The sign reads "Whites Only Telephone Booth." It is underscored with "Lincoln Telephone & Telegraph."
JOE DUGGAN / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Sunday, April 5, 2009 12:00 am
The sign reads "Whites Only Telephone Booth." It is underscored with "Lincoln Telephone & Telegraph."
No one knows for sure when it first was displayed in Lincoln, but it's up again.
The Nebraska State Historical Society bought the sign recently through an online auction and put it on exhibit Friday morning at the Museum of Nebraska History in downtown Lincoln.
The bright white letters against a cobalt glass rectangle spell just seven words, but they evoke powerful and painful stories.
The words say the institutional segregation that stains a nation's history bled through Lincoln's borders. It wasn't just in the Deep South.
The words also raise questions about a company so central to the city's early success. LT&T's philanthropic legacy, the Woods Charitable Fund, remains vital to Lincoln's future.
And the path struck by those words leads to a historic moment that captivated the world: the election of the first black president of the United States.
Perhaps most importantly, the words "whites only" force those who read them to confront attitudes and values still alive today. It's the story not just of the oppressed, but of the oppressor.
"When I hear that, it just touches a nerve," said Loretta Russell, a 76-year-old African American woman. "It makes me wonder, who are whites? What does it mean to be white?"
Trying to authenticate the sign requires a bit of historical sleuthing that starts in 1904, with the founding of Lincoln Telephone & Telegraph by Frank H. Woods. He also owned the Sahara Coal Co. in Chicago.
In 1941, Woods and his wife, Nelle Cochrane Woods, started a community foundation that served both Lincoln and Chicago.
Lincoln Telephone was sold to Alltel in 1998. The Woods Charitable Fund in Lincoln and the Woods Fund of Chicago now operate as independent entities in their respective cities.
Dale "Wally" Tubbs saw a picture of the "Whites Only" sign before it was auctioned. As curator of the Frank H. Woods Pioneer Telephone Association Museum in Lincoln, he thought about buying the sign for the collection.
Before he placed a bid, however, he wanted to know more. As a longtime collector of telephone memorabilia, Tubbs had seen other phone booth signs made of dark blue glass with white lettering, but all of the early LT&T booth signs he had seen were made of steel and porcelain.
What's more, Tubbs had never seen a segregated booth sign manufactured by any phone company.
So the former Lincoln Telephone employee searched the museum's archives, which include company magazines, records and advertising materials dating to 1915. He found no references or photos of "whites only" signs.
Tubbs also thought the racist sentiment didn't jibe with the company's founder. Although nothing in the archive directly reflects Woods' stance on segregation, Tubbs said, the founder cared about his customers, employees and communities. Why else would he have started the trusts?
"It almost rubbed me the wrong way," he said. "I just felt that was kind of besmirching the phone company's name. It just didn't look right."
He reached a conclusion: LT&T didn't manufacture the sign. He believes another business owner, perhaps of a restaurant or hotel, had it made and installed it on a booth. He even raised the possibility it's a fraud.
John Carter, senior research associate with the state Historical Society, rejected the fraud theory. Although the sign has not yet been analyzed by the society's conservators, the glass shows signs of advanced age, and other marks indicate it was once mounted on a booth.
While Carter said he can't be certain, he thinks it's more likely the sign was made by the phone company. After all, why would a second party have included the words "Lincoln Telephone & Telegraph"?
Carter guessed it might have been made or displayed in the 1920s.
He based his guess, in part, on the fact that Ku Klux Klan activity in Lincoln reached its zenith then. For example, a KKK event at the state fairgrounds in 1924 drew 7,000 Lincoln members, Carter said, a substantial number considering the city's population was about 54,000 at the time.
Displaying the sign now isn't intended to sully reputations, but to show how segregation would have been acceptable in the larger society.
"It's not Frank Woods, it's not the company, it's all of Lincoln," Carter said. "It's the sentiment that was there. If customers wouldn't have wanted that, it wouldn't have existed."
Lela Knox Shanks grew up an African American in Oklahoma City. Whites only signs confronted her everywhere she looked.
On public bathrooms and drinking fountains. In restaurants, street cars and buses. Black shoppers couldn't try on clothing in department stores or visit the library on most days. Black patients admitted to the hospital had to sleep in basement hallways.
Those who dared break the barriers risked arrest, a beating or worse.
"They will say today that black people make too much of being African American," she said. "In those days, your very life depended on remembering your place and that you were African American."
Shanks, now 81, moved to Lincoln in 1965, a year after passage of the Civil Rights Act. Overt segregation had gone underground by then. Racism had not.
She recalled cross burnings and the arson of a black family's home in Havelock. Her late husband, Hughes, endured racial slurs from white clients while working at the local Social Security office.
It is history either underplayed, ignored or forgotten by generations born since the Civil Rights Movement.
So Shanks favors displaying the "whites only" sign at the state museum.
"Anything to give people awareness so we can change and really begin see people as equals."
Loretta Russell, who has lived in Lincoln all her life, said it is a good community where she feels accepted and appreciated.
But as a child, she couldn't swim at muni pool. She and other black children waited for city workers to open hydrants so they could cool off on sweltering days.
When she walked downtown to do errands for her grandmother, she was given a little extra to buy a doughnut at Kresge's. But she couldn't sit at the lunch counter to eat it.
Like other stores of the time, Kresge's accepted green or silver, but not black.
"That stayed with me," she said. "That stayed deep."
Display the sign, she said. Learn from the past to make the future better.
"Definitely, we've made strides, but there's still a lot still going on under the current."
The "whites only" sign surprised Pam Baker, a former Lincoln Telephone employee who is executive director of the Woods Charitable Fund.
"It's another painful instance in our history," she said. "To me, it's a bit shocking that people thought and behaved like that."
While it's hard to know the beliefs of a man who died in 1952, Frank Woods' descendants support racial diversity, she said. The fund has long awarded grants to community efforts aimed at helping the disadvantaged overcome barriers.
"I always think of us as kind of leveling the playing field," she said. "We're really interested in social justice."
The same goes for the Woods Fund of Chicago. Its president, Deborah Harrington, is African American. And in the mid-1980s it provided a grant that allowed a local nonprofit to hire a community organizer named Barack Obama, who would later serve on the board.
Carter, the historical society researcher, said it's just another story tied to the cobalt glass and white letters.
The story's message: We can change.
Reach Joe Duggan at 473-7239 or jduggan@journalstar.com.