In June 2022, the Christian Street/Black Doctors Row Historic District became Philadelphia’s first historic district based on Black history. The designated area spans from Broad Street to 20th Street. It grants protection to the structures remaining from 1910 to 1945, the era when Christian Street boasted the city’s highest concentration of African American professionals and was the locale of many important Black institutions. Among these was the Quaker City Lodge, a thriving chapter of the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World (IBPOEW) or the Black Elks. Exalted Ruler John Miller Marquess was the chapter’s leader from 1930 until his sudden death in 1936. Marquess’ life story is fascinating in itself, but also because of what it reveals about 1930s African American life on and beyond what the Philadelphia Tribune called “Black Main Street.”

Beginnings

Marquess was born in rural Arkansas in 1882. John was an excellent student, but lacked the skills required for life in the countryside. According to an obituary, Marquess “had an interest in hunting—but couldn’t shoot with the accuracy of a palsied octogenarian seated atop a bucking bronco.” The description continues, “Efforts, frantic at times, to teach him the technique of milking a cow were futile.”

Thus, at 12-years-old Marquess left home to enter a preparatory program at Fisk University from which he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1902. Marquess was captain of the football team, a singer in the Glee Club, and had the opportunity to travel the country as a member of the Fisk Quartet. He earned an additional degree after two years at Dartmouth where he ran track and sang in the Glee Club.

Marquess became an instructor of math and languages at two small Black colleges: Shorter College in Arkansas and then Kitrell College in North Carolina. In 1916, after eight years as a high school principal in Kansas City, Kansas, he was appointed president of the State University for Colored People in Langston, Oklahoma. Marquess married Anna Dickson of Ohio, and they had three children.

When Marquess came to Philadelphia in the mid-1920s, he was an established, educated, and worldly family man, known to have significant real estate investments and contacts in Black communities across the nation. Unsurprisingly, Marquess chose a house at 909 South 18th Street, just steps from Christian Street, for his relocating family. He also opened a pharmacy at 18th and Christian Streets. By 1920, Christian Street was 57 percent Black. By 1930 it was 92 percent Black. The Black population there would peak at 97 percent in 1940.

Exalted Leader of the Elks

The period of Marquess’ residence on Christian Street coincided with a time that most Americans, especially most African Americans, were affiliated with numerous civic and social organizations. The Black Elks, founded in 1898 and continuing to this day, appealed to Black men from a range of social strata and offered a wide array of activities including athletics, musical performances, fellowship, and civil rights advocacy. They were also well known for their pageantry, from wearing purple fezzes to staging extravagant parades.

The Quaker City Elks Lodge 720 was founded in 1926, and Marquess quickly emerged as a leader. Although the O.V. Catto Lodge was already established and had moved from the Seventh Ward to 15th and Fitzwater Streets, this new chapter grew quickly. Under Marquess’ supervision, the Quaker City Elks opened the Keystone Temple in 1930 at 1943 Christian Street. The official launch of the Quaker City Lodge’s new clubhouse was attended by nine thousand people that represented Elks lodges from New York to Baltimore. Marquess was especially proud that nearly all the work on the new facility had been done by Black workers. “This home is a demonstration of what the black man can do when you give him a chance,” he proclaimed.

Marquess was reelected again and again as Exalted Leader, but that does not mean his reign was without controversy. He had numerous conflicts with Magistrate Edward W. Henry, the leader of the O.V. Catto Lodge. In August 1932, Henry accused Marquess of robbing him of his reputation because Marquess had written an editorial critical of Henry in the Philadelphia Tribune. Marquess faulted Henry for stating at the first meeting of the National Negro Association Opposed to Atheism and Communism that “Communists are employing white girls at $10 a day to entice Negro youth to the Communist’s cause.” According to Marquess, “While sensible Negroes are fighting against segregated schools and working for jobs and political advancement, Magistrate Henry gives the ‘white women and Negro men’ argument new force and direction.”

Loyalty to the GOP

Despite this very public spat, less than two months later the Tribune reported that “for the one hundredth time the Honorables…John Miller Marquess and Edward W. Henry have buried the hatchet.” The newspaper attributed this reconciliation to the two leaders’ joint desire to see Herbert Hoover reelected president of the United States on the Republican ticket. Marquess had become a leading figure in the state and national Republican party. Indeed, he was tapped to make a nomination speech for Hoover at the Republican Party convention in Chicago during the summer of 1932.

As the “Party of Lincoln,” Republicans had a solid hold on the Black vote in the early 1930s, and Hoover vowed, at least when speaking in front of Black audiences, to promote civil rights should he be reelected. Throughout the decade, however, the African American vote shifted to favor the Democrats, in large part because of the New Deal.

This dynamic played out nationally, but also along Christian Street. The 1700 block of Christian Street was home to four Black State Representatives. John C. Asbury (1921-1924, 1710 Christian Street), William H. Fuller (1925-1932, 1705 Christian Street), Walker Jackson (1935-1936, 1724 Christian Street), and William A. Allmond (1937-1940, 1700 Christian Street). Allmond, previously a Republican, ran successfully as a Democrat in 1936 presaging an era of Black support for that party.

However, in 1932, ambitious Black men like Marquess were still Republicans. One reason for this was the Republican outreach to Black communities. According to the Philadelphia Tribune, Hoover told a group of 300 Black supporters that “The platform of the Republican party speaks with justifiable pride of the friendship of our party for the American negro that has endured unchanged for 70 years. It pledges itself to the continued insistence upon rights.” In contrast, the article continues, “The Democratic platform is exceedingly quiet on the Negro question. It is absolutely silent.”

The Tribune reported another factor discouraging Black voters from supporting the Democrats in 1932: the headquarters for Black Democrats in New York was set up apart from their white counterparts. In contrast, the Republican National Committee resisted “any physical Jim Crow set up.”

Fighting Jim Crow

Marquess’ period of local leadership illustrates that racial segregation was a perennial threat, even in cosmopolitan cities in the North. In February 1931, Marquess was named the general secretary of the Grand Lodge Convention Committee, responsible for organizing a national gathering of Elks in Philadelphia during the following summer. Marquess used the leverage of tens of thousands of expected visitors to address two grievances regarding segregation with the Pennsylvania Railroad.

In a letter to the company’s leadership, Marquess indicated that he had learned of the existence of separate washrooms for Black and white employees at 30th Street Station, a terminal that was then under construction. “If the company is allowed to get away with this,” wrote Marquess, “if we sit supinely by and make no effort to stamp out such a hideous thing, the next step will be to have Jim Crow waiting rooms for the passengers.”

In his letter, Marquess also complained that Black passengers traveling to New York were only sold tickets for seats over the wheels on Greyhound buses, a company owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad at that time. Claiming to be expecting more than 100,000 visitors from across the country, Marquess warned that if the company did not change its policies, “I shall advise all of these delegates to WALK TO PHILADELPHIA rather than come over any of your lines.”

Marquess seems to have succeeded in this pressure campaign, and he was soon threatening Nevin Bus Lines with a boycott and a lawsuit after 15 students returning to Lincoln University from Washington, D.C. and Baltimore were told to board a separate bus.

Despite Marquess’ wealth and social status, the indignity of segregation remained a perpetual peril. In November 1932, Marquess went to the Penn Athletic Club at 18th and Locust Streets to attend a meeting of the Amateur Athletic Union. When told that he would need to ride the freight elevator, Marquess walked out.

Another battle in which Marquess was engaged was to have a Black person appointed to the Board of Education. At the time, judges on the Court of Common Pleas appointed school board members and also distributed a large number of patronage jobs, none of which had been given to Black people. In his 1934 plea to the judges to appoint a respected Black doctor, John B. Turner, to the school board, Marquess lamented, “The Negro pupil in your school system, particularly in the secondary schools meets discrimination and embarrassments in a degree which saps his courage out of him. Both he and his parents are helpless because they have no one to whom they can really make an appeal and get a sympathetic hearing. Those who do finish our High Schools should be awarded special medals for having developed a super grit, which the negro surely must have in order to put up with conditions long enough to graduate.” In 1935, Dr. Turner became the first Black person to serve on Philadelphia’s Board of Education.

A Tribute to the Tribune

It is not surprising that the Philadelphia Tribune, the nation’s oldest continuing Black newspaper, printed in-full Marquess’ letter in support of Dr. Turner. As a prominent Black leader living on a prominent Black corridor, Marquess’ name and activities appeared frequently in the Tribune’s pages. Other African American newspapers, from the Chicago Defender to the California Eagle, also reported on Marquess’ leadership in the Elks, the Republican party, and in the fight for equality. His name scantly appeared, however, in the Philadelphia Bulletin or the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Marquess was aware of the importance of the Black press. At a 1932 event celebrating the 48th anniversary of the Tribune, Marquess stated, “Negroes should not only make it a rule to patronize those firms which advertise in Negro newspapers, but they should feel it a duty to ask firms with which they trade to advertise in the Negro press.” Just months before his death, Marquess spoke in Washington, D.C. before the Executive Committee of the Eastern Federation of Negro Republicans, an organization of which he was president. He described Black newspapers as “the best medium for the dissemination of political information among Negro groups.”

Alas, Marquess, only 54-years-old, suffered a fatal heart attack while working alone in his office at the Quaker City Elks Lodge Christian Street home on Sunday, May 3, 1936. This, too, was given extensive coverage in the Tribune. The newspaper included a heartbreaking description of the great man’s final moments. “Alone, according to police records and officials of the lodge, the smooth-faced, copper-colored Elks leader staggered to the chasm that leads to Eternity with none to lend him courage, none to soften the blow of the realization that his end had come.”

Marquess’ body lay in state at the Quaker City Elks Lodge clubhouse. His casket was carried in a procession down Christian Street to Tindley Temple where thousands attended his funeral. Marquess’ erstwhile adversary Edward W. Henry was master of ceremonies. Like so many of the city’s Black leaders, John M. Marquess was buried at Eden Cemetery, an institution founded, in part, by Marquess’ former Republican Party ally and Christian Street neighbor, John Asbury.

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Author’s Note: I learned about John M. Marquess’ fight against segregation of employee washrooms at 30th Street Station from the nomination submission for Christian Street/Black Doctors Row Historic District. This impressive document was written by Kevin Block and Adrian Trevisan for the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia. In an effort to learn more about that story, I fell down a Marquess rabbit hole. This article is a much-abridged summary of what I found.

Christian Street circa 1910 to 1945 contains so much more rich history. In addition to politicians and doctors, the street was home to performers, pastors, architects, hairdressers, shoemakers, and strivers of every stripe. Although the Quaker City Lodge home was demolished, other institutional structures including the First African Baptist Church and the E.M. Stanton School remain standing.

Now that Christian Street is an official historic district, I hope that more researchers take a closer look. I would love to see someone develop for Christian Street a project similar to the brilliant 1838 Black Metropolis which has recreated an earlier Philadelphia Black community in vivid detail. For more inspiration on the fascinating stories waiting be told, see my talk for the Preservation Alliance given earlier this year: https://vimeo.com/1054537588/dacb65f3ab

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