Digital Extra

3/06/97
Bertha Higgins: Marshaling the black vote

By ELLEN LIBERMAN
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer

Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves on New Year's Day 1863 and they thanked him by joining his Grand Old Party. In Providence, Bertha Grant DeLard Higgins was the toast of that party.

"As Fred Douglass has well said," she wrote in a 1920 letter urging black women voters to register as Republicans, "the Republican party is the ship for the Negroes, all else is sea."

Born in Danville, Va., in 1872, Higgins once worked as a dressmaker. But her real genius was for manipulating the social fabric. She plunged waist-deep into every important civil rights cause of the early 20th century, from the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill to woman's suffrage.

In politics, Higgins found her calling. Her personal papers at the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society bulge with handbills announcing political gatherings and newspaper clippings of controversies long forgotten.

The tattered Christmas cards and thank-you notes from Rhode Islanders politically prominent enough then to have their names emblazoned on public buildings today secure her place as a foot soldier in their campaigns.

But in church basements and living rooms, Bertha Higgins was much more of a general, commanding the loyalties of legions of black voters.

"Very forward," was one aquaintance's none-too-complimentary assessment of Higgins's character.

Yet that very quality made her an effective organizer and leader. She married physician William Harvey Higgins in 1896 and the couple moved northward to Providence in 1903, where they lavished effort on social change.

For a quarter of a century, Bertha Higgins created and led political and social clubs. She was president of the Woman's League of the Douglas Republican Association, the woman's Auxilliary to the Charles Summer Club and Guardian of the young women's 20th Century Arts and Literature Group. She was an incorporator of the Rhode Island League of Women Voters, founder of the Julia Ward Howe Republican Women's Club and the Colored Woman's Non-Partisan Politican and Civic League.

She claimed her place in the big picture, but she kept one eye fixed on the details: jobs. She was relentless in her efforts to peel back the color barriers to employment.

She did not hesitate to remind the white politicians she had helped elect of the consequences of shortchanging her people. When Higgins took up her pen, the wise course would be to grant her request immediately.

"His grandmother is a member of the organization and they reside in Ward 3, which is quite thickly populated with our voters . . ."

"I dislike to burden you with a letter of this kind. Still, I would like to know what I am to look forward to in this coming campaign . . ."

Young Allen K. Robinson was one beneficiary of one of Higgins's postal onslaughts. In a 15-day span, 17 letters flew back and forth from Higgins to Sen. Theodore Green, Congressman Aime J. Forand, and Thomas Bride Jr., then the state's head of the federal civil service. Robinson became Bride's newest Junior Interviewer.

She worked just as hard for her husband, writing letters for two years to get him a part-time postal clerk's job. She similarly launched the career of her only child Prudence, who became the state's first black social worker in 1937.

The powers that be knew Mrs. Higgins's thinly veiled threats to be more than idle.

Fred Williamson, now the director of the state's Historical Preservation Commission, was a boy in the 1930s when his uncle hauled him by streetcar from East Providence to the Winter Street AME Church for a political meeting.

Higgins was the afternoon's sensation when she announced her intention to abandon the Republican party.

"She was so closely identified with the Republicans, to have her testify for the Democrats was devastating," recalls Williamson. "But when the afternoon was over, she converted everyone present, more or less."

Higgins died in 1944, at age 72. It would be another decade before the civil rights movement's confrontational turn made Higgins's letters look genteel.

But it takes no great effort to imagine Bertha Higgins's shouldering her way to front ranks of those long marches to freedom.

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