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The Last March: The Demise of the Black Militia in Alabama
- University of Missouri Press
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The Last March The Demise of the Black Militia in Alabama ( Beth Taylor Muskat L ate on Sunday Afternoon, August 20, 1905, the Capital City Guards marched jubilantly homeward toward their armory on Dexter Avenue, Montgomery’s principal thoroughfare. The nearly one hundred black members of the Alabama National Guard were returning from a successful five-day encampment that had been held on the outskirts of the city. As the uniformed Guardsmen swung up the street leading to the capitol, the company’s brass band “made the mistake” of playing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” whose many parodies included the reproachful version entitled “Hang Jeff Davis on a Sour Apple Tree.”2 The twenty-year career of the Capital City Guards was soon to end abruptly; the black troops of the Alabama National Guard were stepping off their last march. Twenty years earlier, during the summer of 1885, the city of Montgomery enjoyed “an atmosphere of confidence.”W. W. Screws, editor of the state’s most important newspaper, the Montgomery Advertiser, and one of the city’s biggest boosters, wrote that “in many ways [it was] a year of jubilee.” The capital had become a major railroad junction where four rail lines, including the Louisville and Nashville, converged. The construction of many new residences and public buildings measured Montgomery’s economic resurgence. The Weekly Citizen, a black newspaper, noted “some of the finest houses ever built in Montgomery are going up. . . .”Although the city’s economy remained closely tied to cotton—its six to seven million dollars annual trade represented about one-fifth of Montgomery’s yearly commerce—considerable industrial 112 113 Demise of the Black Militia in Alabama diversity existed, which included a textile mill, several metal manufacturers, and lumber companies. The growing trade revenues allowed the city to expand and update its public services. During the fall of 1885 the city built a new water system, which Screws considered “the most important event in the history of Montgomery’s progress as a city.”Also installed that same year was a street railway system that soon spread from the city’s center into the suburbs. Paved streets improved sanitation, a new jail was built, electric lights replaced gaslights along the streets, and city parks were created. The first major extension to the state capitol was undertaken with the addition of an east wing. The erection of the imposing U.S. post office, with its “new and novel” device, an elevator, added to the construction boom.3 Montgomery was small compared to major southern cities, but its population grew nearly 33 percent during the 1880s, from 16,700 to 22,000.Although blacks outnumbered whites five to three,4 separation of the races continued largely through social custom, rather than by law. A visitor to the city in 1885 may have found that “blacks and whites are indiscriminately intermingled on the street,at the cotton stores,and in all the channels of business,and the shops and other mechanical pursuits exhibit the white and the black man side by side in earning their bread,”5 but job opportunities generally were segregated, as were the public facilities-theaters, restaurants, train station waiting rooms, schools, trolley cars, and the volunteer fire department.6 Social activities of the two races also existed in separate worlds: black and white alike joined a wide range of segregated fraternal, social, and service organizations, as well as professional groups and sports clubs.7 The capital city enthusiastically supported the five local white military units of the Alabama State Troops. Encampments, prize drills, social events, and elections were covered frequently and in great detail by the Montgomery Advertiser.8 Politics were dull during that summer of 1885. Governor Edward A. O’Neal was less than a year into his second term; Grover Cleveland—the first Democratic president since the Civil War—was in the White House; there was “but little interest” in the city elections, as the mayor and other Democratic nominees (all white) ran without opposition.9 It was, then, a relatively stable community into which the Capital City Guards entered. During the previous four years Montgomery’s blacks had actively tried to obtain local support and official approval to organize their own military company. In 1881 James A. Scott, a black lawyer and editor of a “straightout Democratic” newspaper, optimistically and prematurely announced “a colored company will soon be organized in this city.”10 Three years later a black carpenter named Milledge A. Love reported...