“Colored People to Hold Mass Meeting and Make Protest.”

by Richard White 
Copyright © 2016. All rights reserved by the author.


This was the dramatic reportage in the Buffalo Courier on Thursday, June 19, 1902. What prompted this announcement was a surge of insults and attacks on blacks with impunity by “white thugs” on Michigan Street south of Broadway. The racial situation in that part of the city was tense. The newspaper suggested that “a race war is imminent…the young colored men…have already organized into several crowds for protection.” However, one victim of the most recent assault, William P. Rhodes, proposed another option—to demonstrate publically blacks’ indignation and anger against virulent prejudice, and to demand change.


Rhodes, the proprietor of the Magnolia Saloon at 55 William Street, called for the protest meeting to occur at his business on June 20. Early on Sunday morning on the 15th, he and two companions—bartender James Dorsey* and housekeeper Jessie Wright - were accosted by a crowd of white men as they returned home from the Central RR Station. According to the Buffalo Evening News on June 16, one of the white men “made some slurring remark about the woman.” Dorsey protested, and was knocked to the ground by the thugs who then pounded Rhodes so severely that he required hospital care. But there was still more to occur.

On the 16th, the Buffalo Express best summarized what happened next when a patrolman from the 3rd Precinct arrived on the scene—“none of the assailants was arrested. Patrolman Malonney… arrested Dorsey and Wright… They were fined $5 apiece [for disorderly conduct] in sunrise court yesterday by Justice Rochford.” Later, because of Rhodes’ actions including hiring an attorney one day before the rally, and threatening to file suit to recover the fines imposed on his cohorts--four of the alleged assailants were arrested, although their cases never were adjudicated.

Rhodes’ “mass meeting” drew about 25 prominent black men, according to the Courier on June 21. Some of them made speeches that “were quiet in tone, although some criticism was made of the lack of necessary police protection…. The men then formulated an approximately 350 word resolution that reviewed the hostile racial setting caused “by thugs called men who, possessing white skins, arrogate to themselves the right to molest…any person of a different race or color….

The resolution concluded with a request for “the cooperation of all good citizens, white or black, to aid us in our denouncement of this wanton tendency to the end that we may live in harmony together.” There was no word in the resolution on a need to form groups “for protection.”

The aftermath of these events was positive. The protest meeting, and its proposal for racial harmony, generated its desired goal--the local daily papers carried no new reports on race-based attacks by white thugs near Michigan Street at least for the rest of 1902. Thanks to one black man who almost overnight became an activist for justice-- a tense racial situation subsided in a northern city. Five decades before the emergence of the modern Civil Rights Movement, an African American man successfully confronted racism in his hometown of Buffalo.

*The Courier is the only newspaper that refers to this man as Ralph B. Dolsey.

About the author: Richard White's articles have appeared in Civil War History, The Journal of Negro History, and other publications.

Flying Tigers Memorabilia Lands at Cherry Creek Town Museum

by 
by Sharon Howe Sweeting
Copyright © 2016. All rights reserved by the author.
Two blood chits, a short snorter, and a 1943 cloth map of eastern China have landed in a small town in southwestern New York.

These artifacts and more are displayed at the Cherry Creek Town Museum. They were given by Larry Waite in memory of his father, Second Lt. Lawrence A. Waite, who served with the 14th U.S. Air Force in the China-Burma-India Theater in 1944 with the American Volunteer Group (AVG).

The AVG was better known by a nickname: the Flying Tigers.

The AVG was founded in 1940 and led by a renegade pilot named Claire Chennault whose pursuit pilot training was criticized by his superiors but later endorsed by the U.S. War Department and the president.

Capt. Chennault had been in China for a few years assisting Chiang Kai-shek’s government in training Chinese Air Force Pilots when, in 1939 he traveled to Washington with Chinese officials to request fighter planes, bombers, supplies and parts in their war against the Japanese. By the end of 1940 the U.S. government had agreed to provide 100 Curtiss P-40 Tomahawks to China after signing a currency stabilization agreement with them.

The P-40s were made available after the RAF deemed them to be obsolete. They were painted with flying tiger “nose art” shark faces. Each plane had a pilot, a co-pilot, a navigator and bombardier. Lt. Waite served as a bombardier as evident by his pocket notebook with several mathematical calculations for dropping bombs.

The “Blood Chits” issued to the American Volunteer Group Flying Tigers in Chinese characters in case they were shot down read “This foreign person has come to China to help in the war effort. Soldiers and civilians, one and all, should rescue and protect him.” The collection at the Cherry Creek Museum includes one made of silk, worn inside the jacket and one made of a more durable material, worn on the outside.

A useful souvenir called a “Short Snorter” was also donated. The Department of the Air Force describes it thus: “Many Allied airmen in World War II made souvenirs of their travels by collecting currency from all the places they visited.” The collection of bills were taped together and signed by friends with whom they traveled. Waite’s includes 24 bills from the U.S., Portugal, France, Algiers, Egypt, Iran, India, East Africa and the Congo, British West Africa, British Guiana and Australia among others.

With a slice of military history presented in this small American town museum, an airman, a friend and a neighbor is remembered.



Sources:

Byrd, Martha. Chennault: Giving Wings to the Tiger, 2003.

Office of Air Force History. The Flying Tigers: Chennault’s American Volunteer Group in China. 2015



About the author: Sharon Howe Sweeting is the Cherry Creek Town Historian and Museum Curator (Smithsonian Trained) and a Trustee of the Chautauqua County Historical Society.