Feed My Sheep: The Life of Alberta Henry

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INTRODUCTION

In 1972 Alberta Henry was hired as a minority consultant for Salt Lake City School District. She took that job just as the tensions of both the civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement were being widely acknowledged and hotly debated. And she was in the thick of both battles. Some people felt deep respect and affection for her while others felt something close to hatred. She acknowledged that her own approach did nothing to ease those feelings: I don’t sugarcoat anything. In fact, I don’t know how to do that. I didn’t like myself very much in those days, but I had a job to do. I usually wasn’t very nice.¹ Carolyn Kemp, member of the Salt Lake City School Board at that time and later the first woman to serve as its president, fully understood the problems Alberta faced: She was black and a woman. If she’d been nice, they’d have chewed her up and spit her out.²

I first met Alberta in October of 1998 when I was working on Worth Their Salt, Too: More Notable but Often Unnoted Women of Utah. I had wanted to include her in the first Worth Their Salt book published two years earlier, the result of several years of work by twenty people fascinated by remarkable women who had done great things but who were by then pretty much forgotten.³ My proposal to include Alberta, however, was firmly squelched at the initial planning meeting for the project on the grounds that she was much too political.

I argued, We’ve got Esther Landa, for crying out loud. How much more political can we get? Those good historians pointed out that Landa was long since retired but Alberta was still president of the Salt Lake City Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and a member or officer in dozens of other organizations, and was still in the thick of civil rights negotiations—often dealing with people who weren’t even aware of their own prejudices. So I reluctantly conceded the point.

By the time Salt, Too got under way, however, Alberta had turned the reins of leadership of the NAACP over to her protegee, Jeanetta Williams, and was no longer in the midst of every political and civil rights action in the area, even if she was still well aware of issues and holding very strong opinions. I insisted she was fair game. An out-of-state author with local ties volunteered to write an article on her, and I was satisfied—at least, I was until a year later when that author suddenly called and said she could not finish the work. Worse, her call came one day after another author had fallen through on Edith Melendez, a Hispanic linchpin in the Utah Democratic Party. Melendez was the only other woman of color who had survived earlier attrition, so I was looking at a lily-white slate of subjects, and the first draft was due at the press in a month. I knew I could not ask anyone else to jump in that fast, and I did not want to lose Alberta Henry a second time, so I called her, explained the situation, and she said simply, Come on over. Let’s see what we can do.

Two days later I was in her kitchen, where she was scrambling through the Bible, looking for a particular verse, which I happened to know. We bonded over Acts 3:6, Peter’s command to a lame beggar, Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have given I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk.⁴ I didn’t know then how unusual it was for someone to know where to find a verse in the Bible when Alberta did not. And as I think about it now, telling people to rise up and walk was exactly what Alberta Henry had spent her life doing.

Once we had settled Peter and the lame beggar and she had told me that everyone just called her Alberta and I told her to make me Colleen, we held our first recorded interview. When we concluded, she led me into the living room and showed me a large pile of papers, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, and notes stacked on, under, and around her coffee table. She said they were all of her papers and I should take them and return them when I was through. I questioned her sanity. She said a lot of people did that. When I suggested her papers belonged in a university library, she said she would consider that. She did. Alberta’s records are now housed in the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah.

I took her records—they filled the entire trunk and most of the back seat of my car—and went to work copying them in my office at Brigham Young University. I spent more than eight hours over a hot copy machine. I could have spent eight years to accumulate so much material without them, and then I would never have found the personal letters Alberta had included. When I returned her records the next week, we settled into the conversations that became the basis of the article for Worth Their Salt, Too and for this book as well.

Alberta said she would like this book to be her own autobiography. We set out to make it that: her words in the text with notes from me providing context, like identities of historical events or individuals. Unfortunately, death was quicker than we were, so it was not completed before she moved on. Consequently, I have tried to do the next best thing. All of Alberta’s statements from our recorded interviews and extensive conversations, in person and by telephone, appear in one font, as do any quotations by Alberta from newspapers and interviews other than mine, the latter with quotation marks and citations. The rest of the book, including all quotations from sources other than Alberta, is in the same font as mine.

The organization of the book is essentially chronological, but given Alberta’s extensive involvement in so many organizations at the same time, deciding where to include many pieces of information became a lot like waltzing with an octopus. While she was working with the Salt Lake City schools, for example, she was also involved in the NAACP, the Democratic Party, Model Cities, Altrusa Club, her church, her family, and at least two dozen other organizations. I’ve occasionally included endnotes to connect those items to further context in other chapters. I have also added occasional asides, especially when it is necessary to know the look she had on her face or the tone in which she made a given statement. She could be quite dramatic. And funny.

The historical context for her life and actions comes from published sources or those papers Alberta let me copy, but much of it comes from people who were kind enough to grant me interviews. Helen Sandack, for example, charmingly described their first meeting, Alberta’s interview for the only job she ever applied for in Utah. Mrs. Sandack explained that she immediately hired Alberta as a maid after her baby, Artie Sandack, crawled into the room and Alberta picked him up. Watching her interactions with baby Artie, she knew Alberta would fit very well into their family. Then she added, Alberta became my very best friend.⁵ Donald Thomas, who became the superintendent of Salt Lake City School District in 1973 and one of Alberta’s strongest allies, was most gracious in an extensive interview and in answering subsequent questions by telephone. Alberta’s brother, David, confirmed Alberta’s memories of life in Topeka, and he added a few more she hadn’t mentioned. Her daughter, Julia, recalled her own involvement in many of her mother’s good works from the time she was a child until just before her mother’s death. Stuart Reid talked about first meeting Alberta when she decided to approach the LDS Church about community relations; Reid became both her good friend and a board member of the Salt Lake City Chapter of the NAACP. Reverend France Davis remembered working with Alberta on a range of projects from the time he first met her in the early 1970s until just before her death, when she was a volunteer at Calvary Baptist Church. Many other people—family members, neighbors, academics, religious leaders, students she helped—graciously provided information from their personal interactions with Alberta over her years in Utah.

Alberta’s life spanned an important and turbulent period in U.S. history. She was born in a sharecropper’s shack in segregated Louisiana in 1920, moved to semi-segregated/partially integrated Topeka, Kansas, in 1924, and arrived in mostly white/mostly Mormon Salt Lake City in 1948, just as the relationships among races and ethnic groups in America were beginning to alter more radically than they ever had before, even at the end of the Civil War.

During and immediately after World War II Americans had come to recognize both the depths and horrors of racial discrimination, not only through seeing what Hitler’s ethnic cleansing had done to Jews, Gypsies, and others he despised, but also through witnessing how Americans were treating our own minorities: Japanese Americans were forced into relocation centers for the duration of the war. Black soldiers had to eat outdoors, sitting on the floor of railroad platforms while white German and Italian prisoners of war ate inside sitting at tables in the dining rooms. In 1954 the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka made many of us aware of legalized segregation in the Southern states, and then we looked around and recognized the less formal but still hurtful discrimination in our own neighborhoods. That recognition helped most of us understand the need for the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

While the violent verbal and often physical responses of Southern politicians like George Wallace and police officers like Chief Theophilus Eugene Bull Connor to legal requests and peaceful marches shocked the rest of the nation, national heroes like Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr., and A. Philip Randolph led the effort to make all of us full citizens of the same country. Able as those national leaders were, and dramatic though their actions often were, the civil rights movement succeeded largely because local leaders like Alberta Henry took up the cause at home. They informed their friends and neighbors of the de facto segregation and often total discrimination in their own backyards. They worked in the trenches—school board meetings and city councils and individual homes, usually without the blaze of television lights—to end segregation in housing, seating in theaters, and access to schools, restaurants and dozens of other areas, segregation often invisible to the majority of the population. The Southern Colored Codes provided clear targets, but the lack of formal codification in areas like Utah presented an entirely different and often more difficult target.

Because Alberta’s life began in an era of overt bigotry and ended after most legal distinctions had been eliminated, even though individual prejudices remain, this book will use a range of racial references, particularly in quotations. Some simply reflect the polite terminology of the specific times: colored then Negro then Black then African American and occasionally back to Black with or without the capital B. In this book any such references will appear as they do in the quotations and in the text simply as black and white regardless of the designation at the time in question. Since this text is based as much as possible on direct interviews and personal papers, all of those forms will appear, as will an occasional racial slur or epithet. Alberta didn’t react to them; she even quoted them herself at times, so I figure that if she could tolerate them, we’ll live with them when they show up here and then move on to more important issues. Alberta would have expected nothing less from us.

Similarly, Alberta grew up speaking what would have been called at that time American Negro dialect (subsequently called African American English, Black English, Black Vernacular, Black English Vernacular [BEV] or Black Vernacular English [BVE], and Ebonics). Both politeness and political correctness became issues for everyone during her lifetime. However, as she lived in Utah and assumed a public presence, she became more cognizant of her own language. When she spoke to me about her work in Salt Lake City School District, for example, her grammar was precise. When she was talking, joyfully or angrily, about her childhood, her style becomes far more casual and grammatically colorful. I have not attempted to remove any of that color with needless emendations.

At the end of the book are three appendices, which provide insights into Alberta Henry’s life and what she viewed as her mission. Appendix A is a timeline of her life in the context of events in the history of the world and the state of Utah. It also contains a list of her affiliations and honors. Appendix B contains a small sample from the hundreds of students aided by the Alberta Henry Education Foundation with their subsequent successes. Appendix C is a complete copy of An Act in Relation to Service, the law passed by the 1852 Utah Territorial Legislature legalizing slavery.

I am deeply indebted to a great many kind and gracious people who provided information and insights on both the state of our state and Alberta’s impact on it. First, of course, is Alberta herself, who was generous with her time and her records, and who became a really good friend. Her daughter, Julia Lebya, and granddaughter, Patrice Sawyer, provided invaluable perspectives and affectionate insights, as only family members can. Neighbors, friends, and colleagues from work in various areas and organizations graciously granted me interviews, providing stories and opinions not otherwise available. Alberta introduced me to Jennifer O’Neal, who was completing her master’s degree at Utah State University with an excellent thesis on Alberta Henry, and my neighbor Tiana Freimann shared her outstanding senior thesis for the University of Utah about the juxtaposition of the LDS Church and African Americans.⁶ Both of these good women helped me in several areas. Finally, John Alley of the University of Utah Press has provided his customary excellent advice and guidance, while my resident user-friendly software, my husband, Tom, has shown great patience and support with computers and much more. I am deeply grateful to all of them.

CHAPTER 1

UP FROM THE FLOOR

Alberta Henry was born into a racially segregated nation, despite the promises of the Fourteenth Amendment. Black and white did not simply refer to newspaper pages. Most of the Northern and Western parts of the country enforced segregation by custom rather than law and the separation usually extended only to specific businesses or neighborhoods. Public buildings and schools were usually available to anyone, but some accommodations were closed to blacks or to other races, and in some cases, to whites. Nonetheless, racial bigotry was a constant presence and sometimes it became highly overt. The growth of bigotry and intolerance in America was stimulated by the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan after 1915. . . . From beneath their burning crosses the hooded leaders of the Klan exhorted all true Americans (native born, white, Protestant) to unite against Negroes, Roman Catholics, Jews, Orientals, and all foreigners.¹ For example, in Indiana in 1924 Governor Ed Jackson and the majority of the state’s House of Representatives [were] all nominated and supported by the Klan.²

Louisiana, where Alberta was born, however, was a bastion of the Old South and the Klan was regarded as simply another civic organization. Blacks were firmly segregated by law, restricted to specific neighborhoods, schools, restaurants, even restrooms and drinking fountains. The policy was designed not just to separate the races but to debase people of any color except white. Segregation was upheld by the United States Supreme Court decision in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson.³

The Plessy v. Ferguson case came in response to a law passed by the Louisiana State Legislature on July 10, 1890. The law required railroads to supply separate cars for whites and coloreds, in the polite parlance of the time. Its first test came on September 1, 1891, when a group of influential blacks in New Orleans formed the Citizens’ Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law. On February 24, 1892, Daniel E. Desdunes, a light-skinned black man, boarded the whites-only coach on the Louisville and Nashville Railroad. A conductor asked him to move to the colored coach; he refused and was arrested. The court dismissed the charges against Desdunes but could not rule on the constitutionality of the law itself since his ticket was for a destination outside Louisiana. The federal court ruled that since Congress controlled only interstate travel, no single state law could apply to a train that crossed state lines. That left individual states entirely free to impose restrictive laws within their own borders.

On June 7, 1892, Homer Adolph Plessy set out to provide a test case carefully designed to meet the necessary constitutional requirements. Plessy purchased a ticket in New Orleans on the East Louisiana Railway to Covington, just within the Louisiana borders. Covington was little more than a trading post, but it did contain a United States post office, which Plessy listed as one of his intended stops. Soon after the train began to move, Plessy, who was seven-eighths white, took a seat in the whites-only car. He told the conductor, J. J. Dowling, that he was by definition of Louisiana law a colored man and Dowling asked him to move to the colored car. When Plessy refused to move the conductor summoned Chris C. Cain, a private detective, to arrest him, carefully citing the Louisiana law. I suspect, as do others, that both incidents were set up, not only by blacks seeking freedom, but also by the railroad companies, which were greatly inconvenienced by the requirement that they attach two separate cars to each train even when there were not enough passengers to fill one.⁴

The Plessy v. Ferguson case eventually worked its way up to the United States Supreme Court, where Plessy’s attorneys argued that the law violated the constitutional rights granted former slaves in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. Those amendments outlawed slavery and granted full rights of citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States. Plessy’s attorneys also noted inconsistencies in the Louisiana law that allowed exceptions; black nurses, for example, could accompany their employers and patients in the whites-only cars. The justices, however, were swayed by the state’s arguments that separation did not necessarily mean discrimination and that while the amendments had granted legal equality, they did not guarantee social status. The Supreme Court came to the conclusion that separate but equal in terms of facilities and service was constitutional and denied Plessy’s claims.⁵ Justice Henry Billings Brown stated, In the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races unsatisfactory to either.⁶ Ironically, the only dissenter was Justice John M. Harlan, a former slave owner.⁷

This decision cemented the concept behind the legal and systematic segregation of the races in both public and private facilities throughout the South for the next sixty years.⁸ States in the South responded to the decision by enacting a host of Jim Crow laws, which dictated the operations of virtually every business and service in the South and were designed to keep colored citizens from advancing in any way. In theory all services were separate but equal; in practice those services provided nonwhites were almost always inferior, if, in fact, they worked at all.⁹

Alberta’s father had grown up under that system and he knew nothing else.

Daddy, James Hill, was not a slave; his father was. He was born on the reservation in El Reno, Oklahoma.¹⁰ James worked on a sharecropping farm owned by Henry Nowell in Housten, Cado Parish, Louisiana.¹¹ We lived in a shack down in there. It was a shack—call it what it was. Two rooms. Two little rooms, a kitchen and everybody slept, some in the kitchen and some in the other room, on a sharecropping farm.

Sharecropping was a system of farming that evolved after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect throughout the South at the end of the Civil War. A condition in the lease required the sharecropper to purchase his own and his family’s needs—seed to plant, tools to use, even clothes to wear and food to eat—through a company store where the value of all products bought and sold was determined by the owner. Moreover, sharecroppers could only sell their harvest through that same company store where the landowner controlled the price. Neither Alberta nor I had ever heard of a case where that system worked in favor of the sharecropper.

Beyond that, segregated schools for black children, and even the rural schools designed for the children of white sharecroppers, were at best inadequate. The extremely poor education virtually guaranteed that most sharecroppers faced difficulty if not impossibility in tallying the numbers for themselves. That lack of decent education restricted them to only the most menial jobs, keeping them in shackles as strong as any forged for slaves.¹² Since education was abysmal if not denied altogether, the former slave could not even question the amounts, so he inevitably found himself deeply in debt at the end of each season. Hence, the option to move forward from such a life was virtually obviated by the fact that the debt simply grew larger every year. The system was designed to create what W. E. B. DuBois called a slavery of debt.¹³ For all of his life James Hill reflected the submissiveness required of blacks in the Deep South, much to his wife’s and Alberta’s distress.

Alberta’s mother, Julia Ida Palmer, had come from a very different background. Her parents, John Jackson and Susie Williams Palmer, had moved their family from Louisiana to Kansas City when Julia was eight years old. While Kansas had some segregation—both legal and de facto—it also had a large black population with access to businesses and decent schools, both integrated and segregated. Julia was able to attend school through the eighth grade so she could both read well and handle math. Consequently, she was aware of options—both legal and social—beyond those available in Louisiana.¹⁴

My mother, Julia Palmer, was part Native American. Grandmother Susan Palmer Barnes was an Indian-looking lady and she was a spiritualist. She lived in Kansas City, so my mother went to school there. I think she was in about the eighth grade and then on the way from school one day, she was dragged in an alley and raped. My mother never talked about it, but my grandmother would tell me. She said that when she found out there was nothing she could do after Mother was raped, she took her back to Louisiana, to Shreveport, where Mother’s grandmother, my great-grandmother, lived.

Daddy and Mother got married, and my older sister, Rosetta Martin, was born in 1917.¹⁵ And for the babies, [Mother] would say, Jim, it’s time, and he would run across the field and get the midwife, Maggie Rattler. Maggie Rattler was the midwife for all of us. When he went to get her, Mother would put the sheets and blankets on the floor and got ready to have a baby in the kitchen because the stove was right there for hot water and the kids were in the other room in the little shack. It was a shack, nothing but a shack, but it’s all the privacy she had.

Nevada [pronounced NevAda] was born one year four months and two days before I was, June 12, 1919, and you didn’t hear me say she was born in that two-room shack. When Nevada was born, Mother got real sick, she turned yellow and Daddy had to take her to a hospital. It wasn’t a big hospital, because they couldn’t go to the big hospital, but it was a little, old, dinky hospital that blacks could go to because they couldn’t go to the white hospital. So the doctor came out, and said: She’s got yellow jaundice. We can either save her or the baby. But we cannot save both of them. They would try saving the child, if Daddy wanted it.

Daddy said, I can’t—wait a minute. And he went and got Susie Barnes, my grandmother, who was a spiritualist. Grandmother went in and said: You leave both of them alone. Don’t worry about her. I’ll take care of her. And then she went out into the hills and the fields, got a whole bunch of herbs and stuff, mixed them together and mashed them up and made some kind of a salve, went in the hospital room and locked the door, went in there with Mother and rubbed her all down with it. I think Grandmother stayed for two or three days without letting the people come in, because she said they didn’t know what they were doing. She said, They don’t have enough training and I’m putting you in the hands of the Lord and I’ll do it, because she believed, oh, did my grandmother believe. For three days she applied this to Mother, and after those three days the yellow jaundice was gone and Mother was able to have Nevada, but Nevada was born very weak. The yellow jaundice, whatever it did, it took its toll upon her. But anyway, she saved Mother.

I was born at five o’clock in the morning on October 14, 1920. I came out squealing. I had two sisters, Rosetta and Nevada; they did not have a name for me, so there was a peach tree out in the yard, so she said, We’ll just call her Alberta. They never worried about me when I was little because before I was eight months old, I started walking and clapping.

David is one year and one month and one day younger than I am. November 15, 1921.¹⁶ He and I were like twins. When we went to school and the girls would pick on him, [he had] curly hair and everything, or if the boys would step on him,¹⁷ well then, they had to fight me. We’ve always been close. If anything happened to one of us, the other one would be right there.

These are the things Mother told me about me. Mother would have to go out in the fields to pick the cotton with Daddy, so they could make a little bit of money. Rosetta was supposed to watch us. Rosetta was three years older than I am, so when I was two, she was five, and she was supposed to watch Nevada and me. Mother had a great-big tub she put clothes in, and she washed the clothes with a wood fire under there. She’d come in and take a stick and push the clothes up and down. She made our dresses, the little tiny pinafore white dresses for Nevada and me because we were the same size. I’d run up there and say, These are mine! And I’d run up there again, and one time Rosetta wasn’t watching and I ran up too far and got my foot in the fire. Mother could hear me clear across the field, hollering. And so they whipped Rosetta, because she was supposed to be watching us not letting us get close