Not So Black and White by Kenan Malik

Author:Kenan Malik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hurst
Published: 2022-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

VI

Frank Ferrell was an engineer, a socialist, and a lifelong trade unionist. He was also black. A leading member of the New York District 49 of the Knights of Labor, a cross-racial radical labour movement, in 1886 he was a delegate to the Knights’ annual conference, held that year in the South, in Richmond, Virginia. The District 49 delegation was due to stay at Murphy’s Hotel, owned by the Confederate veteran Captain John Murphy. He told them that only white people were permitted in the hotel, so Ferrell was barred. The delegates refused to segregate themselves. Instead, they came to Richmond carrying tents. Several boarded with black families. “The delegates”, the New York Times reported, “are determined to fight the battle on the color line right in the midst of that part of the country where race prejudice is the strongest, and they will insist on carrying on what they claim is a fundamental principle of their order—that the black man is the equal of the white socially as well as politically.”35

Ferrell was chosen to introduce Terence Powderly, the Knights’ president or “Grand Master Workman”, to the 800 delegates, sitting on the same platform as Virginia’s Governor Fitzhugh Lee. And in the evening Ferrell joined white delegates to watch a performance of Hamlet at Richmond’s Mozart Academy of Music, the first black man to sit in the “white” seats in the town’s history.

All this created a national sensation, dividing opinion across the land and among the Knights. The New York Herald called District 49 delegates “anarchists” and told the Knights that “they must take the world as it is”. The Raleigh News and Observer thought it “well that our people should be warned in time of the new and vile use to which the Knights of Labor organization is to be put”. But the Philadelphia Press praised the stance of the New York delegates, insisting that “Laboring men struggling to better their condition have a common cause which binds them together in a common brotherhood. There can be no color line.”36

A leader of the Knights in Richmond told the Richmond Dispatch that the actions of District 49 delegates were “an outrage upon the people of this city, and an insult to the Knights of Labor of the United States”. A letter from a “white Virginian Knight” in the New York Tribune criticized, however, Virginia’s “political aristocracy… which has no sympathy for the workingman, and which seeks to perpetuate its political control by appeals to race prejudice”. The Boston Herald cited “a conservative and influential citizen of Richmond” who acidly told Northern Knights to get their own house in order: “New York and Massachusetts lodges have been the most persistent in their refusal to admit colored Masons into their lodges, and yet a party of New Yorkers undertake to force a social equality upon us that they do not practice themselves.” Powderly himself wrote a letter to the Richmond Dispatch insisting that he had “no wish to interfere with the social

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