Department of History

Elizabeth Johnson Harris, "Life Story." Full text available at website http://odyssey.lib.duke.edu/harris/harris-indx.html.

This document is the handwritten autobiography of an African–American woman who lived in Augusta, Georgia, from 1876 to 1939. I discovered the document's existence at the website of the Special Collections Library of Duke University. I cannot travel to Duke this semester, but fortunately the library has digitized a full text of this remarkable primary source. 

I was searching for materials to write about the lives of African–American female domestic servants during the apartheid–era South. Primary documents on this subject are difficult to find. Few African–American women in the segregated South left written records––diaries, letters, etc.––of their own, and my capacity to do oral history is limited. Thus, this document is an especially important find, for it gives the first–hand account of an ordinary black woman and laborer of the Jim Crow era. [note: this addresses question 2, "what is the historical context of the document"?]. Even more helpfully, the website provides both scanned imagery of what the diary actually looks like, as well as plain text transcriptions that provide for easy reading. 

It is clear from her writing style, penmanship, and use of words that she was at best a modestly educated woman. The handwriting is that of an older and "simple" woman. But in spite of this, the memoir has moments of elegance and eloquence, seemingly unconscious to the writer herself. That is, the document is not "written" with a self–conscious style, but is more the somewhat rambling reminiscence of an older person who is not equipped with any special literary gifts. But the document has a freshness and humanity precisely because it is not self–consciously "written," but emerges naturally from the life experience related in the memoir.

The document's main theme surprised me. Elizabeth Johnson Harris seems to have led a happy life. She was not unaware of racism and the problems faced by African Americans, but her memoirs focus mostly on the joy she derived from living in her community––watching children grow (both those she had and those of her friends), attending church and other communal events, visiting with her neighbors. She seemed to live in a strong and vibrant African–American community. She mentions whites only occasionally, and often to note a good relationship with a particular white person or employer. Thus, her autobiography provides a counterpoint to the image we might have of African–Americans living under a system of such subjugation and terror that they could not form strong communities.

The document itself does not explain why she produced this autobiography, but the ancillary information provided on the website clears this up. Johnson wrote this as a kind of family heirloom, to leave for her children and hope it would get passed down with each successive generation of the family. In other words, she had a profound sense that she herself was a historical figure, no matter how "ordinary" she was.

I have chosen one section, below, to xerox for special discussion in the class. Elizabeth Johnson Harris was a devout Christian, very active in church. Her life story returns at several points to experiences in church––her childhood in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, her conversion experience, her attendance at special events such as revivals, and her longtime service as an organist and Sunday School teacher. She of course attended an all–black church, and her church home was part of that vibrant community that seems to have given her meaning and joy in life. At the same time, one section of the document mentions, almost offhandedly, a revival in town led by the Reverend Dwight Moody, a revival attended by both whites and blacks.

I knew very little about Moody, so I looked him up in a secondary source. Fortunately, I found an excellent biography of Moody by William McLoughlin. Moody was a shoe salesman who moved to Chicago in the 1860s. In the 1870s he began leading revivals locally in the Chicago area, in tandem with Ira Sankey, a songwriter and songleader who served as Moody's sidekick on the revival circuit for over thirty years. Moody's reputation as a preacher grew, and soon he was leading revivals in other cities. By the 1880s he was a nationally known figure; he seems to have been to that age what Billy Graham is to our own age. Moody spent the rest of life his conducting mass revivals all over the United States, receiving very large contributions from businessmen especially to fund his activities. Moody also started his own Bible School, the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. I discovered that this school still exists and draws thousands of students to the North Side of Chicago.

Moody traveled to Augusta to conduct a revival, and Elizabeth Johnson Harris attended. In the section of the document below, she describes this particular event. What most attracted my attention was the following sentence: "Rev. Moody was perfectly free and friendly as a man of God, with both white and colored. He extended a free invitation to one and all, to these services. The audience was sometimes mixed, the crowds were great and the Holy Spirit seemed to be in such control over the house that the color of skin was almost forgotten for the time being."

Most books I have read about the Jim Crow South mention that churches were entirely segregated, that there was no interaction between whites and blacks in religion, because white and black people had formed separate religious institutions. But here, we see that whites and blacks did interact, at least on this instance. How many more instances were there of such interaction? More research will help me determine this. I used Moody's biography to research his stay in Augusta, but the author mentions nothing about the crowd present in the one sentence he devotes to Moody's visit there. Clearly this was not a top event in Moody's life, just another one–week stand in a small American city. But it was a very large event in Elizabeth Harris's own life, in part because she witnessed, for one of the few times in her life, a moment in which the color barrier seemed to fall, at least "for the time being." I checked two more secondary sources on African–American life in the Jim Crow South, Neil McMillen's Dark journey and Robin Kelley's Race Rebels. Neither of them mentioned any such racial interaction in religion. But then, in looking at a book about black music in the South (Bill Malone's Southern Music, American Music), searching for information on black female blues singers, I discovered that whites and blacks often attended Pentecostal churches together, at least in the early days of Pentecostalism. So that will be an avenue for further research.

Thus I am left with two questions. First, how peculiar or typical is the experience related by Elizabeth Harris? To what degree were black women able to find such strong communities that they could survive and almost ignore the strictures placed on their lives by southern apartheid? Second, I want to investigate more the possibility of racial interactions that took place in spite of the officially segregated culture of the South. I have found the published memoirs of two more black women, that may help me address that question.