A couple of years ago the Mill published a history column about one of the most beguiling vintage photos of Salem and Salemites. I totally missed it at the time, and now that I've seen the photo, it's very hard to get out of mind. It is worth much more attention than it has got.
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| Likely Rev. G. W. White, and kids (detail and two below, via State Library) |
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| Congregation left side |
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| Congregation right side |
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| February 2021 - reproduced at the Mill |
There are quite a number of perplexities about the image, starting with who is in it. Kylie Pine writes:
One of the wonderful and most frustrating parts of this image are the faces preserved in it. Photographs of Salem’s early African American community are few and far between. What a resource this would be had someone taken the time to identify the individuals in the photograph, perhaps a gentle reminder to us to label your photographs for future generations.
We do have a good idea of who was involved with the church. Charter members are listed in a newspaper announcement of the church’s founding as Albert and Mary Bayless, R.T. Starkey, Mrs. Jones, Mrs. H.E. Sheppard, George T. Reynolds and William Gorman. Connecting names to faces is a little more elusive. Could the man in the center with the silvering hair be Albert Bayless, a charter member of the A.M.E. Church, who escaped slavery for the California gold fields before moving north to Salem and operating a blacksmith shop for nearly forty years. The man who one early Salem writer remembered as having hair “fast turning gray, and somewhere hidden about that old shop were sticks of red striped candy to give to the children who stopped to talk with him on their way from school.” Without a verified date for the photo, can we even be sure that the pastor is Rev. G. W. White? There just isn’t enough data to help support identification.
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| April 19th, 1907 |
You may recall a few notes here about Albert Bayless. There is a real arc to his life, from what looks like modest prosperity to poverty. Together with Oregon Black Pioneers, the Mill will give a talk on him later this month. They are sure to have more!
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| Jan. 27th talk - via FB |
At the moment I want to look at a different theme, though it intersects with the lives of the Bayless family. Over the span of 20 years there is what appears to be a real hardening of racism in Salem.
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| Amity and collaboration, c.1892 |
When Rev. White first came to town, he preached at First Methodist. Once formed, the congregation worshipped at the German Methodist Church between November of 1891 and March of 1892. The fund-raising was ecumenical. Pine noted it "included many well-known Salemites like George Whitaker (then president of Willamette University), Z.F. Moody (former Oregon Governor), and B.F. Drake (manager of the Salem Iron Works)." And the tone in the paper is calm.
There is what looks like a real collegiality, even tolerance at this time.
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| Minstrel shows, January 1891 |
It's not that there was no racism in Salem. There were plenty of minstrel shows and other expressions of it. But it may have been a racism of "genial" condescension and less directly hostile, and people would have varied in how much they bought into it and expressed it.
Consider the person in the far right of the image of the congregation. He is holding his hat, standing apart a little, and not looking at the camera. As I read it, he is not fully committed to the commemoration of the moment and image-making. But the others all look into the camera.
Just a few years later when the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson was announced here in 1896, there was a very different tone in the papers. This likely signaled a real shift, from more tolerance in the broader Reconstruction era to an embrace of Jim Crow.
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| May 18th, 1896 |
A different attempt at a church 15 years after Plessy and 20 after Rev. White's church was fraught with virulent racism.
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| More virulent racism, 1911 |
And just a decade later we have the malignant and popular flowering of the second Klan here. Running in parallel was anti-Japanese and anti-Chinese sentiment.
On the one hand, there was no golden period free of racism here. But on the other, the intensity and particular expression of racism did likely vary over time, and we may misrepresent that history if we flatten it as expressing one undifferentiated, monolithic expression of badness. Salem was not isolated from the pattern of greater freedom and tolerance during that greater Reconstruction era, and less freedom and tolerance after its end was ratified in Plessy.
So a theme we will try to be more alert to here are the changes from the late 19th century to the early 20th in attitudes towards Black Salemites and visitors.
See previously on the period:
- "Notes on Black Churches in the 19th and early 20th Century" (2022)
- "Column on Emancipation Celebrations Turns up Lost History and New Names" (2022)
- "Salemites Saw Negro League Star and Hall of Famer Bullet Rogan in 1921 at Long-gone Oxford Park" (2021)
- "Policing Racial Boundaries in 1920s: Herman Hayes, D. H. Brown, and Charlie Maxwell" (2021)
- "Ten Days in Jail for Tearing Down a Whites Only Sign in 1920" (2020)
- "Jazz first comes to Salem in 1917" (2017)
- "100 Years ago The Birth of a Nation "took Salem by Storm" (2016)
- "When Minstrelsy was a Central Part of Civic Culture" (2019)
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