Anecdotes from Seattle public transit I

I was standing at a bus stop for King County Metro, reading.

A late-20s alabaster-white goth woman with red-orange lip stain sat on the bench, smoking. A light-skinned black woman who turned 71 over the weekend asked if she could sit, and joined goth girl on the bench.

A white-and-grey shaggy haired white guy somewhere between prematurely grey late-20s and Pacific-Northwest-age-deceiving 40s paced in front of us, well-dressed, two of his backpack compartments unzipped and open to the world. The older woman called out to him to ask if he knew his backpack was unzipped. He swung it around to fix it.

The older woman noticed [the size of] my feet - I wear a women's US 4.5 - and it started a conversation between the three of us women about shoes. The pacing guy announced, "Hey! Hey, watch this!"

We turned and he hiked his leg and pretended to pee on the bus stop sign post.

"I peed on the sign!" he declared in a high voice with bright eyes.

Goth girl and I exchanged looks. I never know what to say in moments like this, and neither did she. We'd both been riding Seattle public transit plenty long enough to abide by the unspoken rule of not engaging unless something critical was escalating.

The older woman looked at the sign post, looked on the ground to see if there was a puddle, and then calmly looked up at him and said, "I missed the show. Can you do it again?"

Garveyites and the Back-to-Africa movement

Point of Curiosity: How many Garveyites returned to Africa and what happened to them?

I've just read the restored version of Black Boy by Richard Wright that was originally intended for publication. The version I read in the 1990s was Part 1: Southern Night, Wright's upbringing in Southern poverty and eventual migration to Chicago. This adds in ~130 pages of Part 2: The Horror and the Glory, Wright's early dealings with the Communist party in Chicago and his first successes as a writer.

Wright has two quotes in this book that made me curious about the Garveyites.

The one group I met during those exploring days whose lives enthralled me was the Garveyites, an organization of black men and women who were forlornly seeking to return to Africa.

Those Garveyites I knew could never understand why I liked them but would never follow them, and I pitied them too much to tell them that they could never achieve their goal, that Africa was owned by the imperial powers of Europe, that their lives were alien to the mores of the natives of Africa, that they were people of the West and would for ever be so until they either merged with the West or perished.

The Garveyites are named for the movement's founder, Marcus Garvey. Garvey was born in Jamaica in 1887. Among other things, Garvey founded a passenger line called Black Star Line which "promoted the return of the African diaspora to their ancestral lands."¹ It was considered one of Garvey's key contributions to the Back-to-Africa movement.

Yarmouth, the first Black Star Line ship (src)

^{Work in Progress: a Timeline of Returns to Africa}

^{For now, I'm collecting data about any returns of slaves or free people descended from slaves to their homeland or their ancestors' homeland, not just self-identified Garveyites.}

^{1815-1816 Sierra Leone}

^{Captain Paul Cuffee, a wealthy multi-racial Native American man also of Ashanti (modern Ghana) descent, and a group of Philadelphia Quakers sent 38 blacks (18 adults and 20 children of eight families) to Freetown, Sierra Leone. This included provisioning their first year upon resettlement.}

^{1855-1856 Liberia}

<sup>Reverends Moses Tichnell (Methodist3) and Samuel Rutherford Houston (Presbyterian4) freed slaves and financed their voyages to Liberia5 TBD: Details

To be continued... need to read up on the American Colonization Society (ACS) which looks like it's going to be wildly controversial, and I suspect there's going to be a whole separate interesting wonderlust rabbit hole post about the founding of Liberia. I'm embarrassed that I knew nothing about its history. And obviously more post-Civil War stuff, since my first data points are before the war.
1</sup> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Garvey
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-to-Africa_movement#Religious_motivations_for_colonization
³ Sayre, Ralph SAYRE FAMILY: another 100 years, Volume 4
⁴ Houston (Samuel Rutherford and Family) Papers 1781-1940 Mss. 3451
⁵ Rabbit hole: neither of these gentlemen have Wikipedia biographies. I'm going to make an effort to fix that. Rev. Houston's correspondence is archived at LSU which may or may not be a good place to start researching.

Charline Fay Howard Conyers

Point of Curiosity: Who is the author of Cheyney University's early history?

Follow up from Coppin State, Cheyney University and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU)

When I added A Living Legend: The History of Cheyney University, 1837-1951 by Charline Fay Howard Conyers to my Goodreads to-read list, I noticed that there was no information available about the author. Even her alma mater (one of many, as I'm discovering) failed to list her birth and death dates. Did that mean she was still alive and being coquettish about her birth date, or did they not know? And if they didn't know, why not?

As a reader of non-fiction on ancient Cretan and Egyptian history from the early 20th century, I have evolved a bit of a crusade to undo some wrongs done to women during that era. Namely, women who researched or even wrote whole sections of these books are often not credited. It is our good fortune that the male authors whose names adorned the covers of these books sometimes took the time to include thanks to their helpers in a foreword which often reveals the byline-worthy contributions these women made. These women weren't just typing a manuscript, they were often Linguists, Archaeologists, Egyptologists and Historians in their own right. One such example is Edith Williams Ware and Caroline Ransom Williams' contributions to the transliterations and interpretation of The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus which is credited exclusively to James Henry Breasted.

At least in this case, Conyers is credited for writing the book. However, a preliminary search to expand her biography only gave me enough information to make me very curious. And that's when four hours passed without my noticing as I dug deeper into her digitized history during the 1930s and 1940s.

My eventual goal is to update her Goodreads Author Profile to be more complete (ETA: done!) and possibly create a Wikipedia page on her depending on what I am able to learn. Here is my current list of things I've learned about Conyers since wandering down this tangent:

Dr. Charline Fay Howard Conyers, 1989 (src, Clarence Harris)

• Born 9 October 1911 (thanks to my buddy Phil who utilized his genealogy resources to appease my curiosity)
• She was in the class of 1928 for something, but unsure what; HS graduation? (src)
• In 1933, she was the "Interracial Secretary" at the Pennsylvania branch of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and had a brief correspondence about the capitalization of "Negro" with W. E. B. du Bois (src)
• She was a pianist, and a 1936 graduate (or hopeful for the 1936 class, pending further research) from the Froehlich School of Music in Harrisburg, PA (src 1, src 2)
• In September of 1938, she was a Maid of Honor at the wedding of Hermione Hill at St. Simon's Church on 22nd and Reed St. in Philadelphia, PA and wore a yellow tulle gown with a brown velvet poke bonnet (src) 
• On 15 June 1940, she was married to William Conyers
• In 1942, she was the Chairman of the "Subcommittee on Lectures" at the Cheyney Training School for Teachers which would later evolve into Cheyney University (src)
• Died 23 September 1989 in West Chester, PA at Chester County Hospital and is buried at the William Howard Day Cemetery in Steelton, PA (src)

And then I hit the jackpot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE58amcjqZM

The Evening News 25 June 1935 (Harrisburg, PA)

Coppin State, Cheyney University and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU)

Point of Curiosity: What's Coppin State's context in Black History?

I just finished reading The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates.  In it was this mention of Coppin State and I wanted to understand the broader context.

We were one of six gifted classes on the Thurgood Marshall Team. I don't know how gifted any of us were - more likely we had parents in the race, mothers who worked for the city, got their degrees from Coppin State. They'd gone far enough to know what was out there and what they'd missed in the manner of their coming up. These are the parents the intellectuals erase in their treatises on black pathology. But I saw them in effect at Lemmel, that and teachers always with an eye for children who were two seconds faster and seemed to be bound for something more than the corner or Jessup.

Coppin State University (CSU) is in Baltimore, MD. It was founded in 1900 to train African-Americans for teaching in elementary schools. Over the course of the 20th century, it evolved from a one year program taught at a local high school to today where it offers 53 majors and nine graduate programs including Teaching and Special Education. One of its interesting projects is the reform and management of local Rosemont Elementary School starting in 1998. In 1997, the school was put on the Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE)'s watch list as below acceptable standards. With guidance from CSU, it was removed from that watch list in 2003.

As I read about Coppin State, I hit on an interesting wonderlust tangent: Coppin State is one of 107 historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) in the United States. Most were created after the Civil War and prior to the civil rights changes that came in the 1960s. Two were created for black education prior to the Civil War, and the founding of Cheyney University in particular caught my eye.

Emlen Hall Reading Room, ca. 1900s (src)

In 1837, Cheyney University was founded in Pennsylvania by a Quaker philanthropist named Richard Humphreys. He bequeathed $10,000 - one-tenth of his estate - to the endeavour, after the race riots of 1829. I would love to have learned about Humphreys in my American history classes in public high school, and about the men and women who first got their education at this institution. Humphreys, to me, is a patriot. My favourite patriots are the ones who saw problems unique to the United States and pro-actively enacted solutions at a grassroots level.

Per the history on Cheyney University's web site:

Born on a plantation in the West Indies, Richard Humphreys came to Philadelphia in 1764. Having witnessed the struggles of African Americans competing unsuccessfully for jobs due to the influx of immigrants, he became interested in their plight. In 1829, race riots heightened and it was that year Richard Humphreys wrote his will and charged thirteen fellow Quakers to design an institution: "...to instruct the descendents of the African Race in school learning, in the various branches of the mechanic Arts, trades and Agriculture, in order to prepare and fit and qualify them to act as teachers...."

I'm frustrated at the difficulty I'm having in finding more information about Humphreys and the Cheyney foundation that isn't just parroting the sparse Wikipedia article. A few to follow up on:
The Crisis Aug 1940 "CHEYNEY: Quaker Heritage"
Sing to me David by Thomas McCavour, which mentions that the education was provided free to qualified students.

Follow-up questions:

• Are there any biographies by early students of Coppin State or Cheyney University?
• Who are some of the interesting alumni of Coppin State and Cheyney University?
• Is there a book on Richard Humphreys or any of the 13 board members designated to design what would become Cheyney University?

the Cross of Lorraine, the Cross of Anjou

Point of Curiosity: Tuberculosis has a Symbol?

I recently attended a Queen Anne Historical Society and Pacific Northwest Historians Guild lecture on the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (AYPE), which was the World's Fair in Seattle before the 1962 one we now refer to without qualification as the World's Fair. The AYPE took place in 1909 and was a crossroads of culture and commerce between the Pacific Northwest, Alaska and the Yukon territory and the Asian-Pacific.

Dan Keslee of http://www.aype.com gave an excellent, impassioned slideshow of rarely-seen photographs from the AYPE. I came away with about 100 questions, and one of them was about brief imagery concerning a symbol related to tuberculosis. I didn't know there was a symbol for that.

Croix de Lorraine / the Cross of Lorraine
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Croix_de_Lorraine_3.svg

The symbol can be inserted into HTML with &#9768; which appears in Unicode as  ☨

Other Names

In 1161 C.E., Lazar Bohsha crafted this cross for the order of St. Euphrosyne of Polatsk where it was known as a Russian Orthodox religious relic called the "cross of St. Euphrosyne." During the 15th and 16th centuries C.E., the cross was known as the "cross of Anjou." An evolution of the cross of Lorraine is the "cross of Jagiellons" with equal-length horizontal bars and is a national symbol of Lithuania.

Timeline of Symbol Adoption

1161 C.E.

Made as a Russian Orthodox relic for the order of St. Euphrosyne of Polatsk.

1172 - 1196 C.E.

First used as a symbol of royal power by Béla III in Hungary in the 12th century. This may have been borrowed from earlier use in the Byzantine Empire.

12th - 14th centuries C.E.
Used by the Knights Templar in the Crusades.

1409 - 1480 C.E.

Used as the personal sigil of René the Good of the House of Anjou. He had thirteen children, three of whom were illegitimate. Interesting wonderlust tangent... the three illegitimate children all held titles: son John, Bastard of Anjou and Marquis of Pont-à-Mousson; daughter Jeanne Blanche the Lady of Mirabeau; and daughter Madeleine the Countess of Montferrand. I love that there was a guy known as the "Bastard of Anjou."

15th century C.E.

Used to symbolize the Duchy of Lorraine from whence its name "croix de Lorraine" arises.

1750 - 1810 C.E.
French Jesuit missionaries brought the Croix de Lorraine with them to the New World where it was a recognized symbol by the native peoples of the Wyandot Nation. I haven't found the definitive citation about this symbol and its use in the symbolism of the Huron a.k.a. Wyandot Nation; the original reference is from a book called The Museum Called Canada. 

1902 C.E.

Paris physician Gilbert Sersiron suggested its use in the "crusade" against tuberculosis. This is the origin of the symbol's use by the American Lung Association and other related international organizations.

1939 - 1945 C.E. (World War II)

Symbolized Free France during the war.

Perhaps most amusingly - interesting wonderlust tangent! - is its appearance in the embossment of Oreo cookies. There's a whole big conspiracy theory about it.