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113 5 BUILDING IT OF BRICK AND HOLLOW TILE W hen Lee Wilson crossed the Mississippi River in 1880 to establish a lumber camp on his Arkansas property, Napoleon Wilson , a forty-five-year-old black freedman born as a slave into the Wilson household in Randolph, Tennessee, accompanied him. Napoleon’s decision to join fifteen-year-old Lee Wilson in his Arkansas venture suggests an attachment that some freed people retained for the families of their former masters, but it more importantly reflects the lack of opportunities existing elsewhere for blacks after Reconstruction ended. The older black man remained closely tied to Lee Wilson throughout his life, and the “farmer prince” acquired a reputation—though sometimes contradicted by the facts—of treating blacks more generously than other employers. Certainly Wilson’s construction of a state-of-the-art industrial school for African Americans in 1924 reveals a benevolence rare among planters, and his rage when white arsonists burned the school to the ground demonstrates not only that he understood it as a personal affront but that he saw it also as a threat to the African Americans on his plantation. As he stood viewing the smoldering ashes of the school on the morning of its scheduled dedication, he silently smoked his cigar and said nothing. When he returned to his office, however, he “gave vent to his feelings” and vowed to begin again, “except that I may build it of brick and hollow tile” to prevent the arsonists from repeating the offense.1 “They have helped me to make what I have,” Wilson declared, “and I wanted to do something to help them in a substantial way.” S. L. Smith of the Julius Rosenwald school building program, who had traveled from Nashville to attend the dedication, recorded these remarks, accepting them on face value. However, far more than benevolence motivated Wilson. Just a little over two years earlier—in January 1921—a black man, Henry Lowery, was burned to death on a neighboring plantation in front of a crowd of approximately five hundred men and a few women. Lowery, who stood accused of murdering Lee 114 DELTA EMPIRE Wilson’s brother-in-law and niece, endured an agonizing forty minutes before expiring. Burning a criminal at the stake was an ancient form of capital punishment , usually reserved for such crimes as heresy, witchcraft, and treason. Regarded as “cruel and unusual,” it was no longer employed as a method of execution in the United States, but it served as a particularly savage alternative to hanging blacks in the American South in this period. It functioned as both retribution and warning to the black community, but the burning of Henry Lowery occurred at a particularly problematic time for Arkansas planters . Just fifteen months earlier, an exodus of black labor from Phillips County followed a massacre of blacks, accelerating a trend begun earlier in the decade and mirrored in other southern rural areas: a migration of black southerners to northern industrial cities. The $52,500 Wilson spent of his own money to build the Wilson Industrial School for his African American laborers probably seemed a small price to pay to reward black labor for remaining in place, but he also likely hoped the school would encourage other African American laborers to migrate to the area. The plantation system in Mississippi was continuing to expand, and the demand for labor constituted a crucial component of planter operations. The burning of the black school, however, revealed the resentment some whites continued to feel for blacks and exposed, once again, the vulnerability of African Americans in a racially charged environment, a vulnerability against which Wilson could or—in the case of Lowery—would offer only limited protection. Two other very pragmatic reasons also influenced Wilson to construct a school for the children of his black laborers. One key feature of the Wilson Industrial School involved the limited range of classes it offered, reflecting Wilson’s point of view regarding the proper education for African Americans. While the white school offered a college preparatory track, the black school only prepared blacks to work in one of the Wilson enterprises.2 Building the school also made good sense for Wilson from another perspective. A shrewd businessman to the core, Wilson hedged his investments according to a lifelong practice of leveraging every asset he owned to provide working capital and expand operations. Required by lenders to insure buildings against fire and other damages, Wilson...

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