38 Books Nominated for Lillian Smith Book Awards for 2012

The Southern Regional Council (SRC) recently announced that thirty-eight books have been nominated for the Lillian Smith Book Awards for 2012, to be presented in Decatur, Georgia on September 2, 2012.

SRC is an inter-racial organization founded in 1919 to combat racial injustice in the South. SRC initiated the Lillian Smith Book Awards shortly after Smith's death in 1966 to recognize authors whose writing extends the legacy of the outspoken writer, educator and social critic who challenged her fellow Southerners and all Americans on issues of social and racial justice. Since 2004 the awards have been presented by SRC in a partnership with the University of Georgia Libraries, whose Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library houses a historic collection of Lillian Smith's letters and manuscripts. The Georgia Center for the Book became a partner in 2007, when the awards ceremony first became part of the Decatur Book Festival.

The award recipients for 2011 were Sacrifice Zones by Steve Lerner and At the Dark End of the Street by Danielle McGuire.

The 2012 nominees include:

TITLE	AUTHOR	PUBLISHER
New Destination Dreaming: Immigration, Race, and Legal Status in the Rural American South	Helen B. Marrow	Stanford University Press
Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age	Virginia Eubanks	The MIT Press
The Book of Sarah: Poems	Amy Benson Brown	WordTech Communications LLC/ DBA Turning Point
Still A Man and Other Stories	James E. Cherry	Aquarius Press/Willow Books
Legacy: The Secret History of Proto-Fascism in America’s Greatest Little City	Scott Smith	Createspace
The Last Will and Testament of Rosetta Sugars Tramble	Myra McLarey	Ink Brush Press
Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement	Tomiko Brown-Nagin	Oxford University Press
Dancing with Gravity: A Novel	Anene Tressler	Blank Slate Press
Tobacco Capitalism: Growers, Migrant Workers, and the Changing Face of a Global Industry	Peter Benson	Princeton University Press
The Red Market: On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers and Child Traffickers	Scott Carney	William Morrow, An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
The End of Anger: A New Generation’s Take on Race and Rage	Ellis Cose	Ecco, An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
Girls Like Us: Fighting for a World Where Girls Are Not for Sale, an Activist Finds Her Calling and Heals Herself	Rachel Lloyd	Harper, An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
All Labor Has Dignity	Edited by Michael K. Honey	Beacon Press
Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparkled the Civil War	Tony Horwitz	Henry Holt and Company
Hey, Shorty! A Guide to Combating Sexual Harassment and Violence in Schools and on the Streets	Joanne N. Smith, Mandy Van Deven, and Meghan Huppuch	The Feminist Press
Critical Race Consciousness: Reconsidering American Ideologies of Racial Justice	Gary Peller	Paradigm Publishers
Black and White: The Confrontation between Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth and Eugene “Bull” Connor	Larry Dane Brimner	Boyds Mills Press
Brothers (And Me): A Memoir of Loving and Giving	Donna Britt	Little, Brown and Company Hachette Book Group
The Night Train: A Novel	Clyde Edgerton	Little, Brown and Company Hachette Book Group
The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time	David Sloan Wilson	Little, Brown and Company Hachette Book Group
White Flight/Black Flight: The Dynamics of Racial Change in an American Neighborhood	Rachael A. Woldoff	Cornell University Press
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention	Manning Marable	Viking/Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Upheaval in Charleston: Earthquake and Murder on the Eve of Jim Crow	Susan Millar Williams and Stephen G. Hoffius	University of Georgia Press
Elbert Parr Tuttle: Chief Jurists of the Civil Rights Revolution	Anne Emanuel	University of Georgia Press
Civil Rights History From the Ground Up: Local Struggles, A National Movement	Edited by Emilye Crosby	University of Georgia Press
Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching	Julie Buckner Armstrong	University of Georgia Press
The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family	Mark Auslander	University of Georgia Press
Writing the South through the Self: Explorations in Southern Autobiography	John C. Inscoe	University of Georgia Press
Alabama Getaway: The Political Imaginary and the Heart of Dixie	Allen Tullos	University of Georgia Press
Detained without Cause: Muslims’ Stories of Detention and Deportation in American After 9/11	Irum Shiekh	Palgrave Macmillan
No Room of Her Own: Women’s Stories of Homelessness, Life, Death, and Resistance	Desiree Hellegers	Palgrave Macmillan
Head Off & Split: Poems	Nikky Finney	Northwestern University Press
Gust: Poems	Greg Alan Brownderville	Northwestern University Press
The Stranger You Seek: A Novel	Amanda Kyle Williams	Ballantine/Bantam Dell A Division of Random House, Inc.
Diary of an Eco-Outlaw: An Unreasonable Woman Breaks the Law for Mother Earth	Diane Wilson	Chelsea Green Publishing
The Trials of Eroy Brown: The Murder Case that Shook the Texas Prison System	Michael Berryhill	The University of Texas Press
Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence, and the Last Lynching in America	B.J. Hollars	University of Alabama Press
Civil Rights in New York City: From World War II to the Giuliani Era	Edited by Clarence Taylor	Fordham University Press

"Slavery by Another Name" Comes to PBS

Doug Blackmon formerly served as Atlanta Bureau Chief for The Wall Street Journal. Several years ago the Journal carried a long front-page article based on Blackmon's research into a pervasive system of involuntary servitude that persisted long after the end of the Civil War. This article was a forerunner of Blackmon's Pulitzer Prize Winning Book, Slavery by Another Name. In the Introduction to this remarkable book, Blackmon describes the reaction to the Journal article:

"The article generated a response unlike anything I had experienced as a journalist. A deluge of e-mails, letters, and phone calls arrived. White readers on the whole reacted with somber praise for a sober documentation of a forgotten crime against African Americans. Some said it heightened their understanding of demands for reparations to the descendants of antebellum slaves. Only a few expressed shock. For most, it seemed to be an account of one more important but sadly predictable bullet point in the standard indictment of historic white racism. During an appearance on National Public Radio on the day of publication, Bob Edwards, the interviewer, at one point said to me: 'I guess it’s really no surprise.'”

"The reactions of African Americans were altogether different. Repeatedly, they described how the article lifted a terrible burden, that the story had in some way—partly because of its sobriety and presence on the front page of the nation’s most conservative daily newspaper—supplied an answer or part of one to a question so unnerving few dared ask it aloud: If not racial inferiority, what explained the inexplicably labored advance of African Americans in U.S. society in the century between the Civil War and the civil rights movement of the 1960s? The amorphous rhetoric of the struggle against segregation, the thin cinematic imagery of Ku Klux Klan bogeymen, even the horrifying still visuals of lynching, had never been a sufficient answer to these African Americans for one hundred years of seemingly docile submission by four million slaves freed in 1863 and their tens of millions of descendants."

"How had so large a population of Americans disappeared into a largely unrecorded oblivion of poverty and obscurity? They longed for a convincing explanation. I began to realize that beneath that query lay a haunting worry within those readers that there might be no answer, that African Americans perhaps were simply damned by fate or doomed by unworthiness. For many black readers, the account of how a form of American slavery persisted into the twentieth century, embraced by the U.S. economic system and abided at all levels of government, offered a concrete answer to that fear for the first time."

A Suppressed Research Report Resurfaces as DuBois' First Novel

The Quest of the Silver Fleece, by W.E.B. DuBois

In his recent Pulitzer Prize willing book, Slavery by Another Name, author Douglas Blackmon uncovers many nearly forgotten stories from the Southern past. One of these is a story of land reform and government-sponsored censorship at the dawn of the Twentieth Century.

In the summer of 1906, a team of social researchers led by W.E.B. DuBois embarked on a major study of the social and economic conditions in Lowndes County, Alabama. With funding from the Federal Bureau of Labor, the DuBois team scrupulously investigated land ownership, labor control, family life, education, sexual mores, morality, political activity, and other aspects of African American life. Two white federal employees simultaneously examined the political operations and sexual morality of Lowndes County whites, also analyzing property records and civil and criminal court records.

A major center of Black Life in Lowndes County during the period was the Calhoun Colored School. Although it was in many respects like many other institutions established for African Americans after the Civil War and operated largely on the industrial education principles of Booker T. Washington, the Calhoun School differed in one major respect: Not only did it offer training in basic academics and advanced vocational skills such as bricklaying and carpentry - the school eventually promoted a land ownership experiment, sponsoring land companies that purchased more than four thousand acres of cotton land, encouraged local blacks to operate the farms on a quasi-communal basis, and ultimately resold smaller tracts of land to African Americans.

For its time, the Bureau of Labor Study presented an ambitious and comprehensive portrait of the evolution of political, economic and racial dynamics of a Southern community. According to Blackmon, “[n]o social study on such a scale of research and ambition had ever been undertaken in the United States, certainly not one focused on black life and, even more so, never one attempted in the environment of overt physical danger that existed in Lowndes County. The report was completed, written by hand, and delivered to the Bureau of Labor for publication A year later, after months of pushing for publication of his research, or at the very least that the document be returned, DuBois was informed that the study’s conclusions 'touched on political matters.'" It could not be returned to him because it had been destroyed.

Nothing of what might have been a seminal study of black life survived, writes Blackmon, with one exception: Three years later, DuBois penned his first novel – The Quest for the Silver Fleece, “a richly descriptive portrait of African Americans struggling against the strictures tightening against them in the North and South.”

The story is set against a backdrop of persistent feudalism, sexual exploitation, and legalized kidnapping on a massive scale. Farm families live in near hopelessness while Southern landowners form a successful alliance with Northern industrialists, sometimes cornering the cotton market. Leading Northern and Southern philanthropists conspire to advance the cause of industrial education at the expense of liberal education (with its attendant notions of social equality). Leading political figures on the national level work to secure the African American vote with a small number of mid-level political appointments.

The novel’s central narrative derives from DuBois’ observations from his dangerous summer in Lowndes County. And at its heart are the lives of people who were brought together around an institution clearly modeled after the Calhoun School. These include the steadfast Sarah Smith, who wages a constant battle against reactionary forces to pursue a vision of progressive rural education; the wealthy and powerful Cresswell family, whose members routinely travel between the halls of Congress and the familiar plantation whose tenants are served by the school; and two former students – one who emigrated from Georgia in pursuit of an education, and another who was born in a nearby mysterious swamp – who join forces to lead their community toward a vision of self-sufficiency, economic cooperation and collective action.

A Story that Needs to Be Told

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Hollywood produced scores of films based on events from the Second World War. Some of them were generally well-made, and some weren’t. Some had high production values, and some didn’t. Some had great dialogue, and some didn’t. What many of them had in common is that they were based on stories that needed to be told.

We haven’t seen as many films lately about the global conflict that shaped the Greatest Generation. But a new release presents a World War II story that is long overdue for big-budget treatment.

Red Tails is based on the experiences of the first African Americans to fly in combat as fighter pilots for the United States. The film dramatizes their struggle to obtain combat experience in the face of fierce institutional resistance (a major theme of the story), the discrimination they faced (even in uniform), and the extraordinary success that they achieved in battle. Along the way, the film occasionally glimpses beneath the surface to provide genuine insights into the world of this valiant group of heroes.

Among other things, the film reminds us that, even before enlisting, these young men were already on a path to success. The Army Air Corps initially only accepted cadets who had completed at least two years of college. Author J. Todd Moye* quotes pilot Roscoe C. Brown Jr. has having observed that the Tuskegee Airmen were “probably the most talented group of African American men ever brought together in one place.” This reality is reflected in when the film’s protagonists talk about their backgrounds: Some come from medical families. One is driven to alcoholism by the pressure to please his father, a distinguished judge. According to Moye, nearly one thousand young men with similar backgrounds and similar expectations graduated from Tuskegee Army Flying School between 1941 and 1945.

The film also reminds us that these men had a keen awareness of being part of something much larger than themselves, in more ways than one. Certainly, they were aware of being part of the nation’s struggle against the Axis powers. But they were also aware of being part of what the Pittsburgh Courier described as the “Double V Campaign” – a quest for victory against racism abroad and at home. When one of the film’s characters accuses another of being his “own damned Atlanta Compromise,” it’s a signal that these men possessed a keen social consciousness. They were the leading edge of a movement to expand opportunities for people of color throughout American society. They yearned for combat experience not just for its own sake, but as an opportunity to prove what they really shouldn’t have had to prove – that African Americans are just as competent, courageous, and patriotic as any other Americans.

*Moye, Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, 2010.

The Latest Issue of Southern Changes is Now Available!

Features Include:

Steve Lerner and Danielle McGuire Receive Lillian Smith Book Awards for 2011

Toxic Neighbors: Grassroots Activists Pursue Environmental Justice

Civil Rights and the Protection of African American Women

The Power of a Common Cause: Race, Democracy and the Masons

North Carolina Case Challenges Voting Rights Pre-Clearance

Remembering Fred Shuttlesworth

To request a hard copy or an electronic copy, contact the Southern Regional Council at charles.johnson@hklaw.com or deborah.jennings@hklaw.com.

Perez v. Perry: Gerrymandering Latinos in the Lone Star State

By Leland Ware

On December 9, 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court granted an emergency stay that blocks the use of a redistricting map drawn by a panel of federal judges in Texas. The 2010 Census showed that over the last decade, Texas' population grew by 4.3 million. As a result, the state was given four new seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. The state's Republican dominated legislature redrew its congressional districts in ways that made it likely that Republicans would win all of the new seats.

Texas is a "covered" jurisdiction. Under the Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, it cannot implement its redistricting plan until it is approved by the U.S. Department of Justice or by a federal court in Washington D.C. The Obama administration objected to Texas' redistricting plan, as did several Latino civil rights groups. Instead of following the usual route of seeking approval by the Department of Justice, Texas filed a suit seeking preclearance in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (a choice that the Voting Rights Act allows). The State later moved for summary judgment on the preclearance question. The federal court in Washington denied the summary judgment motion which means that the case will proceed to a trial.

Six consolidated cases filed by individuals and civil rights organizations are pending in a federal court in San Antonio. The plaintiffs in those cases claim that Texas' redistricting plans violate the U.S. Constitution and the Voting Rights Act. They contend that the legislature drew the maps to dilute the influence of the state’s rapidly growing Latino population, which accounted for more than half of Texas' population growth.

The federal court presiding over the cases challenging Texas' redistricting plans issued an order on September 29, 2011, enjoining implementation of the State's plans pending Section 5 preclearance. Texas primaries are scheduled for March 2012. After Texas' summary judgment motion was denied by the court in Washington, the federal court in Texas decided to draw an "interim" redistricting map that would allow election planning for 2012 to proceed.

Federal law provides that challenges to redistricting cases are to be heard initially by three-judge federal district courts with direct appeals to the Supreme Court, by-passing the usual route of proceeding through federal appellate courts. Texas sought review of the "interim map" decision in the U.S. Supreme Court, which issued an order staying the decision issued by the federal court in Texas. The Supreme Court said it would hear special arguments on January 9, 2012, to decide whether Texas can hold elections using redistricting plans that have not been approved under the Voting Rights Act.

It appears that the Supreme Court will only rule on the validity of the Texas court's decision to draw its own redistricting maps. None of the lower courts have ruled on the underlying question of whether the districts established by the Texas legislature violate federal law or the Constitution. But that won't prevent Justices such as Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Clarence Thomas from reiterating their claims that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional. Despite the mountain of evidence of continuing discrimination complied in Congressional hearings when the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized in 2006, they contend that the patterns of discrimination that justified Section 5 in 1965 have been eliminated.

This case is one of the many challenges to the Voting Rights Act by those who are unwilling to accept the realities of rapidly changing demographics and continuing efforts to discriminate against minority voters.

About the Author

Leland Ware, a member of the Board of the Southern Regional Council, is Louis B. Redding Chair and Professor for the Study of Law and Public Policy at the University of Delaware.He is the author of numerous publications, and he served as co-editor of the recently-published volume, Choosing Equality: Essays and Narratives on the Desegregation Experience.

The Power of a Common Cause: Race, Democracy and the Masons

By David A. Taylor

My grandparents lived in the shadow of Alexandria, Virginia’s tallest building, the Masonic Temple on Shooters Hill. Grandpops ran a plumbing and heating wholesaler in the old port section of Alexandria, in a warehouse that began as a lathe shop for repairing ships docked nearby. As a small boy I visited his office with my mother: climbing the steps from the big, drafty brick warehouse, a hive of activity with shelves of copper pipe and ceramic fixtures in all sizes. Following her up the staircase for the first time, I saw the great desk and then my grandfather, a balding man with glasses, a long white face, and a deadpan sense of humor who regarded me seriously and said, “What can I do for you, sir? Would you be interested in buying a bathtub today?”

When he died, I read the death notice in the newspaper, my first experience, at the age of 11, reading about someone I knew in the obituaries. Near the end, it said that my grandfather was a thirty-second degree Mason. My eyes lingered on that strange phrase. I had heard of Masons as a secret brotherhood, which fascinated me. But I was confused: had Grandpops kept his Masonic identity a secret? What did ‘thirty-second degree’ mean? It sounded impossibly high in the Masons’ hierarchy, a fact at odds with my sense of my grandfather, who tended to disdain hierarchies. Who was this man?

As anyone who has read The Lost Symbol knows, Freemasonry in America dates back to before the days of George Washington. What started as a stoneworkers’ guild in the Middle Ages emerged as a men’s club for civic leadership. By 1900, one out of three American men belonged to the Masons or another fraternal society, and millions of women joined their sister organizations. The icons of the Masonic compass and sphinx were as visible in everyday life as Nike’s swoosh or the bitten Apple are now. With passing time they’ve become even more enigmatic, staid yet mysterious.Freemasonry has a very different connotation in black communities. For African-Americans, Freemasonry started with Prince Hall, a Boston freedman and veteran of Bunker Hill who saw Freemasonry not just as a men’s club but as a forum for transforming their history and their future. “Freemasonry gave the Negro in this country his first opportunity to find himself,” wrote a black lawyer named George W. Crawford in 1914; “it started him on the road to self-hood.”

“When you study Prince Hall, you learn he became a Mason because he saw the philosophy of Masonry as a way to advance his cause, to free his brethren and sisters,” says E. Denise Simmons, a council member and former mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts who in May 2010 dedicated a memorial to Prince Hall there on the town green. “Martin Luther King, Jr. stands squarely on the shoulders of Prince Hall.”

Simmons came to Prince Hall’s story through her own. She grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood of Cambridge, earned a Master’s degree in Psychotherapy as a single mother, and ran for city council on a platform of making government more responsive to Cambridge’s black and gay communities. She served as mayor in 2008-2009, the city’s first openly gay African-American woman mayor. Growing up in a family hurt by addiction and poverty, her guidepost to accomplishment was her grandfather, a Prince Hall Mason in Alabama. Her grandfather’s involvement in Prince Hall Masonry, she says, “gave me an interest in Prince Hall in line with my interest in black history.”

Prince Hall founded African Lodge No. 1, established in Boston in 1787 with a charter from the Masons of Britain. When white American Masons refused to grant Hall and other black applicants membership, they started their own lodge. For over 200 years, the fraternity of American Freemasonry, with a core tenet of universal brotherhood, was segregated by race.

I became curious about Prince Hall Masonry and its link to social justice after I came across the papers of George W. Crawford while doing other research in Yale’s Sterling library. Crawford came of age in post-Reconstruction Alabama under Booker T. Washington, graduated from Yale law school in 1903, co-founded the Niagara Movement with W.E.B. Du Bois, and helped start the NAACP. As a Prince Hall Mason, Crawford led the organization through an era of remarkable advances, and helped channel Masonic support to the NAACP’s campaign for equality crowned by Thurgood Marshall’s victory in Brown v. Board of Education. Barely a footnote in most histories of civil rights, Crawford’s story highlights surprises in Freemasonry and illustrates the role of Prince Hall Masons in the civil rights struggle, with links to four generations of civil rights leaders. (Washington and Du Bois were both Masons. Washington believed that Freemasonry could forge leadership in the black community; Du Bois considered Masonic lodges a natural successor to secret societies in Africa. Both saw Prince Hall Masonry as fostering black enterprise and institutional change, as Theda Skocpol and Ariane Liazos observe in their 2008 book, What A Mighty Power We Can Be.)

When I looked for people who could tell me about Prince Hall Masonry and George Crawford, I soon came to Dr. Ann Robinson.

Robinson, a North Carolina-born psychology professor and community historian in New Haven’s Dixwell neighborhood, grew up seeing Prince Hall Masons as unwelcoming, notwithstanding that her father was one. She and her husband moved north in August 1967, when her husband took a position at the Yale School of Medicine. Those years were exciting but tumultuous, with riots, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and New Haven’s Black Panther trial. For decades as the city endured waves of ups and downs, Freemasons seemed irrelevant. So she was startled when, in the 1990s, she was asked by the local Prince Hall Masons to help prepare their lodge to become part of the Connecticut Freedom Trail.

“It was a secret society,” she said when we met last winter, “a world of men closed to women.” But the Masons knew they had to extend a hand across old barriers to reach a new generation. Before long Robinson was inside the Widow’s Son Lodge, an old brick building she had never imagined entering in 30 years. There Robinson “met George Crawford as a historical personage,” she explained. “You enter the building – there’s George Crawford.” A bust in the foyer stands at a height he had in life and his contributions. You go further in, to the main room – there’s George Crawford in a large portrait on the wall. You can’t tell if he’s white or black, he’s simply stiff and formal. Who was this? Robinson wondered.

We explored this question when we met again in June 2011, on a rare day when New Haven’s Prince Hall lodge opened to outsiders. It was part of New Haven’s International Festival of Arts & Ideas, and a sign out front said: ‘Walking Tours, Arts & Ideas.’ Robinson as community historian had organized the event and invited me to share what I had learned about Crawford.

Crawford devoted years of activity behind those closed doors, through decades when black history hardly gained historians’ attention. His legal career stretched from 1903 until his death in 1972; to the end he was writing case notes that fed seminal civil and affirmative action litigation, including Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, which started the year Crawford died. A longer career in civil rights litigation is hard to imagine. Yet not long after his death, the black student coalition at Yale, his alma mater, concluded Crawford had made little lasting impact on black life. Yet he had earned the praise of NAACP director Roy Wilkins, who said, “The benefits which minorities enjoy today and the efforts to expand their opportunities are due in no small measure to the men of vision, hard work and unassailable achievement exemplified by George W. Crawford.” Thurgood Marshall expressed gratitude for the support of Prince Hall Masons under Crawford’s leadership, saying, “Whenever and wherever I needed money and did not know of any other place to get it, the Prince Hall Masons never let me down.”

People who knew Crawford in life often commented on his imposing presence: “You could feel it when he came into a room,” recalled one, “You knew he was there.” They remembered his oratorical skills and willingness to trade jibes with white corporate bosses on the steps of city hall. Yet over time he seemed to pour himself less into his own individual portrait, and more into the work of changing institutions: shoring up Howard University as a member of its board, filing briefs for the NAACP, serving as New Haven’s corporation counsel, administering an obscure fraternity. It seemed that the law and Freemasonry harnessed all of Crawford’s energy.

Born in October 1877 in Tuscaloosa to parents who had grown up in slavery, Crawford faced bleak prospects in rural Alabama. Orphaned while he was still a young boy, he was raised by grandparents in Birmingham. At 16 he made his way to Tuskegee, where Booker T. Washington was headmaster. As Washington’s office boy, Crawford was one day assigned to the print shop, where other workers teased him. His anger exploded and he hurled a blocked typeform at one of them. It sailed across the room, scattering wooden type everywhere. Crawford was sent to the headmaster, where Washington talked him down, then let him off without further punishment.

Crawford graduated from Tuskegee Institute the year that the Supreme Court ruled for segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson. After a bachelor’s degree from Talladega College, he launched into a new century with law school applications. He ended up at Yale Law School, and happened to be there when Booker T. Washington and President Theodore Roosevelt (also a Mason) both received honorary degrees during Yale’s bicentennial celebration in 1902. Crawford was likely in the audience then, one month after Washington and Roosevelt met over a meal at the White House. The image of a black man sitting down for dinner at the White House (with white women present) had outraged Southern whites, and mindful of the backlash, Roosevelt and Washington barely acknowledged each other during the Yale event.

As graduation approached, Crawford decided to practice law in the South, he told the Times-Picayune of New Orleans of his plans after Yale. “I am going back to my own State to practice among my own people.” He explained that 70% of criminal defendants in Alabama were black, and that “white lawyers are now taking their money to defend them. I might as well have some of that money as the white lawyers, and perhaps I can do a little more for it.”

It was a dangerous path. Black lawyers in the South were mocked and threatened with violence. “No Negro lawyer in this County, Thank God,” one white lawyer replied to a 1928 survey of counties in the South. “I never knew or heard of any Negro with nerve enough to come to this County or Court House to practice law,” replied another in Georgia. Black lawyers faced hurdles even in the black community, explained W.E.B. Du Bois, because their clients recognized that, while a doctor’s work rests mainly on his or her skill, “a lawyer must have cooperation from fellow lawyers and respect and influence in court; thus prejudice or discrimination of any kind is especially felt in this profession.”

In Crawford’s scrapbooks there’s a telling artifact from that time as a freshly minted Yale lawyer. Alongside newspaper clippings about his winning the Townsend Oration Prize, he had carefully placed the only recognition of his accomplishment from his home newspaper in Birmingham: a racist cartoon that depicted him as a grinning caricature beside a gravestone for Yale’s standards. The clipping, saved by Crawford for the rest of his life, testified to his capacity to burnish a cool outrage.

Ultimately he decided to settle in New Haven with an appointment to Connecticut’s Probate Court. Still he always remained attuned to the needs of blacks in the South, often going back to the segregated world of Talladega to serve on the college’s board or craft a vocational guide for its graduates, and through his activity with the Masons and the NAACP.

Crawford joined Du Bois at a gathering at Niagara Falls in 1905 to establish a more assertive movement for equality, in an apparent break with his schoolmaster Washington. The Niagara Movement urged the U.S. government to end discrimination and illiteracy in the South, and to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment. Crawford managed the Niagara Movement’s Civil Rights Division; when the organization fell apart, succeeded by the NAACP in 1909, Crawford helped establish that too. That same year he was initiated among the Prince Hall Masons at Widow’s Son Lodge, No. 1 in New Haven. Soon afterward he invited Du Bois to be inducted as a Mason there as well. For Crawford, the NAACP and Prince Hall Masonry both were re-igniting high ideals and a search for social justice.

He and his wife Sadella had a daughter, Charlotte, and a son who died at just two days old. In the wake of that family tragedy, Crawford funneled even more energy into NAACP affairs and the Masons. He published a book, Prince Hall and His Followers, a robust defense of the group at a time when white Masons waged legal attacks against Prince Hall Masonry and other black fraternal societies. (Legal suits by white masons aimed at shutting down black fraternal orders began before 1900 and were among the first victories won by the black fraternities in the courts.) His idea of slow, steady legal change fused with his sense of Prince Hall’s vision.

“It often happens that Error and Falsehood for a time out-pace the Truth,” Crawford wrote in a play titled The Immortal Fifteen, which he intended to be performed in Prince Hall lodges. “They mostly go on horseback, while she makes her tedious way afoot.”

A test of the national coordination of the new NAACP came in its campaign against D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film, Birth of A Nation. Crawford led the New Haven campaign, pushing city officials to cut the most egregious scenes in the film’s racist interpretation of blacks and American history. NAACP branches across the country waged protests, The Crisis reported, but “the most astonishing cutting has taken place in New Haven.” Crawford obtained an injunction and got the Mayor personally involved in reviewing the film, resulting in more thorough censorship of the racist scenes than anywhere else, noted The Crisis. To make sure the scenes stayed cut, Crawford got a ticket to every screening.

In 1917, the NAACP scored another legal victory in a defense of black soldiers accused of inciting unrest in a segregated town, and won. Crawford highlighted this and other victories at the national meeting of Prince Hall Masons and urged that they support the NAACP’s work. By 1920 the NAACP was receiving strong support from fraternal organizations and their sister groups. At an annual meeting in Detroit, the leader of the New Orleans branch of the Daughters of Isis, a Masonic affiliate, presented a check for $57 – half her salary – to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Contributions also came from Eastern Star, another Masonic sorority. Through the following decades Crawford kept Masons’ attention on what the NAACP was doing nationwide for civil rights.

The Masonic ideal of articulate civic discourse gained, in Crawford’s hands, a sharper edge. When the brutality of lynching continued to leave roughly 80 dead every year, Crawford supported the NAACP campaign against lynching with an open letter in the New Haven paper urging passage of a federal anti-lynching law, in which he acidly cited a recent Supreme Court decision on out-of-season bird hunting. “A white Georgian who kills a wild goose or a woodcock in the closed season will find himself facing a heavy fine or imprisonment,” wrote Crawford. “He may kill a Negro citizen, however, at any time with perfect impunity. The federal government does not concern itself with the matter, and under the laws of Georgia there are no closed seasons for Negroes.” He concluded by affirming a courtroom fight for civil rights, which was not at all obvious in 1922: “The statute book is the only recourse which a civilized state has against assaults upon its mores.”

Before long Crawford assumed the leadership of the Prince Hall Masons’ northern jurisdiction. Along with supporting litigation for civil rights, he guided the Masons toward mutual recognition with the northern branch of white Masons. “Race prejudice is a communicable disease,” Crawford said. “Usually the most effective measure against its spread is exposure to the truth.”

Thurgood Marshall, who joined the NAACP’s Legal Defense Unit in 1935, was himself a Prince Hall Mason. He grew up in Baltimore where, he would later tell interviewers, the National Urban League in 1930 found a brand of segregation “more rigid than any other city in the country, including Jackson, Mississippi. I know this is almost unbelievable, but it’s true.” Outside a few African-American enclaves, Baltimore businesses offered no toilet facilities for Negroes. “I remember one day, I had to go, and the only thing I could do was get on a trolley car and try to get home,” Marshall recalled. “And I did get almost in the house, when I ruined the front doorsteps. That gives you an idea what we went through.”

In early 1954 Crawford was appointed to be corporation counsel for New Haven, the first African American to hold such a high public office in the state. Crawford was 76 years old. That spring the Supreme Court rendered its decision on Brown v. Board of Education, ending segregation in public schools. Du Bois called the decision “unexpected and extraordinary,” and later wrote that for him, “this success was beyond anything I had dreamed.”

Crawford, too, was clearly moved but perhaps less surprised. At a Masonic banquet in Philadelphia, he spoke of the long path to that moment and said that through fraternal organizations, African Americans “first learned the power of a common cause.” He saw it globally: “A Prince Hall Mason has an inescapable identification” with people of color around the world, he declared. From Greenland to Africa to India, he said, “geography cannot diminish your inevitable concern nor your inescapable attachment. You are in Little Rock, Arkansas, even though a postman leaves your mail at a street address in Pittsburgh. You are in Montgomery, Alabama even though you vote from Manhattan. You are in Johannesburg, South Africa even though a census taker registers you on the south side of Chicago… Be proud to be a Negro American. Be proud to be a Negro Mason.”

Crawford led the northern branch of Prince Hall Masons for nearly a half century. In 1966, a senior housing project in New Haven was dedicated in his honor with the governor, Marian Anderson, and Roy Wilkins attending. The next year, Crawford watched his Masonic brother Thurgood Marshall get confirmed as a Supreme Court justice. A photo of Prince Hall leaders around that time shows the two together, with Crawford uncharacteristically smiling.

White Masons in Connecticut were the first to recognize Prince Hall Masonic lodges officially, in 1995. Most states followed suit, yet today white Masons in several southern states still refuse to accept Prince Hall Masonry as legitimate.

Within view of the towering temple of my grandfather’s white Masonic lodge, Alexandria’s Prince Hall Masonic lodge operates from a little bungalow near a subway station. Lee Roy Steele, its Historian Emeritus, is in his 90s but clearly remembers the segregated city and the duality in Masonry that mirrored daily life. “At the bus stop you were the last one they let on the bus. That didn’t make any sense, for one thing, because you’d have to squeeze past everyone who had already gotten on to get to the back.” Nothing diminished his pride in being a Prince Hall Mason; he recalls Thurgood Marshall at regional meetings. “I enjoyed every bit of it,” says Steele. “You feel good being in an organization for 62 years.” For him, the organization’s role in advancing civil rights is obvious even though few non-Masons these days know it.