During the dark days of 2020, casting about for a way to cope with the George Floyd murder, I decided to seek my father’s counsel. Although he died in 1997, I knew that in the 1950s, when he was the editor of the Chicago Defender, Chicago’s black newspaper, he wrote a column, “Dope and Data,” about current events. I had never read the columns, because I was too young when they were published and he did not save them. A friend told me that the New York Public Library had a digital archive of the paper. I wanted to see what my father had written after the death of Emmett Till, the Chicago boy murdered in Mississippi in 1955. The library was technically closed, but my friend helped me gain access to the archive online.
I remember my father, Louis E. Martin, mainly as a politician, not a journalist. He was forty-eight and I was nine when we moved to Washington, D.C., in 1961, for his new job on the Democratic National Committee. Since he served as an advisor to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter, that work overshadows his journalist career in the public record as well. I don’t believe he thought of himself as a “writer”—in the second half of his life, he did not write for publication at all. Despite my mother’s urging, there was no memoir.
Even in Chicago, I don’t remember seeing Louis writing. There was no study at home piled with work in progress. He often worked late at the office “putting the paper to bed,” which made sense to me because he arrived home about my bedtime. After he ate the plate of dinner my mother reheated over boiling water, my parents spread out the newspapers in the living room—they subscribed to the New York Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Wall Street Journal—and analyzed what “angle” each paper was taking. They wrapped up with the television news at ten. From my earliest days, I knew that there was more than one way to tell a story, and that part of my father’s job was checking what the other guys were writing about black folk.
When I started looking at the columns last year, I turned first to 1955, and sure enough, there was a Sep-tember 17 piece about Till. His mother, Mamie Till Bradley, had famously insisted on an open coffin, to make sure the world saw her son’s mutilated body. That decision, to display her son’s wounds, ignited the same media firestorm that the video footage of Floyd’s murder did last year. The column begins, “The reservoir of hatred among Negroes for the white American neared the flood stage this week as the details of the savage lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Louis Till in rural Mississippi were being discussed in barber shops, bars, crowded parlors and churches.” I stopped there to catch my breath.
Louis continues in the same implacable tone. “The Negro seems to have committed a crime by being born. Brought here in slave ships, brutalized in passage, worked like a draft animal and dehumanized, the Negro’s sweat and blood nurtured the very sinews of this so-called white culture.” But what he calls “the great mystery” is why the white American so violently hates the Negro. “I have read all the books about this situation, most of them anyway, and I have listened to practically all the experts on racism. I still do not understand how the average white American, particularly in the South, developed so much prejudice, so much anti-Negro hatred.”
Yes, that’s it, I thought. The look on Derek Chauvin’s face, his absolute indifference and arrogance—hate was the right word for that. But I also thought: Louis could write what he wanted because he was the editor. He knew that he was writing for black readers, and he didn’t have to worry that he might be maligning the “average white American.” A Southerner himself, he had no illusions that blacks had only been “overlooked” or “left behind.” He recognized intimate partner violence when he saw it.
The end of the column was weak: “This is a queer animal, this prejudiced white man, and I suppose he too is one of God’s children. Well, for my money, God can have him.” My father was not a religious man. But what was there to say in the face of such violence?
My parents believed in integration as much as anyone I have ever met. They sent all five of their daughters to private, predominantly white schools. They themselves attended public state universities, not historically black colleges. In other columns, Louis’s elation about the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education is palpable: “It marks a turning point in history almost as dramatic in some ways as the Emanci-pation Proclamation itself,” he wrote on February 12, 1955. Yet he worried, too. “We must, therefore, make certain that the white supremacy forces will not be able to negate the decision of May 17th as they were able to negate so much of the freedom granted by the document Lincoln signed.”
There are several columns in 1953 that reference the Brown case before it was decided. In August of 1953 he asked readers to contribute to the NAACP to support the lead attorney Thurgood Marshall’s research. “Thur-good took a chance and put the experts to work. We have to get him the dough. Brothers, this is it. It’s put up or shut up for sure.” The intimacy of the appeal is typical.
My favorite column about Brown v. Board displays my father’s sense of humor; he divulges the “secret weapon” blacks have, a campaign of prayer. “The cynical may laugh but it is reliably established that the white folks are scared of colored folks’ prayers. It seems that most white folks have consciences and when it comes to their treatment of their colored brothers, they know they cannot square their belief in God with their behavior to some of God’s children. Thus they grow mighty uncomfortable at the thought of millions of colored folks praying away for their sorry souls.”
Seventy years after these columns were written, we can definitively state that Brown v. Board did not accomplish all Louis had hoped. Most schools remain segregated. Even where students of different races sit side by side, their parents may discourage dialogue. When I was a parent at Berkeley High, one mother told me that she didn’t think her daughter needed to learn about slavery because it made her sad. (She was taken aback when I pointed out that slavery made my daughter sad, too.) At back-to-school night, a dad objected to expanding “World History” to countries beyond Europe, because it was “too much for children to learn.” Probably not too much for the Asian and Latin students in the class.
Louis once said that every generation of black folk are new immigrants to white folk, who never get to know us. At the time, I thought he was exaggerating, but over the years, I have come to see his point. It is incredible that at this late date we are still arguing whether people of color are part of “mainstream” American history. My son reminds me that the Berkeley Unified School District was the first in the nation to voluntarily desegregate with two-way busing in 1968. For all the diversity hesitancy I observed, we are the vanguard.
Louis had plenty to say about another topic much in the news recently: voting. Writing on August 30, 1952, he pointed out, “The ballots we cast in 1948 turned the tide in favor of President Truman as the records of the Negro vote in the key states of Illinois, Ohio and California will show. President Truman, you remember, was vigorously opposed by the Dixiecrat candidates in the South, by the screwball progressives in the East and by the Republicans. Harry won in the biggest upset in modern political history.”
Later he predicts, “The time will come when the Negro vote will be just as strategically important in some southern states as it is now in the key northern and western states.” That time came for Georgia, his home state, in 2020, almost seventy years later. I wish my father had lived to see Obama elected president, but even more, I wish he could have met Stacey Abrams, who led the voting rights charge in Georgia in the last election. In 1955, Louis eulogized Mary McLeod Bethune, a black leader of an earlier generation, in a column where he called her “an ebony Joan of Arc.” “She was convinced that she was on God’s side; she was convinced that our democratic system was the best developed by mankind and, finally, she was convinced she and other Negroes had the capacity to achieve whatever was worth achieving in our society.” His description could apply to Abrams as well.
Before I read these columns, my understanding of my father’s career was that the scope of his work was local when he was a newspaper editor; that only later, working for the Kennedy campaign, did he start to hobnob with national leaders. But in the column for November 29, 1952, just after Eisenhower’s election, he reports on a visit he made to the White House with the other directors of the National Newspaper Publishers Association. They were presenting a plaque to the outgoing president, “To Harry S. Truman, the 32nd President of the United States, who has awakened the conscience of America and given new strength to our democracy by his courageous efforts on behalf of freedom and equality for all citizens.” Louis notes that “President Truman greeted each of us by name as we were introduced.”
In December of that same year, Louis wrote about Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers union. “Many years ago, I complained to Reuther about the fact that some of the secondary leaders in the auto union seemed to be prejudiced toward the Negro members. He told me to go back and bring him some suggestion about how to deal with the situation and get somebody to work with me. I asked Charles Diggs, Sr, who was then Michigan State Senator, to work with me on the suggestions. Together we came up with a program to educate the secondary leaders on the race problem, a sort of human relations course.” This “program” sounds like an early version of the diversity workshops that corporations hold today for their employees. In a more rational world, I imagine, the integration of the schools would have rendered the need for adult diversity education obsolete by now.
My father’s role as the editor of a black newspaper was not limited to sitting behind a desk in Chicago. To some extent, I think all black professionals back in the day worked beyond their job descriptions. How could anyone lucky and tenacious enough to obtain an education in segregated America not advocate for black people any chance they could? Yet my father’s curiosity and ambition set him on a different course right out of college, when he spent a year in Havana in the Thirties. His father, my grandfather, who died before I was born, was Cuban, and Louis grew up speaking some Spanish, which he also studied in school. I learned this one night in Chicago, when he went out for a walk and came back puffing on a cigar. He said that he had run into a man from the old country, “un campesino.”
According to my mother, whom he married soon after the Cuba trip, the young Louis often couldn’t sleep because his mind was so full of plans for the future. My father’s first job as a journalist was at the Defender, in 1936, but after a few months the publisher, John H. Sengstacke, transferred him to Detroit to become the founding editor of the Michigan Chronicle. There he became involved in the efforts of Negroes to integrate the unions in the auto industry, which led to the opening of his FBI file. In the Forties, the family moved to New York City, where my parents tried to start a news photo magazine, which did not get off the ground. Columns from the Fifties about Adam Clayton Powell and NYC borough politics show that Louis maintained his New York ties when the family moved to Chicago. Later, in 1959, he spent a year in Nigeria, advising the editor of a newspaper there. During that time, my younger sisters and I stayed with my mother in Chicago. (My much older sisters were already pursuing their adult lives.) That summer, my mother wanted to visit my father, so she made the somewhat odd decision to take me, the
seven-year-old, with her, and leave the five-year-old and three-year-old with her sister.
Louis was living in an apartment on the mainland (a suburb, I guess), where he employed a “houseboy” who brought us tea in bed at 6:00 a.m. My father went off to work as usual, but in the evenings the three of us played gin rummy until my bedtime. We could hardly see the cards, because we did not turn on the lights on our side of the room: the wall across from us was black with insects attracted by the two electric light sconces. A decade later, in college, when black American classmates referred to Africa as “home,” I kept quiet. Lagos had not felt like Chicago to me.
In the columns from Lagos, Louis described Nigeria’s federalist form of government, the tensions between Muslims and Christians, and the role of marketplace women in the economy. In a majority black country, “The whites have had to soft-pedal their prejudices and they must put up a good front or court trouble. As a result, the Nigerians do not share the American Negro’s obsession over color. They treat the white man with deference, but they do not fear or hate him.” He knew most of his readers would never get to Nigeria, but he was always looking outward from his own community, trying to form alliances. By sharing his knowledge and opinions with “the brother on the street,” he hoped to nourish political aspirations and mold a more sophisticated Pan-African voter.
He also wrote fairly regularly about South Africa, a place he never visited. On January 29, 1955, he complained that the U.S. aircraft carrier Midway was scheduled to stop in Cape Town, so the colored sailors would be forced to spend their shore leave under apartheid. “Uncle Sam literally gets down on his hands and knees and licks the filthy fascist boots of the ignoramuses who have exploited the basest kind of racial prejudice to win control of the South African government,” he fumed. “When this incident is broadcast to the billions of non-white Asiatics and Africans, what are these people to conclude? What will they think of our democracy?” I am sure that it was particularly galling to him that the National Party came to power in South Africa and started crafting the laws that defined apartheid in 1948, the very same year that Truman ended segregation in the armed forces in the U.S. The Afrikaners were inspired by the Nazis and white supremacists of the American South.
Apart from the subject matter, I strain to recognize Louis in the columns. The father I knew was laconic and cynical: my mother used to say that if it was raining, Louis thought it was raining on him. He was not a hands-on parent who cooked or changed diapers or even asked about homework. His curiosity about people, a hallmark of his work, did not extend to the natural world, music, or children. In seventh grade, when I met a girl who lived alone with her father after a divorce, I was surprised that was possible. How would they eat or keep house or shop for clothes?
Over the years, I did meet another version of my father, a hail-fellow-well-met character, a raconteur who could hold us all spellbound with his anecdotes and pointed jokes. (“Why don’t Puerto Ricans learn English? Because then people would think they were black.”) This “Dad” appeared for company, when my parents entertained, which was not often. We caught glimpses of the anger and wit that animated his columns during those evenings, especially if there was wine with dinner, more common in Washington than in Chicago.
When Louis addressed us children, race was always front and center in his thoughts, just as it is in the columns. He struggled to figure out how people who were smart enough to build skyscrapers and rockets to the moon could steadfastly deny the humanity of blacks. “I am personally convinced that many hundreds of thousands of southern whites follow the segregation pattern without ever once being made aware of the fact that they are committing a grave wrong against the colored citizen.”
He believed (or wanted to believe) that custom rendered blacks invisible to whites. “The whites have learned to behave on most occasions as if the Negro did not really exist or rather as if it were bad form to recognize his existence.” This echoed what we were taught, that it was impolite to talk about race outside of the house, particularly with white people, because it made them uncomfortable. Best to try to slip by without calling attention to our differences. As my father pointed out, “Up North, we are inclined to turn the whole problem of race relations over to committees. Down South, great responsibility falls upon individuals.” He quoted a Southern friend saying, “If you can’t beat them and can’t join them, you have to seduce them.”
Reading these columns has brought me closer to my father. They are conversations with a journalist encountering the world, not the politician whose single-minded focus shut down discussion. The last time I tried to engage my father in person, I was sixteen. My English class was reading Faulkner’s Light in August and I was blown away by the language. It occurred to me that Louis had been an English major. Excited, I asked him what he thought of Faulkner.
“Fucking racist.”
Well, yes, probably. But I knew my question deserved more than that dismissive answer. At least Faulkner didn’t pretend that Negroes didn’t exist.
The columns prove that Louis was capable of a more nuanced approach. When he was an undergraduate, he heard Churchill speak, and after the great imperialist died, Louis wrote, “Despite all my mental reservations about his racial and color views, I liked him immediately… He wrote a great deal of history, made a great deal of it, too, but no man can stop the rising tide of democracy in the world today. Mr. Churchill knows it also, but to know the truth and to follow the truth, as Milton said, are two different things.” This was not the only column where he wrote respectfully of someone whose racial views he rejected. In fact, my parents both taught me that you can learn from anybody, even someone who thinks you are stupid and unmotivated. This has always been a critical skill for black folk, and it has served me well in various contexts.
Today, I can think of a reason Louis did not talk to us children about his work: he wanted to keep us safe. As long as the public didn’t understand his access to Kennedy and Johnson, he could avoid the media attention which, then as now, irritates the white supremacist fringe. He believed Truman’s words—“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit”—and always flew under the radar if he could. Even we, his own offspring, didn’t fully understand his accomplishments. Most of what I know about his life in Washington, I learned from books written later.
In the Sixties, the war in Vietnam further distanced me from my father. Louis served at the pleasure of the president and felt that loyalty to Johnson demanded complete agreement with his foreign as well as domestic policy. I heeded my mother’s constant admonition, “Don’t bother your father,” and kept to myself. Once I left for college, I never spent a summer at home; then I moved across the country for medical school. My first book was published when my father was alive and well, about my age now, but if he read it, he never let on. We were like ships that passed in the night. Yet I believe my curiosity comes straight from him, and I am the only one of his five daughters who writes.
I have one memory of an early Sunday bicycle ride with my father in the summer of 1961, just after we moved to Washington. I was astonished to see him on a bicycle: he seemed both too old and too tall to ride. Without my mother (who never learned to ride a bike), he led me and my sister over city streets to the Capitol building. He wanted to show us the seat of democracy. We tooled around the parking lot, then took off along the mall, which I figured was the most carefully groomed, lush strip of sweet-smelling grass in the world. Louis’s signature compliment or thank-you or goodbye was “You’re a great American.” I felt like a great American that day.
The outing, the attention, was entirely uncharacteristic of our father. I might have thought it was a dream, except my sister confirms it. She, too, had hoped at the time that it signaled a new era in our new city. I do think he was momentarily glad to see us: between Nigeria and the presidential election, we hadn’t lived with him for two years. But it never happened again.
Would my father have been disappointed by the amount of progress that we’ve made in racial matters? I don’t think so. He focused on the political potential of black people without worrying about when, if ever, white folk would see the light. He would be delighted to learn that the camera in our phones has become a successful weapon against police brutality, and that Chauvin was convicted of murder. (An all-white jury let Emmet Till’s murderers go free, and they bragged about it to the press after the verdict.) He would have been surprised by Obama, but not by Trump. In 1954, Louis wrote: “Individual liberty and the rights of man to full citizenship regardless of color may one day cease to be regarded as political issues to be exploited for partisan advantage. From where I sit, I feel that day is nearer than most of us realize. Here I suppose I ought to confess that I also believe in miracles.”
Toni Martin is a writers and physician who lives in Berkeley. She has been writing for The Threepenny Review since 2003.
