Ruth Ellis' Tale of Two Cities:
One Hundred Years In The Making

by Keith Boykin

Some time after eight on the morning of July 21, 1899, Dr. Clarence Hemingway walked out to his front porch at what was then 439 Oak Park Avenue in Oak Park, Illinois. He lifted up his cornet, fingered the valves, placed his lips on the mouthpiece, and began blowing music to announce the birth of his first son Ernest.

Only forty-eight hours later, one hundred ninety-three miles southwest in Springfield, Illinois, thirty-eight year old Charles Ellis and thirty-four year old Carrie Faro Ellis gave birth to their first daughter Ruth. It's hard to imagine how the lives of Ernest Hemingway and Ruth Ellis could be more opposite. Hemingway - White, male, and heterosexual - the son of a doctor, was born into a prominent family. Ellis, on the other hand - Black, female, and homosexual - was born to parents of modest means, although her father held the distinction of serving as Springfield's first Black mail carrier.

That two people born in the same week in the same month in the same state one-hundred years ago could each make such an impact on our culture, and have experienced such different lives, reflects the influence of race, gender, class and sexuality in defining our cultural boundaries. In a sense, these two stories make up one "fairy tale," told in the familiar contrast of Black and White. America, in the dying hours of the nineteenth century, resembled Charles Dickens' description of revolutionary France in his "Tale of Two Cities" as "the best of times" and "the worst of times." Whether you had "everything" before you or "nothing" before you depended largely on your background, your race, and your gender.

When he heralded Ernest's birth by horn, Hemingway's father surely could not have predicted that his son would one day win a Nobel Prize for literature. Yet the boldness of the musical announcement in the early morning hours under the Illinois sky paid homage to the privilege of race, class and gender in America. Understood in the context of America's social and political dynamics, the success of a White, heterosexual man from a professional class family was almost to be expected, and perhaps it was this expectation that the elder Hemingway gleefully trumpeted when he told the world that he had finally created an heir to carry on his name.

By the same token, Charles and Carrie Ellis probably would not have guessed that their first and only daughter would outlive their entire family. In a world of White privilege and male patriarchy, the idea that a small-framed, dark-skinned Black woman born under the same Illinois sky as Ernest Hemingway would live to become a cultural icon and one day celebrate her one-hundredth birthday as perhaps the oldest living "out" Lesbian in America would defy all the odds for her survival. But as a survivor, Ruth's life speaks volumes about the ability of a single individual to overcome adversity through perseverance.

The birth of Ruth's parents in 1861 and 1865 marked the beginning and end of the bloodiest war in America's history. They were born in the slave state of Tennessee in the last years of slavery, during a war that took the lives of six-hundred thousand Americans as the Union struggled to answer the question of what to do with America's four million Black slaves. They traveled up the Mississippi river to Illinois, a free state that sided with the Union in the war, and whose capital, Springfield, gave rise to the country's most prominent Unionist, Abraham Lincoln. Thanks to Lincoln's legacy, Ruth Ellis was born in a somewhat integrated community known for its relatively progressive values, but that sense of community would soon self-destruct only a month after Ruth's ninth birthday celebration.

Provoked by a false accusation from a young White woman that she had been raped by a Black man, White citizens of Springfield, Illinois gathered on Friday, August 14, 1908 at the county jail. When they learned that the sheriff had secretly removed two Black prisoners accused of raping White women, the crowd went on a rampage. They set fire to the Black business district, shot and killed Scott Burton, a Black barber shop owner, burned his shop and paraded his body from his porch to a tree several blocks away where it was hanged. A group of women and young boys even stopped to pose for a camera in front of a tree where Burton was killed.

The mob moved to the Black residential area of Springfield, where rioters set fire to the Black homes and Black families fled for safety. In a move ironically reminiscent of the Biblical Passover, where Hebrews marked their dwellings with lamb's blood so that God could identify and pass over them, White residents placed White sheets and handkerchiefs outside their homes to warn the mob not to burn their houses. By the time firefighters arrived the White crowd, estimated at twelve-thousand people, had grown so unruly that they cut the fire hoses to prevent the rescue effort.

Another mob gathered the following evening and attempted to enter the State Arsenal where displaced Blacks were being housed. After being stopped by the militia guard, the angry group headed for the home of William Donnegan, a wealthy eighty-four year old Black cobbler married to a White woman. The White citizens cut his throat, dragged his body across the street, and lynched him in a local school yard. By the end of the weekend, seven people had been killed, forty homes destroyed, twenty-four businesses forced to close, and more than two-hundred thousand dollars worth of property damaged. Although a grand jury made one-hundred and seven indictments, only one person was ever convicted - for stealing a saber from a guard - and no one was convicted for the murders of the two Black men.

Civil rights leaders were so alarmed by the race riot in Lincoln's home town that they convened an urgent meeting in an apartment in New York City on the one-hundredth anniversary of Lincoln's birth to form a watchdog group, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Although the NAACP hoped to protect Blacks from future outbreaks of race violence, Ruth and her family had already managed to cheat death. Charles Ellis, armed only with a sword, refused to leave his house in Springfield and stayed to thwart off a band of rowdy, brick-throwing Whites. Young Ruth watched as her father defended the house in 1908, but today she describes the incident with a certain quiet detachment that seems to belie the gravity of the danger she faced.

It only takes a few minutes alone with Ruth before one is struck by the sense of history that she carries with her. She was born just three years after the U.S. Supreme Court decided the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision that used the words "separate but equal" to provide the legal justification for the Jim Crow doctrine of segregation. But she also lived to see a unanimous Supreme Court strike down that same decision in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case.

Ruth is one of the few people in the world to have lived in three separate centuries, making her a treasure of knowledge and experience not only for American Black Lesbians and Gays, but for all Americans. Indeed, her life experiences mirror modern American history. In one-hundred years, Ruth has seen eighteen presidents from William McKinley to William Jefferson Clinton, including her favorite, Franklin Roosevelt.

Audre Lorde once wrote, "Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded, because it is so easy not to battle at all, to just accept and call that acceptance inevitable." With that in mind, Ruth's survival, from the earliest moment, was an accomplishment.

She was born a twin but her sister died shortly after birth. "This little light baby, she ain't gonna live," Ruth's grandmother predicted at the time. "But this little Black baby [Ruth] she's the one who's gonna live. Ruth became the first daughter to parents with three sons, and today reflects on her brothers lives by reminiscing on their musical ability and on their service in the military. The eldest, Charles, born in 1890, played the violin and became a Second Lieutenant in World War I. The next son, Harry, was born four years later on New Year's Eve 1894. He went on to play the piano, clarinet, and guitar, and even joined the military band in the war. The last son, Wellington, born in 1896, played the drums, and was drafted into the service. Ruth rounded out the musical trio by adding her ability to play piano by ear and to play the mandolin and the guitar.

Perhaps as a survival tool learned in a culture of closetedness, Ruth seems to have always had a perceptive ability to identify other homosexuals, even going so far as to pick up on her own brother's sexuality. "Harry didn't care much about the girls," she told film director Yvonne Welbon in the documentary "Living With Pride: Ruth Ellis @ 100." She said Harry "was more of a studious person. Music was his main thing." Harry went on to the University of Illinois Medical School and set up an office in Champaign, Illinois, becoming the first Black doctor in the city.

Decades later, when Ruth was nearing eighty-years of age, she signed up for a karate class in Detroit. Her instructor, a White woman named Jaye Spiro, looked like she might be a Lesbian, Ruth recalled. Ruth invited her to get together some time and when they met outside of the class they "came out" to each other. In eighty years "in the life," Ruth had never before known a White lesbian.

At a time when homosexuality was still referred to as "the love that dare not speak its name" Ruth insists, "I wasn't in what you call a closet. Never!" She never married and lived with her female lover for thirty-five years, but her family never questioned her. While her father seems to have known about his daughter's sexual orientation, the only complaint he ever raised was that Ruth and her girlfriend were too loud one night in the house. "The next time you girls make that much noise I'm gonna put you out," Ruth remembers her father saying. Ruth acknowledges that everything was "hush-hush" in her youth, and yet she managed to find a girlfriend and life partner while living in Springfield, Illinois. She says she knew very little about Lesbians, but she also remembers reading Radclyffe Hall's 1928 lesbian classic "The Well of Loneliness." Somehow, in the midst of a racist, homophobic, and sexist culture, Ruth appears to have lived as a strong and empowered Black homosexual woman.

In the course of her life, Ruth has played many different roles. She was an entrepreneur who started her own printing shop in a time when most Black women were still working as domestics. She has been something of an activist who opened her Detroit home as a social spot for Black Gays and Lesbians as far back as the nineteen-forties, and even attended the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's "Creating Change" conference when it came to Detroit in the ninteen-nineties. She was a loyal spouse, who stayed with her partner Ceciline "Babe" Franklin for thirty-five years.

She is a traveler, venturing to the Bahamas, Mexico City, Niagara Falls, and to women's music festivals. And still she is largely self-taught, having learned photography, bowling, cooking, and piano mostly on her own. Even as the most senior of senior citizens, she leads an active lifestyle. In Welbon's documentary, Ruth, in her nineties, returns to her Springfield High School gymnasium and without prompting begins jogging around the gym floor in the same way that she must have run eighty-five years earlier.

She has been sexually active throughout her entire adult life, including what she calls an "affair" when she was ninety-five. She does not smoke but occasionally will make a drink for herself. Even as a centenarian, she is dancing, bowling, biking, walking, and exercising more actively than many people in their forties or fifties.

"Ruth represents power, strength, and dignity," says Kalimah Johnson, a young Black woman and poet. Johnson had come to a senior citizens center on the third floor of a downtown Detroit church to join dozens of other people, young and old, to fete Ruth on her one-hundredth birthday. Ruth is tastefully dressed in a taupe-colored short-sleeve frock with two strands of pearls draped to her waist and matching pearl ear rings. With her white hair combed and brushed into shape, she is a portrait of matronly elegance sitting at her round table, even as she nibbles on a barbecue drumstick and sips on her fruit punch.


Keith Boykin is the former executive director of the National Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Forum and the author of two books: "One More River To Cross" and "Respecting The Soul: Daily Reflections for Black Lesbians and Gays". He is also a commentator on BET and CNN.