A Pre-Prohibition bartender in two Southern cities, African-American Jeremiah “Jerry” Ragland has received only minimal attention as the great grandfather of England’s Duchess of Sussex, better known as Meghan Markle.Overcoming a series of obstacles to arrive at a measure of success in Jim Crow America, Ragland may not make headlines like that of his descendent, but his story deserves to be told.
Ragland was born into a family of Henry County, Georgia, sharecroppers.The date of his birth is uncertain.His WWI draft registration and Social Security registration give it as 1881, but his death certificate give it as 1883.His parentage also is uncertain. His father was Charles Ragland but his mother’s name is variably given as “Texas” or “Ellen Ann.”
As a youth, he likely worked as a field hand, living in a ramshackle house owned by a Ragland cousin. It would have been backbreaking work planting, tending and harvesting crops. His education likely was short lived and provided in one room schools and extending no more than a few grades. When he was about 21, the youth tired of the drudgery of life on the land and by 1902 moved to Atlanta, Georgia.
There Ragland apparently found work initially laboring as a porter in saloon. He had selected his employers well. They were Edward Lichtenstein and Jacob Hirsowitz, two Jewish saloonkeepers whose drinking establishment at 110 Decatur Street catered to Atlanta’s growing Jewish community. The proprietors sensed that Ragland was capable of something more than loading boxes and sweeping up and encouraged his obvious interest in working over the bar.
In that effort the proprietors were not breaking “Jim Crow” rules meant to keep blacks in subservient roles only. For reasons not easily explained, many Southerners were delighted to have blacks mixing their drinks. As one writer has expressed it: “Respect was also often extended to them from people in the white community, who were won over ‘one gin cocktail at a time.’” A few became prominent figures in their communities, accruing wealth and owning their own businesses. Shown below is a saloon interior with the kind of eclectic clientele that might have frequented the Lichtenstein & Hirsowitz drinking establishment. Note the figure at the far right — a man of color in a bartenders’s outfit.
Ragland apparently gained a good reputation as an Atlanta barkeep. It gave him the financial ability to marry in 1904. His bride was Claudie (aka “Laudie”) Richie of Atlanta. Both were about 26. The 1910 Census found the couple living in Atlanta with three children, Dora, 4; Steve, 3, and Jerry, 1. Things were about to change drastically. Georgia had recently imposed statewide prohibition and Ragland’s job was gone.
The reputation of the black bartender had caught the attention of Herman W. Steiner, the owner-manager of the Julian Distilling Company, producers of “Feldwood Kentucky Whiskey.” This was a well known liquor house and saloon, noted for its vigorous advertising and fancy whiskey jugs. Rather than closing the doors on his liquor house and saloon business, Steiner had moved 120 miles north to still-wet Chattanooga, Tennessee. From there he could service his former customers by railroad express, still a legal practice under the Interstate Commerce clause of the Constitution. His motto was “What we say we do, we do do.”
Remembering Ragland’s prowess as a bartender, Steiner reached out to him to come to work for him in Chattanooga. Family lore is that Jerry was offered a salary well above what he had been paid earlier. Delighted with the opportunity and envisioning a bright future, he moved his family — now five children — to Tennessee, taking a mortgage on a small house at 620 West 10th Street. From indications, Ragland was able to build a reputation as an excellent bartender in Chattanooga just as he had in Atlanta. Ragland may well have used a knife like the one shown below as he prepared his cocktails.
Ragland could not, however, hold back the forces of Prohibition. When Tennessee went “dry” in 1916, Herman Steiner was forced to shut down Julian Distilling and Ragland again was out of a job. Not only that, demand for bartenders elsewhere in America virtually had evaporated. Unemployed and unable to make mortgage payments, he lost the house to foreclosure.
Using his remaining slim savings, Ragland then opened a tailor shop at 215 East Ninth Street in Chattanooga. A neophyte as a tailor, Jerry lacked the skills to keep the business afloat. After it failed, he went to work for a competing shop, soon learned the trade, and by 1921 had the money and ability to open his own dry cleaning and tailor shop. He called it the “Liberty Dry Cleaning Company,” perhaps an oblique reference to being his own boss. Claudie helped financially by going to work as a cleaning woman for the Miller Brothers Department Store.
Although the prospect of home ownership was gone and the family was forced lived in rental housing thereafter, the will to succeed so evident in Jerry and Claudie was transmitted to their children, who proved to be achievers in a repressive system. Daughter Dora, for example, was graduated from Tennessee A & I College and taught in Chattanooga’s segregated school system.
After Claudie’s death in 1939, Ragland lived with two of his daughters in a rented house at 1141 West Terrace until his last days. He died at Chattanooga’s Walden’s Hospital in October 1944 after a bout of pneumonia. If his 1881 birth date is correct, he was 63. Ragland lies in an unmarked grave in Greenhill Cemetery, a Chattanooga African-American burial ground that has been allowed to go untended.
Above is a chart where Jeremiah Ragland’s name appears near the top. It is the heritage of Jerry’s great grand-daughter. The chart exists in the elaborate format seen here only because “Mum” is the mother of Meghan Markle, now the Duchess of Sussex through her marriage to Britain's Prince Harry. Did Jerry Ragland put in motion this “rags to royalty story” when he abandoned sharecropping for pouring drinks over the bar?
Note: This story emerged while I was researching a story about Julian Distilling and discovered that bartender Jeremiah Ragland’s name had some Internet attention. Soon it became apparent that interest in Ragland was related to Meghan Markle becoming a member of British royalty. The most important Internet source was “The Ragland Family of Meghan Markle” by John B. Wells III.
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