Julie Hayden

The above image is of seventeen year old Julia Hayden, a Black schoolteacher who was shot to death by the White League within three days of starting to work at a school for freed people in Tennessee.

From the New National Era, October 15, 1874 --- Harper’s Weekly, one of America’s most read newspapers, humanized Hayden with a portrait, as well as a sketch of her life. The paper described her as a girl who had sought out education for herself, and who was enrolled in college at the time of her killing. She had wanted to spread education throughout the Black community and had been willing to risk going to a rural school where she would be exposed to the dangers of torture or assassination.

Using a photograph of Hayden, Harper’s created an etching of Julia Hayden that hundreds of thousands of Americans saw. So many of the brave Black men and women who brought literacy to former slaves and their children are nameless and faceless now, and their role in social revolution forgotten, but we know what Julia looked like because she died violently.

On August 22, 1874 two white men came to the house Miss Hayden was staying at and killed her.

Describing themselves as defenders of a “hereditary civilization and Christianity,” a group of Confederate veterans in Louisiana formed the White League on March 1, 1874. Their stated purpose was “the extermination of the carpetbag element” and restoration of white supremacy.

The White League, the latest manifestation of the Ku Klux spirit, was a growing force in Tennessee that summer and many African Americans saw her killing as part of the group’s war against Black literacy. Many white journalists disagreed, saying that the killers had merely wanted to rape the teenager, as had been their right during slave times, and that when she had resisted, they killed her. They argued, that this slaughter of a teacher, who had after all been born a slave, had nothing to do with race at all. It was only about a couple of white men wanting to have their pleasure with a Black girl.

The liberal magazine Harper's Weekly condemned the murder as a form of white resistance to the education of freed blacks, a contested issue in Tennessee at the time. In constrast, the New York Tribune considered the shooting merely an unfortunate case of mistaken identity, given black women's reputation for "wanting in chastity." The publication of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Christian Recorder, declared the Tribune's comments "insulting to every colored husband, father, and brother, in the land."

The press controversy reveals how politically charged the sexual respectability of black women had become in the aftermath of Emancipation. Southern white men still deemed all black women to be sexually available, a view that some northerners shared. Even if the men who approached her knew that Hayden was an educated, middle-class woman, they may have targeted her sexually because her school threatened to disrupt the local racial hierarchy. That the black press extended the insult to men and not women reflected aspirations that African American husbands, fathers, and brothers should be able to provide the kind of patriarchal protection that slavery had denied them. Reactions to the Hayden murder vividly display the political as well as personal stakes underlying contestations over the sexual rights of black women.

From the Montreal Star, September 8, 1874 issue: Julia Hayden the colored school teacher, one of the latest victims of the White Man's League, was only seventeen years of age. She was the daughter of respectable parents in Maury County, Tennessee, and had been carefully educated at the Central College, Nashville, a favorite place for the instruction of youth of both sexes of her race. Under the reign of slavery, Julia Hayden would probably have been taken from her parents and sent in a slave-coffle to New Orleans to be sold on its auction block. But Emancipation had prepared her for a different and less dreadful fate. With that strong desire for mental cultivation which has marked the colored race since their freedom, in all circumstances where there is an opportunity left them for its exhibition, the young girl had so improved herself as to become capable if teaching others. She went to Western Tennessee and took charge of a school. Three days after her arrival at Hartsville, at night, two white men, armed with guns, appeared at the house where she was staying and demanded the schoolteacher. She fled, alarmed, to the room of the mistress of the house. The White Leaguers pursued. They fired their guns through the door of the room, and the young girl fell dead within.

Eugene Laurence, in Harper's Weekly says: Her murderers escaped, nor is it likely that the death of Julia Hayden will ever be avenged, unless the nation insists upon the examination of the White Man's League. The fearful association extends through every Southern State, and one of its chief objects is to prevent the education and elevation of the colored race. It whips, intimidates, or murders their teachers from the Ohio to the Gulf, and its terrible outrages have already surpassed the horrors of the most vindictive civil war. Yet the colored people have already made a remarkable progress. Their faithful labors have nearly restored the usual productiveness of the South.

Sources: Harper's Weekly (Oct. 1874 [pgs. 856-57]; LOC; Zinn Education Project; The Reconstruction Era: Blog Exploring the World the Civil War created, Sept 2020 (Patrick Young, Esq.); Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation By Estelle B. Freedman