Kate and the Fifty-Fifty Club
Here’s something to know about housing records that say the homes were built in 1920: more often than not, they weren’t. Sure, they were built around 1920, but you’ll have a hard time finding the exact date or even the year. Blame bad record-keeping if you need something to point a finger at, but I couldn’t actually find why.
All of this to say, my house was built around 1920, and I’m pretty confident that a woman named Kate was the first woman to live here (with her husband, Sidney, a lawyer, but that’s all I have to say about him). On October 12, 1924, The Atlanta Constitution included an article about how Kate would be assisting at a bridge party at the club room for the neighborhood’s women’s club. So I’m going to guess that the house was built around 1924 for Kate and Sidney and she immediately got involved in the social scene.
A rendering of her photo in the newspaper, next to the stuff about the bridge party. The mole may be a misprint from the paper. But I like it!
It would seem that Kate had a history of getting into the middle of social events and the papers.
The earliest mention of Kate that I could find was when she was about 16, in the January 1, 1903, edition of The Bamberg Herald in South Carolina. In it, Kate hosted a party that was supposed to be “sociable” but “turned into what we shall term an informal reception.” From the account, the party was decadent, including an “abundance” of fruit, fireworks, and many games, including the most popular—and at the time newish—sport, ping-pong.
I was thinking of the 1920s when I made this. 1903 is about two decades too early for Art Deco!
Then, in 1904, Kate lost her scarf pin, featuring a lady’s head with a diamond chip, somewhere near the train depot.
Probably not at all what it looked like.
She may have been hopping on a train bound for Swansea, South Carolina, an hour north, because on June 29, 1905, she gave another party at her “hospitable home.” There was a very strange game involving cards cut out in the shape of South Carolina and trivia questions that could only be answered with the name of South Carolina counties. There was a lot of cream and cake afterward, and that’s about all you need to know.
By 1910, her family had moved to Augusta, Georgia, where she married Sidney. The years between the marriage and her bridge party are a mystery, short of her attending the wedding of Joel Chandler Harris’s son in 1922.
Sure, Kate co-hosted bridge parties when she moved to Atlanta in 1924(ish). But she had greater ambitions. In 1925, the ladies of the neighborhood (women from what are now the West End, Westview, and Oakland City neighborhoods of Atlanta) created a new women’s club, the Fifty-Fifty Club. The club hosted about a meeting a year in my house until 1930.
Their official club flower was the carnation, their colors crimson and white, and their quote, “Sure never to o’ershoot but just to hit.” This quote is from Pope’s “Essay on Man.” It’s been a long time since I’ve done a critical analysis of a piece of writing. But the basic premise from the section where this quote comes from is that people are to achieve happiness and transcendence over other creatures through the understanding of the world around them, the world created by god. This essay is also the origin of the popular quote, “whatever is, is right,” which is to say that everything that exists, exists on purpose and we shouldn’t dismiss it just because we don’t understand it.
Every meeting would start with a roll-call, in which the attending women would give their favorite quote on a certain topic. As examples, in one meeting, they had to give their favorite quote on summer and in another they had to give their favorite Henrik Ibsen quote (of which I know none, and I studied his work in college).
There is little doubt that these women were filled with biases and racist ideology–after all, most moved to the suburbs of Atlanta before or during the 40s and 50s when Black families began to move into the area. Their programming had problematic terminology and subject matter. But it’s still pretty interesting to see what some white women in southwest Atlanta were studying in the ‘20s and 30s.
Here’s their yearly agenda from 1937-38:
October 7: “The Peoples of the Red Race” and a paper on “The Lost Maya”
October 21: “Our Good Neighbor Policy” and a paper on “The Romance of the Banana”
November 4: “The Peoples of the Brown Race” and a paper on “Mohammad”
November 18: “The White People” and a paper on “Shakespeare”
January 6: “The Heritage of the Black Race” and a paper on “Apollo and Phaeton”
January 20: A paper on “The Years of Slavery” followed by “Plantation Melodies”
February 3: “The Negro in Public Life and Professions” and a paper on “Achievements of Negro Women”
February 17: “Current Negro Poetry” and “Negro Folklore” by (the white man) Joel Chandler Harris
March 17: “The Beginnings of the Semitic Race” and a paper on “Jewish Holidays and Their Meanings”
April 7: “The Jew in Education, Science, and Invention” and a paper on “The Rosenwald Foundation”
April 21: A paper on “The Jewish Achievements in the Arts” and poetry of the Bible and modern poems
May 6: “The Jew in the World Today” and a paper on “The House of Rothschild”
May 20: “The ‘American Race’ Today” and a paper on “I’m Proud to be an American”
No idea if they ate jello at these gatherings, but it was a very popular, new-to-the-scene food at the time.
Who is really to say if Kate was a good or bad person from a few newspaper clippings. By 1930, her husband started his own law firm, and she moved to northwest Atlanta. She stayed involved with the Fifty-Fifty Club through at least the ‘30s, and she and Sidney moved to join their son in central Florida in the late ‘40s, where she died in 1967.