Two Americans Visited Newfoundland……

Two Americans visited Newfoundland, and the contrast between them, and the contrast in how they responded to Newfoundland, and then in how they themselves were ultimately treated by this place, well, there’s quite a story in all of that.

Rockwell Kent, artist, illustrator.

The first American you may even have heard of. His name was Rockwell Kent. He became a very famous abstract impressionist artist and illustrator who now has works in major museums world-wide. He was born to privilege, well-educated, and visited Newfoundland during the First World War. The other you won’t have heard of. He was Lanier Phillips, born very poor, a share-cropper’s son from rural Georgia, and he visited Newfoundland during the Second World War. Rockwell Kent was exiled from Newfoundland, the only person ever to receive that dishonour. Lanier Phillips was awarded the Order of Newfoundland, the province’s highest award, and received an honorary degree from Memorial University, the only black man to ever receive these two honours.

Rockwell Kent, at 32, brought his wife and child to Brigus, an outport but still a well-established town about forty miles from St. John’s. He had already visited Newfoundland and he had a patron who financed him with an agreement to buy all the paintings he could produce. He took an isolated house at land’s end in Brigus and fixed it up. Other than a few professionals, everyone in town made their living from cod fishing and sealing.

Rockwell Kent, "The Drifter", wood engraving.

But then World War I broke out. Now Rockwell Kent had had an Austrian maid who taught him German and German songs before he was five. He had visited Germany. And like most U.S. intellectuals of his time, he admired German culture and considered it superior in comparison to the British. He loudly expressed his support for the German side (as many in America did at first). Most of Newfoundland was of British or Irish descent and supported Britain strongly.

Rockwell got into an argument and was fined $5 for threatening, attracting even more attention in a small town. Invited to perform a solo in church, he sang a song by Schumann, in German.  He called the locals bigoted and stupid in an article in a U.S. paper, and refused to let the postmaster unwrap and inspect a parcel he was sending to the U.S.

Rockwell Kent, "Men and Mountains".

Needless to say, many in Newfoundland thought he was a spy and that the parcel was a map of the island. After that, Rockwell suspected that his mail was being read (it was), so he purposely took a snapshot of himself dressed like a spy with a German-looking moustache and he wrote provocative comments in German in a letter. When The New Republic, a U.S. magazine, published a letter of his which stated that he hoped some German would “capture, transform and annihilate that sterile land” of Newfoundland, the St. John’s paper picked it up and it was front page news.

The government threw him out, exiling him, the first and last time anyone has been exiled from Newfoundland.

A young Lanier Phillips

The second American, Lanier Phillips, joined the navy after America entered the Second World War to escape Georgia where there were systematic Ku Klux Klan lynchings, church burnings, cross burnings and whipping of blacks. Indeed, his own “coloured” school was burned to the ground. The Navy was no picnic for a black American, though. Segregation was an official policy and blacks were expected to “serve” the regular white navy man by almost exclusively working in the mess hall or laundry. On one voyage, the U.S.S. Truxton, a destroyer, docked in Iceland and over the loudspeaker the captain announced that the crew could go ashore, all except the black sailors. The blacks aboard assumed they would be lynched in Iceland.

Later, in February, 1942, off the icy snow-covered south coast of Newfoundland, the Truxton and another ship ran aground in a furious winter storm and ultimately broke up at Chambers Cove. About 200 died. Of the 186 who survived, Lanier Phillips was the only black man. The other black sailors refused to attempt to make it to shore as the ship was breaking up, because it looked like it was still Iceland and that they would be lynched.

The cliffs at Chambers Cove

The local Chambers Cove mine closed down so everyone could help rescue sailors, as did the nearby communities of St. Lawrence (population 900), and smaller Lawn, Newfoundland. Everyone came out in the time-honoured tradition of sea-faring communities. Phillips was badly injured, frost-bitten and unconscious as he was hauled over the jagged, windswept, icy cliffs to a field hospital at the mine. The women of the two nearby towns took in the sailors, cleaning them up from all the bunker oil on them and feeding them soup and nursing them back to health.

Here’s what Lanier Phillips told the St. John’s paper of his experience. “When I got my eyes opened, I saw the ladies, they were massaging my body, getting the circulation going. I was completely naked and I was really afraid….Being from rural Georgia, it was a crime to be naked in front of a white woman—to even look at a white woman was a crime. Maybe you’d be lynched for it.”

He said the women did not realize he was a black man. They had never seen one. “One of the ladies had my hand and was trying to get the bunker C oil off of me. And she says ‘This poor fellow, I can’t get it off. It’s in his pores.’ That’s the first time I spoke up. I said, ‘It’s the colour of the skin. You can’t get it off. I’m black.”

Her reaction was immediate relief rather than repulsion or disgust and this amazed Lanier Phillips. That he was not white changed nothing. This is how The Washington Post later recounted the story:

The woman cradled Lanier Phillip’s head in her arms as if he were a baby, gently feeding the shipwrecked sailor hot soup she had brewed to save his life.

“Swallow” she said gently, “swallow.”

Phillips could scarcely believe what was happening, a white woman caring for a black man as if he were a son. Back home in Georgia, he thought, she would have been run out of town, and he could easily have been lynched.

Lanier Phillips became reborn after this experience. He realized his value as a human being. He became involved in the civil rights movement and marched with Martin Luther King in Selma in 1965. He spoke tirelessly throughout the U.S. at public gatherings, schools, and events about his liberating experience in Newfoundland.

Lanier Phillips in 2008. He received an honorary degree from Memorial University.

In the fifties he applied to the U.S. Navy’s Sonar School and because of the backing of the first elected African-American Michigan congressman, he was accepted. He graduated in 1957 becoming the first African-American to do so. Later in life he worked on marine submersibles, worked for NASA in the space program and was part of Jacques Cousteau’s deep-sea exploration team, blazing trails everywhere.

At every opportunity, he said it was his experience in Newfoundland that changed his life. The Newfoundland government awarded Lanier Phillips its highest honour, the Order of Newfoundland, in 2011. Lanier Phillips died last week, at 88. Newfoundland mourns him.