1931 The United States: Notable Deaths

Notable Deaths

*There were twelve recorded lynchings in 1931.

*Ida B. Wells Barnett, a journalist, an anti-lynching crusader, and a founder of the NAACP, died in Chicago (March 25).

Ida B. Wells Barnett (also known as Ida Bell Wells) (b. July 16, 1862, Holly Springs, Mississippi - d. March 25, 1931, Chicago, Illinois) was an African American journalist who led an anti-lynching crusade in the United States in the 1890s.

Ida Wells was born into slavery.  She was educated at Rust University, a freedmen's school in her native Holly Springs, Mississippi, and at age 14 began teaching in a country school.  She continued to teach after moving to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1884 and attended Fisk University in Nashville during several summer sessions.  In 1887, the Tennessee Supreme Court, reversing a Circuit Court decision, ruled against Wells in a suit she had brought against the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad for having been forcibly removed from her seat after she had refused to give it up for one in a "colored only" car.  Using the pen name Iola, Wells in 1891 also wrote some newspaper articles critical of the education available to African American children.  Her teaching contract was not renewed.  She thereupon turned to journalism, buying an interest in the Memphis Free Speech.  In 1892, after three friends of hers had been lynched by a mob.  Wells began an editorial campaign against lynching that quickly led to the sacking of her newspaper's office.  She continued her anti-lynching crusade, first as a staff writer for the New York Age and then as a lecturer and organizer of anti-lynching societies.  She traveled to speak in a number of major United States cities and twice visited Great Britain for the cause.  In 1895, she married Ferdinand L.Barnett, a Chicago lawyer, editor, and public official, and adopted the name Wells-Barnett.  From that time she restricted her travels, but she was very active in Chicago affairs.  Wells-Barnett contributed to the Chicago Conservator, her husband's newspaper, and to other local journals; published a detailed look at lynching in A Red Record (1895); and was active in organizing local African American women in various causes, from the anti-lynching campaign to the suffrage movement.  She founded what may have been the first black woman suffrage group, Chicago's Alpha Suffrage Club.

From 1898 to 1902, Wells-Barnett served as secretary of the National Afro-American Council, and in 1910 she founded and became the first president of the Negro Fellowship League, which aided newly arrived migrants from the South.  From 1913 to 1916 she served as a probation officer of the Chicago municipal court.  She was militant in her demand for justice for African Americans and in her insistence that it was to be won by their own efforts.  Although she took part in the 1909 meeting of the Niagara Movement, she would have nothing to do with the less radical National Association for the Advancement of Colored People that sprang from it.  Her autobiography, Crusade for Justice, was published posthumously in 1970.

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*Buddy Bolden, considered to be the first man to play jazz, died in a segregated Louisiana mental institution (November 4).

Buddy Bolden, byname of Charles Joseph Bolden (b. September 6, 1877, New Orleans, Louisiana - d. November 4, 1931, Jackson, Louisiana), was a cornetist and is a founding father of jazz. Many jazz musicians, including Jelly Roll Morton and the great trumpeter Louis Armstrong, acclaimed him as one of the most powerful musicians ever to play jazz.

Little is known about the details of Bolden's career, but it is documented that by about 1895 he was leading a band.  The acknowledged king of New Orleans lower musical life, Bolden often worked with six or seven different bands simultaneously.  In 1906, Bolden's emotional stability began to crumble, and the following year he was committed to the East Louisiana State Hospital, from which he never emerged. 

"Buddy" Bolden is regarded as a key figure in the development of a New Orleans style of rag-time music, or Jass, which later came to be known as jazz.

He was known as King Bolden, and his band was popular in New Orleans (the city of his birth) from about 1900 until 1907, when he was incapacitated by schizophrenia (then called dementia praecox). Bolden was known for his loud sound and improvisation, and although he left no known surviving examples of his playing style, it is certain he was recorded.

Bolden suffered an episode of acute alcoholic psychosis in 1907 at the age of 30. With the full diagnosis of dementia praecox, he was admitted to the Louisiana State Insane Asylum at Jackson, a mental instituion,  where he spent the rest of his life.

Bolden was buried in an unmarked grave in Holt Cemetery, a pauper's graveyard in New Orleans. In 1998, a monument to Bolden was erected in Holt Cemetery, but his gravesite remains unknown.

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*Artist Edwin A. Harleston died in Charleston, South Carolina (May 5).

Edwin A. Harleston (b. 1882, Charleston, South Carolina - d. May 5, 1931, Charleston, South Carolina)  was one of the most distinguished artists and civil rights leaders of his generation. Born in 1882, in Charleston, South Carolina, he graduated from Avery Institute in 1900 and Atlanta University in 1904.  He studied at Howard University with the intention of becoming a physician, but instead set his sights on art.  From 1906 to 1912, he attended the School Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

In 1913, Harleston returned to Charleston to help with the family funeral business.  He soon became an active artist, businessman, and civil rights leader.  Harleston founded the Charleston NAACP in 1916 and was successful in its efforts toward educational reform for Black schools, teachers and principals.  He was a firm believer in civil rights for all Americans.  By the 1920's Harleston's reputation as an artist had flourished.  An active participant in the Harlem Renaissance, he received portrait commissions from all over the United States.  Even though his primary mode of art was portraiture, his work also showed the people and culture of the era.

In 1931, Harleston joined the Harmon Foundation at International House in New York.  The House had presented the first all African American exhibition in the United States.  Harleston created sensitive humanistic portraits of mostly African American civic leaders, businessmen, and their families.  He always captured the strength and depth of his subjects' personalities. The Gibbes Museum and Art Gallery and the Avery Institute in his native Charleston co-hosted an exhibition of his work, Edwin Harleston: Painter of An Era, on the 101st anniversary of his birth.

Among the portraits displayed was his painting of Aaron Douglas, one of the most significant African-American artists of the 20th century.  This portrait was purchased by the Gibbes Museum. Many of Harleston's famous works, including "Mending Sock" and "The Old Servant" are in anthologies of African American Art.  Edwin Harleston died in 1931 at the age of 49.

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*May Howard Jackson, an African American sculptor, died.

May Howard Jackson (b. September 7, 1877, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – d. 1931) was an African American sculptor. She was known as one of the first black sculptors to deliberately use America's racial problems as the theme of her art.

May Howard Jackson was born and grew up in Philadelphia, which had a large and well-established black community. She was a student at J. Liberty Tadd's art school there and in 1895 became the first African American to receive a scholarship to attend The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. 

She married a mathematics teacher, William and moved to Washington, D.C. in 1902. She became a sculptor of portraits, and taught at Howard University. She did not travel to Europe to study and as a result was somewhat isolated from her peers. This allowed her to create her own vision and infused her work with a unique style. Her portraits were at first ignored, as they were not realistic in the cameo style popular at the time.

However, her portraits were provocative for expressing the features of the multi-racial in American society.  For centuries, Europeans and Africans had formed unions and marriages. May was fascinated with the wide variety of features among African Americans. Her works such as Head of a Negro Child 1916, Mulatto Mother and Her Child 1929, and Shell-Baby in Bronze 1929 took up this theme in her abstracts and defined her sculptures.

Few galleries were willing to offer her exhibition space. With legal racial segregation and disenfranchisement of most blacks having been in force across the South since the turn of the century, topics such as racial mixing were taboo in general. Laws against miscegenation had been proposed in both federal and state legislatures after Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected as President in 1912.

As a sculptress, Jackson was accomplished enough to be counted among the pantheon of great American sculptors. May Howard Jackson died in 1931. She is interred at the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City.

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*George Wells Parker, a political activist and writer who co-founded the Hamitic League of the World, died in Chicago (July 28).

George Wells Parker (b. September 18, 1882 – d. July 28, 1931, Chicago, Illinois) was a political activist and writer who co-founded the Hamitic League of the World. 

His parents were born in Virginia and South Carolina, and his family moved to Omaha when Parker was young. He attended Creighton University and later graduated from Harvard University, one of the first African-Americans to do so. He became an ardent follower of Marcus Garvey, a rising figure on the national scene. Garvey first became known in Jamaica and then came to the United States to work on his plans for a pan-African movement.

In 1916, Parker started helping African Americans resettle in Omaha and, by 1917, he helped found the Hamitic League of the World to promote African pride and black economic progress.

Parker studied history and wrote about African contributions. His lecture on "The African Origin of the Grecian Civilization" was delivered to supporters in Omaha and then published in the Journal of Negro History in 1917. Parker argued that new anthropological research had demonstrated that Mesopotamian and Greek civilization originated in Africa. In 1918 the League published his pamphlet Children of the Sun, which further developed his arguments for the African presence in classical Egyptian, Asian and European civilizations. 

Parker became well known for his historic writing. He was commissioned by Cyril Briggs, a Caribbean-born journalist based in New York, to publish some of his work in his journal The Crusader, hoping to win wider circulation in the black community. They disagreed over politics, however, as Briggs was anti-Garvey and Socialist, and became a Communist. 

In 1922, Parker moved to Chicago to pursue newspaper and magazine work and died there almost a decade later, leaving a wife, two brothers and two sisters. 

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*Buddie Petit, a highly regarded early jazz cornetist, died (July 4).

Buddie Petit or Buddy Petit (b. ca. 1890? – d. July 4, 1931) was a highly regarded early jazz cornetist. 

His early life is somewhat mysterious, with dates of his birth given in various sources ranging from 1887 to 1897; if the later date is correct he was evidently a prodigy, regarded as one of the best in New Orleans, Louisiana, in his early teens. He was said to have been born in White Castle, Louisiana. 

His given name was Joseph Crawford, but he was adopted by the trombonist Joseph Petit, whose name he took.

By the early 1910s, he was one of the top horn players in the new style of music not yet generally known as "jazz". He took Freddie Keppard's place in the Eagle Band (a place earlier held by Buddy Bolden) when Keppard left town.

Buddie Petit was known as a hard-drinking, fun-loving man who played cornet with great virtuosity and inventiveness. He was briefly lured to Los Angeles, California, by Jelly Roll Morton and Bill Johnson in 1917, but objected to being told to dress and behave differently from what he was accustomed to back home, and promptly returned to New Orleans. He spent the rest of his career in the area around greater New Orleans and the towns north of Lake Pontchartrain like Mandeville, Louisiana, not venturing further from home than Baton Rouge and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.  

Okeh Records offered him a chance to record on their 1925 field trip to New Orleans, but Petit held out for more money and was never recorded. Musicians such as Danny Barker and Louis Armstrong noted that it is a great loss to jazz history that there are no recordings of Petit.

Some of his contemporaries said that Louis Armstrong's record "Cornet Chop Suey" is the closest to Petit's style and sound of anything put on record.

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*A'Lelia Walker Robinson, the daughter of millionaire Madame C. J. Walker, died in Long Branch, New Jersey (August 17).  Robinson created Harlem's celebrated "Dark Tower," a salon where African American writers, artists, and philosophers mingled with members of New York society.

A'Lelia Walker, original name Lelia McWilliams   (b. June 6, 1885, Vicksburg, Mississippi —d. August 17, 1931, Long Branch, New Jersey),  was a businesswoman associated with the Harlem Renaissance as a patron of the arts who provided an intellectual forum for the African American literati of New York City during the 1920s.

Walker grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and attended Knoxville College in Tennessee before going to work for her mother, Madame C.J. Walker (Sarah Breedlove Walker), who had made a fortune in the hair-care business. When her mother died in 1919, Walker inherited the business and the lavish family estate, Villa Lewaro, in Irvington, NewYork. In the 1920s, Walker entertained writers and artists at Villa Lewaro and at her apartment and her town house in New York City. Her regular guests at the town house -- which she named The Dark Tower after Countee Cullen's column by that name --included Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, and other writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance.  

A'Lelia Walker became president of her mother's company in 1919 and remained in that position until her death in August 1931. She initiated a number of marketing campaigns to promote the company -- including a competition among prominent ministers for a Trip to the Holy Land in 1924 -- and remained the face of the Walker Company after her mother's death, but the day-to-day operation was overseen by Attorney F. B. Ransom and factory manager Alice Kelly at the Indianapolis headquarters. During the 1920s, A'Lelia Walker immersed herself in Harlem’s dynamic social life as a patron of the arts and hostess of some of the eras most notable social gatherings.

Walker Company sales began to suffer in 1929 with the beginning of the Great Depression. Increased expenses associated with a new million dollar headquarters and manufacturing facility opened in late 1927 in Indianapolis, Indiana, placed additional financial pressure on the operation and A’Lelia was forced to sell a great deal of her valuable art and antiques.

A'Lelia's adopted daughter Mae Walker was president of the company from 1931 until her death in 1945. Mae's daughter, A'Lelia Mae Perry Bundles (1928–1976), succeeded her mother as president of the company. Today the company's building is known as the Madam Walker Theatre Center and is a National Historic Landmark.

A'Lelia Walker counted among her friends many accomplished African American musicians. She developed an early love of classical music and opera in part because the choir director at the AME church she and her mother attended in St. Louis was a classically trained opera singer and organist. She grew up in the neighborhood where Scott Joplin and other ragtime musicians gathered at Tom Turpin's Rosebud Cafe on St. Louis' Market Street.

During the 1920s, A'Lelia hosted many musicians, actors, writers, artists, political figures and socialites in her townhouse at 108-110 West 136th Street near Lenox Avenue. The elegant brick and limestone building had been designed by Vertner Tandy, a founder of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity and the first black architect licensed in New York State. Almost from the time of her arrival in Harlem in 1913, her dinner parties, dances and soirees included well known Harlem figures like James Reese Europe, J. Rosamond Johnson, Bert Williams and Florence Mills. Live music—from classical and ragtime to jazz and blues—was a regular feature with entertainment provided by her musician friends.

In October 1927, A'Lelia converted a floor of the home into The Dark Tower, a cultural salon that became legendary as one of the great gathering places of the era, a place where Harlem's talented artists socialized with their Greenwich Village counterparts as well as European and African royalty. She commissioned Austrian designer Paul Frankl to create the interior. She also entertained at Villa Lewaro, her country house in Westchester County and at her pied-a-terre at 80 Edgecomb Avenue in Harlem.

Villa Lewaro was named for Walker (Lelia Walker Robinson) after Italian tenor Enrico Caruso told her after a visit to the property that the newly built Irvington-on-Hudson mansion reminded him of the houses of his native country.

A'Lelia married three times: to John Robinson, a hotel waiter, from whom she separated about 1911 and whom she divorced in 1914; to Dr. Wiley Wilson in 1919; and to Dr. James Arthur Kennedy, in 1926, whom she divorced just a few months before her death in 1931.

A'Lelia had no biological children, but in 1912 she adopted Fairy Mae Bryant (1898–1945), who became known as Mae Walker and traveled with Madam C. J. Walker as a model and assistant.

In November 1923, A'Lelia Walker orchestrated an elaborate "Million Dollar Wedding" (actually closer to $40,000) for Mae's marriage to Dr. Gordon Jackson.  Mae Walker, a graduate of Spelman Seminary in Atlanta, divorced Jackson in 1926 and married Attorney Marion R. Perry in September 1927.

A'Lelia Walker died on August 17, 1931 of a cerebral hemorrhage brought on by hypertension, the same ailment that led to her mother's death in 1919. She was surrounded by friends who had traveled to Long Branch, New Jersey to celebrate a friend's birthday party with lobster and champagne in the midst of the Great Depression and Prohibition.

Thousands of Harlemites lined up to view her body. As her casket was lowered into the ground next to her mother's grave at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, Hubert Julian — the celebrated "Black Eagle"— flew over in a small plane and dropped dahlias and gladiolas onto the site.

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*Daniel Hale Williams, a heart surgeon and founder of Chicago's Provident Hospital died in Chicago (August 4).

Daniel Hale Williams,  (b. January 18, 1858, Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania — d. August 4, 1931, Idlewild, Michigan), was a physician and founder of Provident Hospital in Chicago and is credited with the first successful heart surgery.

Daniel Hale Williams was born and raised in the city of Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. His father, Daniel Hale Williams, Jr. was the son of a black barber and a Scots-Irish woman.

He lived with his father who was a "free negro" barber, his mother, his brother and five sisters and was the fifth child of the family. His family eventually moved to Annapolis, Maryland.  Shortly after, when Williams was nine, his father died of tuberculosis. Williams' mother realized she could not manage the entire family and sent some of the children to live with relatives. Williams was apprenticed to a shoemaker in Baltimore, Maryland, but ran away to join his mother who had moved to Rockford, Illinois.  He later moved to Edgerton, Wisconsin, where he joined his sister and opened his own barber shop. After moving to nearby Janesville, Wisconsin, Williams became fascinated with a local physician and decided to follow his path. He began working as an apprentice to Dr. Henry W. Palmer for two years and in 1880 entered Chicago Medical College, now known as Northwestern University Medical School.

Williams graduated from Chicago Medical College in 1883. He served as surgeon for the South Side Dispensary (1884–92) and physician for the Protestant Orphan Asylum (1884–93). In response to the lack of opportunity for African Americans in the medical professions, he founded (in 1891) the nation’s first interracial hospital, Provident, to provide training for black interns and the first school for black nurses in the United States. He was a surgeon at Provident (1892–93, 1898–1912) and surgeon in chief of Freedmen's Hospital, Washington, D. C. (1894-98), where he established another school for African American nurses.

It was at Provident Hospital that Williams performed daring heart surgery on July 10, 1893. Although contemporary medical opinion disapproved of surgical treatment of heart wounds, Williams opened the patient’s thoracic cavity without aid of blood transfusions or modern anesthetics and antibiotics. During the surgery he examined the heart, sutured a wound of the pericardium (the sac surrounding the heart), and closed the chest. The patient lived at least 20 years following the surgery. Williams’ procedure is cited as the first recorded repair of the pericardium; some sources, however, cite a similar operation performed by H.C. Dalton of St. Louis in 1891.

Williams later served on the staffs of Cook County Hospital (1903–09) and St. Luke’s Hospital (1912–31), both in Chicago. From 1899 he was professor of clinical surgery at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, and was a member of the Illinois State Board of Health (1889–91). He published several articles on surgery in medical journals. Williams became the only African American charter member of the American College of Surgeons in 1913.

Williams was married in 1898 to Alice Johnson, daughter of sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel and a maid of mixed ancestry.  Williams died of a stroke in Idlewild, Michigan, on August 4, 1931. His wife, Alice Johnson, had died in 1924.

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Performing Arts

*The Harlem Experimental Theater Group launched its first season at the Saint Philip's Parish House.

*In Chicago, Thomas Dorsey and Theodore Frye established their gospel choir.

*William Grant Still's Afro-American Symphony was performed by the Rochester Philharmonic Symphony.

*Duke Ellington's Mood Indigo (with lyrics by Albany Bigard and Irving Mills) was one of the more popular songs of the year.

*The Negro Art Theater Dance Group gave its first concert (April 29).

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Publications

*Slaves Today, a Story of Liberia, by George Schuyler, was published.  Schuyler's book deals with the descendants of the original founders of Liberia and their exploitation of the native Africans.  The irony, Schuyler points out, is that the old antebellum South still lived in Liberia, only now the sons of freed slaves have assumed the role of plantation masters.  

*George Schuyler also published Black No More, an original satiricial fantasy about the race problem in the United States.  It ridicules virtually the whole spectrum of American society, from the KKK to the NAACP, the Southern aristocrats to the New York City liberals.

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Sports

*Gorilla Jones, a middleweight, became champion of his division.

*Young Jack Thompson, a welterweight, became champion of his division.

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Statistics

*In 19 major United States cities with large African American populations, at least twenty-five percent (25%) of all African American men and women were unemployed.  In Detroit, sixty percent (60%) of African American men and seventy-five percent (75%) of African American women were unemployed.

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Visual Arts

*Painter Horace Pippin finished The End of the War: Starting Home, which was burned into an oak panel. 

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