Key Points:
- Callie Guy House co-founded the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association.
- Crusaded for the U.S. Government to pay pensions for ex-slaves.
- Her idea was popular and gained a lot of supporters but also a lot of enemies who tried to stop her crusade.
Between 40 acres and a mule and the modern-day reparations movement, sits Callie Guy House.
House was a Black woman in the South who dared to believe ex-slaves should receive some financial benefits for their years of free service.
She found lots of fans, but made lots of enemies, some of them in powerful places.
House was born a slave in Tennessee in 1861, not long before the end of slavery. So, she grew up free, but in the Jim Crow South.
She didn’t receive much education, but in 1883 she married William House and they had five children. She worked taking in laundry and moved with her family to Nashville in the mid-1890s.
In south Nashville, House saw various advertisements and flyers for pro-reparations movements.
Encouraged, she teamed up with Isaiah Dickerson, also a former slave, to organize the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association in 1894 to provide relief and services on a local level while agitating for reparations on a national level.
In 1898, House and Dickerson traveled throughout southern and border states gathering support for the new organization.
The organization was open to everyone regardless of their religion, financial standing or race.
During her 1897-99 lecture tour, the association’s membership increased by 34,000, mainly through her efforts. By 1900, its nationwide membership was estimated to be around 300,000.
On a local level the organization functioned similarly to immigrant aid societies that emerged in urban areas in the early 1900s. Local chapters were established and funded through monthly dues to provide burial expenses for members and to care for those who were sick and disabled.
On a national level, the organization held conventions, elected national officers, and worked for the passage of congressional legislation in support of ex-slave reparations.
The national organization also provided traveling expenses to reparation lobbyists and local chapter organizers. Additionally, it corresponded with local chapters, which responded by paying national dues to further the goal of a reparations bill that would provide monetary compensation for ex-slaves for their labor in the antebellum American South.
Is This a Scam?
Leading Blacks of that time, like W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, pretty much ignored House and her movement. They were busy working on Civil Rights.
Newspapers of the time often ridiculed her efforts.
Whites were so convinced that the reparations legislation wouldn’t pass that they suspected House and Dickerson were defrauding African Americans out of their money with promises of reparations.
In response from supposed complaints from White constituents, the U.S. Pensions Bureau, the governmental agency that supervised the dispersion of money to Union veterans, started covert surveillance on House and the association.
Federal mail fraud laws gave the U.S. Post Office wide powers to deem any piece of mail fraudulent and deny the use of mail to persons engaged in fraud or perceived fraud.
In 1899, House received notice that the Post Office had issued a fraud order against her and her organization, ostensibly because they were, according to postal authorities, soliciting money under false pretenses.
Continued federal hostility led House to step down from her post as assistant secretary of the Ex-Slave Pension Association in 1902. She continued to organize local chapters throughout the South, but after the failure of Alabama Congressman Edmund Petus’ reparations legislation in 1903, the reparations movement in Congress lost momentum and support eroded.
The Audacity to Sue
Facing the prospect of stalled legislation, House enlisted the aid of attorney Cornelius Jones to sue the U.S. Treasury Dept. for $68,073,388.99 in cotton taxes traced to slave labor in Texas. In 1915, they filed the suit in district court and, although the litigation raised the profile of the slave reparations issue, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals dismissed the suit, citing governmental immunity from litigation.
Indicted
In 1916 Postmaster General A. S. Burleson sought an indictment against Callie House. On May 10, 1916, Nashville District Attorney Lee Douglass filed indictments against House and other officers of the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association charging that they had obtained money from ex-slaves by fraudulent circulars proclaiming that pensions and reparations were forthcoming.
The district attorney’s evidence was flimsy. None of the victims of the supposed fraud were named, and the literature in question stated only that the monies paid to the national organization would be used to promote the passage of legislation for slave reparations.
Additionally, House still resided in the same home in South Nashville, undermining the allegation that she personally profited from her work with the association.
Although the evidence was weak, an all-male, White jury convicted House on the charge of mail fraud, resulting in a sentence of a year and one day. She served her sentence in the Jefferson City, MO, penitentiary from Nov. 1917 to Aug. 1, 1918, earning early release for good behavior.
Following her release from prison, she resumed her work as a laundress in her south Nashville community. She died in 1928.
