Wesley Crayton

Wesley Crayton was Vicksburg’s first Black alderman, a lifelong leader of the Republican Party, and a businessperson with a varied career.

Beginning in the late 1870s, Crayton owned the Blue Light Saloon on Washington Street in Vicksburg’s main business district. He became vice president of two banks that served African Americans, and he helped organize and chaired the Vicksburg chapter of the Negro Business League. In the late 1880s he played in his own band, the Wesley Crayton Silver Cornet Band, for white and Black audiences, and he was known for making donations to organizations and individuals needing help when his finances were going well.

Crayton served the local, state, and national Republican Party for decades as an officeholder, convention delegate, and sometimes as a power broker. In the 1880s, he led support for Black schools and Black policemen as Vicksburg’s first Black alderman. In that same decade, Crayton began representing Mississippi Republicans every four years at the party’s national convention, and he was often in the middle of political competition. For example, once in the 1890s, when there were competing factions of Mississippi Republicans led by James Hill and John Lynch, both groups agreed that Wesley Crayton should be their treasurer.

As a leading figure in business and politics, Crayton was involved in all sorts of public issues. He appeared in Vicksburg newspapers supporting events that honored Black soldiers in the Union army, and he helped publicize the city’s new Black military drill team, the True Blues. He also encouraged the efforts of Blacks to protect the city against yellow fever, and he negotiated for Black workers on the railroad. Likewise, Henrietta was active in St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Mississippi’s first Episcopal church for Black churchgoers. She and Wesley married in 1884, and the following year Henrietta helped organize the Ladies of St. Mary’s and, later, an Episcopal women’s group called Daughters of the King.

The public life of Wesley Crayton raised and complicated questions about what scholars have called the “politics of respectability,” a broad concept about uplift, setting examples, and rejecting insulting stereotypes. Once in 1900, when Crayton and attorney W. E. Mollison gave talks at Bethel Hall acknowledging Gov. Andrew Longino’s opposition to mob violence against Blacks in Vicksburg, the two men made clear a crucial part of the politics of respectability: “The colored people were admonished to obey the law, and [in doing so] rob the men who are against them of an argument that they are criminal or lawless.” When some leaders in the Black community opened the Frederick Douglass Club in Vicksburg in 1895, they decorated it with a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation and images of Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Vicksburg religious and political figure T. W. Stringer, and Wesley Crayton. At one point in 1900, a journalist called him “the wealthiest negro in the state,” and when Black leaders like Booker T. Washington—perhaps the leading proponent of the politics of respectability—and Louisiana’s P. B. S. Pinchback visited Vicksburg, they stayed in Wesley and Henrietta Crayton’s large home that they owned on First North Street.

In one vivid demand for equality and respect, Wesley and Henrietta Crayton filed a $10,000 lawsuit against the Louisville, New Orleans, & Tennessee Railroad in 1890 when its employees used new segregation laws to throw them off a train. According to their lawsuit, when Wesley Crayton explained that they were just walking through the whites-only car to reach the car for Black passengers, the conductor assaulted him with racist insults and blows to the face. The conductor pushed the couple off the train, forcing them to wait seven hours for the next train. Mississippi courts ruled in favor of the Craytons and awarded them $2,000.

Critics of Wesley Crayton believed running a saloon while being involved in government mixed political corruption with immorality and violence. Crayton consistently advertised his sale of alcohol in white-run newspapers in Vicksburg, New Orleans, and Jackson. When segregation laws required it, he advertised that he had separate sections for Black and white customers. When he advertised the Blue Light Saloon in a Black newspaper, the Weekly Negro World, he used a revealing headline: “Race Pride. Race Enterprise.” His critics emphasized vice rather than pride and enterprise. White-run Mississippi newspapers often recorded stories of fights and gambling at the saloons Crayton and other Black businessmen owned. One reporter described an early morning attack with a pool cue and mentioned that Crayton’s “saloon bears an unusually bad name.” In 1884 Crayton himself exchanged insults and blows with Ham Carter, another Vicksburg saloon keeper. Many of the stories white southerners told about what went wrong when African Americans became involved in politics involved alcohol and corrupt political deals. The Greenville Times said the Constitution of 1890 meant the end of the tactics that had made Wesley Crayton a powerful political figure: “He is no longer, never more a power to abuse influence over his race and be courted by the white politician. Let him and all like him become reminiscent of an old and a foul order of politics.”

In 1905 Crayton filed for bankruptcy, in part because of a new law against Sunday alcohol sales. Just a few years later, statewide prohibition put him out the liquor business entirely. In 1908 he ran a pool room with a soda stand, though critics said he and others were running “lemonade saloons” that tried to skirt the law. By the late 1910s he had a near-beer license and lived in his place of business. But even as his businesses faced challenges, he continued his work for the Republican Party. Crayton continued to represent the Republican Party at national conventions until 1920, long after the Mississippi Constitution of 1890 disfranchised most Black voters and rendered Republicans insignificant in most Mississippi elections.

Henrietta Crayton died in 1916, and Wesley Crayton died in 1924.