I mentioned in passing yesterday George Henry Woodson, a towering figure in the struggle for black equality in Iowa who doesn't receive the attention he deserves --- in my opinion at least. Yesterday's brief reference was to his role as a principal speaker during the
1902 Emancipation Day jubilee celebration, held in Leon.
There are a couple of reasons for the obscurity, among them the fact that Mr. Woodson died during 1933 after a lifetime during which old white men still were the unchallenged custodians of black history. And then there was the fact that while he worked tirelessly for equality, he seems not to have been especially interested in promoting himself. Although a noted orator on the topic of equality, for example, there are no published collections of his speeches or writings.
The photo here, taken late in life, is from the University of Iowa collection. And the following biographical data is lifted from a Library of Congress Blogs post by Beverly W. Brannan, curator of photography in the Prints and Photographs Division, and was written in reference to the poster at left, a souvenir of Mr. Woodson's second (and final) run for public office in Iowa.
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Woodson’s parents, George Woodson and Sena Sawyer, were enslaved in Wytheville, Va., where George was born in 1865. He attended the Wytheville Freedmen’s School, opened in 1867.
In 1883, at 18, he enlisted in the military in Louisville, Ky. He joined Company I, 25th Infantry, as a “Buffalo soldier,” a term referring to African-Americans who served from 1866 until 1951, when the military became racially integrated.
In 1890, Woodson received a B.A. from Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute (now Virginia State University); in 1895, he earned a law degree from Howard University. Woodson then opened a law office in Iowa, where the Consolidated Coal Company employed many African-Americans. In 1898, he ran unsuccessfully for county attorney but went on to become a leader in the Iowa Republican Party.
With others, he founded the Iowa Afro-American Council, opened a law partnership that would last 20 years and helped organize the Iowa Negro Bar Association. Woodson operated on national scale. He attended meetings throughout the country and delivered talks that received favorable coverage in both the general and the black press. In 1905, he was one of the 29 founders of the Niagara Movement, advocating full civil rights for African-Americans.
In 1912, Woodson ran for the Iowa State House as a Republican candidate but again was unsuccessful. A contemporary African-American Iowan, Reuben Gaines, Jr., commented in his memoir, “It was too early to elect a black man to that position.”
In 1921, as demand for coal declined, Woodson moved to Des Moines as deputy collector of customs and married Mary Montague, in her mid-50s and marrying for the first time, like Woodson.
In 1924, at the request of President Calvin Coolidge, Woodson led a commission to the Virgin Islands, which the U.S. had acquired in 1916. The commission studied unemployment and poverty, and elements of its report were incorporated into the 1924 Republican presidential platform.
In 1925, Woodson was a founder of the National Bar Association (NBA) in Des Moines and served as its first president. Harvard graduate Charles Hamilton Houston, future dean of Howard University Law School, numbered among its 120 lawyers. The NBA gave voice to black attorneys who were excluded from every nationally organized bar association at that time.
Woodson continued attending bar association meetings and worked at the customs office until 10 days before he died on July 7, 1933.
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Mr. Woodson's first office in Iowa was located in Muchakinock, the coal mining town south of Oskaloosa in Mahaska County where Consolidated Coal Co. operations were headquartered at the time. When the company moved on to found Buxton in Monroe County, he relocated there and that was his principal base for so long as that little city, celebrated as a beacon of racial harmony, remained viable.
He was living and working at Buxton during 1912 --- 10 years after his appearance as an orator in Leon --- when he decided to run for state representative on the Republican ticket from Monroe County. With the Buxton vote behind him, he was successful in obtaining the Republican nomination.
During the general election that November, however, Monroe County's white Republicans --- unquestionably dominant in the county --- voted overwhelmingly Democrat instead. Had he been elected, Mr. Woodson would have been Iowa's first black legislator. As it was, however, “It was too early to elect a black man to that position."
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Six years later, during early August of 1918, Mr. Woodson was in Waterloo to address a regional Emancipation Day celebration when he stopped at a cafe operated by Henry E. Meyers (or Meyer) and asked to be served a meal, a request that was refused.
The result of that refusal was reported as follows in The Des Moines Register of August 10 under the patronizing headline, "Woodson Is on Warpath."
WATERLOO, Ia., Aug. 9 --- Special: George H. Woodson, colored attorney of Buxton, Ia., chief orator here today at emancipation day program, charges local cafe refused to serve him a meal and as a result has started things.
He called a policeman to the cafe and requested him to arrest the proprietor, but the request was refused. The attorney then went to the city hall and stated he would sue the city, the cafe proprietor, and said he intended pushing the matter through.
Woodson is known throughout Iowa as a Negro leader and has appeared a number of times in the Supreme court. He made an address here this afternoon at an emancipation day exercises attended by over 17,000 Negroes from Cedar Rapids, Waverly, Davenport and other surrounding cities.
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Down in Chariton, Leader editor Henry Gittinger was following the case in Waterloo with some interest and wrote the following for his edition of August 22 --- a rare foray into the field of civil rights for a small-town editor at the time. I'm proud of Henry for the effort --- republished in the days that followed in The Register and elsewhere:
George Woodson, the talented negro lawyer, of Monroe county, has entered suit against a restaurant keeper of (Waterloo) under the civil rights act. Mr. Woodson sat down at one of the restaurant's tables and called for his meal, and by order of the proprietor the waitress refused to serve him. He brings action under our law that one man is just as good as another and places of public entertainment are compelled to recognize this fact or pay the penalty.
It is probable that Mr. Woodson will obtain judgment under the law, but that will not break down the racial barriers or prejudice, much as the injustice may appear. It is true that at no first class hotel in Iowa can a negro obtain entertainment and in spite of whatever judgment Mr. Woodson may obtain, the law will continue to be held in defiance.
We, in Iowa, boast that we accord equal rights to the negro, but to all intents and purposes we might with better propriety resort to the Jim Crow laws of several other states because we are not altogether sincere. True, the colored children have the privilege of attending school with white children, but after graduation no place in scholarly achievements are given. We let the negro ride in the cars, but do not share his seat with him if it is possible to gain a sitting place elsewhere and we have even seen justice loving citizens of the commonwealth stand up in the aisle "so that no person of color" may have the room all to himself.
He is permitted to cast a free ballot and have it "honestly counted," but his white fellow citizen sees to it that he does not get nominated to office, or if nominated that his defeat is practically certain, as Mr. Woodson well knows because he suffered this experience in Monroe county and he was transgressed against as much under civil rights in his political aspirations as he was when he was denied entertainment at the (Waterloo) chop house, though the law did not apply.
The negro problem is one which the wisest sociologists have not sufficient wisdom to solve. It is regrettable, especially when we call to mind the heroic service the colored soldiers are rendering the nation beyond seas.
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We know that Mr. Woodson carried through on his threat to sue the cafe proprietor. The following was published in The Waterloo Courier of Aug. 30:
Henry E. Meyer, owner of a restaurant which refused to serve George H. Woodson, negro attorney of Buxton, Ia., Aug. 9, has been sued by the latter who alleges infringement of civil rights. Mr. Woodson was the speaker at an emancipation day celebration in this city Aug. 9. He visited the cafe operated by Meyer on that occasion and was refused service. Preliminary hearing was this morning and at request of Mr. Meyer's counsel it was postponed to 3 p.m.
I could find no further reports on the case, however --- so for the time being at least we don't know how it ended.
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