Like Chicago, the New York metropolitan region was still over-whelmingly white in 1893. It was also filled with immigrants from all over Europe and their first-generation children. The wretched poverty of many of them, together with their foreign babble and alien customs, made longtime New Yorkers fear for the future of their city. To acculturate and redeem these motley newcomers, white New Yorkers initiated a variety of reform efforts at the end of the nineteenth century. However, they typically ignored the less numerous native-born blacks who were arriving simultaneously. Blacks were made to feel unwelcome in Manhattan, and many chose to live in the outlying areas. Brooklyn, which would remain an independent municipality until 1898, became especially popular with blacks after the Civil War draft riots of 1863, when white mobs attacked them throughout Manhattan. But even in Brooklyn the black population in 1893 was very small and amounted to only some 13,000 people out of a population of 950,000.
The job that Frederick found after he arrived in Brooklyn was predictable, in both personal and broader social terms. New York was like Chicago, once again, in restricting most blacks to lower-paying, subservient occupations. Within this narrow range of possibilities, however, Frederick was able to carve out a superior position for himself, one that represented an advance over his work as a waiter in Chicago. The Clarendon Hotel in Brooklyn, where he became “head bell boy,” was a new, large, prominent, and strategically located establishment in its day. Opened during the summer of 1890 two blocks north of City Hall, it was also just a few steps away from an elevated railroad that ran to the Brooklyn Bridge a dozen blocks away. A cable car service took passengers across the bridge to lower Manhattan and dropped them off within easy reach of New York’s City Hall, thus putting the Clarendon at one end of a transportation system that linked the two municipalities’ administrative centers.
Frederick was twenty-one at this time, and as the “head” of a crew of bellboys, he had a responsible position that reflected his skill in both serving and managing people. Bellboys would typically be on their feet all day, and because they were always in public view, their physical appearance, from uniform to grooming to deportment, would reflect directly on the establishment where they worked. It would have been his job to give individual bellboys their assignments, to keep track of their hours for payroll, to train beginners, and to resolve complaints made against them. Frederick would have had to balance being a figure of authority toward his coworkers—and since he was black, they could have been nothing else—with being an employee and a servant of whites. It would have been Frederick’s prerogative to go out of his way to provide exceptional service to an important client himself.
Frederick’s subsequent career shows that he impressed guests at the Clarendon: after working there for some months, he left to become a personal valet to a leading local businessman. Percy G. Williams had taken up temporary residence in the hotel in the early summer of 1894, which is when he probably met Frederick and hired him for the traits that any successful servant would need—resourcefulness and a winning disposition. Williams was in his late thirties and was on the verge of making his mark on the history of American popular entertainment as the biggest owner of vaudeville theaters in the New York area. There is good reason to assume that Frederick learned some valuable lessons from witnessing aspects of Williams’s career and character.
This is also the time when Frederick’s ambitions began to surpass the lowly roles that American society allowed him to play and at which he had begun to excel. With a good letter of recommendation from a well-known, rich, and respected man like Williams, Frederick could have continued in New York as a personal valet or even a household butler for many years. But in addition to his vocation, Frederick also had a passion for music. And it was strong enough for him to take the extraordinary step of leaving the United States to study.
Years later, Frederick would explain to an American consular official that “he went to Europe on the advice of his German musical professor, Herman,” who told him specifically to go to London. Frederick hoped to become a singer. It is possible that his studying voice in New York reflected the famous legacy of black church singing, which he would have known in his parents’ chapel in Coahoma County. As far as the German teacher is concerned, nothing is known about the man except that his influence on Frederick was crucial. That he was a foreigner surely explains why he was willing to cross the American color line and take Frederick on as a student; it also explains why he would have looked to Europe as a place to which Frederick could escape to develop his abilities.
In the 1890s, passenger ship traffic between New York City and London was frequent, quick, popular, and affordable. Approximately half a dozen ships left every week during the fall of 1894, transporting thousands of passengers with the most diverse backgrounds and incomes. The vast majority went in “steerage,” which was the cheapest way to travel, and which accommodated surprising numbers of laborers, workers, and others on the lower rungs of the economic and social ladders. International travel was also much simpler then than it is today: one bought a ticket and went. Americans did not even need a passport to leave the country.
Frederick left New York in the fall of that year, apparently on October 9, aboard the SS Lahn of the North German Lloyd shipping line. Its ultimate destination was Bremen in northern Germany, but on the way it was scheduled to call at Southampton, a major port on the south coast of England that was a popular entry point for Americans. The Lahn docked on October 16, after an uneventful seven-day crossing. Direct trains from Southampton to Waterloo Station in central London took two to three hours.
Some of the novelty of arriving in London would have been mitigated for Frederick by the changes he had already experienced in the United States. In fact, the contrast between the Hopson Bayou neighborhood and Chicago was in many ways far greater than that between the two greatest English-speaking cities in the world—New York and London.
But in another and more important way, the change between the United States and England was like climbing out of a ship’s dark cargo hold onto a top deck bathed in brilliant sunshine. “Negro,” “colored,” and “black” did not mean in England what they did in the United States. In London, for the first time in his life, Frederick experienced what most of his brethren back home would never know—being viewed by whites with curiosity, interest, even affection.
It was not that Victorian England was a color-blind sanctuary. For generations, the British Empire had subjugated and exploited entire civilizations in South Asia, Africa, and many other places around the world. In the United Kingdom itself, unabashed racism was directed against the Irish, the Jews, and others. But because there were very few blacks in England at this time, and even fewer American “negroes,” the attitude toward people like Frederick was surprisingly accepting—“surprisingly” especially from the point of view of Americans who happened to be visiting the British Isles.
The seeming contradictions of British snobbery dismayed one American visitor, who noted that in the great university towns of England, one could see “negroes” at college balls waltzing with aristocratic young women and ladies of high position, all of whom would have considered it grossly inappropriate even to acknowledge a familiar tradesman in the street. Another American was shocked by the sight of “two coal-black negroes and two white women” in a fashionable London restaurant. “My first impulse was to instantly depart,” the American admitted, “for such a sight in the United States would surely not have been possible.” But in the end there was little he could do except acknowledge ruefully, “In London a negro can go into the finest restaurants and be served just like a white man.”