To mark the McClung Historical Collection’s 13th Moses Smith Day highlight, celebrating our esteemed Civil War veteran and Custom House policeman Moses Smith, McClung Reference Librarian Danette Welch looks at the life of another Knoxvillian who died on a November 10th: Louis “Libby” Goodman, a local auto racing pioneer, Knoxville’s second black liquor baron, and the city’s 13th traffic fatality of 1930.
Louis Livingston Goodman was born in Asheville, North Carolina, shortly before the turn of the 20th century, into a family well-known as educators and caretakers of City Cemetery (now Riverside). The nickname “Libby” developed early in Goodman’s life. So did his fascination with machines that moved at great speed, possibly stemming from the role Asheville’s train station played in his childhood.
Like Moses Smith, we do not know the exact date of Libby Goodman’s birth, but we do know that his first decade was spent in Asheville, where his twice-widowed mother Amelia suffered the death of a small daughter and found herself forced to give another child up for adoption. Amelia eventually obtained positions which allowed Libby, her eldest, to stay with her, first as cook for a family near the Asheville railroad depot, then at the depot itself, where she was soon entrusted with management of the station dining room. By 1912, Libby’s mother was in Knoxville, working as housekeeper for the family of Thomas H. Johnston, manager of Knoxville Knitting Mills. The Johnston home was large and new, and the position paid well for the time. Not only was Amelia able to bring her sons with her, but she could also afford a small house of her own in East Knoxville.
Amelia valued education, and both her sons’ names regularly appeared in the school honor rolls published in Asheville newspapers. Records from Libby’s school days have not been preserved in Knoxville, but if he followed the same template as his younger siblings, it is likely that he attended high school. By 1916, Libby was old enough to be included in the city directory, where he reported working as a bootblack at Andrew Farley’s, a pressing club at 208 South Central Avenue which catered exclusively to members of color.
Ostensibly a subscription service where members could get their clothes cleaned, pressed and repaired regularly, pressing clubs also served as de facto social clubs for working class and middle class men, providing space where members could linger to read a newspaper, play a card or board game, listen to the radio, or simply talk while their clothes were being processed. In Knoxville, where liquor had already been outlawed, Farley’s South Central Pressing Club also operated as a de facto speakeasy. Andrew Farley would eventually be charged with violation of local bone-dry laws, but while Goodman worked there, the club ran “wide open,” meaning members could obtain both fresh laundry and an alcoholic drink in a relatively upscale atmosphere without fear of police interference.
During the 1910s, when cars were not yet commonplace, Farley’s brought Libby into regular contact with men who were involved in driving occupations or owned vehicles of their own. Automobiles were still a cutting-edge invention and knowledge in their construction, repair, or operation were considered “high tech” skills which automatically conveyed status to people of any color. As professional positions like chauffeurs and taxi drivers increased, these jobs were open to black men as well as white ones. Employment driving or repairing cars carried a social prestige, and many working-class men, both black and white, regarded gaining experience in the automotive field as a potential step toward upward mobility. Libby Goodman was among them.
As the United States prepared to enter World War I, Libby joined the Army. The Army accepted recruits of color for only a few specific skilled positions: cooks across all branches and credentialed chauffeurs as drivers or mechanics in the quartermasters’ corps or medical department. The only option open to a soldier of color without a previously certified profession was to enter as a stevedore (dock or supply worker) and hope for an opportunity to move into one of the skilled classifications. Both the auto and air services would be new to American military in a time of conflict, and how those corps might develop was not yet determined. As in civilian life, military men of position generally hired drivers rather than performing the task themselves and more machines used in war meant more need for their care, so opportunities to be trained as drivers and mechanics were expected to expand. As the air services began, it was believed that planes would work very similarly: with an officer directing and shooting while an enlisted “driver” performed the technical functions of piloting the plane. When he enlisted, Goodman could have reasonably hoped he might have a chance to gain experience with automobiles or even airplanes.
Initially assigned to the regular army at Ft. Oglethorpe, Georgia, Libby was soon promoted to Private First Class, Company M, 302 Stevedores. December 1917 found Libby and his unit traveling to Hoboken, New Jersey by train. On the morning after Christmas, they boarded US Transport President Grant and set sail for France, where they would spend a year and a half working on the docks at the port of Brest, site of the United States Navy’s European headquarters.
Goodman returned to the United States on the SS Patricia, arriving back in Hoboken on July 5, 1919. Upon his return to Knoxville, Libby went directly to work for Jack McGill, ostensibly as a mechanic in his garage on Hudson Alley, once located between North Central and North Gay Street in North Knoxville. McGill had been a farmer, a miner, a moonshiner, a textile mill worker, and a mechanic, but his most lucrative business was trafficking stolen cars—until National Prohibition, at least. While Libby was away, a constitutional amendment for National Prohibition had been drafted. It went into effect on January 20, 1920. Some saw the outlawing of alcoholic beverages as an opportunity. Libby Goodman and Jack McGill were among them.
Knoxville was one of only a few areas in the South whose Prohibition-era liquor industry remained relatively unencumbered by interference from groups centered in the larger, better-organized areas of the North and Midwest. These spots owed their independence to the presence of a strong local leader, called a “liquor baron”, who was able to consolidate and control all aspects of the region’s liquor industry (production, transport, and sale) on his own. In addition, localized liquor barons shared another skill, the ability to unite all the usually separate factions—country and city, black and white, and to a lesser extent, other ethnic groups—under their control and avoid competition which outside forces could exploit to gain a foothold.
By early 1920, McGill had successfully recruited most of the moonshiners (who made the liquor) and the bootleggers (who sold the liquor) in Knox and surrounding counties. McGill employed his own drivers to pick up the liquor and transport it into Knoxville, relieving a good deal of uncertainty and risk for moonshiners who had been bringing their product into town to sell on their own. Based on who was already established in an area, friendships, and familial ties, McGill created a hierarchy with himself at the top of a pyramid and power spread out among various employees in various sections of the city and in each county surrounding it.
Working in conjunction with black liquor baron Phil Glover, Jack McGill was able to control and coordinate almost all liquor production, transport, and sale between Greeneville and Madisonville, down to the North Carolina state line and up to Harlan, Middlesboro, and Whitley in Kentucky. Both McGill and Glover were originally car thieves, and cooperation instead of competition had made them the heads of the most successful group of car thieves in the region. Since they were marketing their stolen cars to other rings in Georgia, Alabama, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, they had already established ties that could be expected to allow them to spread the market for their liquor outside the region once Prohibition became national law. Those ties would also allow them to purchase name-brand (but still illegal) liquor obtained from smugglers in the north. Glover and McGill also had access to start-up capital, very fast cars and some of the best drivers to be had, in the form of car thieves experienced in the art of escaping.
For most of the decade, Jack McGill’s liquor empire would soar. Fleets of his cars were picking up and delivering whiskey 24 hours a day seven days a week. He ran his operation from his service station garage on Hudson Alley and a farm he owned on Papermill Road near Kingston Pike. The Bureau of Investigation (the agency that later became the FBI) at times estimated he did between $5000 and $7200 per day in business, and a raid on the farm once revealed an underground storage area for 80,000 gallons of liquor.
Though Phil Glover was recognized as the head of Knoxville’s car thieves of color, the town’s first black liquor baron, and the person in control of that portion of both businesses within the city, Libby Goodman declined to become a direct part of his organization and instead remained working alongside McGill. By the end of Prohibition’s first year, Libby Goodman was a rising star within the world of local autos and had gained name-recognition all about town as a driver of great skill and daring.
Within the local black community, Goodman also became known as an aspiring businessman. By 1922, he had opened a pressing club of his own at 214 South Central. A restaurant would soon follow, but branching out did not mean that Libby would abandon his interest in liquor or cars. Jack McGill considered Goodman one of his top mechanics as well as one of his top drivers, and when McGill moved the heart of his liquor operations to his Papermill property in 1924, he chose Libby to take over his Hudson Alley property, effectively ensconcing the home and auto business of a black man in one of the best-known car-related addresses of the region. It was a bold decision, but neither man minded controversy.
In 1928, Phil Glover was convicted on liquor charges and despite numerous appeals, it was clear that he was soon headed to prison. No controversy occurred in the organization when, in preparation, Libby Goodman assumed the role of Knoxville’s black liquor baron. 1928 also marked the year Knoxville Motor Speedway was born. Admiration for the daring and skill of liquor car drivers had begun to translate into races for prizes in conjunction with the local fair and other special occasions, eventually setting the stage for NASCAR.
When Goodman married Ella Grigsby in 1929, he gained not only a wife, but also deep connections to Knoxville’s middle-class black community. Ella was the granddaughter of Anderson Grigsby, who, like Moses Smith, had served in the 1st U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery. Ella was also the younger sister of local photographer Ruth Grigsby Browder, whose husband was local photographer and politician Boyd Browder, and the niece of Margaret Grigsby Johnson. The widow of early saloon, restaurant, and hotel owner John Johnson, Margaret carried on those businesses in conjunction with a brother-in-law who had stepped into John’s spot as the family’s male figurehead, Calvin Fackler Johnson, better known as “Cal”.
As a community leader and businessman, it would be easy for Goodman to find things to admire in the legend of Cal Johnson. But Johnson’s ambition to turn the money he made in liquor into opportunities to promote his passions may have been the one Libby found most inspiring. Johnson provided venues for horse racing, and as technologies advanced, auto racing, movies, and even airplane exhibitions. When promoter Joseph Cate announced a series of holiday races to inaugurate the new track at Inskip, Goodman requested one for Emancipation Day 1929. Cate agreed. It would, they advertised, be Knoxville’s first public race event involving only black drivers. Two races would occur: one for “pros” who were required to qualify for positions in the line-up and after that race, a “free-for-all” for anyone who wished to enter.
There would be wrecks and injuries, but in racing terms, the Emancipation Day race was a great success. Advertising attracted attention throughout the region and beyond. Attendance more than sold-out. Drivers came from as far as Kentucky, Illinois and Ohio, but local favorite Libby Goodman maintained one of the fastest qualifying times and the status as odds on favorite to win. He was more than a lap ahead of his closest competitors and nearing victory, when another driver wrecked into him, disabling both their machines. A Knoxvillian, 25-year-old Grant Haynes, still claimed the victory.
The “thrills galore” along with the profits ensured the offer of future Emancipation Day races and Libby Goodman promised he would be back to win the next, but unfortunately, neither event came to pass. During the intervening year, Goodman was sentenced to serve a relatively short prison sentence for liquor conspiracy. He was released in Fall 1930, but without his boostering, that year’s Emancipation Day had passed without a race. Nevertheless, Libby felt confident a race would happen in 1931, and that he would win it.
On the evening of Saturday, November 8, 1930, a car failed to stop for the sign at the intersection of Luttrell Street and Magnolia Avenue. It collided with another driven by John Cole, the manager of Libby’s restaurant. Both drivers emerged uninjured from the demolished automobiles, but the skull of Cole’s passenger had been crushed. It was Libby Goodman. He died at Knoxville General Hospital on the morning of November 10, 1930.
Researched and written by Danette Welch