In April, a crowd estimated at 1,000 witnessed the Rev. Hammond baptize some fifty converts in Sunday Creek, including Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. In later years Powell went on to become pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in N.Y. City - one of the largest in the country.
As early as 1884 it is estimated that there were as many as 250-300 Black citizens in Rendville. Community stabilization and economic opportunity attracted a group of talented Black entrepreneurs and professionals to Rendville. The founding of the United Mine Workers in 1890 also opened up opportunities for able workers to gain experience and confidence in the arts of administration and in the practice of democracy. Clergymen, businessmen, the town doctor, and not a few miners comprised a cadre of leaders who often doubled as the town's elected officials. A hotel and barbershop were owned by Samuel Blaine Allen from 1881-1892. He was born in slavery in Virginia in 1842. He served first as councilman for nine years, but also as mayor of Rendville in 1891. And offering extraordinary leadership and intelligence were John L. (Sandy) Jones, Doctor Isalah Tuppins, and Richard L. Davis.
John L. Jones moved to Rendville from Pomeroy, Ohio, in 1881. he had hoped to obtain the school teaching position but that had already been filled by Sarah D. Broadis, a local pastor's daughter. She later became his wife and the mother of four children. Jones worked for two years as a "trimmer" in the mines but then acquired business experience in James Johnson's grocery store. In 1884 a number of leading Black citizens organized the Sunday Creek Cooperative and hired John l. (Sandy) Jones as manager. The business prospered but due to a sharp slump in the coal market in 1887, Jones was invited to buy it out. Active as church leader and conference delegate, member of the school board, and county executive committeeman in the Republican party, Jones was appointed Postmaster in 1897. Jones's well-written family history and autobiography, now extremely rare, is a valuable historical document.
In November, 1888, a mob began to form in nearby Corning, Ohio, to lynch a Black Rendville resident who was being held on suspicion of killing a white man. the mayor of Rendville immediately confronted the Corning marshall and told him that the people of Rendville demanded justice and if this man were lynched, he could expect retribution form many of the citizens of Rendville who as colored people were tired of being killed without legal protection. "If the law will not protect us, we will protect ourselves." (Many hundreds of Blacks had been lynched across the United States in the 1880s and 1890s.) Corning officers escorted their prisoner to the security of the New Lexington jail.
The mayor in question was Dr. Isaiah S. Tuppins, who had been mine physician, druggist, and community doctor in Rendville since 1884. Born of free parents in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1854, Tuppins grew up in Xenia, Ohio. He taught school for several years in Tennessee. He then returned to Columbus, Ohio, where he saved enough money in the barber trade to put himself through Columbus Medical College. He was the first Black graduate of his institution. He represented Perry County in the state Republican convention and was the first elected black mayor in the north central of the United States. He was also at the time coroner of Perry County. Three times he was elected District Master of the Negro Odd Fellows organization and just prior to his untimely death in 1889 had been elected Grand Director of the Order.
Leaders in the Black community in Rendville formed the Afro-American League. As part of its program, the society actively advocated the repeal of the so-called "Black Laws" of Ohio, some of which including local option, school segregation, and the prohibition of racial intermarriage remained on the books until 1887. Later they opposed pending legislation which would again allow school segregation in the state and sent a delegation to Columbus to make their position known.
Musical groups such as the Orpheus society, an orchestra, the Allen Cornet Band, and the sixteen piece Dodson Brass Band led parades and serenaded guests on into the middle of the 1890s. A new baseball park was completed in 1896. Teams such as the "Colored Giants" of the 1890s and the various community celebrations brought the Black citizens of Rendville together. Indeed, it might be said that this coming together had a beneficial bonding effect in that it gave them an awareness of who they were, where they came from, and what they stood for.
The celebration which went beyond all others in Rendville was September 22, Emancipation Day. Newspapers made mention of it as early as 1883. Thereafter it became a tradition with flags, bunting, Chinese lanterns, a parade and a picnic with an ox roast. There were fireworks, a "wheel of fortune," various kinds of races, and orations by visiting dignitaries - including politicians "who were on hand to make friends." Farmers came in from the countryside and the entire community, both Black and white, took part.
Though separate churches and lodges were maintained along with separate cooperative stores, and No. 3 mine was predominantly Black, by the end of the 1880s these divisions had become more traditional and cultural than prejudicial. Attitudes between the races had improved considerably by 1885. But that they were not yet without a certain sensitivity can be seen in a droll but salty Rendville item which appeared in the Black-owned Cleveland Gazette on April 21 of that year.
"A new skating rink has been opened, and the invitations read three nights for whites almost as good as we, we feel sorry to see them insulted, so we will give them six nights in a week and stay home ourselves."
Separate platforms for social dancing were set up in 1882, but housing became completely integrated. Black and white-owned stores catered to both races and the school was interracial from its founding. Many whites attended the Black churches, and picnics and celebration were held on an interracial basis.
By 1896, school officials averred that there were little or no differences in progress between Black and white pupils in all grades in the Rendville school. The New Lexington newspaper story which carried the interview concluded that this was indeed remarkable given the fact that the Black parents had been born as slaves in Virginia.
On August 22, 1895, a United Mine Workers mass meeting was held in nearby Corning for the miners of Sunday Creek Valley. National UMW officers, President Philip Penna and Secretary Treasurer W.C. Pearce along with Ohio officers Micheal Ratchford (later to become the national union president) and others, were on hand to speak to the miners. the meeting had been organized by Richard L. Davis, a founding delegate of the UMW and a member of the Ohio District 6, Executive Board. David met the visiting union dignitaries at the Corning depot, but when they checked in at the mercer Hotel and went to dinner, they were informed that Davis, a Black man, would have to leave because West Virginia guests would be offended by his presence. On hearing that, state and national leaders rose with one accord and walked out.
Davis later sued the innkeeper, George Mercer, for damages with Penna, Pearce, and Ratchford testifying on his behalf. The suit and subsequent appeal in Perry County Circuit Court lost, presumably because the defendant had already been fined for the action. Davis was ordered to pay the court costs for himself and the defendant.
Richard Davis was born in Roanoke, Virginia, a few months before the Civil War ended in 1864. At the age of eight he went to work in a tobacco factory where he was employed for the next nine years. Dissatisfied with the low wages and poor working conditions he secured work as a coal miner, arriving in Rendville by way of West Virginia's Kanawha and New River regions in 1882. Davis was 18 years of age at the time. He immdiately became a member of the local Knights of Labor Assembly 1935 ("colored") which was formed during that year. (The Knights of Labor allowed segregated organizations to appease the rank and file, including southern workers.) Nevertheless the Knights' goal of organizing Blacks was enthusiastically endorsed by the Rendville organization. The young Davis forwarded the following motion drafted by John L. Jones in November, 1886, to Grand Worshipful Master Powderly, then meeting with the General Assembly in Richmond, Virginia, "that we (L.A. 1935) will never relinquish our work until the bulk of our brethren are brought within the folds of our noble order." By 1890, when the Knights of Labor had begun to fade as a movement, Davis lost no time in joining the spreading United Mine Workers Union. Though working as a "checkweighman" in Rendville, he was sent out as an organizer for the Union travelling throughout West Virginia and as far south as Birmingham, Alabama. the purpose was to try to bring as many Blacks into the union as possible and thus frustrate the frequent mine-owner strategy of using Blacks (and various other ethnic groups) as strike breakers. To be a union organizer in that era was dangerous enough, but to be a Black organizer in a period of increasing violence and unabashed racism was at times nothing short of terrifying. Davis left a fascinating chronicle of his adventures, both in and out of Rendville, in a series of letters which he wrote for the United Mine Workers Journal during the 1890s. In 1896 he was elected to the National executive Board of the Union...the only Black chosen.
With the advent of the 1890s, coal mining became even more spasmodic in the Sunday Creek Valley. The number of workdays decreased and people began to move away. In 1894 the entire nation sank into a deep depression. Coal production slowed to a mere trickle in the valley. Miners averaged only ninety days of work in Rendville. The two previous years had not been much better. A Governor Commission found one third living in distressed circumstances.
Rendville miner William E. Clark wondered in a letter to the United Mine Workers' Journal "...If other worlds were inhabitated? Did they have the same kind of law and government that we have? Did they have the same kind of law and government that we have? And my next wonder was, was this world of ours the hell we read about in the good book? If it is not, how can a man stand the punishment twice, and then live through eternity? Monopoly has been against the oppressed of this country .... I would ask those of my race ... Do you owe ant political party a debt of graditude? I claim not."
On the national scene, "Coxey's army" marched on Washington to secure work for the unemployed. In early 1895 Mayor David Wells and John L. Jones of the Rendville Relief Committee petitioned Governor McKinley for food and clothing for some 225 families "without work or any means of support." The stores themselves were going broke as miners were indebt from $500 to $7,000. They could no longer carry the miners on credit. Relief trains with donated provisions distributed food and clothing to the miners of the region. The miners reciprocated by volunteering their labor to secure coal for other destitute families.
Mining improved briefly in 1899 for No. 3 mine but davis for some unknown reason had been "blacklisted" and could not secure work. In words reminiscent of the apostle Paul's letter to the Corinthians he described his situation in the United Mine Workers' Journal of May 19, 1899:
Davis died of pneumonia thirteen months later at the age of 35. He served as town constable at the time of his death and left a wife and two children.
On October 2, 1901, a fire swept through Rendville destroying sixteen buildings on Main Street including the post office, the town hall, Sandy Jones's general store, and the Second Baptist Church. Most of the buildings, including Jones's store, were rebuilt and life went on.
Yet, with the exception of World War I, when there was a sudden upsurge in the coal market, production continued to decline in Rendville. Following the depression years of the 1930s the town could boast only two stores, a tavern, a post office, and 120 homes. Today, only the First Baptist Church and something under a fifty residents remain.
The early evening shadows grew longer as I listened to Joseph Williams some eighteen years ago. (Joseph T. Williams died in 1982.) We wounded at the richness of community life which had flourished here. Here was a "valley haven" which though connected by rail and road with the markets and barbarities of a larger world, nurtured, nevertheless, a depth of culture and leadership exceptional for a town this size. Immigrants and Blacks, anxious to test and practice their newly acquired freedom, lived here in mutual respect and common decency. During a period when Black freedom and dignity were being routinely abrogated throughout the country, an unpretentious community of Blacks and whites constructed an American civilization in miniature.
During the last three decades of the nineteenth century and a decade and a half into the twentieth more than sixty all-Black planned or intentional communities had been founded in the United States. Most were in the southwestern part of the country, with as many as twenty in Oklahoma alone. Rendville, however, was not a planned community, it was, as we have seen, a thoroughly interracial community.
Like the planned communities, however, it did offer and oasis for the testing of the American ideal of self- determination in the generations immediately following the Emancipation Proclamation. That it was able to accomplish this in an interracial setting is a point of special interest. For here, under unique social and economic circumstances, the observer is afforded a glimpse of race relations as they might have been. Race relations emerging without the usual obstructions and intimidation of Jim Crow institutions.
Of course, Rendville had the advantage of being a partially isolated geographical entity. it was also favored by a critical mass of employed Black citizens who had come together in a somewhat atypical setting, one which did not carry with it the baggage of traditional Black subordination.
Furthermore it was a completely new community in the North; it had no prior social structure. A majority of the whites who settled in the town, and this was true also of the founding mine owner, were themselves immigrants. They were by no means insulated from racist attitudes since such existed at this time in their countries of origin. But it is also quite probable that they had not yet been influenced by the severity of Southern racial attitudes or by those of the larger country.
What is observable in Rendville in the broadcast sense was what Sara M. Evans and Harry C. Boyte have called "free spaces" - "free spaces" being the relatively unencumbered, spontaneous, social relations within which the quest for identity, autonomy, and dignity of a group of people may be pursued. Free spaces arise out of, and are nourished by the intimate give-and-take and the small-scale organization of towns - especially the free and spontaneous face-to-face relations of family, ethnic community, church, fraternal and workers' organizations. What is crucial is the freedom of exchange and association appropriate to changing social and economic conditions, such that the individual feels empowered to enhance his status on one or more levels - economically, socially or culturally - as the situation warrants.
What is important here is that individuals and groups of individuals have the freedom and the motivation to engage in these activities as independent agents.
Historically, the full flower of such "free spaces" was to be found whenever self-help associations were formed and mutual encouragement was practiced, as various groups sought enfranchisement, recognition, and meaningful participation in various sectors of the local community.
In fact, just this sort of empowerment with its accompanying sense of personal autonomy was well-served in nineteenth-century America - that is, in a rapidly developing, hopeful America - before the matrix of human relationships became more centralized and congealed in either the corporate economic or the urban political sectors.
Such "free spaces" found expression in the abolitionist, labor, and civil rights movements but they also appeared with no less exhilaration in the lives of whole communities. And the town of Rendville was a case in point.
For indeed there arose there, as part of its very social and economic fabric, the same spirit of hopefulness and progress which was often part of the rapidly developing communities of America in the nineteenth century.
Towns like Rendville therefore reflected in many ways the Zeitgeist of the period. It is true, as in the Rendville case, that its economy was tied in directly with coal production and the more irrational coal market. But if the coal market had its ups and downs, so it seemed did he life- struggle itself. Even the mine-owners could be perceived as economically rational human beings, not unlike so many of the other smaller entrepreneurs in town.
For these reasons then, the rising Jim Crow system of oppression and segregation did not appear to penetrate Rendville with the same fury as elsewhere. Rendville became somewhat of a haven - a free space - for African-Americans as their economic and political power gradually took root there in the 1880s and tolerable, even congenial, relations between the races emerged as a practical result. The promise of racial equality remained alive and it lived on in tandem with the then vibrant hope of economic improvement and self- determination.
The shadows have indeed lengthened over the physical town of Rendville. But neither the economic vicissitudes of coal nor the corruptions of time have been able to completely dampen the life force and hope which rose to a crescendo here. In truth lives on in the generations which have scattered from this place.
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