or biographies of speciﬁc
funeral directors, are the assessments of the profession by business professors, labor
historians, and economists. Finally, the obituaries, eulogies, and newspapers kept by
individual Black churches may hold the greatest possibilities for seeing into the world of
the Black poor from their emancipation through the Jim Crow era across the country and
not just those migrants who were the object of bourgeois reform in Northern cities is

available but not immediately accessible.

29 Juliet E.K. Walker. “Undertaking and Cemetery Enterprises,” in Walker’s The Histogy
of Black Business in America: Capitalism, Race, and Entrepreneurship. (New York:
MacMillan Library Reference USA, 1998), 114-115. There are several studies of the
history of US. death care, but none which place the historical signiﬁcance of African
American funerary display at its center, i.e., not a case study or biography of a speciﬁc
funeral director. For a good introduction to the newest cultural studies of US. death care,

see: Virginia Russell Remsberg. From Cofﬁn-Making to Undertaking: The Rise of the

 

184

 

Funeral Directing Industry in the 18803. Master’s Thesis submitted to the University of
Delaware, 1992; Karen Pomeroy Flood. Contemplating Corjpses: The Dead Body in

 

American Culture, 1870-1920. Doctoral dissertation submitted to Harvard University,
2001.

 

30 John Sibley Butler, ‘To Seek for Ourselves’: Benevolent, Insurance, and Banking

Institutions,” chapter 3 in Butler’s Entrepreneurship and Self-Help Among Black

 

Americans: A Reconsideration of Race and Economics. (New York: State University of

New York Press, 1991), 79-142.

 

3 ' Plater, Aﬁican American, 127.

 

32 Frazier, The Negro Church, 36.

 

CHAPTER FOUR
1 Second Baptist 15th anniversary souvenir booklet that had been preserved by the Fred
Hart Williams Genealogical Society and archived as the Leontine Cole Craig Smith at the

Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library.

2 Leontine Cole Smith, “James H. Cole,” 1-11. Cole family history. Leontine Cole Craig
Smith, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library.

3 Smith, “James H. Cole,” 4.
4 Smith, “James H. Cole,” 5.
5 Smith, “James H. Cole,” 5-7; The Union Army later needed Black troops. And although

James was drafted for military service, the quota had been ﬁlled before he was called into

active duty.

185

 

6 Smith, “James H. Cole,” 7. Karla Green Cole still takes on other multiple community
roles. For, example, she hosted a group of medical students from Wayne State University.
These prospective doctors needed to see what happened to Black bodies that did not
recover. After the livery attendants, the ambulatory service from the funeral home that
transported the bodies from the hospital morgue, people whose lives had not been saved
by their healing hands, the deceased family's next institutional interaction would occur in
the ofﬁce of the funeral director. Therefore, Karla gave these medical students a tour of
the Cole facilities. She shared with these burgeoning medical professionals the other side
of human health, that is the death experience. She explained that many doctors and head
nurses face families with the news that a loved one has died without concrete ideas about
what will happen next. Releasing the body to the hospital morgue breaks the connection
between the family, the medical staff, and the hospital. The visit to Cole Funeral Home
brought clarity to the other scenario of patient care, the question of what happens without
recovery. Karla addressed a family's ﬁnal decisions concerning deceased patients. In this
educational role, Karla simultaneously achieved two ends. She furnished future Cole's
families with more informed and sensitive health care providers. Second, this volunteer
service also facilitated a much needed and neglected dialogue between two related, yet
hitherto estranged, professional service institutions. Now, Karla questions with the
intrusion of intemationally-owned funerary establishments and cemeteries, who will
provide these kind of community functions to Black families, community clients who
historically have negotiated literally life and death with their undertakers, morticians,

funeral directors.

7 The Cole family owned funeral business is the focus of chapter eight. Chapter eight
focuses on mid-Michigan, primarily the relationships between Black funeral directors and
working-class and poor, African American communities in Detroit, Grand Rapids,
Lansing, and Saginaw. The majority of my conclusions about the continunity in death
care and poor Black communities are drawn from the Cole Home for Funerals at the

center. It is the oldest and largest (in volume) family-owned funeral establishment in

186

 

Michigan. All of the mid-Michigan funeral directors interviewed for this study interned at
Cole.

6 The student groups of Epsilon Nu, “Horus clubs” were probably named in recognition
of the Egyptian god, Horus. One of the major Egyptian divinities, Horus was the son of
Osiris, the god of the underworld, and Isis, the goddess of nature; Horus was then a
natural name for a group of aspiring moriticians. Phone and personal interview with the
several, current members of Epsilon Nu Delta Mortuary Fraternity gave the research
access to this fragmentary history. There is no through examination of the systemic
professionalization of Black men in the funeral business. Although the African American
funeral industry has not been completely ignored. See, for example: Juliet E. K. Walker.
Encyclopedia of Aﬁican Business History. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999).

9 Carolyn P. DuBose. The Untold Story of Charles Diggs: The Public Figure, The Private

 

M;an. (Arlington, VA: Barton Publishing House, Inc., 1998,) 8. The construction of a
US. highway cut through the Brewster community, the humble beginnings and homes to
many Motown entertainers, including Diana Ross. According to urban research
conducted by June Manning Thomas, the Brewster Homes were the results of both local
and national housing iniatives. In 1933, Detroit established the city’s housing
commission. Four years later, the Housing Act of 1937 gave US. cities the authority to
purchase land, build low cost housing units, and maintain through the city’s housing
commissions. After the US. governmental agency that oversaw public housing
construction, the Public Works Administration, approved Detroit’s desire site in 1937, the
Brewster Homes were built. Thomas’s study of “redevelopment” provides insight into
how this neighborhood of some 701 “fortunate Black families” who had moved into the
units in 1938. Detroit’s plan of “improvement,” however, eventually gave the City of
Detroit the property on which the House of Diggs had prospered. At that point the House
of Diggs left the community and expanded to four different locations. City planners
serendipitously dislocated the House of Diggs, but permanently dislodged hundreds of
Black families in the process. For a detailed social analysis of the power and pawning of

Detroit city planners see the work of June Thomas. Redevelopment and Race: Planning A

 

187

 

Finer City in Postwar Detroit. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
For a complete, historical context of African American community building in Detroit,

see: Thomas, Richard Thomas. Life for us is what we make it: Building Community in

 

Detroit, 1915-1945 (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992).

 

'6 DuBose, The Untold Story, 5, 8-9, passim.

 

H DuBose. The Untold Story, 8. The Michigan Compiled Laws of 1948 interrupted the

 

modern methods by which Black men afﬁrmed their control over Black families’

mortuary needs.

'2 DuBose. The Untold Story, 8.

 

‘3 DuBose. The Untold Story, 8.

 

'4 The Michigan Compiled Laws. 1956, Act 218, Eff. Jan. 1, 1957. For an entire history
of how life insurance and funeral services were combined and bourgeois politics deﬁed,

see: Robert A. Weems,, Jr.. Black business in the Black metropolis : the Chicago

 

Metropolitan Assurance Company, 1925-1985. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 1996).

 

'5 DuBose. The Untold Story, 8.

 

‘6 DuBose, The Untold Story, 9.

 

H DuBose, The Untold Story, 9.

 

'6 DuBose. The Untold Story, 8. The Michigan Compiled Laws of 1948 interrupted the

 

modern methods by which Black men afﬁrmed their control over Black families’

mortuary needs.

188

 

'6 DuBose. The Untold Story, 3- 4 passim.

 

26 Jesse Jackson. Interviewed in Part 2 of “Too Close to Heaven: The History of Gospel

Music.” Princeton, NJ: .” Films for the Humanities & Sciences, 1997.

21 Richard Thomas, “Charles C. Diggs: Symbol of an Age,” in Thomas, Life For Us, 265-
269.

22 Statistical information taken from one agency, but prepared by another. Initial
publication credit goes to the Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) File, 1990 Census
of Population and Housing. Actual printout of information was provided by the
Applications Programming Ofﬁce, (East Lansing, MI:, Michigan State University,
December 1998).

23 Vanderlyn R. Pine, Caretaker of the Dead: The American Funeral Director (New

York: Irvington Publishers, Inc.), 28.

24 Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death Revisited (New York: Alﬁed A. Knopf,
1998), xi.

25 In other words,
the orientation, education, and training of funeral directors are
based on the philosophy of professionals [and] the occupational
ethos of funeral service is that the funeral director's most important
job is that of providing professional services at the time of death.

Pine, Caretaker, 25, 27, 28.

26 Mitford, The American Way, xi.

189

 

27 Pine, Caretaker, 29, 30.

28 Pine, Caretaker, 31-33, 157-61.
29 Pine, Caretaker, 26,27, 30.

3 6 Pine, Caretaker, 27.

31 Pine states this quite plainly
The American funeral director is a death professional partly
because he hopes to improve the public's conception of his
occupation and partly because he is one of the few people in
our society who actually knows what can, should, and must
be done following death.

Pine, Caretaker, 28 (emphasis mine).
32 Department of Labor, 159.
33 Department of Labor, 160.
34 Department of Labor, 160.

35 The Michigan Occupational Code, Public Act 299 of 1980 as amended (Article 18),
Board of Examiners in Mortuary Science dictates the preparation and training of funeral
home directors.
339.1806 Practice of mortuary science; license; requirements;
inspection; revocation or cancellation
Sec. 1806. (1) The department [State of Michigan, Department of
Consumer & Industry Services] shall issue a license to engage in the

practice of mortuary science to an individual who has served as a resident

190

 

trainee for 1 year under the personal supervision and instruction of the
holder of a license for the practice of mortuary science, has graduated
from a 3-year course in mortuary science in an accredited school, college,
or university, has satisfactorily passed the examination approved by the
department and the board [of examiners in mortuary science, created in
1980], and is of good moral character. The applicant may take the
examination in 2 parts, 1 part after the completion of the prescribed
education and 1 part after the completion of the prescribed education and

the service of resident training.

State of Michigan, Department of Consumer & Industry Services, Ofﬁce of Commercial
Services. Excerpts ﬁom the Michigan Occupational Code, Public Act 299 of 1 980 as
amended (Article 18), Board of Examiners in Mortuary Science. (Lansing, Michigan:
State of Michigan, 1995), 2.

3 6 Suzanne Jolicoeur, Department of Consumer and Industry Service, Ofﬁce of
Commercial Services, Board of Mortuary Science Administrator, Telephone Interview
(Lansing, MI: December 15, 1998). The Board of Mortuary Science, a public agency,
interprets and enforces the laws of the Michigan legislature regulating the behavior of
funeral directors. They also clarify and update speciﬁc rules concerning the licensing of
funeral directors. For example, Ms. Jolicoeur told me that mortuary the board determined
that school candidates need the following semester hour credits in certain disciplines: 3
hrs/computer science; 6 hrs/composition or business writing, 3 hrs/ public speaking or
communication; 8 hrs/chemistry lab and lecture; 6 hrs/accounting, and 6 hrs/psychology,
death and dying, or gerontology. The total number of credit hours expected of these
hopeﬁils equaled a two year liberal arts degree or sixty hours. WSU also takes the
possession of the B.A. as fulﬁllment of their educational requirement for admission to

mortuary school.

37 After 1949, Michigan mortuary statues combined the positions of funeral director and

embalmer or mortician. From this point on, the designation "funeral director" primarily

191

 

serves as a description for both occupations. Also, several authors use the term

"undertaker" or "practitioner" as synonyms for this funeral director.

36 Some funeral establishments sidestep the appropriate order of operation regarding

apprenticeship, e. g., hiring recent high school graduates interested in their business.

39 The set of assignments include, but are not limited to: twenty-ﬁve reports as evidence
of the trainee's assistance with or primary responsibility for embalming; accurate
recording, ﬁling, and submission of appropriate death certiﬁcates; various practical
applications such as cosmetics ("restorative art"), helping families make funeral

arrangements, removing and transporting the deceased.

46 As a public agency, the Michigan Mortuary Board operates independently of private
organizations such as the National Funeral Directors Association (N FDA). Yet, the

NF DA collects information regarding state licensing procedures. For example, the NFDA
keeps track of those states with continuing education policies. That is to say, some states
(unlike Michigan) require that licensed, funeral directors to complete ﬁfteen hours of
related study every two years in order to maintain their certiﬁcation. In the State of

Michigan, the awarding of the license marks completion of certiﬁcation prerequisites.

4‘ A criminal record check sufﬁces the Board of Mortuary Science in their personal
background check. However, more than one section of the Michigan Occupational Code
from the Board of Examiners in Mortuary Science addresses the funeral director's
deportment. See below and also note 10.
393.1808 Resident trainee; license; qualiﬁcations, service; notice;
reports; statement; supervision.
Sec.1808. (1) The department [of Consumer & Industry Services] shall
issue a license as a resident trainee to an individual who is of good moral

character and possesses a high school diploma or its equivalent.

State of Michigan, Excerpts ﬁom the Michigan Occupational Code, 3-4, emphasis mine.

192

 

42 Cole Funeral Home employs more than half a dozen people. A secretary handles the
clerical duties of the front ofﬁce, several receptionists interact with visitors to the
establishment, and drivers transport the deceased and their families from homes,
hospitals, churches, etc. Licensed funeral director or morticians perform embalming and

cosmetic services.

63 Aﬁican American or Black families comprised the majority of the Cole clientele. At
this time, while Karla and her staff serve other people of color and occasionally a white

family, Black families remain the primarily customers of the Cole Funeral Homes.

44 Recent literature on US. families shows more critical analyses in family studies. For
example, some researchers of Black families place emphasis on the cognitive, social, and
political consequences of certain concepts and terminology. In this vein, Niara
Sundarkasa explains the difference between family and household. Sundarkasa ﬁnds that
policy makers make the mistake of collapsing these two units of analysis. Sundarkasa
believes that the traditional household structure of most Black families often includes
people outside the nuclear construct. Therefore, fathers or husbands tend not symbolize
household stability as they do in nuclear family representation. Whether or not men
comprise the decision makers of the family, the household as a functioning unit within
Black communities needs serious attention. This focus helps balance pervasive,
disparaging portraits of Black family life. Niara Sundarkasa, "Interpreting the African
Heritage in Afro-American Family Organizations," in Black Families, Harriet Pipes
McAddo, ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998.

45 Karla Cole relies on her only sibling, a school teacher, for sporadic help with
accounting. She calls on her sister whenever she needs some assistance with Cole's
ﬁnancial matters and books. While her sister shares this responsibility for the family
business, she expressed early on her decision to pursue an alternative to the funeral home

industry.

193

 

46 While Cole Funeral Home is the oldest, Black-owned funeral establishment in Detroit,
it is not the only Black-owned funeral establishment. There are, however, only a few
business which handle a comparable volume of customer calls, i.e. the number of funerals
per month. Swanson, McF all, and Thompson Funeral Homes of Detroit all contend with

Cole Funeral Homes in terms of their customer base and revenues.

47 The relationship of Black service professionals and the communities probably reﬂect
the dynamics of other urban populations in modern America. While the neighborly doctor
or banker of rural imagination may not be evident in the urban centers, comparisons of
immigrant, working class, and "old guar " middle income areas within a particular
metropolis may reﬂect more personal interaction between professionals and the
neighboring society. What maybe helpful are national investigations of communal issues
such as health insurance, death beneﬁts, and supplemental resources through the presence
of extended family members within emigrant, immigrant, and migrant communities in
modern US. history. The signiﬁcance of extended family members enjoys a central role
in many studies of Aﬁican American history, especially in discussions on the survival of
Black families. For some examples of this literature see: Sundarkasa, "Interpreting the
African Heritage,"; Carol Stacks All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black
Community. (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); Andrew Billingsley, Climbing Jacob ’s
Ladder: The Enduring Legacy of Aﬁican- American Families Climbing. New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1992; Herbert Gutrnan, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom,
1750-1925. New York: Pantheon Books, 1976.

46 Tenisha Mercer, “Black-owned funeral homes feel threat.” Crain ’s Detroit Business.
September 8, 1997. However, Mr. Alonzo Betts serves solely as the manager/funeral
home director at Browne's Mortuary in Saginaw while Karla Cole, Michael Johnson, and

James Riley are all owner/operators of their respective enterprises.

194

 

4'9 For a more in depth look at this development and speciﬁc responses see: Ian
Portsmouth, "The Trial of Ray Loewen: F uneral-home mogul Ray Loewen built an
industry giant by expanding almost effortlessly into the US. Then he was blindsided by a
legal and cultural gap he never knew existed," Profit: The Magazine for Canadian
Entrepreneurs, Vol. 15, no. 1 (February/March 1996): 24-32; Ross Laver, "Bargain
priced burials," Maclean’s (Toronto Edition), vol. 110, no. 28, (July 14, 1997): 38; author
not cited, "Takeover ﬁght livens up death-care business," Financial Post, vol. 90, no. 38,
(September 21/23, 1996): 78; Jennifer Hunter, "Taking on the giants: a consumer
revolution is shaking things up in the funeral business," Maclean's (Toronto Edition), vol.
1 10, no. 40, (October 6, 1997): 62. The Loewen Group, Inc. listed their company on the
New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in October 1996 under the symbol LWN. As of
Friday, May 14, 1999, their earning per share reﬂected -8.50 loss. Since its initial public
offering some ten years ago, according to The Loewen Group web site, the company
grew ...”from owning 47 funeral homes and one cemetery to its position today of owning
and operating over 1,100 funeral homes, 500 cemeteries, and 50 crematoria.” In addition,
The Loewen Group, Inc. home page claims that the company “. . .is the world’s second
largest publicly held funeral service and cemetery corporation in terms of revenues and
assets. The Company employs some 16,000 people and owns and operates. . .funeral
homes. . . [and] cemeteries in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.” See
also: The Loewen Group, Inc. http://www.loewengroup.com In addition to falling stock
prices, Loewen faces a particular stumbling block in the state of Michigan. To counter
monopolies in the funeral industry, Michigan enacted an anti-combination law which

prohibits one company from holding both cemeteries and funeral homes.

5 6 Hylan Lewis. “Small Southern Town,” in The Black Church in America. New York:
Basic Books, Inc., 1971.

 

61 Karla F.C. Holloway. Passed On: Aﬁican American mourning stories: A memorial.

 

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). State penitentiary guards shot and killed
Karla’s son as he was trying to escape. She wrote her book to display her love for him.

Gomez and Roediger argue that the physical embrace of the dead Black body is deﬁnitely

195

 

an Aﬁican retention. Therefore, Dr. Holloway’s memorial to her son, the publication of a
book about Aﬁican American mourning maintains the academic and spiritual integrity of
the historical signiﬁcance of funerary display. Gomez, Exchanging, 274-78; Roediger,
“And Die in Dixie,” 168-70.

CHAPTER FIVE

' The literature on the Till lynch-murder includes published materials such as
monographs, anthologies, popular magazine features, pamphlets, newspaper articles, and
broadsides. There are also other media such as ﬁlm documentaries as well as research
papers. For lengthier descriptions, analyses and reports of aftermath and legacy of the Till
case: See, for example: Clenora Hudson-Weems. Emmett Till: The Sacriﬁcial Lamb of
the Civil Rights Movement. (Troy, MI: Bedford Publishers, Inc.,), 1994; Christopher
Metress, ed. The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative. (Charlottesville,

 

 

 

VA: University of Virginia Press, 2002); William M. Simpson. “Reﬂections on a Murder:
The Emmett Till Case,” in Southern Miscellany: Essays in History in Honor Glover

Moore, Frank Allen Dennis, ed. (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi, 1981); William

 

Bradford Huie, “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,” in Look:
America ’s Family Magazine. v 20 n 2, (January 24, 1956): 46-50; William Bradford
Huie, “What’s Happened to the Emmett Till Killers?” in Look: America ’3 Family
Magazine. v 21 n 2, (January 22, 1957): 63-66; Stephen J. Whitﬁeld, A Death in the
Delta: The Story of Emmett Till. (New York: The Free Press, 1988); Anne Sarah Rubin,
“Reﬂections on the Death of Emmett Till,” in Southern Cultures. v2 n 1, (Fall 1995): 45-
66; Jacqueline Goldsby, “The High and Low Tech of It: The Meaning of Lynching and
the Death of Emmett Till,” in The Yale Journal of Criticism. v 9 n 2 (1996): 245-282;
Editorial Advisory Board, “L’Affaire Till in the French Press,” in The Crisis: A Record of
the Darker Races. v62 n10 (December 1955): 596-602; chapter 14, “Emmett Till:
Impudent Young Upstart Asking for Trouble,” in Ira B. Harkey, Jr., The Smell of

 

 

 

Burning Crosses: An Autobiography of a Mississippi Nemaperman. (Jacksonville,
Illinois: Harris-Wolfe & Company), 1967; William B. Huie. Wolf Whistle and Other
Stories. (New York: Signet Books, 1959); Warren Breed. “Comparative Newspaper

 

 

196

 

Handling of the Emmett Till Case,” in Journalism Quarterly. v35 n3 (Summer 1958):
291-298.

2 William M. Simpson. “Reﬂections on a Murder: The Emmett Till Case,” in Southern
Miscellany: Essays in History in Honor Glover Moore, Frank Allen Dennis, ed. (Jackson,

MS: University of Mississippi, 1981), 183.

 

3 Initially, Mr. Rayner had refused to pen the casket when Mrs. Bradley asked him if he
had a hammer to pen up the nailed shut box. In response to Rayner’s explanation, she
replied, “I haven’t signed anything, and I haven’t made any promises, and if you can’t
open that box, I can.” Mr. Rayner opened the casket. The conversation between Mr.
Rayner and Mrs. Bradley has been transcribed from the 2003 PBS documentary,
“American Experience: The Murder of Emmett Till.” The entire transcript of the
documentary is also on-line at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/til1/index.html.

 

4 For the PBS documentary, Mrs. Bradley conﬁded that she had actually tried to coax the
idea of visiting Money out of her son’s mind with a bribe. She herself had planned to take
a road trip to Nebraska and though that if she told Emmett he would get some time
behind the wheel that he would prefer to stay with her for the smnmer. 2003 PBS
documentary, “American Experience: The Murder of Emmett Till.” The entire transcript
of the documentary is also on-line at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/index.htrnl.

 

5 William Bradford Huie, “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,” in
Look: America ’s Family Magazine. v 20 n 2, (January 24, 1956): 46-50.

6 Huie, “The Shocking Story, “ 46.
7 Huie, “The Shocking,” 46.

6 Huie, “The Shocking,” 46.

197

 

9 Southern historian Alferdteen Harrison used the phrase “stay-at-home” in reference to
the majority of Black Southerners who did relocate to northern areas. Contrast her
discussions about non-migrant and migrant African Americans during the Great

Migration in: Black Exodus: The Great Migration From the American South (Jackson,

 

MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1991).

'6 Emmett’s father died in Europe during World War II by military execution.

H What emerged in the Look expose was a confession of murder that could not be
prosecuted because a Sumner jury of their peers had already given a not guilty verdict.
U.S. jurist prudence protected Emmett’s murders. Double jeopardy prohibited a second

indictment or trial for the same crime that had previously been adjudicated.

'2 On November 9, 1955, a LeFlore County grand jury in Greenwood, Mississippi refused
to indict Milam and Bryant on kidnapping charges. The two men had earlier confessed to

kidnapping prior to being acquitted on murder charges.

‘3 Bryant and Milam told Huie that they made Bo load the cotton gin fan which they
would later tie around the neck of his corpse, for example. Bo carried the gin to the bed
of the pick up truck and laid back down in the back on the truck instead of trying to

escape or resist in any way.
'4 Huie, “The Shocking,” 50.

‘5 All pictures are copy written, but have links at the PBS American Experience website

for the Till documentary: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/index.html.

 

'6 All memoirs are copy on-line at the PBS American Experience website for the Till

documentary: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/index.html

 

198

 

H Alfred Duckett. “Teenagers Give Meaning to Money: It’s the Worst,” in Chicago
Defender, September 24, 1955, 7.

'6 Attorney Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr., activist Julian Bond, and historian James Horton

contributed their memoirs on-line.

'9 “Memoirs,” on-line at the PBS American Experience website for the Till documentary:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/index.html. Autobiographies referencing the

 

inﬂuence of the Till murder on their ethnic identity within the United States include:
Anne Moody. Coming Of Age in Mississippi. (New York: Laurel Editions, 1968); Mrs.
Medgar Evers. For Us, the Living. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company,

 

 

Inc., 1967); and James F orrnan. The Making of Black Revolutionaries: A Personal
Account. New York: The Macmillam Company, 1972); Muhammad Ali. The Greatest:
My Own Stog. New York: Random House, 1975).

 

 

 

26 Mattie Smith Colin. “250,000 View Slain Youth’s Body,” Chicago Defender.
September 10, 1955. front page. Albert Barnett. “Till’s Murders Didn’t Know That A
Drowned Body Floats to the Surface,” in Chicago Defender. September 17, 1955.

2' All headlines and estimates were taken from one source: Christopher Metress, ed. E
Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative. (Charlottesville, VA: University of
Virginia Press, 2002), 31.

 

22 A year after Look published Huie’s article about “approved killing in Mississippi,”
they released an update to tell its readers what had happened to the Till killers. By
January 1957, Black people would not shop at the Bryant’s Grocery. African Americans
had been his most frequent customers. Milam could not get any Black men to work his
ﬁelds. Prior to Milam’s decision to become a god and take the life of children of whom
he disapproved, he had a reputation based on his effective supervision of Black

employees. For full details, see: William Bradford Huie, “What’s Happened to the

199

 

Emmett Till Killers?” in Look: America’s Family Magazine. v 21 n 2, (January 22,
1957): 66.

2’ Eventually, the NAACP. and Mrs. Bradley experienced serious miscommunications
and distrust. She was uninvited, for example, from a membership drive and accusations
ﬂew back and forth concerning the misappropriations of monies collected either in the
name of the NAACP. or contributions given speciﬁcally given to support Mrs. Bradley
through her ordeal. The N.A.A.C.P. used media such as the Chicago Defender as
propagandist Opportunities to channel anger into activism. See, for example, John Earl
Lewis, “Lewis Says Fight Fill Tragedy By Joining NAACP,” in Chicago Defender.
September 10, 1955, 4.

24 “Primary Sources: Reactions in Writing,” on-line at the PBS American Experience
website for the Till documentary: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/index.html;
“Readers Flood Defender with Letter About Till,” Chicago Defender. September 17,
1955, 3; “Letters Blasting Lynchers of Till Still Pouring In,” in Chicago Defender.
September 24, 1955, 8; “Citizens Flood Ike, Brownell [sic] With Wires Asking Justice,”
Chicago Defender, September 10, 1955; Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley even “urged

President Dwight D. Eisenhower to use all the facilities of the federal government to see

 

that justice is served on the slayer sof l4-year old Emmett Louis Till of Chicago.”

Daley’s quote was printed in the same issue.

25 D. Jones of San Antonio, Texas mailed a letter to the editor of the Chicago Defender
that was printed in their December 10, 1955 issue which they called, “Just No Justice.”
Jones lamented: “I understand the Justice department says there is nothing it can do about
the Emmett L. Till case, despite the evidence in the case. Well, if the Department can’t
act in this case, just when and where can it act?” The Justice Department received an
investigative report from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The director of the FBI, J.
Edgar Hoover, even wrote a personal letter to civil rights attorney Thurgood Marshall to
explain that private citizens were responsible for what had happened to Till, not an

organization. The other limitation in ﬁnding grounds for federal prosecution was that

200

 

neither the body nor crime had crossed state lines. The letter from FBI Director J. Edgar
Hoover was dated September 30, 1955 and is reprinted on-line at the PBS at the PBS
American Experience website for the Till documentary:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/index.html;

26 Mamie Till’s reclamation of her son’s body is no less a story of tragic loss, love,
heroism than the civil disobedience of the Sophocles’ classical character, making Mamie
Till was a post-modem Antigone. The Greek tragedy of Sophocles’ Antigone is an apt
metaphor for the heartbreaking murder of Emmett Till and the national funerary drama
that African Americans rendered for his mother. Antigone deﬁed a civil command that
would have left one of her brother’s dead bodies unburied and dishonored. Although both
of her brothers had been killed in Thebes’ civil war, the new ruler of Thebes, Creon, had
decreed that the bodies of those who fought against him would not receive customary,
funeral rites. Antigone’s sister refused to help Antigone bury the body of their brother
who had fought on the losing side because of Creon’s penalty of death for those who kept
familial obligations to the dead of the opposing side. Antigone buried her brother’s body
by herself. In defense of her action, she argued unapologetically about the morality of her
civil disobedience. In the end, the omniscient gods themselves are said to have sided with
Antigone, although she herself would later take her own life. Mamie Bradley Till gave
herself permission to publicly display the mutilated remains of her teenage son. She gave
herself permission to indulge in the emotional obsesses that Northern bourgeois
respectability had checked during the modern era.

27 Milam told Huie that Emmett was too tall, too heavy, and too fresh for him to consider
Emmett a “child.” Other critiques also questioned the childhood of the youth. Emmett’s
peers across the country, however, saw him as a child. Most importantly, Emmett’s

mother had lost her only child. If not a child to anyone else, he was her baby.

26 “Interview with Robin Kelley: Open Casket,” on-line at the PBS American Experience

website for the Till documentary: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/index.html.

 

201

 

29 DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro, 40-42 passim; Gomez, Exchanging, 277; Miriam
deCosta-Willis, ed.. The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995),
2.

 

 

3 6 James A. Emanuel, “Emmett Till,” in The Poetry of Black America: Anthology of the
20‘6 Century. Arnold Adoff, editor. (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1973), 179.

 

 

Conclusion

' Houston’s biography written by Genna Rae McNeil is a must read as well as a viewing
California Newsreel documentary, “The Road to Brown: The untold story of ‘the man
who killed Jim Crow’” for every student of the African American civil rights movement.
See: Genna Rae McNeil. Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for
Civil Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983, ﬁrst edition.

2 Michael Katz,, ed. 1993. The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History. Princeton, NJ:

 

Princeton University Press.

3 Activist-scholars like bell hooks for example, have encouraged theorists of the Aﬁican
Diaspora to tell death stories in order to present the positive functions of Black families
across time and place. Like the healing power of love, bell hooks argues, not poverty or
racial oppression, white patriarchy nor capitalist greed have stolen the signiﬁcance of
death care from Black families. Other scholars such as Audrey B. Chapman echo the
undeniable power of love in the Aﬁican American past and its indispensable necessity in
the African American future. Cultural historians of the Black experience make their
living by providing memories and lessons from the past. Therefore, historical
reconstructions of African American funerary behavior are depictions of Black love.
Community clients, as a conceptual model, simply provides a historical description that

reﬂects it. In doing so, this historical conceptualization demythologizes misleading

202

 

perceptions of poor, Black families, exposing the imprecision of some social policies.
Conceptualized in their true historical roles, poor Black families could not be stereotyped

as societal pariah dependent on exhaustible, public funds. See: bell hooks. A Woman’s

 

Mourning Song. New York : London : Harlem River Press,1993); bell hooks. Sisters of

 

the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery. (Toronto: Between The Lines, 2001); bell

hooks. Salvation: Black People and Love. (New York: William Morrow); Also see:

 

Audrey B. Chapman. “The Search for Love and Devotion: Facing the Future Against All
Odd.” In Black Families, 3rd edition, edited by Harriette Pipes McAdoo. (Thousand Oaks,
CA: SAGE Publications, Inc., 1997); And: Sharon Patricia Hollard. Raising The Dead:
Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,

 

 

2000); and Karla F.C. Holloway. Passed On: Aﬁican American mourning stories: A
memorial. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).

203

APPENDIX

204

APPENDIX A

COLE WRITES WIDOW WHEELER CONCERNING BALANCE ON ACCOUNT

JAMES H. COLE. JR.

“If Cum

...a scam Avmuz UNDERTAKER r... in. ﬁrst: meet
WALNUT 4820

TWO MOD‘RN ISTAILISHMZNTS WI.“ .

November 25. 192‘.)

Mrs. Ruby Wheeler
2960 Clinton Street
Detroit. Michigan

My Dear Mrs. ﬂheelor1-

do would certainly appreciate it very
much if you would call in and make a payment on your bul-
unoe which amounts to $73.50. You promiaud to be in about
the 10th of thin month but I suppose it slipped your mem-

ory. / "4

V

I have called several times but wan ’
never fortunate enough to find you at home. .

Ii’ yousxtbllt can on I will come res
any money you may have for me or will send Mina Hurst, my
Secretary. .Please make payments only to her or to me.

Hoping to hear from you this week. I

Very truly yours.

Yu'valn

205

APPENDIX B

_,_____ JAMES H. com Jn.‘ ~ A" '6 . 44
“ml“
'w-

NMAKIR
TWO HODIIN tum-Luann”? x

Detroit. Mid-1.. ..L.-. II-___5LL_.LLL‘ 1912..
MrsL .Bubx Wherr ..L _L. LLLL ..LLL.

9' 1
11311 Jan l‘nnmnu ' ‘

 

   
  
       

rj“"-""" 4 v :
' .JAMES H meg-“LE3“

i .
1 momma-mt)“ .
I

.

alor

   

lira. Ruby 4 '
zeao'onnto’n apt
Detroit. "#913185”

1..
..-

206

APPENDIX C

COLE INCLUDES AN ITEMIZED RECEIPT OF THE WHEELER ACCOUNT

JAMES H. COLE. JR. . ‘3'.

— _- ....
— m avenue UNDERTAKER
”Al-I‘m“
Two nonznu [ITAILIsnuiu‘u
Detroit. Manamhlﬁié '

 

M re. Ruby Ruggier-

RVL'K R Pm» t

To tuner-3101382311385 of Jags: Igoler. deceased.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

l casket _ LL“- Lie oo'
4 ‘7 0 o t a Box a 4 2 913
3.x u E}. 0-- ---1,-.‘. ; V‘s . . A .
_ oz 2..o’U Embalming _ ,_ , ' 10"00" ":
’ iii/.d-U Removal charge 6 0‘0:
6‘. 0’0 . ' 7” 1 T”
xT-‘f—d B Oars and Hear"... 2_ 00,
4 I‘ereonal,nrvioea...a._. ..L.L10 ’03:. -
291.0190 Gr"- -.9p.9.n.1ns. . ‘ 2216‘ '
L7. ".6- ﬁnial tumors . ' 3‘50 -
/”73 I 3 A-
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. , James E. 001e,» JriL ,/ 7 d '
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. ”’3 ,1.“ . - W 4‘3”}! ca ,-

207

APPENDIX D

JAMES H. COLE. JR..

UNDERTAKER
0

TWO M ODIRN “TAIL-Ill! HINTS
..

lay 1.

 

‘ Detroit. Mich,

 

 

’1

 

 

 

 

208

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MrnL Ruby ‘llhaalar
4W Ave- .5
Re: James Wheeler, deceased. .- -.L .. -.--LL.--
BALANCE our. TODATE 113,320 -. ,_
James H. _;Co,l.e., Jr....i--. L ..- ..L ----..L -
“M“ *r' 6'63: _
I
‘f
’\

APPENDIX E

ACQUISITION GROUPS

Betts compiled this chart ﬁom data contained in Mortuary Management. Abbott & Hast

Publications. Monterey, California. Published nationwide since 1914

Sentry

SCI
(Bay City and
Flint)

ECl
Combined
SCI and ECl
Keystone

Prime
Succession

Loewen~
(Saginaw)
as of 1 1/21/97

Liberty
(Detroit)

Stewart

Carriage

as of 1 1/21/97

~Year-to- As of
date 11/21/97

STATES/ LOCATIONS
COUNTRIES
24
18 countries 3292
35 (l 326
province)
3618
12 42
20 144
1000
12 *
507
19 1 l6
Loewen Loewen's
Acquisitions: Pending
236 Million Acquisitions:

131 Million

209

C REMATORIES

174

175

CEMENTARIES

422

81

503

20

420 *

133

APPENDIX F

AFRICAN-AMERICAN DEATH CALLS/SAGINAW COUNTY IN1998*

 

 

BROWNE BLACK EVANS OTHER MONTH YTD PERCENTAGES
% # % # % # °/o # TOTALS Browne’s Black Evans Other

Jan 59% 13 9% 2 32% 7 0 22 59% 9% 32% 0
Feb 52% 13 20% 5 20% 5 8% 2 25 55% 15% 26% 4%
March 53% 10 10% 2 37% 7 0 19 54% 14% 29% 3%
April 42% 8 5% 1 42% 8 1 1% 2 19 52% 12% 32% 4%
May 52% 16 13% 4 32% 10 3% 1 31 52% 12% 32% 4%
June 39% 12 16% 5 32% 10 13% 4 31 49% 13% 32% 6%
July 51% 14 6% 2 40% l I 3% 1 28 49% 12% 33% 6%
Aug 70% 16 4% l 17% 4 9% 2 23 52% 1 1% 3 1% 6%
Sept 27% 6 27% 6 36% 8 10% 2 22 49% 13% 32% 6%
Oct 44% 14 19% 6 34% 1 1 3% 1 32 48% 14% 32% 6%
Nov 3 8% 8 24% 5 3 8% 8 0 21 48% 14% 3 3% 5%
Dec 60% 1 9 3% 1 3 1 % 1 0 6% 2 32 49% 13% 32% 6%
YEAR’ 149 40 99 17 305

8 AVG.

 

*Betts explained that a high volume of calls does not necessarily indicate signiﬁcant revenues.
Browne’s Mortuary buries many people who receive federal assistance such as veteran’s pensions, social
security beneﬁts, and other forms of welfare. According to Betts, the “class” of Browne’s clientele often
reﬂects people from modest or poor income households. In contrast, the higher “class,” in Bett’s wording,
comfortably spends more money on funeral needs. Therefore, a high volume of lower “class” funerals fails
to produce signiﬁcant proﬁts especially in cases where the funeral owner (not the manager) decides to bury

an individual despite an obvious ability to pay for services.

210

APPENDIX G

LANSING’S BLACK COMMUNITY SURVEY“

DEMOGRAPHIC PROFILE or CURRENT] POTENTIAL FUNERAL HOME CUSTOMERS, 1998

Age Range Sex Occupation Residence

25-40 F clerical Lansing
over 60 F homemaker Lansing
over 60 F retired Lansing
40-59 M laborer Lansing
25-40 F lab technician Lansing

Church Role

choir secretary

deaconess

church mother

Sunday School superintendent

preacher's wife

"All respondents identiﬁed themselves as “Black” in terms of racial category.

211

BIBLIOGRAPHY

212

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abbreviations for Manuscript Collections, Papers, and Archives

WSU-VF Wayne State University School of Mortuary Science Vertical Files
UNO-APB A.P. Boyer Undertaking, Univ. of New Orleans, Earl K. Long Library
UNO-F&S F rantz & Schoen Undertaking, Univ. of New Orleans, Long Library
UNO-MCC Marcus Christian Manuscript Collection, UNO, Long Library

NPL New Orleans Public Library

H/R-CRM Cora MacKarrow Collection, Harvard/Radcliffe, Schlesinger Library
DPL-LCCS Leontine Cole Smith, Burton Collection, Detroit Public Library

J HC James H. Cole, Jr. Business Correspondence and Personal Files
WSU-WR Labor/Urban Affairs Archives, Reuther Library, Wayne State Univ.
CFM Cole Family Memorabilia

UM-BHLC Bentley Historical Library Collections, The University of Michigan

Government, State, and City Documents
Soards’ 1896 City Directory for New Orleans, Louisiana
Soards’ 1897 City Directory for New Orleans, Louisiana

State of MichiganDepartment of Consumer & Industry Services, Office of Commercial
Services.Michigan Occupational Code. Public Act 299 of 1980, as amended
(Article 18). Board of Examiners in Mortuary Science. Department of Consumer
& Industry Services (December 1, 1995)

State of Michigan. Cemetery Regulation Act. (Act 251 of 1968) Department of Consumer
& Industry Services.

State of Michigan. The Michigan Compiled Laws. 1956, Act 218, Eff. Jan. 1, 1957.

US. Government Printing Ofﬁce. Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) File, 1990
Census of Population and Housing. Actual printout of information was provided by the
Applications Programming Oﬂice.

213

II

 

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California Newsreel Documentary, “The Road to Brown: The untold story of ‘the man
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Canﬁeld, S.A. Martha. Colored Orphan Asylum and Extracts from Mrs. Canﬁeld’s
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1909 http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/queryD?rbaapc:12:./temj)/~ammem IvIV::, pp. 11,
15, 20

James, Horace. Report of the Superintendent of Negro Affairs in North Carolina, 1864 in
From Slavery to Freedom: The Aﬁican-American Pamphlet Collection, 1824-1909
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Watson, Henry. Narrative of Henry Watson, A Fugitive Slave in From Slavery to
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Weber, J .H.. Pass System at Vicksburg. January 31, 1865 letter to Colonel Samuel
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Newspapers and Periodicals
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Chicago Defender

The Colored Embalmer

Jet Magazine

New Orleans Republic

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