Radiolab - The Vanishing of Harry Pace: Episode 2

Episode Date: June 19, 2021

Dreams Deferred.  The story of the post Black Swan years. We follow Harry’s Supreme Court battle to desegregate the South Side of Chicago, and then the mysterious decision which forces him into seclusion, before his untimely death. The Vanishing of Harry Pace was created and produced by Shima Oliaee and Jad Abumrad.  This series was produced in collaboration with author Kiese Laymon, scholar Imani Perry, writer Cord Jefferson, WQXR’s Terrance McKnight, and WNYC's Jami Floyd. Based on the book Black Swan Blues: the Hard Rise and Brutal Fall of America’s First Black Owned Record Label by Paul Slade. Featuring interviews with Pace's descendants and over forty musicians, historians, writers, and musicologists, all of whom grapple with Pace’s enduring legacy.

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From WNYC. To C. To C. To C. To C. Okay, I'm Chad Ibumrod, herewith. She'm Oli A. Yes. This is the vanishing of Harry Pace, a miniseries on Radio Lab.

This is episode 2. Quick recap. In the last episode, we started with a family secret. Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. This is crazy. Can't believe this has been kept from us.

About a guy named Harry Pace, who it turned turned out was not an Italian mobster, but rather African American, a light skinned black man from Covington, Georgia who fell under the tutelage of the great W.E.B. Du Bois and created America's first black-owned record label. It said the only records using exclusively Negro voices and musicians. Almost a hundred years ago today. So we thought this is going to be a series just about music. But what Harry does next? It's like, poof.

Is on a whole nother level. Wait, that sh** is haunted. Trying to sort through what that experiences like psychologically is very hard to do. It's a mystery. It's a mystery. Okay, to pick up where we left off. End of Black Swan article, A Consolidation. Screenwriter, Courgetherson.

Chicago Defender, April 19th, 1924. White combinations of white businesses are frequent. It does not often occur where there is a combination of a white and a racial business. It is of more than local interest, therefore, to note the recent consolidation of the phonograph record business of the Paramount, a white organization, and the Black Swan. At the end of April 1924, after a very intense two-year run, Harry sells Black Swan to Paramount, a large white record company. He tries to put a good spin on it, but there's no mistake.

This was definitely the end. One thing worth saying is, this was what happened in every aspect of American life. Whenever Blacks found a way to earn money, whites would come in and subcapacity and destroy that. This is not unusual. What is unusual though is the way Harry responds. The way he immediately changes keys.

One thing we didn't tell you in episode one is that while Harry was doing all the black swan stuff, he was also the president of an insurance company. On the side. He's got this other job, this other life. This is journalist Paul Slade. He's written an entire book about Harry. He actually got us started on this whole journey. Black swans at its height, and yet he still finds the time

and the energy to act as chairman of a brand new life insurance company. And this is happening while Ethel's on tour and they're blowing up. Oh my gosh, that's insane. So when Black Swan folds, like right in the middle of its collapse. Harry drove through a merger between two other insurance companies selling to Black customers. And that created a massive new firm, which more or less owned the Black market for life insurance.

Called the Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company. Scholar Imani Perry, when Lorraine Hansberry writes a reason in the sun, this is in some ways predicated on the whole play as predicated on that company. Wow. More on that in a second. Supreme Liberty life was headquartered in Chicago

and it was enormous. And getting an idea of the size of the fact that here assets of $1.4 million, and again, this is in 1929 money, and over a thousand employees. So he just flips industries from music to insurance? Yeah, that's the next step. And that's when Harry moves to Chicago. Initially, this seemed a little out of the blue to us but pretty much everyone we talked to said no no no this makes total sense. Think

about who this guy was. Remember Pace is a race man. Pace wanted to uplift the race. He's a race man. Scholars Emmett Price, David Sussman. The same way that Dubois is a race man. This was his Dubisian programming kicking in. How do I uplift while I climb? An insurance was actually a natural next step. I mean, a couple of things that are pertinent here. And one of them is insurance has this really important social function. Paces work needs to be understood in that context,

as doing activism through business. If you look at this time economically, the folks that had accumulated the most wealth had been able to pass it down, so they were mostly white people. Black America had largely been kept below the poverty level, and they didn't have structures to protect their money to protect themselves with insurance. This was stability.

It was something that they could pass down. So for example, Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company is important because it really is the only way to accumulate wealth upon debt. This is what people have to give their families after they die. And then there's also this. When we think about benefiting financially from slavery,

slave owners took insurance policies out on their slaves, knowing that the slaves would die, and that the death of the slave would be replaced not necessarily with a body, but with a bag of coins, right? Money. So insurance wasn't just insurance. It was justice. Chad, do we... should we skip the Paces Mission Statement of Supreme Liberty Life?

Totally. I think I just want to get your voice reading it. We asked historian Amani Perry if she would read Pace's mission statement. Okay. Pace stated that the first purpose of the Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company was providing low-cost homes of finest construction using all-colored craftsmen. There's very much like Black Swan.

The only records using exclusively Negro voices and musicians. Except replace records with homes and musicians with builders. The second objective is for the company to make an investment of funds into the purchasers of these homes. He also said I actually want to give them money so they can move into those homes. Yeah, so this sort of historical context is that this is actually during the Great Migration. So the Great Migration on the most basic level, Professor Charles McKinney, is a mass exodus of African Americans from the South, from the deep South, to Northern cities like

Chicago, Detroit, Flint, Michigan, New York, New York, New Jersey, Washington, which is going to become known as the chocolate city. Before this moment, there's probably fewer than 10 cities that have over 5,000 black people in. That number's got a mushroom. So there's this massive movement rate. So in starting this company, Harry clearly saw a need. All these migrants are coming and there's essentially not enough housing.

They just, there's not enough space. So Harry decides to try and solve this space problem. And what was immediately clear to him to anyone was that there were tons of neighborhoods with space. Those were the white neighborhoods. But most of Chicago is covered by what were called racially restrictive covenants, which are these sort of private land agreements and neighborhoods that people would enter to preclude African

Americans from moving into them. These are contracts? The contracts, yeah. They are legal documents. These would be the neighborhood association coming together to form a contract that someone would have to sign in order to move in. And it would read like this, this is literally a one of those contracts. No fence hedge or barrier more than 36 inches in height shall be placed within 30 feet of

any street. No foul or animal other than songbirds, dogs or cats as household pets. No part of the land hereby conveyed shall ever be used or occupied by or sold, diminished, transferred, conveyed onto or entrusts for leased or rented, or given to Negroes, or any person or persons of Negro blood or extraction, or to any person of the Semitic race, blood or origin, which racial description shall be deemed to include Armenians, Jews, Hebrews, Persians, and Syrians. Basically, you can't have these kind of people in the neighborhood. And as a race man of sorts as someone who was interested in pursuing civil rights for African Americans, Harry Pace decided it's time to do something.

1930, he starts studying for his law degree. Doing it in his spare time, he's running this massive insurance company He still finds time to work four nights a week to do all his law studies and he graduates from Chicago Law School in 1933 July 8th 1933 Chicago defender Surprising his friends many of whom had no previous inkling of his study Harry Pace well- insurance executive, appeared in the graduating class of the Chicago Law School. I just the sheer amount of energy that he had, you know, just one of his lives would have exhausted me. At this point, he's got a wife, Ethlin, a kid, Harry Jr. who's 15, he's managing

a company of a thousand employees, he's gone to law school in his spare time. The next thing he does in his off hours, I guess, is he starts looking for homes that are for sale in white neighborhoods. He eventually zeros in on a neighborhood called Woodlawn. Like, if you go to Woodlawn, that Woodlawn is like 100% black now, right? At the time, it was completely white. So Harry sets his sights on this neighborhood. Harry managed to find one of the white guys who had been involved in running the owner's association at Woodlawn, a guy called James Burke. James Burke was a cop.

Now James Burke, I believe it actually been involved in drawing up the original restricted covenants. That document? No, Negroes, or any person, or persons of Negro blood or extraction. He was one of the guys who wrote it. He defended it in court. He won.

But the reason that Harry got in touch with him is that somewhere along the way, this man, he'd fallen out with the other members of the property association. And he wanted to get back at them. Do you know what the falling out was? I don't, I'm afraid. I don't know what it was all over. But he was an officer for that neighborhood.

Yeah, but he had this massive falling out. And everything he does from that point onwards seems to be driven by spite. We think it was a dispute with his ex-wife who was still on the neighborhood association. We're not sure, but for whatever reason he was so upset with them that he vowed to put a black family on every single block in woodland just despite them and

Somehow Harry finds this guy and basically He's like you and me. We have the same goal integrate the neighborhood Yes, and he unites with this racist cop. This is, I just have so much respect. I mean, this is, I don't know. Harry just got done, you know? A racist white cop is going to be helpful when you're trying to sort of take on the law.

They probably had to swallow his pride. I can't imagine what the conversations were like between those two people, but you know, it was probably amazing. Now, we don't quite know how they met, but we do know from Harry's testimony in court that he was working with James Burke in this. This was problem solving at its best. Harry tells James Burke to find him a house that is for sale in that white neighborhood. James Burke does. Harry then, in a very kind of clandestine, complicated series of transactions,

arranges for the house to be sold to a black man, in direct violation of the racial restrictive covenant. And the name of that man? Carl Augustus Hansberry, a real estate mogul of sorts for black Chicago, and the father of Lorraine Hansberry. The future playwright. The first black playwright to win the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for the best play of the year. Now, when Emmett Price talks about the six degrees of Harry.

Yeah, I mean, Harry Pays touches people who... don't even realize that they were touched by Harry Pays. Well, Harry just shows up everywhere. Everywhere. Literally, everywhere. This is what he's talking about. Everybody's connected. Now Lorraine Hansberry was young.

She was eight at the time. When Harry sold her dad the house that they would move into, she would ultimately write a play about the whole experience called Raisin in the Sun. I mean, a Raisin in the Sun is in many ways kind of the door opening. It was the black swan moment of the theater, the watershed. It was like LeRen was opening a new chapter in a theater that included black people. In the way that black swan records was a watershed.

If you've seen the play, you'll recall that it's about a black family moving into a white neighborhood or about to move in right before they do. There is a white man who shows up at the Younger's apartment. We had a grotto our attention at the last meeting that you people bought a piece of residential property. And he tries rather delicately to explain that they do not want the younger family to move into their neighborhood. And offers them money to prevent them from moving in. And ultimately the family, we have all thought, refuses, that insult. And we've decided to move into our house.

It's sort of dramatic rendering of what these restrictive covenants were actually doing. The play ends with this family about to move into a white neighborhood. It ends with a point of possibility? What will happen? In real life, they did move in. Harry Pate sold the house to her dad, convinced him and his family to move into that white neighborhood,

and when they did, it was much worse than anything she wrote about in that play. They move in and they are met with mob violence. Lorraine Hansberry wrote about this in a public letter. That fight required that our family occupy the disputed property in a hellishly hostile white neighborhood in which literally howling mobs surrounded our house. She says they threw stones in through the windows. One of their missiles almost took the life of the then eight-year-old signer of this letter. My memories of this correct way of fighting white supremacy in America include being spat at, cursed, and pummeled in the daily trek to and from school.

I also remember my desperate and courageous mother patrolling our household all night with the loaded German luger, doggedly guarding her four children. doggedly guarding her four children. This is all part of Harry's plan. Maybe not the mob violence, but he wanted to provoke the neighborhood. He knows he's going to trip a lawsuit. That's the whole point. Journalist and legal expert, Jamie Floyd. He wants to trip a lawsuit. It's just like the woman who started Roe vs Wade.

When you were bringing a test case, you're bringing a test case. You know what you're doing. So, anyway. May, 1937. So now Harry is working with Karl Hansbury and the Hansbury family. Hansbury moves in. And at that point, Woodlawn's white residence, the property owners, the association, they realize they've been tricked. They sue. Arguing that this purchase violated their restrictive covenants. That's exactly what Harry wanted, so he counter-sues and... They end up in court. First of all, it's heard by a circuit court. And then it goes to the Illinois Supreme Court.

And those first two stages go against the handsprees. Against Harry. They know going in. The precedent is against them. Jamie says just 15 years earlier, the US Supreme Court had found, as a constitutional matter, that restrictive covenants were constitutional. That it was okay for people, white people,

to say we don't want you in our neighborhood. On what grounds? It was part of your property right. It was part of your property right, to make a decision about who will inherit this land and under what condition? So from the plaintiff's standpoint, that's the other side. All they felt that you needed to do was to prove that Harry and Carl Hansberry were conspiring to break the law.

So at a certain point, the other side calls Harry himself to the stand. Oh, maybe the chat would be good. Um, for this part, we got an assist once again from John McWordor who played piano for us in the last episode. He comes in here as a linguist, which is his day job. Anyplace Harry. Pace would have taught kind of like me that's interesting. I'm not even going to do a voice. That's just me. Okay, yeah, I can do that. And Jamie, do you want to be the lawyer for the other side? Yeah, sadly yes, I think that makes sense. Here we go, ready? Yeah. Pardon me for asking you this question, Mr. Pace. You are a negro, are you not? Well, that would be a conclusion on my part.

I am commonly known as a colored person. You can form your own conclusion please. I mean you admit that you are. I say I am commonly known as a colored band and prefer to be known as such. Are all the other officers of your company also colored people? Yes. All of them? Yes. All right. John, you are great.

I felt that. You're the best Harry so far. If I am that man. I felt that. You're the best Harry so far. If I am that man. You've auditioned well for Harry. A colored man. I am him. There are many ways to read this exchange. I mean, one could be that the lawyer, Churren, is unnerved by Harry's pale complexion.

And he just wants to establish for the jury that guy is a black man. Don't be fooled, all white jury that guy is a black man. Don't be fooled all-white jury. That is a black man causing trouble. Just trying to get the jury to be so angry with these black folk for stepping out of their rightful place down at the bottom of the ladder. But then he says, it's a little weird. He says, you're an eagerer, are you not? And then Harry replies, that would be a conclusion on my part.

That phrase throws me. What are you hearing there? That's an indication of what he was going to do later. He's letting on that there's a part of him that thinks, why do I have to accept that particular Balkanized category? I wondered if he was sort of ahead of his time a little bit. Obviously, there's legal strategy happening also,

because he had to be prepared to testify, right? But could he also have been saying, listen, this race thing is crazy. That is what he meant. Yeah, he was slipping that in. I think pace thought, maybe it's time for us to start letting this go. Isn't that about two and a half generations past slavery? Isn't that natural to start thinking, maybe it's time to start letting this go, given that we're all different colors. And I like Mozart just as much as they do. What is this white color Negro thing? I can see him thinking that Getting back to the case Harry and his team lose twice in the lower courts. They appealed twice and eventually in in the lower courts. They appealed twice and eventually in 1937.

The honor of all the team justice and the associates is of the Supreme Court of the United States. The arrive at the Supreme Court. Oh, yay, oh, yay. You know, of course they love the courts to say, well, it's just unconstitutional. You can't segregate this neighborhood. That's just against our principles in America.

But, you know, the year is 19, I don't know, 38. I mean, come on, the military is not even integrated. The military, the first major institution in our country, is years away from integration. This is what they're up against. So Jamie says, Harry and his team deploy kind of an ingenious strategy. Strategically, they decide, let's just look at the paperwork. Let's look at the paperwork. Like, okay, let's look at these contracts on their terms, on the terms that the Neighborhood Association set out.

According to their rules, these are the rules the association made for themselves. They needed to have 95% of the people who live there signing the thing. Otherwise the contracts weren't valid. They needed to have close to 100% of the landowners to sign it. But then Harry and his team go out and they check every single lease in the neighborhood. And what they discover is that the neighborhood association, they had only gotten 54% of the people in the neighborhood to support the restrictive covenant. Without the remaining 46% or so, the thing wasn't a good document. So it was like a technicality? Right, right.

But when you bring a test case in the courts, the first thing you want to do is what? When? And that's what happens. And the house can be occupied by African Americans in the neighborhood where it is is then opened up for black people. The decision opened 500 new properties to black residents. Harry basically transformed Chicago's South Side in an instant. I mean, this dude's good God. Why do we have like three movies about this dude? I mean, you know, hello, Eva Duprene, right?

I mean, you know, record owner, lawyer, good God. I mean, this dude is like, he's like the vocational Maghiver. Right, he's all over the place. And then, things get really confusing. Like, if you ask yourself, as we have a million times in this project, why don't we know about Harry? There are a lot of reasons for that.

You know, not a ton of documentation. We don't have his voice. It was a long time ago. And then there is the tricky business of what was happening in his life at the time he was testifying. That's after the break. This is Angela Babbiars from San Jose, California. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,

enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.Sloan.org. Science reporting on Radio Lab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. This is the Vanishing of Harry Pace, the miniseries on Radio Lab. I'm Chad Abumrod here with... I'm Shimou Liai. There you are.

Okay, so one of the tricky things about Harry is boiling down his life to just one story. Like there seem to be so many stories happening all at once. For example, if we were to split screen the story we just told you, on one screen you would have a great Supreme Court victory about a race man who desecrigates a huge chunk of Chicago. On the other side, very different. So certainly some for... According to Paul Slade,

if you look at the census records for him and his family. In 1930. This was before the case. He entered the whole family as being Negro. Any G was the notation on the form. And in 1940, the year of the Supreme Court decision. He entered the wall as being W for white. But at what? Okay. So at some point between 1930 and 1940, something changed. We don't know exactly what we looked at the census records and Paul's right. Between the time Harry testified in Hansberry Lee

and the time the outcome was announced, he reclassified himself and his family from black to white. And apparently, even before Karl Hansberry had moved his family into into that woodland white neighborhood. Harry had already snuck his family in. So it's complicated. Just your professional opinion, do you think he moved into that neighborhood to test the bounds of covenants to set up Hansberry Veeley? My instinct is that it was probably a dry run. I think he would he was probably already thinking it was a rehearsal, I think, for fans pretty veily. And he wanted to see if this idea would work. That's my feeling. So, 1937 this case starts, right? 1930 Harry's family's lifted in the census as Negro. Right. 1940, as this case is being concluded, Harry and his family is now listed as white.

What is your take on that? Well, honestly, this, it's not all that uncommon that that would happen, and it can be for a couple of different reasons. Census takers list whatever they want. So they look at people and are making decisions about their race without asking them at times. We have to remember, we didn't start filling out our own census forms until 1960. It's a modern phenomenon. A hairy paste never got to choose for himself

and think about it if the enumerator, that's what they used to call the census takers. If they walked into a segregated white neighborhood and they see a person standing on the lawn watering his lawn, they're just going to make the assumption that person is white. So maybe that's what happened. Maybe he was there watering his lawn, Harry Jr. playing with a ball,

Little Josephine, tagging along, Etheline his wife, and maybe the numerator saw little Josephine, tagging along, ethylene his wife, and maybe the enumerator saw this just assumed, well everybody else in this neighborhood is white by law. So these people must be white. So we don't know what happened, Chad. We don't know what transpired. Did the enumerator simply make that assumption and mark down W? Or was there a conversation about race

in which Harry pace misrepresented? We just don't know. Whatever the case, if it were a W, maybe that suited him to be classified that way since his goal was at some point to out himself and bring a case. I mean, it's even possible that James Burke, that racist cop only worked with Harry in the beginning because he thought he was white.

James didn't understand who he was talking to. I don't know. It seemed plausible. But then, Mr. Pace, would you consider him to be your mentor? He definitely was my mentor. He would have to go to the bank and he would let me ride with him when I got driver's would let me ride with him. When I got driver's license, I would drive him. We found a video interview done with a guy named John Johnson, who was the founder of Ebony and Jet Magazine.

In the interview, he tells the story of meeting Harry Pace on June 4, 1937. This would have been right in the middle of the hands-bury V. Lee case. He just graduated high school and he'd been selected to go to some kind of event, honoring black high school graduates. We all went to some place where there was selected one person on the school to be on it. And Mr. Pace was the main speaker. He gave a talk called the Negro's Contribution to American Life, and he talked about how black history has not been recognized how we fixate too much only on white men and what they've accomplished, and to quote,

This is actually Harry's grandson Peter reading from the speech. There were Negroes who came to America with Columbus. Across the country and saw the placid Pacific with Balboa, who went in the wilds of Mexico and Central America with Cortez, who searched for the fountain of youth with Ponce de Dalyón. All of these people, he argued, they need to be seen. And so, after it was over, having practiced public speaking and not being shy anymore, I went up and said,

how, what a great speech he had made and how inspired we were by speech. And he said, well, you had a great high school record. What are you gonna do? I said, well, I'd like to go to college. I have a small scholarship, but I just cannot see my mother scrubbing floors and washing dishes in order for me to go to college.

He said, have you ever thought about going to college part-time and working part-time? I say, I've thought about it, but I don't have a job. You say, well, maybe we can find you one. Come to see me on the first work day of September, and I'll find some kind of job for you. And you really didn't have a job for me, but he had a desk outside his office, and he set me at the desk, and so I would run errands and do whatever he wanted me to do. And he would talk to me about business and about his life and I never knew that blacks could do what they were doing. At this point, the interviewer for this oral history was done for the visionary project.

Jumps in with a question about Harry's complexion. Mr. Pace was very fair skin too. Oh yeah, it's a matter of. Pace was very fair skin too, wasn't it? Oh yeah, it's a matter of he was a film. He was very fair skinned, but he identified completely with blacks until he had a daughter and a son. This would be Harry, Jr. and Josephine, now teenagers, who went to the University of Wisconsin, and they fell in love with white boys and girls and they wanted to get

married and the time came for them to meet the parents so naturally they didn't want to meet a black person so when Christmas came and it was time for the parents to meet him he didn't take any black newspapers or magazines home with him, which was a godsend for me because he gave me the job of reading black newspapers and giving him a digest of what was happening in the black community each week. I did that so he could talk intelligently to the people who were coming in and out of his office. That's how I got the idea for Negro Digest.

Basically, he says Harry was temporarily pretending to be white for his office. That's how I got the idea for Negro Dages. So he basically he says Harry was temporarily pretending to be white for his kids. All the while John Johnson would secretly smuggle in these black publications, which he says was what led him to start Ebony and Jett, making him one of the 400 richest men in America. Actually he was the first black man to make that list. So he was more than a mentor. So, um, I'm at this point, the interview goes in other directions, but Johnson continues the story in his autobiography. David Susman told us that after Harry decided to move his family into that neighborhood.

At that point, Johnson recounts there's this threat by his employees at Supreme Liberty Life who realize that he's passing because otherwise he wouldn't be able to live in this white neighborhood. And they threatened to basically out him. Apparently some of the younger employees had found out that he was potentially passing and they were horrified. He was the president of the largest black owned insurance company in America after all. So they threatened to march into his neighborhood and picket his house. And Johnson writes from that day until his death a year later, he was a changed man. And that day, until his death a year later, he was a changed man. More cautious, more withdrawn, more secret.

From that day forward, apparently, he just faded away from the black limelight and decided to become white once and for all. I think that decision, which he couldn't have made lightly, must have been scary for him. I just didn't know that Harry, honestly, I did not know that there were black, race people. Right, or Kieh-Seglanan? Who passed as white, and I did not know that damage that it could cause. I just didn't know and then you're shown the consequences of like this neon catastrophe of race in this country

and you're just like, oh, f***ing like, of course that could happen but I never ever imagined it. Everyone we talk to had a different take about this moment in Harry's life. Historian Elliot Hurway. I mean, the thing is, the way in which he retreats into his house and leaves Black life and hides is really very unfortunate. To Elliott, it's just a betrayal of everything that Harry stood for. It's almost a it's almost a Halloween story, you know, it's

maybe it's the time of year, but I see him as kind of a an unquiet spirit, you know, who can never rest. A ghost wandering the earth. You know, this is when we talk about stuff like this in my class, historian, Charles McKinney, and you know, and I, and I'm, you know, I'm pushing back on my students, they're like, Oh, you know, this is a betrayal. This is a betrayal. And I ask them, I'm like, Okay, so basically after 60 years of, of, of battle,

right? You know, how many more years did he owe you to engage in this battle? How many more years did he owe? Yeah, I do think that some of these figures, and I think Harry Pace is one of them. Sometimes, and our judgment of them as historic figures, we forget the risk and the cost. Historian and money peri. And I just keep thinking about the threat of that picket. Professor Yvdenbar. For his family and what that might mean in the neighborhood

that he lives in, like what would they do if they found out that a black person was among them, they would make his life hell. But what would that hell look like? Would they try to burn his house down? What, you know, what would white people do if they found out a black family was living next door? Here's what we know. I think we know just a couple months after the threat of that picket, Harry is shoveling snow outside his home, and he falls over, has the stroke, is bedridden for six months, and then he dies. Let's do this.

Let's do it. A day later, his body ends up in the Bronx. All right, so this must be it, right? 78 years later, so do we. Hi. We met up with the archivist of Woodland Cemetery, Susan Olson. Hey, show. Oh, you've got, okay, cool.

When we told her we were interested in Harry Pays, she was like, oh, WC Handys, clamorator, that guy? I worked for the Memphis Pink Palace Museum. And my first job was dusting WC Handys trumpet. Oh my God. But then when you guys call, I never really bothered with pace. She walked into a side room and a minute or two later, she came back with a stack of paper. What do you have there in your hand? These are the internment orders. What does internment mean? Barrel. Okay. So you fancy words to think that it softens the blow.

No, you got a dead relative. You're digging a hole, but we call it internment. Okay, so what we know is that with Harry Pace, we know that Ethelind is the owner of the lot. Is it Ethelind? That's his wife. Ethelind Pace. That's C.S. Hall is the owner of the lot. Is it Ethelind? That's his wife. Ethelind Pace.

That C.S. Hall is the funeral director that the HERSS is scheduled to arrive at 12 o'clock. What's the deed numbers at 3-2? Can you see it? You're talking to two old people. What's the deed number? It's 3-2-8-2-6. I'm fed such a high number.

I'm sure it would bother you. The story that we quickly assembled is that Harry dies on July 19th, 1943. The next day, Ethland is on a plane from Chicago to New York with the body. She comes to New York, she buys the space and she bears in the next day. But it sounds like I don't even know if he had a New York City funeral. Seems like there was no funeral, no ceremony, nobody present, except for her. We visited Harry's grave with Jamie Floyd on the hundredth anniversary of him starting Blacks One records.

And predictably, so this is our Buddhist to our right. See, it's just gonna be one piece of grass. So, how do you think this is our Buddhist? This is the word going on. There should be a Gertrude Ederley and Mighlin Memorial will make it clear. We couldn't find them. On Harry I know you're here. Where are you Harry? Took us an hour. Come on Harry. Harry pays.

Geez Louise Harry, you're hard to find. It really is the vanishing of Harry pays now. Oh my god. Surprisingly hard to find. It just looks like every single grave. It's so modest. Which is, if you want anonymity, I guess that's a good thing, right? Yeah.

It's a simple gravestone but waist-high, three rows back from one of the roads in a far corner of the cemetery. Nothing really special about it. Nothing on the grave that would let you know he did anything with his life. It just says, PACE in Art Deco font. And it's nicely understated. We knocked on his door. We almost wanted to be like, Harry, give us a sign.

Tell us where the journals are buried or give us some insight. This section that were in, this was a sign. Tell us where the journals are buried or give us some insight. This section that we're in, this was a white section? Mixed, right? Was your spirit broken? Did you feel betrayed? What happened with your family? Did you give up?

Here, why is he in there? What's he even doing here? Yeah, I know. And there's just no information to answer these questions. After such a full life, the end seems so abrupt and so, I don't know. Well we all end up dead in the ground alone.

Ultimately, we're all alone. We're all alone. I guess we should just wish him happy 100th. Happy 100th anniversary, Harry. After Harry Pace died, his wife, Ethelin, and his kids, Harry Junior and Josephine, who were teenagers at that point, they seemed to have made a pact. To completely bury his story, his story of activism, the story of Black Swan, they just tried to erase it. The only way we can really explain that is that they must have been really scared.

There certainly would have been backlash from white people after a hands-bury V. Lee. There was the threat of that picket. They must have felt pressure from all sides and just wanted to make his story disappear for their own safety. I don't know, maybe that's too generous an interpretation. What we know is that his wife and kids packed up and then sold a lot of his things and then proceeded to never talk about his past. Not to family, not to friends, no one. Actually, it was beyond that. They lied to their children about it.

Somehow the notion was presented that pace was an anglicization of Pache. Pache. Pache. Italian name. You know, we grew up thinking maybe we're Italian. In just one generation, the entire family was cut off from the real story. They lived with zero idea that they could be anything other than white. But like all lies or half-truths, there's leakage. Eventually the truth does leak out a little bit.

Way back in the days when I was starting to play music, I was practicing in my little house. For some reason I looked down at my skin and it was like a kind of thing. All of a sudden I'm looking at it and I think I was looking at a black person. In the next episode, the Ghost of Harry revisits the modern daypaces. That's next week on the Vanishing of Harry Pace. The Vanishing of Harry Pace was created by a Jad Abumrod and Shima Oliai and is presented as a collaboration between awesome audio, radio lab, and radio diaries. The series is based on the book Black Swan Blues, The Hard Rise and Brutal Fall of America's

first Black-owned record label by Paul Slade, who helped us out a ton with research as well. Our editorial advisors are KAC Lehman, Imani Perry, Kour Jefferson, and Terence McKnight. Jamie Floyd is our consulting producer. Our fact checker is Natalie Mead. Series artwork was created by Katya Herrera. Special thanks to Nelly Gillis, Ben Shapiro, Deborah George, and Joe Richmond. Episode 3 arrives in just a few days.

Okay. Thank you for listening. Yeah. Radio Lab was created by JAD, a boom rod, and is edited by Swarren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasar are our co-host. Suzy Electrenberg is our executive producer. Dylan Keef is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Kiesik, David Gable, Maria Pasco-Tieres, Sindoon Yannesambandum, Metculti, Annie McEwen, Alex Niesen, Sara Kari, Ariane Wack,

Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Sarah Sandbach, Karine Leung, and Candace Wong, our fact checkers are Diane Kelly and Emily Krieger. and Candice Wong, our fact checkers, our Diane Kelly and Emily Krieger.