By Jacob Dorman, PhD
On Nov. 16, 1904, Reno Police Chief Robert Charles “Charley” Leeper ordered all unemployed “negroes” to be rounded up and packed onto trains leaving town, leading to an “Exodus of the Colored Race.” “There are too many worthless negroes in the city,” said Chief Leeper. “In the last few weeks there has been a big influx to Reno and few of them have any visible means of support. Their presence is a menace to the order of the town and we mean to get rid of them. All who have employment will not be disturbed, but the others must go.”
I am the co-director of the Racist Covenants Research Project at the University of Nevada, Reno, whose work has been supported by the university and the State of Nevada. A team of faculty and student researchers has mapped 8,100 properties with racist covenants in Washoe County alone, with plans to expand the work throughout the Silver State.
A racist covenant is a contractual clause that bars occupancy to people of color, unless they are present as domestic servants. They were commonly used from 1926 until they were outlawed by the Fair Housing Act of 1968, even though the Supreme Court ruled them unenforceable in 1948. Nonetheless, about half of the restrictive covenants we have found were put into place after 1948, and we have even found one from 1969. They effectively created “white space” even when they could not be legally enforced.
These covenants predated and laid the groundwork for the better-known racist practice of “redlining” by which the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Authority and the Veteran’s Administration refused to issue or guarantee mortgages in areas occupied by people of color, or in close proximity to them. While some people today are aware of such practices, most people are unaware that they replaced physical forms of exclusion, such as Reno’s unfortunate effort to expel African Americans wholesale, or, in many cases in Chicago and one in Las Vegas, the bombing of Black homes.
On that day 120 years ago, Chief Leeper’s patrolmen gave Black people without jobs 24 hours “in which to shake the dust of the riverside city from their feet and forever more make this place one of the stations to avoid in their journeys,” as the San Francisco Chronicle put it. The police edict was backed by the threat of violence in a year when several mobs tried unsuccessfully to lynch Black prisoners in Reno, and when African Americans suspected of crimes were commonly described as “nigger,” “black fiend” and “black brute” in the local press.
idleArticle from Nov 30, 1904 Reno Gazette-Journal (Reno, Nevada)
The trains leaving Reno were said to be “laden with exiles leaving, as they said, to avoid complications and the further fear of personal force on the part of a stern Caucasian population.” Some African Americans decided to leave town even if they were not ordered to do so, concluding that Reno’s racism was so bad that their futures were limited in the city on the shores of the Truckee River.
Leeper’s edict was so patently illegal that the Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times declared it signaled the return of “ante-bellum times,” that is, the days of slavery before the Civil War. Of course, during slavery, millions of African Americans were not expelled but enslaved—in the North and West as well as the South.
The return of antebellum times therefore meant the return of an era when African Americans were not legally considered citizens, before the constitutional amendments passed during Reconstruction after the Civil War declaring all people born on U.S. soil to be citizens and guaranteeing all people equal rights.
“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” 1868’s Fourteenth Amendment mandated, “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
The Reno police’s actions in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution brought condemnation from a minority of Reno’s residents. The opposition included “many of the church people,” indicating that opposition to racism for some was rooted in their Christian faith. Nor did the expulsions make economic sense: The city was so desperately short on laborers that six months later it planned to import 100 Greeks to lay water mains.
Yet most residents both locally and nationwide were in favor of the expulsions. The Reno police’s actions inspired letters and telegrams of congratulations from across the country. One writer from Mississippi wrote: “Send them down here. We can use them: we like them: we know what to do with them. They are the best people on earth properly handled. Send them along. We will take them all. Can’t get too black for me.” It was an ominous note of assent from the former Confederacy for the state that in later years gained the unfortunate moniker the “Mississippi of the West.”
Some of Reno’s targeted African Americans defied the order to leave, although unsuccessfully. One “strapping” man, J. Hamphill, was packed onto a train where he met another Black man who told him that the police had no right to expel him and advised him to “assert his rights as a citizen.” He disembarked and was soon seen “strutting about the streets with as much pride as a millionaire.”
But millionaires were never arrested on charges of vagrancy and sentenced to work a month on the chain gang repairing county roads, which was the fate that befell Hamphill. Another Black man turned to violence, attempting to shoot a police officer in a dark alley downtown in revenge for the cop’s attempt to expel him. Most of Reno’s remaining African Americans resisted in other ways, by attempting to prove themselves to be model citizens.
Reno’s brazenly illegal actions had a chilling effect on its Black community.
“As a result of the chief’s order there are fewer negroes in Reno and the ones that are left have been remaining on their good behavior,” the Reno Evening Gazette reported two weeks after the expulsions. “From now on the police mean to keep a sharp lookout for colored vagrants and will move them on as fast as they reach the town, unless, of course, they are enabled to secure employment that will keep them out of mischief.”
Reno’s remaining African American citizens resisted the town’s racism by persisting and building communal institutions, as Demetrice Dalton of the local African American history group Our Story has documented. Only three years following the expulsion, a tiny congregation of seven people organized the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church and built a church at 220 Bell St. just south of the railroad tracks in the northwest portion of downtown Reno. In 1919, the members of the church, along with local sympathetic whites, would form a local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which used the legal system to fight for civil rights in accordance with the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.
Reno’s patently illegal expulsion of U.S. citizens in 1904 is a reminder that the path towards recognition and enforcement of constitutional rights was long and tortuous, and that the fight against racism would be bolstered but not completed by the civil rights fights of the Reconstruction era or its successor battles a hundred years later during the period known as the “Second Reconstruction.” The fight for civil rights was fought by small groups of people like those who organized Reno’s first Black church and its NAACP chapter, who refused to be cowed by racism, and who stayed in Reno and refused to be moved.
If you would like to help with the work of documenting the experiences of people of color in northern Nevada by offering your experiences in an oral history or by learning how to do the painstaking but rewarding work of mapping racist covenants, please email [email protected].
Jacob S. Dorman, Ph.D., is an associate professor of History and Core Humanities at the University of Nevada, Reno, and co-director of the Racist Covenants Research Project, an effort to document how Nevada’s people of color have persisted and built communities in the face of structural racism. Thus far, the project has documented 8,100 racist covenants barring occupancy of homes by people of color in Washoe County, Nevada. See: https://www.unr.edu/history/rcrp
Sources
- “Negroes Forced to Leave Reno,” “San Francisco Chronicle” (November 17, 1904).
- “To Drive the Vagrant Negroes From City: The Police Making a General Roundup of Tough and Dissolute Characters Today,” “Reno Evening Gazette” (November 16, 1904), 1.
- “Negroes Are Leaving the City,” “Reno Evening Gazette” (November 17, 1904).
- “Negroes Forced to Leave Reno;” “Negroes Must Leave “Reno,” Los Angeles Time” (November 17, 1904).
- “Idle Men Won’t Work: P.L. Flanigan Forced to Secure Greeks to Lay Mains” “Reno Evening Gazette” (May 5, 1905), 5.
- “Congratulate Chief Leeper for Expelling Idle Negroes from Reno,” “Reno Evening Gazette” (November 30, 1904).
- “Wouldn’t Leave a Good Town: Strapping Negro Stood on His Rights As An American Citizen and Defied the Officers to Expel Him,” “Reno Evening Gazette” (November 22, 1904), 8.
- “Thirty-Day Sentence: Given Negro Hamphill by Judge O’Connor Last Night,” “Reno Evening Gazette” (November 23, 1904), 5.
- “The Mystery of A Dark Alley: Negro Accused of Trying to Assassinate Officer Acree” “Reno Evening Gazette” (November 16, 1904), 5.
- “Congratulate Chief Leeper”
- Dalton, Demetrice P. “Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, Reno, Nevada (1907– ),” February 22, 2016. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/bethel-ame-church-reno-nevada-1907/.
