The Best of Enemies: Chapters 2–3

Her father was a church deacon and he believed the injunction “till death do you part” to be as inviolable as “Thou shalt not murder.”

Her family had little sympathy for what they considered merely the histrionics of a spoiled child.

The next day Ann had French arrested for beating her, but she allowed him to talk her into withdrawing the charges with expressions of contrition and promises of a new beginning.

It was as if the town had swallowed more than it could hold and had regurgitated, for the Bottoms was an odorous conglomeration of trash piles, garbage dumps, cow stalls, pigpens and crowded humanity.

In fact, all but a few blacks living in Durham were consigned to slum life.

“Now, I do not want a fair dog,” he informed the breeder imperiously.

The Mutual presented itself as merely the most visible face of a vibrant and economically maturing black community, but it quickly became a vehicle of and for the black bourgeoisie in Durham, separated from the bulk of the black population.

Where many whites saw black America as a monolithic, undifferentiated mass, the African-American community has since slave days been organized along a hierarchy based in large part on skin color and assimilation into the white world.

Among the company’s founding triumvirate, John Merrick was the son of a black mother and a white father, and C. C. Spaulding and his uncle Dr. Aaron McDuffie Moore proudly traced their roots to a long line of mixed-race freemen.

The Mutual’s influence in other areas—banking, real estate, education—guaranteed a nearly seamless, insular Negro ruling class.

And, indeed, when a young Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., showed up at White Rock in 1932 looking for a preaching post and outfitted in cream-colored trousers and a sharp jacket, the future firebrand was turned away.

Durham the city—a complicated jumble of prosperity and poverty, success and failure, struggle and conformity—was replaced by Durham the "Symbol of Negro Progress,” in an often acrimonious debate that raged in the black community during the early decades of this century.

A battle raged between two titans: the professor Booker T. Washington and the brilliant, mercurial, and quarrelsome W. E. B. Du Bois.

Washington also advised blacks to spurn higher education, ridiculing degrees in Greek, Latin, and law as “ornamental gewgaws” and stressing the sufficiency of industrial education for his people.

Timing was also important to his appeal with whites, for Washington was well aware of the xenophobia then rising in America as immigrants poured into the country, and he exploited these emotions to the benefit of native-born blacks.

The "City of Negro Enterprises,” he dubbed Durham, blithely ignoring the fact that the prosperity he saw there didn't extend much beyond Parrish Street.

White leaders—former planters—were clearly fighting to regain their antebellum positions of political and economic privilege.

The first great black American leader born outside the South, the Harvard-educated Du Bois dared to confront not just the white elite but also the black elite—Washington and his followers—and the inchoate culture of materialism that was then beginning to remake America.

In his 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois began by admitting Washington’s genius in “grasp[ing] the spirit of the age...triumphant commercialism,” calling him “the most distinguished Southerner since Jefferson Davis...” (a wholly sarcastic compliment, as Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis has pointed out, and a harbinger of what lay ahead).

As the twentieth century opened, however, “wearing the mask” (as the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar called this dissembling) was fading from favor—a reminder of slavery as unwelcome as the bullwhip or leg iron.

At the college’s first commencement in 1912, Shepard applauded the white president of Southern Railways as he exhorted the newly trained black teachers to “above all... avoid creating in the minds of your pupils dissatisfaction with the opportunities that are open to them.”

C. C. Spaulding, the proud, almost taciturn office manager of the Mutual who assumed full control of the firm in 1923, was in many ways a transitional figure, linking the past, as represented by Washington, to the future, which belonged to Du Bois and his more militant partisans.

C. C. Spaulding, the proud, almost taciturn office manager of the Mutual who assumed full control of the firm in 1923, was in many ways a transitional figure, linking the past, as represented by Washington, to the future, which belonged to Du Bois and his more militant partisans.

Under slavery, the primary route to freedom for blacks, short of running away (with its risk of recapture, physical torture, or death), was to be manumitted—legally released from slavery—by the master after “years of loyal service.”

The local city library’s collection of African-American books was limited to a few dog-eared copies of Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery and a few other equally innocuous works.

The trade union movement as a whole buckled under fierce right-wing attacks and quickly abandoned black workers. The incipient movement in North Carolina collapsed.

Black leaders continued to nudge white society for small concessions while at the same time attempting to stifle the more urgent demands of a frustrated black poor.

White leaders had heard this rhetoric before, however, and chose to ignore it.

And in the end they managed to convince themselves so completely that when the quake finally came, when Ann Atwater and hundreds of other poor black residents of Durham’s slums poured into the streets demanding the reconcilement of myth and history, of dream and reality, the white families who had ruled Durham like monarchs fabricated a credible display of shock, indignation, and even betrayal.

The whoops and shouts of children at play rose from the schoolyard into the humid air, mingling with the languorous scent of tobacco that drifted over from the warehouses on Pettigrew Street.

The paternalism that governed relations between white planters and slaves in the Old South was extended in the New South to include poor white factory workers.

When a smattering of education was considered a good thing for workers, some mills offered classes at night at no charge.

They were raised on an ethic that extolled the power of the individual to shape his or her life, and then forced into a world where they were treated like cogs in a vast machine.

One of these little men, Paul Ellis was descended from yeomen farmers forced into tenancy and then off the land altogether when tobacco prices plummeted, thrusting him and thousands like him into the new industrial society that was transforming the South.

“The exchange was merry,” he recalled, “till one [white] girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.”

Over the family’s meager supper, he and his father talked about the Durham Bulls’ latest victory and C.P. managed to wheedle a promise from his father to take him to the next ball game.

There has never been a third-party movement to match it, not in the number of electoral victories it won, nor in the feeling of class unity across racial lines it engendered.

As a final insult, Durham’s Big Men now derided the “vulgar” racism of their white employees.

Any setback, disappointment, or reversal was easily and perfunctorily blamed on those dark-skinned residents living just beyond the railroad tracks.

“Only the Klan looks out for the white man,” Paul Ellis told his son, with the profound solemnity of inebriation.