South Side Girls

Growing Up in the Great Migration

Duke University Press

Contents

"DO YOU SEE THAT GIRL?"

The Dependent, the Destitute, and the Delinquent Black Girl

In the September 1916 edition of the Amanda Smith School News, principal Adah M. Waters painted a bleak picture of African American girlhood at the dawn of the Great Migration era. Waters asked readers: "Do you see the ragged, unkempt foul-mouthed girl that stands at the street corner pelting those boys with stones for jostling her from the sidewalk?" Founded in 1899 by Christian missionary Amanda Smith as the Amanda Smith Orphanage and Industrial Home for Abandoned Destitute Colored Children, Waters's school had started out as Illinois's first orphanage for African American children. Renamed and reconstituted in 1912 as the Amanda Smith Industrial School for Colored Girls, it relied on Waters's fundraising appeals to stir black Chicagoans to action on behalf of her girls. Waters described a girl with a "face ... clouded by sullen passion," wearing "soiled motley clothing ... her scant cover for [her] unwashed body." She warned that this girl's survival and success was important not only in the case of one abandoned child but also for all African Americans at the dawn of a new era. "Nevertheless the young body may imprison a soul destined by the All-Father to say the word, do the deed, think the thought, and live the life that may move or revolutionize a world. Be careful! A soul with mighty potentialities is about to be worse than wasted! That girl ... needs love, the right environment and training."

The Amanda Smith Industrial School for Colored Girls offered the "right environment and training" for a black girl abandoned by an unwed mother, or for a teenager orphaned by migrant parents whose immune systems had been unable to resist an influenza outbreak. The school bulletin, a key tool for thanking benefactors and attracting potential donors, illustrated the multifaceted concerns about African American girls in Chicago: vulnerability on city streets, harassment from boys, poor or neglectful parents who did not know or care to bathe and properly clothe their daughters, exposure to scrutiny and disdain from onlookers, and worst of all, the lack of a family or community to cultivate a girl's gifts and talents. In one carefully crafted paragraph, Waters invited Chicagoans to consider what they could do to save this girl and other black girls. She also challenged them to think about what girls could ultimately be for their families, communities, and race. The school's brief history demonstrates the enmeshed issues facing African American girls and their advocates from the years immediately preceding the first wave of the Great Migration and extending into the pivotal period when Chicago's black population soared.

The formation of the Amanda Smith Industrial School for Colored Girls and its leaders' tireless efforts to keep it open reveal the complicated ways the first industrial school for orphaned black girls in Chicago made the case for the proper care of black girls by arguing that they were indeed children who were worthy of protection. Paradoxically, the school's advocates did this by emphasizing black girls' future importance: as race mothers, they would lead the crucial work of racial uplift and community rehabilitation. In addition, these advocates established a narrative of black girlhood that was centered on the sanctity and possibilities of the black home and family in an era when poverty and racism severely limited black Chicagoans' ability to fulfill even the smallest parts of the uplift mandate. Fears about girls' sexuality, as well as the suitability of black leaders to manage their own community resources, locked black girls into an impossible position in community battles. Girls' advocates used black girls' moral and social fitness as an indicator of race progress and health in order to compel black Chicagoans to act on behalf of institutions like the Amanda Smith Industrial School for Colored Girls. This chapter uncovers the rhetorical approaches to convincing Chicagoans to care for orphaned black girls and considers the material conditions that created destitution among this population, in order to reveal how black communities highlighted and obscured the impact of the Great Migration on black girls.

In order to better understand the struggles and significance of the Amanda Smith Industrial School for Colored Girls, I look to the organizational strategies of Smith, her successor Waters, and the commitment of the school's board member Ida B. Wells-Barnett in order to present the difficulties of work with girls at the dawn of the Migration. I situate the school in relationship to two important institutional movements in Chicago. The school's founding coincided with the growth of children's social services within a network of orphanages, the Juvenile Court, and girls' homes established and managed by influential white women. As a black institution, the School also contended with the alliances and brokerage politics of the Urban League and other African American organizations led by men. These forces impeded black women's ability to control institutions for girls, and the school's brief history illustrates how shifts in power influenced attitudes and perspectives on black girls' future in Chicago. Through careful examination of cases adjudicated in the city's Court of Domestic Relations and the School's records, a view of the early years of the Migration emerges that shows how black girls and young women entered the foyers, parlors, and admission desks of institutions devoted to their care and other spaces that merely tolerated their presence. The stories in this chapter move beyond the anecdote about the sullen girl longing for the right home and toward the actual girls—some abandoned, some criminalized, some searching for autonomy—who experienced the limits of Chicago's ability to protect and care for them.

This chapter is divided into two sections, the first one devoted to Amanda Smith's journey from slavery into prominence as a figure in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Smith's remarkable life, which included close relationships with leaders in an array of social movements and great renown among black and white Methodists, highlights the racial dynamics of women's reform culture in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cities. Smith's 1893 autobiography, The Story of the Lord's Dealings with Mrs. Amanda Smith, the Colored Evangelist: Containing an Account of her Life, Work of Faith, and her Travels in America, England, Ireland, Scotland, India and Africa, as an Independent Missionary, detailed her visits to orphanages in India and Liberia. She shared with her audience her perspectives on child-rearing, black girlhood, and commitment to the racial uplift beliefs that circulated among her cohort of black institution builders. This section also provides context for understanding Chicago's networks of orphanages, children's homes, and industrial training schools that sought to protect and rehabilitate children, especially those from immigrant and black migrant families.

The second section focuses on the establishment and operations of the Amanda Smith Industrial School for Colored Girls, specifically the racial tensions that hampered its progress and its position in debates about the nature of black girlhood, race, and sexuality. I present a snapshot of girls whom the Juvenile Court and social workers deemed dependent, delinquent, and destitute and the many ways these girls and their families interacted with institutions. Even after its destruction by fire in 1918, the school remained a source of contention and inspiration for black leaders.

THE LORD'S DEALINGS WITH AMANDA SMITH

Nearly a decade before Waters asked if African Americans could truly see the desperate state of their girls, Amanda Smith presided over the institution that she believed was the fulfillment of a great call from God. Smith's journey from her birth into slavery on a plantation in Long Green, Maryland, in 1837 to the morning of June 28, 1899, when she christened the Amanda Smith Orphanage and Industrial Home for Abandoned Destitute Colored Children amid a "wild storm of wind and rain," was a remarkable one. Smith was the eldest girl of Samuel Berry and Miriam Matthews's thirteen children. Berry purchased his family's freedom when Smith was a young girl, and the newly emancipated family settled in Pennsylvania. Smith's early life was filled with tragedies nearly as dismal as her years in bondage. She lost one husband to the Civil War and she endured the deaths of four of her five children by the age of thirty-two. In order to resist bouts of depression and temptations from the secular world, Smith attended lively religious camp meetings and revivals. In 1868, after years of attending invigorating celebrations of faith, Smith committed herself fully to God and became "sanctified"—the pinnacle of human purity in the AME Church. She preached and performed songs at Methodist camp meetings for nine years before she heard the call to go overseas to spread the Word.

In an era when few black women traveled outside their towns and counties, Smith was among a privileged group of black women missionaries who spread Christianity abroad. She set sail for England in 1878, and her next destination, India, proved most valuable to her later work, as she ministered to Christian converts in a church-sponsored orphanage. Smith concluded her missionary years in Africa, traveling to Liberia and across West Africa, again working in orphanages. She adopted two children while overseas, a boy named Robert and a girl, Frances. Robert later joined the other orphans at the Amanda Smith Orphanage and Industrial Home for Abandoned Destitute Colored Children.

This evangelist's decision to establish an orphanage and later a girls' school drew on her personal experiences as a widowed mother to her own daughter Maizie after the Civil War and as an adoptive mother to Frances, her beloved "Bassa girl" from Liberia, the nation colonized by freed US slaves in the 1820s. After Smith's first husband died, she sent Maizie to board with other families because she lacked the resources to raise her daughter alone. Smith agonized over this decision. "Sometimes she was well taken care of and other times was not. I found that often people do things just for the little money they get out of it." When a family neglected Maizie, and Smith "had to turn around and leave her," she "cried and prayed." Smith remarried in order to create a stable family for Maizie, but that marriage proved unsatisfactory. By the time she embarked on her speaking tour and missions abroad, she had found a school in Baltimore to care for and educate her daughter.

Later, Smith invited her daughter to travel to England and further her education, but Maizie wanted to marry instead. Smith was not initially pleased with her daughter's decision. Citing the fact that few black girls were afforded such a chance to travel, Smith told her daughter: "If you can risk losing the opportunity that not many colored girls have had, and that you will not have again, and think more of the man, and take him in preference after all I have said, I guess the safest plan is that you remain." Smith's affinity for her adopted daughter, Frances, was immediate, and perhaps the girl, who was twelve or thirteen years old when Smith met her, reminded her of the daughter she had had to leave behind in the States. Smith traveled with Frances and Robert to Sierra Leone but when she returned to the United Kingdom, she could not bring Frances with her because of the girl's poor health.

In her autobiography, Smith documented practices toward girls and teenage women that she observed in Africa that upset her. She vividly recounted witnessing a group of men beating a teenage girl, and she used her status as a missionary to retrieve the girl from her attackers and take her away from her much older husband. Smith was also critical of Liberia's tolerance of arranged marriages for adolescent girls. "Poor things, they are not consulted; they have no choice in the matter. If they don't like the man, they are obliged to go with him anyway, no matter how illy he may treat them; and sometimes they are cruelly treated. But their own father could not protect them." Smith also criticized the lack of educational opportunities for girls in Africa. "There is so little attention paid to the education of girls; not a single high school for girls in the whole republic of Liberia. It is a great shame and a disgrace to the government." Other Christian missionaries established schools akin to American industrial schools in Liberia, and Smith was impressed by the schools' training models. She was "delighted" with the Episcopal School's "house-keeping department, where in connection with their studies, each girl took her turn in the sweeping, dusting, making bread, biscuit, pie, or cake, and in washing dishes and attending the dining room. This, it seemed to me, was the most essential of all."

With memories of the African and Indian orphanages imprinted on her heart and mind, Smith returned to the United States in 1896. She immediately appealed to her friendships with white reformers to create a home for black children in Illinois. Her friend and colleague Frances Willard, founder of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), may have helped her settle in the town of North Harvey, a protemperance community thirty miles north of Chicago. Smith was an avid critic of African Americans who drank alcohol. In an 1886 article for the Christian Standard Home and Journal, she wrote: "Oh, how the curse of strong drink has almost ruined us as a church, as a republic, as a race. Africa's greatest need is temperance and holiness. Without these we never can be of any use to our native brethren, nor to ourselves." Willard recruited prominent black Christian women to join the temperance movement and spread the antialcohol message among blacks. Smith and Willard maintained a close relationship throughout Smith's life, despite the fact that many black clubwomen, notably antilynching advocate Ida B. Wells-Barnett, criticized the WCTU president for her apologies for southern lynching. Regardless of her ill feelings toward Willard, Wells-Barnett was among the most dedicated of the Amanda Smith Industrial School for Colored Girls—the later incarnation of Smith's project to help African American children.

BLACK CHILDREN AND INSTITUTIONAL CARE IN CHICAGO

Smith's decision to settle in the Chicago area was a fitting one, considering the city's status as a national model for civic reform and a center of advanced municipal services and child-care institutions in the late nineteenth century. Chicago's first orphanage was established in 1849 in response to a citywide cholera epidemic. Orphanages expanded through the following decades and cared for Protestant and Catholic children separately. Orphans often hailed from homes in which they still had a surviving or remaining parent but the family could not meet the child's needs. Despite the growth of children's institutions into the early twentieth century, few resources were made available to black children. Between 1899 and 1911, the Amanda Smith Orphanage and Industrial Home for Abandoned Destitute Colored Children was the only Protestant institution for the care of African American children in the state of Illinois.

Prior to Smith's opening of her orphanage and later christening of the Amanda Smith Industrial School for Colored Girls, care for black children varied across the state, and black women reformers wondered if the existing institutions provided equal attention and nurturing to black residents. Long before trains deposited scores of black southerners in Chicago, the smattering of blacks in the city and in small Illinois towns had been reading stories of black girls abandoned by the institutions that claimed to save them. On the afternoon of Friday, August 27, 1897, the Geneva State Reformatory for Girls had gathered six of its black residents to serve as pallbearers at the funeral of Annie Lulu Jackson, the first girl to die at the facility. Jackson, a fifteen-year-old resident, had arrived at Geneva in February 1896 in "sickly condition." Under the care of resident physician Doctor Benthol, the young girl had slowly recovered from consumption, or tuberculosis. Mysteriously, her health was improving when she passed away. For concerned black leaders, Jackson's death may have signaled the inability for white-run institutions to provide adequate care for black girls.

Civic and community agencies, such as the Illinois Children's Home and Aid Society (ICHAS), lent support to orphanages and other institutions, and they recognized a need for an organized system to care for black children before the tide of Migration. The ICHAS's 1913 investigation of twenty-two settlement house day nurseries, kindergartens, and orphanages reported that only half of these institutions were willing to accept African American children and often imposed restrictions on the ones they did admit. For instance, the Chicago Home for Boys claimed that they had tried to admit black children in the past and concluded that integration was a "failure" after one experiment. The Chicago Day Nursery Association admitted that white mothers had objected to their children sharing the nursery with African American children, and nursery heads had swiftly changed their stance on integration in their facility. The Salvation Army Emergency Lodge reported similar backlash because it had allowed integration in all its common areas and only segregated its sleeping quarters. "We found that this close association has caused discontent among the lodgers in a great many instances." The Chicago Foundling Home, established in 1871 to shelter single mothers and their babies, admitted black women and children, but the school's leader felt strongly that black communities were ultimately responsible for their own destitute children. The Home segregated residents in the dining facility, bedrooms, and infirmaries but allowed integration in the nursery and living areas. A 1926 study on similar issues included the opinion of the home's superintendent. "[He] feels very strongly that the Negro people should care for their own dependents, and therefore, preference is given to white cases." These policies and attitudes made black Chicagoans particularly anxious to ensure that the Amanda Smith Industrial School for Colored Girls was on solid footing.