A storm in my hands

A family relic stirs a maelstrom of emotions on class, race, and manipulations aimed at depriving us all

I found a weathered testament to both privilege and misfortune in my father’s things. In a matted frame is my great grandfather’s 1929 exemption from Alabama poll taxes, a boon contingent on his World War I U.S. Army service.

From the document we know Horace Greeley Lee was drafted and sworn in on Oct. 15, 1918, at Andalusia, Alabama, a hardscrabble town on the scorched coastal plain of pine forests just 65 miles north of the Florida beaches. He had been married only eight months then.

I just knew him as Grandpa Lee because that was what my father called him. I remember his tin-roofed farmhouse and the fields beside it, a barn holding an ancient tractor, a coop of chickens that supplied tan and freckled eggs, and a covered well we were warned to stay away from. I also remember afternoons on their wide front porch, swaying in porch swings and gliders while juicy watermelon was served up on damp newspaper, or when everyone took turns cranking the ice cream maker.

It doesn’t appear Grandpa was eager to leave his farming community when America entered World War I in April 1917. Born in 1898, Grandpa would have been eligible to join the military two years before Uncle Sam gave him little choice. He was sent to the vocational section of the Student Training Corps at then-Alabama Polytechnic Institute, now Auburn University, for training in radio and mechanics. Lucky for him the war ended a month after he donned a uniform. Grandpa was discharged as a private on Dec. 8, 1918, in Auburn, Alabama.

Like 70 percent of Alabama farmers then, Grandpa started out as a tenant farmer. The difference between him and a sharecropper was simply ownership of some farm property, the house maybe, or equipment. Ultimately, the land was still someone else’s, a social “better” you constantly kicked up to while breaking your back to scratch something fruitful from the earth. Both tenant farmers and sharecroppers bought everything needed on credit from local merchants and simply hoped to make enough money at harvest time to pay debts.

In Alabama society of that time, he was close to the social ladder’s bottom rung. How he landed there is no mystery.

The misadventure started with Horace Greeley Lee’s grandfather, James Madison Lee, born in 1828. Ironically, the man named for one of the United States’ most revered foundational leaders left a wife and seven children to battle U.S. forces on behalf of the Confederacy during the Civil War. He was stationed near Vicksburg, Mississippi in 1862 when he contracted measles. James Madison Lee was ordered home for recuperation but died in a Columbus, Mississippi hospital in August 1862.

Family lore has it that when the courier arrived in lower Alabama with the tragic news, he found Lee’s seven kids at the graveside service for their mother. That meant Grandpa’s father, James Kenyard Lee, was just three years old when he and the other orphans were parceled out to family.

A few decades later, Grandpa was one of James Kenyard Lee’s 16 kids. Resources would have been stretched thin.

I found it curious Grandpa was named after New York newspaperman, Republican Party founder, congressman and presidential candidate Horace Greeley. Literacy would have been nearly as scarce as leisure time in Alabama rural quarters during the late 19th century. How did James Kenyard Lee know about Greeley, an influential abolitionist?

Abolitionist notions normally earned rebuke “down South” in the 19th century. North Carolina-born Hinton Rowan Helper spent the antebellum period lobbying against slavery even though he was an ardent white supremacist. Helper used statistics on land values, literacy levels, and manufacturing rates in an 1857 book to show slavery obstructed economic opportunities for non-slaveholders and damaged the entire South. Predictably, upper-crust Southerners led charges that Helper was a Northern provocateur agitating class friction.

Helper’s bitterness grew after the Civil War. He eschewed any contact with Black people, refusing to frequent businesses that employed them and became increasingly unstable. Even so, Southern sentiments toward him remained brittle and in 1909, Helper purposefully filled his Washington D.C. apartment with natural gas and died.

Conversely, Greeley earned Southern favor when he ran for President in 1872. He favored labor, opposed monopolies, and wanted an end to Reconstruction policies such as the military oversight across the South. The last of those earned him endorsement from southern Democrats of the era. He lost in a landslide to incumbent President Ulysses S. Grant, picking up no electors. The vote in Alabama was closer, with Grant garnering 53 percent of the vote to Greeley’s 47 percent. It would be the last presidential election a Republican would win in Alabama until Barry Goldwater in 1964.

In my ancestors’ home of Covington County, Greeley cleaned up, pulling in roughly 90 percent of the 670 votes cast. The reason was simple: Democrats were the party of white supremacy in that era. If they summoned votes for Greeley, rural white Alabamians followed suit.

Those racial sensibilities were also a big part of how my great grandfather ended up a tenant farmer. The Deep South was settled by those who sought to recreate the ancestral society of England, where a tiny percentage of landed gentry lorded over a minimal middle class and a vast population of tantamount serfs held in place by economic deprivation or law. Down South, peasants were called “mudsills,” “poor whites,” indentured servants, and slaves.

Through manipulation or conscription, that inequitable system sent James Madison Lee to war. It orphaned his kids. In their time and place, that would have been a deep hole to dig yourself out of while young. There’s no telling if Horace Greeley Lee would have wound up a tenant farmer even without the rug being pulled from beneath his father like that. It certainly didn’t help.

We know the spirit of the Old South’s social system still loomed in the 20th century, too. Poll taxes were a result of it, a way to keep lower classes from taking part in democracy.

Horace’s son Arnie benefited from New Deal programs during the Great Depression by working in the Civilian Conservation Corps. When World War II began, he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps and was stationed in the Azores, a verdant archipelago off Portugal’s coast. He learned telecommunications skills that brought opportunity in civil service and the private sector. He helped Horace buy his farm.

So, Grandpa had an advantage in a son who was better able to grasp Uncle Sam’s hand and help pull his family into a better life. That avenue was largely attainable thanks to Grandpa’s other advantage. It was a big one evidenced by the mere existence of his poll tax exemption.

Horace was white. Were he Black, poll tax exemption would have been basically impossible. He was also male. At the time of his military discharge, it was outright illegal for Horace’s wife to vote.

I don’t know for sure what Horace’s feelings about his racial advantage were. I can presume they were typical for his era and station.

I know his son, Arnie – my paternal grandfather – was an unrepentant racist. With no prompt, he once announced to his daughter at the dinner table, “I’d rather you were dead than be with a n----r.” Even in telling the story 60 years later, her shock from the moment was tangible.

Just months before the Berlin Wall fell, Arnie told me, “The Democrats will never be nothing with a n----r running things,” in reference to new Democratic Party leader Ron Brown. If Arnie’s attitude was indicative of the environment in which he grew up, it is likely Horace’s perspectives weren’t far from it.

I don’t understand what finally prompted Horace to obtain the poll tax exemption a full decade after he was first eligible. There was no federal or state election in 1929. Maybe he was preemptively clearing the ledger since Alabama’s poll taxes were cumulative. That meant if you couldn’t afford the $1.50 to vote in 1928, it got tacked onto following years. To vote in the next trip to the polls would have been $3. If you couldn’t pay it, then it was $4.50 to vote the next time and so on. The powerful kept you under, good and hard.

Horace G. Lee’s timing was fortunate. He obtained the exemption just months before the stock market crash plummeted the nation into the Great Depression.

Staring at that historic piece of paper stirs a maelstrom in me. It speaks of the humility in my lowly roots. It is rebuke of the mendacious nostalgia that seems especially powerful among Southerners.

The document is a reminder to cherish my voting rights. I am impoverished and disabled. I don’t own land. That means under the old system, I would be expected to fork over money or pass a rigged test to vote. Though my ancestors’ racial baggage wouldn’t let them admit as much, my rights were secured by those who endured mistreatment in the mid 20th century because they understood how we ensure the rights of all by aiding those most abused or exploited. John Lewis spilled blood for it. Jimmie Lee Jackson, Rev. James Reed, Viola Liuzzo, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner lost their lives specifically for it.

The forces that created poll taxes used racial friction to keep the disadvantaged from uniting in power. It is how oligarchy ruled the Deep South for centuries.

Grandpa Lee’s poll tax exemption testifies how much worse times can be for us all if we don’t stand together. The only advantage those of us on society’s bottom rungs have is our numbers and it is only useful if we keep ourselves connected, informed and empathetic.

Without unity among the hoi polloi, those on top will take away whatever they’re able, every last scrap. I’ve got the proof in government-issued black-and-white, dated from 1929.