Fade to Black and Fade to White
This evening, the most uncommon and usual name comes into view. Welcome to the life of Orindatus Simon Bolivar Wall (1825 - 1891) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orindatus_Simon_Bolivar_Wall Orindatus Wall lived a life along the color line. One day, a white man in Atlanta learned his most famous ancestor was a pioneer Black lawyer. One could have knocked Thomas Murphy over with a feather. This is the American story of Fade to Black and Face to White.
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On August 12, 1825, a female slave named Priscilla gave birth to a baby boy. The father was her slave owner, planter and State Senator Stephen Wall.
Stephen Wall (1791 - 1845)
The place was the Wall plantation in Rockingham, Richmond County, North Carolina. Stephen gave aforethought to naming his son. He wanted a unique, special name. After reflection and study, Stephen named his black son “Orindatus.” Orindatus's unusual first and middle names are historically based, "Datus" being a Latin deviation from the word "given" and "Simon Bolivar" having come from the famed Venezuelan military and political leader Simon Bolivar (1783-1830).
One imagines Priscilla had no say in the matter.
Stephen Wall and Priscilla would have at least five children. Not much is known about the relationship between Stephen and Priscilla. We do know that Stephen as a father invested an unusual level of affection and attention in his black children. In 1837, Stephen manumitted Orindatus and, presumably, his brothers and sisters well.
In 1838 and in a gesture common among a certain class of white slave owning fathers, Stephen sent five of his children, including Orindatus, away to be educated at the Harveysburg Black School in Ohio. Not only did Stephen pay for the tuition of his children’s education but he took the additional step of naming a guardian, Nathan Dix, and forwarding $1,000 in trust for each child to Dix. The trust arrangements meant all of the Wall children were among the wealthiest residents in the Oberlin area.
Orindatus would be raised in Harveysburg by a family of Quakers.
Orindatus enrolled in Oberlin College where he met a fellow student, Amanda Thomas. One thing led to another and the two married in 1855. Amanda was 17 years old. Together, Orindatus and Amanda would have 8 children.
Orindatus dropped out of college to go into business with David Watson. The two ran a boot and shop making shop in Oberlin. Over time, Orindatus gained a reputation as a prominent cobbler.
On September 13, 1858, Orindatus stepped into American history for the first time. A runaway slave named John Price was betrayed by a young white kid in town. The U.S. Marshal apprehended Price and prepared to take him to the railroad tracks and back to his master in Mason County, Kentucky. Orindatus joined a group of men who rescued Price from the U.S. Marshal and spirited Price away to Canada. There is a famous picture of Orindatus and his fellow liberators posing for the camera at the County Jail in April 1859. Orindatus is second from the left and wearing a top hat.
The rescue placed Orindatus in the national spotlight. It may be at this time that he began to read law under the guidance of his famous brother-in-law, John Mercer Langston, the first pioneer black lawyer in Ohio.
On the eve of the Civil War in 1860, Orindatus owned $1,600 in real estate and $1,200 in personal property. He was a prosperous and successful businessman (and liberator of runaway slaves on the side).
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The Civil War came and Orindatus was called to help the Union effort. After President Abraham Lincoln authorized recruitment of black soldiers, Orindatus recruited black men for the army in Ohio. In 1864, Orindatus arrived in Washington, D.C. and came to the attention of top brass in D.C.
In March 1865, the U.S. Army commissioned Orindatus as a captain. Orindatus was not the first black captain but he was one of the early black captains in the ranks. He served with the 104th U.S. Colored Infantry and was sent to South Carolina to raise black troops. Dissatisfied with the Army’s treatment of blacks, Orindatus signed a petition along with 16 black ministers, deacons and elders calling for the Army to cease its ill-treatment of blacks.
Later in the year, Orindatus attended a South Carolina black convention. The War was over now and opportunity presented itself.
From 1867 to 1870, Orindatus worked for the Freedmen’s Bureau in South Carolina and D.C.
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The 1870s revealed the best in Orindatus as the youthful rescuer of a fugitive slave now applied his skills and talents in the public realm. Washington, D.C. was his home base and where he made his mark.
In 1872, the voters elected Orindatus as a Representative in the District Legislature. The voters re-elected Orindatus to the same position in 1873. Note well that his district was majority-white. Orindatus did not require racial gerrymandering or a majority black district to win election.
In the same year, Orindatus graduated from the new Howard Law School and began to practice law in our nation’s capital. Little time passed before Orindatus S.B. Wall’s name was on the radar of movers and shakers in D.C. He was the first black appointed Justice of the Peace in D.C. While his brother-in-law John M. Langston was founding Howard’s Law School, Orindatus was serving as Magistrate of the Police Precinct, Notary Public, practicing law and deciding cases as Justice of the Peace.
Orindatus and Amanda were well-known and comfortably part of the city’s black upper-class society.
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A whiff of corruption caused his application for another term as Justice of the Peace to be rejected.
By 1890, Orindatus was still “one of the best-known colored lawyers in the city.” He was hustling, however, as Reconstruction had come to a close and he was not receiving fees and profits anymore from deciding cases. His bread and butter was representing criminal defendants down at the Police Court.
On April 1891, Orindatus suffered a stroke while practicing law in Police Court. He could not move. He was paralyzed. Bystanders carried him to his home where he lingered. Two weeks later, he passed away.
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Three of Orindatus’s children passed for white. One married a white German engineer and moved out west. A son, Edward, married a French woman and moved to Canada. And then there was Stephen, named after his grandfather, planter and slave owner Stephen Wall in North Carolina.
Stephen worked in the Government Printing Office in D.C. He held a conventional clerk position and lived a normal life. He married a white woman from Canada. They had a daughter who appeared white. The daughter enrolled in a white school but there were still memories of the Wall family, particularly grandfather Orindatus S.B. Wall. Wasn’t Orindatus Wall a black man?
Of course, the rumors were true. Stephen and his wife were forced to remove their daughter from her white school. The public scandal left a racial wound in the family. Eventually, they would move to new neighborhoods, change their family name from Wall to Murphy and pass out their days as white Americans.
And this is how one day, a white guy down in Atlanta, Georgia learned that his most famous ancestor was a pioneer black lawyer, Orindatus Simon Bolivar Wall. Daniel J. Sharfstein, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Journey from Black to White, New York: Penguin Press (2011); 28–29. https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Line-American-Families-Journey-ebook/dp/B004H4XCVE
Orindatus S.B. Wall (1825 - 1891)
Very interesting. We are all more American than we know and less a specific color than we want to believe. Blacks are finding out they have ancestors who were slave owners and whites are finding out they have black blood running through their veins.