Name:
Ruth Charlotte Ellis
Birthdate:
July 23, 1899
Birthplace:
Springfield, Illinois
Parents:
Charles Ellis (born 1861)
Carrie Faro Ellis (1865)
Siblings:
Charles J. (born 1890)
Harry D. (born 1894)
Wellington B. (born 1896)
Education:
Elementary School
(1905-1914)
Springfield High School
(1914-1919)
Resided in:
Springfield (1899-1936)
Detroit (1937-1999)
Ruth Ellis's Tale of Two Cities:
A Modern Fairy Tale in Black & White
Some time after 8 o'clock on the morning of July 21, 1899, Dr. Clarence Hemingway walked out to his front porch at what was then 439 Oak Park Avenue in Oak Park, Illinois. He lifted up his cornet, fingered the valves, placed his lips on the mouthpiece, and began blowing music to announce the birth of his first son Ernest.
Only 48 hours later, just 193 miles southwest in Springfield, Illinois, 38-year-old Charles Ellis and 34-year-old Carrie Faro Ellis gave birth to their first daughter Ruth.
It's hard to imagine how the lives of Ernest Hemingway and Ruth Ellis could be more opposite. Hemingway -- white, male, and heterosexual -- the son of a doctor, was born into a prominent family. Ellis, on the other hand -- black, female, and homosexual -- was born to parents of modest means, although her father held the distinction of serving as Springfield's first black mail carrier. That two people born in the same week in the same month in the same state exactly one hundred years ago could each make such an impact on our culture and have experienced such different lives reflects the influence of race, gender, class and sexuality in defining our cultural boundaries. In a sense, these two stories make up one "fairy tale," told in the familiar contrast of black and white.
America, in the dying hours of the nineteenth century, resembled Charles Dickens's description of Revolutionary France in his Tale of Two Cities as "the best of times" and "the worst of times." Whether you had "everything" before you or "nothing" before you depended largely on your background, your race, and your sex.
When he heralded Ernest's birth by horn, Hemingway's father surely could not have predicted that his son would one day win a Nobel Prize for literature. Yet the boldness of the musical announcement in the early morning hours under the Illinois sky paid homage to the privilege of race, class and gender in America. Understood in the context of America's social and political dynamics, the success of a white, heterosexual man from a professional class family was almost to be expected, and perhaps it was this expectation that the elder Hemingway gleefully trumpeted when he told the world that he had finally created an heir to carry on his name.
By the same token, Charles and Carrie Ellis probably would not have guessed that their first and only daughter would outlive their entire family. In a world of white privilege and male patriarchy, the idea that a small-framed, dark-skinned black woman born under the same Illinois sky as Ernest Hemingway would live to become a cultural icon and one day celebrate her 100th birthday as perhaps the oldest living "out" lesbian in America would defy all the odds for her survival. But as a survivor, Ruth's life speaks volumes about the ability of a single individual to overcome adversity through perseverance.
The birth of Ruth's parents in 1861 and 1865 marked the beginning and end of the bloodiest war in America's history. They were born in the slave state of Tennessee in the last years of slavery, during a war that took the lives of 600,000 Americans as the Union struggled to answer the question of what to do with America's 4 million black slaves. They traveled up the Mississippi River to Illinois, a free state that sided with the Union in the war, and whose capital, Springfield, gave rise to the country's most prominent Unionist, Abraham Lincoln. Thanks to Lincoln's legacy, Ruth Ellis was born in a somewhat integrated community known for its relatively progressive values, but that sense of community would soon self-destruct only a month after Ruth's ninth birthday celebration.
Provoked by a false accusation from a young white woman that she had been raped by a black man, white citizens of Springfield, Illinois gathered on Friday, August 14, 1908 at the county jail. When they learned that the sheriff had secretly removed two black prisoners accused of raping white women, the crowd went on a rampage. They set fire to the black business district, shot and killed Scott Burton, a black barber shop owner, burned his shop and paraded his body from his porch to a tree several blocks away where it was hanged. A group of women and young boys even stopped to pose for a camera in front of a tree where Burton was killed.
The mob moved to the black residential area of Springfield, where rioters set fire to the black homes and black families fled for safety. In a move ironically reminiscent of the Biblical Passover where Hebrews marked their dwellings with lamb's blood so that God could identify and pass over them, white residents placed white sheets and handkerchiefs outside their homes to warn the mob not to burn their houses. By the time firefighters arrived, the white crowd estimated at 12,000 people had grown so unruly that they cut the firehoses to prevent the rescue effort.
Another mob gathered the following evening and attempted to enter the State Arsenal where displaced blacks were being housed. After being stopped by the militia guard, the angry group headed for the home of William Donnegan, a wealthy 84-year-old black cobbler married to a white woman. The white citizens cut his throat, dragged his body across the street, and lynched him in a local school yard. By the end of the weekend, seven people had been killed, 40 homes destroyed, 24 businesses forced to close, and more than $200,000 worth of property damaged. Although a grand jury made 107 indictments, only one person was ever convicted -- for stealing a saber from a guard -- and no one was convicted for the murders of the two black men.
Civil rights leaders were so alarmed by the race riot in Lincoln's home town that they convened an urgent meeting in an apartment in New York City on the 100th anniversary of Lincoln's birth to form a watchdog group, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Although the NAACP hoped to protect blacks from future outbreaks of race violence, Ruth and her family had already managed to cheat death. Charles Ellis, armed only with a sword, refused to leave his house in Springfield and stayed to thwart off a band of rowdy, brick-throwing whites. Young Ruth watched as her father defended the house in 1908, but today she describes the incident with a certain quiet detachment that seems to belie the gravity of the danger she faced.
It only takes a few minutes alone with Ruth before one is struck by the sense of history that she carries with her. She was born just three years after the U.S. Supreme Court decided the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision that used the words "separate but equal" to provide the legal justification for the Jim Crow doctrine of segregation. But she also lived to see a unanimous Supreme Court strike down that same decision in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case. Nearly 60 years after she survived the Springfield riot she found herself in Detroit during that city's worst riot, which erupted on her birthday in 1967.
She is 100 years old -- much older than anyone I've ever met before -- and yet she moves, talks, dances, and runs (yes, she runs!) as well as someone half her age. In a country with a current average life expectancy of 76, where black life expectancy is lower because of racial and social problems, and where homosexuals have even lower life expectancies because of AIDS, it is difficult to imagine living 100 years. In fact, it is hard even to appreciate the concept of being 100 in the same way that most of us cannot truly fathom what it means to be a billionaire. Both possibilities were even less likely when Ruth was born.
Average life expectancy was only 46 at the turn of the century when W.E.B. Du Bois predicted that "the problem of the twentieth century will be the problem of the color line." He might not have imagined that a black person would live to see the entire century. He and Ruth both lived to see the rise of the Harlem Renaissance, Martin Luther King Jr., and James Baldwin. But Ruth continued on, outliving not only Du Bois, but also King, Malcolm X, Thurgood Marshall and the founders of the NAACP. She was born before the NAACP, SCLC, Social Security, and Stonewall, and she has seen two of the worst riots in American history, and still she lives to tell about these things.
When the Millennium arrives in a few months, Ruth will become one of the few people in the world to have lived in three separate centuries, making her a treasure of knowledge and experience not only for American black lesbians and gays, but for all Americans. Indeed, her life experiences mirror modern American history. In 100 years, Ruth has seen 18 presidents from William McKinley to William Jefferson Clinton, including her favorite, Franklin Roosevelt. She is one of the few people in the country to have lived through two presidential assassinations. She has lived through at least six major American wars, including the Philippine-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, and the Gulf War. To get a sense of what it means to be 100, consider that Ruth is older than the states of Alaska, Hawaii, Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, and she even pre-dates the state of Washington by four months.