Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2020/Spring/Section25/Allen Turpin

Overview:
Allen Turpin was an African American man born circa 1865 in Creekstand, Alabama. Throughout his life, Turpin took up the roles of farmer, preacher, janitor, husband, and father. Turpin was one of the many interviewed for the Federal Writers Project between 1936-1940.

Early Life:
Turpin was born to plantation farmers on Borum Plantation in Creekstand, Alabama. During his time as a child on the plantation, Turpin befriended a boy named Mr. George Williams, a white boy who was a relative of the Borum’s. During his interview with Adelaide Rogers for the Federal Writers Project, he claims that they were like brothers, doing and sharing everything together. Although Turpin was unable to have a formal education, during the evenings when Mr. George came home from school, he and Turpin would practice reading together. In the documentation of this interview, it is stated that the relationship Turpin had with Mr. George altered “the whole course of Allen’s life.”

Adulthood:
Up until the point of being interviewed for the Writers Project, Turpin had been married five times. His first marriage was to a woman named Matilda, whom he considered his only “real” wife, the other partners of whom were just people “he married.” Once married to Matilda, Turpin went and lived on and ran Mr. George’s farm, not wanting to be too far away from him. Turpin took much interest to tending to Mr. George’s farm, despite him getting very little of the profits Mr. George made from the farm. Turpin raised all six of his kids with Matilda on the farm and believed that he made a great living that supported his family due to all of the resources on the land.

Years later after the death of Matilda and Ida, his second wife, Mr. George and his family moved to Montgomery prompting Turpin to do the same with his third wife, Emma. Mr. George died soon after, leading Turpin to leave Montgomery and go to Birmingham where he took up preaching at the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. As years went on, Emma died and Turpin married and divorced a woman named Mary. After his split from Mary, Turpin struggled economically which led him to find and marry a woman named Maria, a cook for an upper-class white family. Maria was able to financially support him while he was a janitor at a synagogue. Maria heading the household stirred Turpin to a degree, stating in his interview that “The Lord never intended a woman to be the head of a man’s house.”

Turpin, a voter since 1887 and a supporter of the Democratic party, had yet to receive a pension from the government, and in his interview highlights his disappointment with the lack of support and oppression he and Maria face.

Employment, Land Ownership, and Interracial Tension:
During and after the Civil War, freed African Americans struggled to find employment. Though many went on to own land and farm, others were unable to work and competed with unemployed white people for jobs, especially within the manufacturing industry. A lot of the African Americans that were employed lived in poverty and labored in conditions that paralleled the working conditions of a slave. When the economic system shifted, opening up to growth in black cotton farmers, interracial tension arose, especially between small farmers and black people, as many small farmers lacked resources to grow financially. In general, there was already an increase in competition with white and black farmers to share the “cotton market.” This competition led to a rise in the lynching of black people. And despite land ownership by black people, the systemic inequality of black people made it hard for them to thrive within the workforce, leading to the decline of black farmers. To add, Jim Crow laws made it hard for black people to gain access to education on politics and real estate, making it hard for them to defend their land when threatened by white people attempting to take it from them.

Compensation Post Civil War:
After the Civil War, compensation efforts for ex-slaves were made largely by Republicans. Attempts to distribute land to help ex-slaves gain economic independence were put in order but were diminished in 1865 by President Andrew Johnson’s “Amnesty Proclamation of May 29th, 1865,” and all those who were given land were forced out of it. This led to the Ex-Slave Pension Movement, the push for ex-slaves to earn pensions and be compensated for their forced labor. Although many Republicans were trying to help ex-slaves and back the movement, federal agencies like the “Bureau of Pensions, the Post Office Department and Department of Justice worked to combat the movement to gain pensions for former slaves. Officials who investigated the “ex-slave pension movement,” viewed “pensioning ex-slaves {as} unrealistic because the government had no intention of compensating former slaves for their years of involuntary labor.”

In later years, when political parties realigned themselves and many African Americans held allegiance to the Democratic Party, ex-slaves were still struggling with receiving pensions and, more broadly, African Americans were greatly affected by the Depression, “losing jobs at a greater rate than whites.” Because many black men requested their spouse to “withdraw from the fields” after emancipation, despite the low wages they (black men) receive working as sharecroppers, black women were forced to look elsewhere for work, doubling the duty to care for the household and work outside of it as well. Unlike white women caring for the nuclear family, black women and men were financially dependent upon each other, many times the man more on the woman. The Democratic Party promised more jobs for African Americans leading many to vote for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and backed his New Deal Plan. The election in 1936 was the first election that showed the switch of alliance between political parties. It was also the first time “since Reconstruction that national political parties actively courted African Americans.”