The "Jim Crow Bible" - Did you know?

While reading this post, please click on each of the articles to enlarge and isolate them. All articles are sourced by hovering over the title bar at the top of each one.

Last night, I participated (via live feed), as an audience member, in a wonderful talk, given by author Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns) at the University of Richmond. During her engaging lecture, Ms. Wilkerson mentioned something that I'd never heard of - the "Jim Crow Bible". Curious, I decided to look up the term, to learn more about it. The closest thing to an actual definition I found was in this somewhat satirical little snippet posted in The Albuquerque Journal, in 1903.

Found on Newspapers.com

As was shared during the talk, the Jim Crow Bible was a term used to describe the separate bible that was used to swear in blacks, in a court of law, during the Jim Crow years - roughly 1877 to the beginning of the 1950s, when the Civil Rights era began.1

In my quest to learn more about this oddity, I discovered several newspaper articles, most of which made reference to the same (apparently) monumental event which occurred in Raleigh, NC in 1906.

First there was this, from The Raleigh Times, in March 1906.

Found on Newspapers.com

By August of that same year, apparently folks were still talking about this judge's horrible mistake, only now, as often happens when stories are passed down and around over time, the tale has grown to include a bible-tainting kiss. Read about it from the Rochester, NY Democrat and Chronicle. No worries though. A new (replacement) bible could be purchased for just fifty cents.

Found on Newspapers.com

Now, before you go thinking that the whole kissing the bible thing was an embellishment, take a look at this article from a November, 1947 edition of The Pittsburg Courier.⁵  Yes, that's right. I said 1947. 

Found on Newspapers.com

Well, folks, I think you get the picture. I have to say that I've been educated, yet again. Little did I know that Jim Crow stretched its racist, segregationist hand even to the touching (or kissing) of the Holy Book. What baffles me most about this is that those same black hands that weren't supposed to grace the same bibles, were holding, loving, raising the children, preparing the food, washing the clothes, and even changing the very sheets of the folks who dared not place a hand on this sacred implement during a seconds-long courthouse ritual.

Go figure...

1 Melvin I. Urofsky https://www.britannica.com/event/Jim-Crow-law

Permalink: http://justthinking130.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-jim-crow-bible-did-you-know.html

Update #2 - (Finally) A Response from the City Manager

Dear Readers:
I have not been able to read this entire letter.  I got a message about it, and began reading, but I am at work, and my break is ending.  From what I did read (just the first few paragraphs), my sense is that Angela Harris is passing the buck, but I'll come back later with more of a commentary.  Meanwhile, I just want to share this with you, as I know that there are folks who are following along, and waiting for updates.

Please click HERE to read the letter of response from Angela Harris, Franklin County City Manager, regarding the destruction of historical documents in the courthouse basement.

Also, an article was just published in the Raleigh, NC-based News and Observer, yesterday.  I was interviewed extensively for this piece, but none of my comments were used.  (Hmmm...) Special thanks to genea-friend, Angela Walton-Raji, who helped me to tweet the news of this out on the day it was happening.  Certainly, those initial tweets played a significant role in gaining the "international attention" this situation has garnered.

Click here to read my eyewitness account (and first post on the subject) of what happened on December 6th, when (my) history was destroyed in Franklin County.

Click here to read the brief update I shared a month later, following a Franklin County Commissioners Meeting, during which several citizens spoke and inquired about the destruction of the records.

Thanks for reading.  Your comments are welcome!

Renate

Click HERE to read a final UPDATE on this very sad situation.

Wedding Wednesday - Mabel GREEN and James POWELL

This is my grandmother, Anna Green's sister, Mabel Lee GREEN, and her husband, James Calvin Powell.  Mabel was born in Rolesville, NC on March 9, 1889 to John Wesley and Susan Dunstan Green. She died in Raleigh, NC on December 11, 1978 at the age of 89.
James was born on June 19, 1889 in Wake Forest, NC, to Calvin and Healon Powell. He died at age 36 on June 16, 1925 of acute Bright's Disease.  According to his death certificate, James was a barber.  This makes me wonder if he may have worked for (or with) my grandfather, who I'm told owned a barber shop.
James and Mabel made their home in Raleigh, NC on Person Street.  They were the parents of five children;  James Jr., Ella, Roger, Mabel, and Ruby (who was born the same year her father died).

Mysterious Monday - Diagnosis: Pellagra

This Mysterious Monday is not about a picture.  Instead, it's about a disease, and the startling finding I've made of it in my family history  The name of the disease is Pellagra.  You can read all about it, here and here.

I have written before about my great-grandfather, Calvin Yarborough, Sr.  This post is about the wife of his son, and namesake - my grandfather, Calvin Yarborough, Jr.  My grandfather died decades before I was born, but it was a desire to know more about him and my grandmother, Anna, that actually started me on my genealogy quest 15 years ago.  Calvin was married twice - first to Toynetta Littlejohn, and then to my grandmother, Anna Green.  Calvin's first wife, Toynetta, is the subject of this post.

For many years, I've tried to find evidence of Toynetta's death, so that I could get a better sense of the timeline between my grandfather's two marriages, and of what life may have been like for him and his three oldest children.  Until last week, I could never find a death certificate for Toynetta, despite my searches on the Internet, as well as visits to the Franklin County Register of Deeds office, where the death certificates are housed.  In my research, I'd found that several members of Toynetta's birth family, the Littlejohns, had died of tuberculosis in the first decade of the 1900's, as had some of my Yarborough ancestors, so I've been assuming all this time that it was this same disease that took her from my grandfather, especially considering that Calvin, himself, was later consumed by it.  But, thanks to a surprise finding of Toynetta's death certificate (when I wasn't even looking for it), I know differently.  Toynetta did not have tuberculosis.  She died of pellagra.

Pellagra, for those who don't know, is a vitamin deficiency disease, which is characterized by the "4 D's": diarrhea, dermatitis, dementia, and death.  In the early 1900's there was an epidemic of this disease in the southern states.  Apparently, the disease appeared in 1902 and peaked in 1915-16.  Toynetta died of it in May 1914.

Ancestry.com. North Carolina Death Certificates, 1909-1975 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2007. Original data: North Carolina State Board of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics. North Carolina Death Certificates. Microfilm S.123. Rolls 19-242, 280, 313-682, 1040-1297. North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, North Carolina.

What is most interesting to me about this, and what presents the mystery, are the circumstances as presented by Toynetta's death certificate.  I've learned from reading about Pellagra, that its victims were isolated in hospital settings, away from the general population, so I guess this is how Toynetta ended up in St. Agnes' in Raleigh.  I'm aware that this was the Colored, or Negro hospital for decades.  But, still, it surprises me that Toynetta somehow ended up there from Louisburg, a town close to 30 miles from Raleigh.

On her death certificate, Toynetta is listed as single, though she was definitely a married woman.  The hospital seems to have no information on her.  It almost seems as if perhaps she went there on her own, or was left on their doorstep.  Where was Calvin?  Why wasn't he (or anyone) there to provide information about her to the hospital?  Surely, she was demented from the disease by the time she arrived there, just four days before her death, but why didn't anyone know anything about her?

Toynetta's body was returned to Louisburg for burial, but this was handled by a company out of Raleigh.  Why didn't the undertaker from Louisburg (Blount) who was handling most of my family's (and the Littlejohn's) handle the arrangements?

Toynetta Littlejohn Yarborough was born in 1884, and died May 3, 1914, possibly demented and seemingly alone.  She was survived by her husband, Calvin Yarborough, Jr., and four children, Vida (7), Priscilla (6), Felix (4), and Fredrick (9 mths).  Her son Felix, who turned 5 the month after she died, followed her to the grave in September 1914.

My grandfather, Calvin, remained a widower for five years after Toynetta's death, an unusually long time for a man of of that time period, who had small children to raise. He married my grandmother, Anna, in 1919.  I can only imagine the sorrow he must have carried in his heart after losing his wife, and his young son in the same year.  I hope to learn more about the circumstances surrounding Toynetta's illness and subsequent death, as well as Calvin's life as a single father, who ended up courting and marrying my grandmother-to-be.


Source information:  Information about the disease, Pellagra, was obtained for this post from the following articles:
http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/985427-overview
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pellagra