Fire Hero and media racism

One hundred years ago today … The New York Age celebrated the heroism of James Cross, a Black man who had saved a white co-worker from a fire in the Winter Garden Building on 1646 Broadway at 50th Street on April 1st.  Its front page offered a headline blaring the hero’s name, race, and face.

The report read: 

When a fire started in a room the fifth floor of the Winter Garden Building, and William Matthews, a white man clerking for the Winter Garden Drug Co. in whose store Cross is the porter, was caught in a room and his clothes became a mass of flames, James quickly prevented Matthews from hurling himself from the window, beat out the flames, took the white man along a six inch ledge from one five-story window to another, broke the window glass and dragged Matthews into the room into safety.

The valerous [sic] feat was witnessed by thousands who lined the curb on West Fiftieth street from Broadway to Seventh avenue, and a great wave of applause went up when the rescue was finally effected. 

The Age was clearly remedying the reports in mainstream newspapers. The Tribune, for example, had referred to Cross as “Jim … [an] unidentified colored porter.” 

Editor James Weldon Johnson penned an editorial, “Just ‘Jim’ ” decrying the media’s treatment of Cross as symptomatic of racism.

The newspaper reporters were not able to find out either Jim's last name or his address. Nobody in the store knew either.

There is a bit of irony in this. All the while preceding this test, the proprietors and employees of the Winter Garden Drug Store had been ordering around a Negro whom they called Jim, a Negro who nobody took the trouble even to find out his name or to care where he lived. Probably some of them merely thought of him as "Jim, the nigger." Yet Jim's was the bravest heart, the most heroic soul, among them all.

Jim was indeed a double hero. He not only had the stoutness of heart to go through danger for another, but when the danger was over he had the heroismi not to stand around and brag about what he had done, to seek the applause of the crowd, or even to get his name in the newspapers. There are perhaps a good many men who could perform the first deed but not many who could do the latter.

(Johnson, James Weldon, “Just ‘Jim.’ “ New York Age, 9 April 1921, p.4.)

Note: James Weldon Johnson and the Black weekly The New York Age  have appeared frequently on this site, starting with our feature about its January 3, 1920 edition.

– Jonathan Goldman, April 9, 2021

TAGS: Black history, African American media, journalism, racism, fire, emergency, heroism