Rae Linda Brown - The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price

Family Ties

Florence Beatrice had remarkable parents. Her mother, Florence Irene Gulliver Smith, was an amateur singer, accomplished pianist, and astute businesswoman. Her father, Dr. James H. Smith, a dentist, was also one of Little Rocks most esteemed community activists.

Florence Irene Gulliver was born to William Gulliver and Mary McCoy Gulliver in Indianapolis in 1854.

The McCoys were free blacks in a state where the slave population constituted over 90 percent of the total population of blacks in 1860. Everyone in the McCoy household could read and write, a rarity among blacks in the antebellum South. Most southern states passed strict laws prohibiting anyone from teaching slaves to read or write, arguing that slaves might become dissatisfied and incite rebellion. Even free blacks suffered severe punishment for violating the law. The 1830 North Carolina law states,

That any free person, who shall hereafter teach, or attempt to teach, any slave within the State to read and write, the use of figures excepted, or shall give or sell to such slave or slaves any books or pamphlets, shall be liable to indictment in any court of record in this State having jurisdiction thereof, and upon conviction, shall, at the discretion of the court, if a white man or woman, be fined not less than one hundred dollars, nor more than two hundred dollars, or imprisoned; and if a free person of color, shall be fined, imprisoned, or whipped, at the discretion of the court, not exceeding thirty nine lashes, nor less than twenty lashes.

William and Margaret McCoy had three children. After Mary, there was Laura, born in 1839 or 1841. With their two daughters, the McCoys moved to Indianapolis during the 1840s, leaving the disparagement of living in a slave state behind them. It was here that their youngest daughter, Alice, was born in 1850.

William Gulliver, Florence Irenes father, also a mulatto, was born in Virginia in 1831. After he established a profession as barber, he moved from Virginia to Indianapolis as a young man where he met the McCoys. By 1854, he was married to Mary McCoy and in that year they became the proud parents of their daughter, Florence Irene. And by 1860 Gulliver and his father-in-law, William McCoy, had established a family barbershop.

It is possible to speculate about the time and the reason for William Gullivers and the McCoy familys move to Indiana from the South, Virginia and South Carolina, respectively. During the 1840s and 1850s, large numbers of white immigrants settled in the South, and miscegenation, although banned in most states, was commonplace. William Gulliver and William McCoy were probably free blacks and although we cannot say for certain, slave studies suggest that, given their surnames, they may have been the children of white fathers and Negro mothers. Hence the use of the term, mulatto. However, social and legal distinctions between mulattoes and pure Negroes were virtually nonexistent. As competition for jobs between free Negroes and whites became more widespread, free Negroes were constrained unduly and their few liberties became more and more restricted. Unfair labor practices were also instituted. Some southern states even began to consider expulsion, colonization, and enslavement as a drastic means of protecting jobs. Many blacks, like Gulliver and the McCoys, fled before any of these steps could be imposed. Frederick Douglass, himself an escaped slave, declared that Negroes should be prepared for more and more limited employment opportunities. In 1853 he wrote,

The old avocations, by which colored men obtained a livelihood, are rapidly, unceasingly and inevitably passing into other hands; every hour sees the black man elbowed out of employment by some newly arrived emigrant, whose hunger and whose color are thought to give him a better title to the place; and so we believe it will continue to be until the last prop is levelled beneath us.

As a black man, we say if we cannot stand up, let us fall down. We desire to be a man among men while we do live; and when we cannot, we wish to die. It is evident, painfully evident to every reflecting mind, that the means of living, for colored men, are becoming more and more precarious and limited. Employment and callings, formerly monopolized by us, are no longer.

White men are becoming house-servants, cooks and stewards on vesselsat hotels.They are becoming porters, stevedores, wood-sawyers, hod-carriers, brick-makers, white-washers and barbers, so that the blacks can scarcely find the means of subsistencea few years ago, and a white barber would have been a curiositynow their poles stand on every street. Formerly blacks were almost the exclusive coachmen in wealthy families: this is no longer; white men are now

By virtue of their financial independence the Gullivers and the McCoys became part of Indianapoliss small middle-class black community. Consisting of free blacks and slaves who had escaped the South before the Civil War, the members of this class provided the foundation for generations of the black elite in the city. Like others in their community, the McCoys and the Gullivers established a lucrative business and provided a sound education for their children.

By all accounts, William and Mary Gulliver lived comfortably at 179 Kentucky Ave. Gullivers successful business grew into a chain of barbershops. The family also owned considerable property.

The Gullivers had a full household. Sometime before 1860 Marys sister, Laura, a dressmaker, then in her early twenties, came to live with them. And by 1870, Marys youngest sister, Alice, a teacher then twenty, was also living with them. Given that unmarried women rarely lived alone and that perhaps they had trouble making ends meet, the young women no doubt welcomed the open home of their sister and her husband.

Surrounded by her parents and aunts, Florence Irene grew up in a stable and comfortable environment. The Gullivers could afford a few luxuries, including piano lessons for their daughter, not uncommon for an advantaged Negro woman of her time. She had a good public school education and she was no doubt aided in her studies by her parents and her aunts, all of whom were literate.

Florence became a school teacher. Teaching was one of the few career options available to educated black women in the nineteenth century. Florence taught all courses, including music, at the New Eleventh [Elementary] School on the northwest corner of Huntington and Michigan Ave. in Indianapolis. She was probably the only Negro teacher in the almost all-white school. In 1874, two years before Florence left Indianapolis for Little Rock, the school system enrolled 18,074 white students and 1,051 colored pupils. It was during this time that Florence Irene probably met James Smith whom she ultimately married in 1876.

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Florence Prices father, James H. Smith, was born of free parents of mixed racial blood, in Camden, Delaware, December 4, 1843. years old his parents moved just across the Delaware River to Penns Grove, New Jersey, where the family resided until his fathers death.

There are no family records extant from Smiths childhood but the move from Delaware to New Jersey was no doubt precipitated by the desire to escape from slave society. Although the number of free blacks in Delaware, a slave state,

New Jersey, though not the golden land of opportunity, provided some respite from the restrictive and oppressive Delaware laws. In the North, free blacks did have their personal freedom, since slavery was abolished shortly after the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Further, free blacks posed little threat to the white population because their numbers were relatively small. Like free blacks in the South, northern free blacks found their greatest challenge was securing a good job. With stiff competition from white immigrants, blacks were often limited to domestic work and common labor; few blacks held skilled jobs or became professionals. While many blacks in the North could read and write, few had education beyond this.