Growing Roots: Fighting for a Multiracial Democracy in Reconstruction Era Mississippi
The Making of Two Activists, Josephine and George Albright
Note: This article uses an uncensored version of a racial slur. A 1937 issue of The Daily Worker originally printed the uncensored word when quoting Karen “Kiwi” Burch’s great Grandfather George Albright, who was himself quoting a klansman’s use of the slur against him. After much deliberation between the editors and the author, we collectively decided to leave the word uncensored so as to reflect the original printing in The Daily Worker, as well as to highlight the reality of the denigrating racism perpetuated by the klansmen.
In the 1840s Mississippi was “home” to almost 200,000 enslaved people. By the start of the Civil War, just 20 years later, that number had doubled to almost 450,000. Slavery was the foundational element of the economy in the New World. Beginning in 1619, human beings were kidnapped and forced by cruelty and violence from Africa in order to provide free, expendable labor for the production of cotton, sugar cane, and tobacco in what is now the United States. Even slave babies were valued commodities that increased the wealth and productivity of their owners.
My great-grandfather, George Washington Albright, was born into slavery in 1846 on the Ike Marr plantation in Mississippi. In an interview conducted when he was in his 90’s, George said that when he was 5 years old, his family (we believe his mother, father, and sister) was sold to another plantation owner, Colonel John Albright of Holly Springs, Mississippi. But what did it mean in the system of slavery to be a family? There was an early lesson for all enslaved people that the primary relationships of a mother, a father, and children living together under one roof were tenuous at best, if not completely superfluous. George’s family was no exception.
It wasn’t clear when the family was initially separated, but George’s father was forced to live on a different plantation from the rest of his family. George’s mother was the cook in the big house on the Albright plantation, which afforded her and her children exposure to things that she used to help improve their quality of life. But nothing could replace the absence of her husband, their father. George was 11 when yet another tragedy struck and his father was sold again, but this time to a plantation in Texas, bringing an end to any possibility of “normal” family life.
Meanwhile, my white great-grandmother Josephine Hardy’s family was not haunted or bound by the specter of slavery, except as a political issue and a cause to fight as abolitionists. Her mother and father, Charlotte and Thomas Hardy, were married in 1850, settling in Groveland, Massachusetts, where Josephine was born in 1851, followed by her younger brother Jefferson in 1855. Her New England Protestant upbringing focused on family and church.
Right before the start of the Civil War, Charlotte Hardy came down with consumption and died when Josephine was 9 years old and Jefferson was 5. Thomas Hardy was heartbroken. He felt he was losing his ability both to care for the children and to run his shoe making shop. So, putting his children in the care of a close relative, he enlisted in the Union Army. This was something he could do to try to make a better world for his young children.
1863 was a pivotal year for both George’s and Josephine’s family. The Emancipation Proclamation was signed in January of that year. Two months later, the battle and the siege of Vicksburg began. George’s father, who had escaped from the plantation in Texas, joined an all-Black regiment and was assigned to the Vicksburg campaign. Josephine’s father was one of 77,000 Union troops who also took part in the siege of Vicksburg. Tragically, as for so many families, these two fathers were among the 4900 Union casualties sacrificed at Vicksburg. Their efforts turned the direction of the American Civil War towards the Union cause and away from the evils of slavery.
What creates a true activist? Someone who can see the wrong in a system and is driven by passion to change that wrong to right. I can’t say for sure but I feel strongly that the impact of such profound losses on both of these two young people began to shape their sense of duty and led to their activism: identifying what was right in their society, what was wrong, and what they could do to change it.
While George may not have known of the death of his father in the war, his being sold away was just as traumatic. For George, finding meaning for his life took the form of learning how to read and write, skills that were forbidden to slaves and if discovered could cost the enslaved person his life. With her position in the big house, George’s mother had access to the plentiful books, pamphlets, newspapers and discarded primers that the master’s children were quickly outgrowing. The more George read, the more he began to understand the world around him. After the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, George was recruited into Lincoln’s Legal Loyal League, or “the 4 Ls”, where his task was to carry the news of the proclamation to plantations in the vicinity of his own, letting as many enslaved people as possible know that their freedom was coming. George knew the countryside around Holly Springs like the back of his hand and now his fellow enslaved brothers and sisters were getting to know George as well.
Josephine did know that her father had died in the cause of the abolition of slavery. And as she mourned the deaths of both her parents, she saw a way to give their loss meaning, and give her own life meaning as well. During the war, Josephine moved from Groveland to New York where she lived with the Ladd family. She was a good student and knew that what she wanted to do was to become a teacher. She entered the Albany State Normal School where she received her teaching diploma (160 years later the diploma remains as a prized possession in the family) and by 1871 she had applied for and been accepted as a teacher in the Freedman’s Aid Bureau. She was assigned to Holly Springs, Mississippi. And so, as a 20 year-old single white woman, she traveled south to teach newly freed Black people.
George and Josephine met during the tumultuous post-Civil War period known as Reconstruction. By then, George was one of nine Black men elected to the Mississippi State Senate, who would serve until the time they escaped Mississippi. The two began working closely together on the establishment of Mississippi’s statewide public school system not just for the newly freed population but for all of Mississippi’s children.
In 1937, The Daily Worker interviewed 91-year-old George Albright, who recalled some of the accomplishments he and his cohorts achieved during that once in a lifetime experience:
I taught the first public school in Mississippi. We held our sessions under a shade tree, and later in a cabin, and still later in an old abandoned church.
The state had no teachers, and we brought in teachers from the North, men and women, white and Negro. The rich whites ostracized these Northern teachers, and tried to make … life hell for them. They called the Northern teachers carpetbaggers, as they did everyone from the North who treated Negroes on a man-to-man basis.
Before the Civil War there wasn’t a free school in the state, but under the Reconstruction government, we built them in every county, 40 in Marshall County alone. We paid to have every child, Negro and white, schooled equally. Today (1937), they’ve cut down on the educational program, and discriminated against the Negro children, so that out of every educational dollar, the Negro child gets only 30 cents.
I became trustee of the State Normal School. We paid off every debt we contracted, and when I turned in my financial report in 1874, there was $150 left in the treasury. I helped supervise the budgets for other higher schools and by careful accounting saved the state more than $30,000.
We had Negroes in many responsible positions. A Negro was lieutenant governor – his name was Alex Davis and Negroes also filled the offices of Secretary of State, Superintendent of Public Instruction, and Commissioner of Immigration.
I helped to organize the Negro volunteer militia, which was needed to keep the common people on top and fight off the organized attacks of the landlords and formers slave owners. We drilled frequently – and how the rich folks hated to see us, armed and ready to defend ourselves and our elected government!
Our militia helped fight off the Klan which was organized by the old slaveowners to try to make us slaves again in all but name.
I had a couple of narrow escapes from the Klan myself. When I began to teach school, the plantation owners said: ‘That Albright is a dangerous nigger. He’s a detriment to the state.’ One day I got a warning from a friend that I’d better sleep away from home. I took the hint. Sure enough, that night the Klan came to the house and asked for me. My sister said she didn’t know where I was.
George was becoming one of the more visible leaders of the African American population, therefore, attracting the attention of the growing Ku Klux Klan forces. His close relationship with Josephine Hardy, a white woman, could only have intensified the danger. Several black leaders had been murdered across the state and, in 1875, a white mob massacred many in a gathering of Black men, women and children in Clinton, Mississippi. On Christmas Day of 1875, Charles Caldwell, as much a mentor to George as a friend, was assassinated. It was clear to George that his days were numbered. He and Josephine pledged their love and quickly left Mississippi.
The Albrights first went to Missouri where they found someone willing to marry them, even though their marriage was illegal in the United States, then they went to Illinois, to Kansas, and finally brought their young family to Los Angeles, California.
Check back in two weeks for Part III of this four-part series.
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PLEASE NOTE: This article was supported in part by Quien Es Tu Vecindario, a local 501(c)3 in the neighborhood, through a grant from the L.A. County Department of Arts and Culture as part of Creative Recovery L.A., an initiative funded by the American Rescue Plan.