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PART IV
W. E. B. Du Bois CHAPTER 21 Renewing the South
“THE SLAVE WENT FREE; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again towards slavery.” W. E. B. Du Bois had lived almost seven decades before he gave this classic summation of the Reconstruction era. He was born under the sun on February 23, 1868, the day before the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. While Garrison applauded Johnson’s impeachment from the eastern end of Massachusetts, “Willie” Du Bois came into being on the western end of Massachusetts in the small town of Great Barrington. He grew up between two encircling mountain ranges: the Berkshires to the east and the Taconic chain to the west, assimilationist ideas to the north and segregationist ideas to the south.
1 Mary Silvina Burghardt raised Willie. Alfred Duboise, Willie’s FrancoHaitian father, had left his wife and child for Connecticut by 1870. Burghardt became the single mother of two boys. She had already birthed the only outof-wedlock child in recent family memory, Willie’s older half-brother, Adelbert. In a way, Burghardt resembled Garrison’s mother, Frances Maria Lloyd, who had defied her family, lived on the social edge, married a rover, and, after being deserted and devastated, poured what was left of herself into her children. And their prized youngest sons wanted nothing more than to make their distressed mothers happy.
Willie gleaned his first sense of racial difference on an interracial playground at ten years old in 1878. The exchange of “gorgeous visitingcards . . . was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others,” he later wrote. From then on, Willie Du Bois fiercely competed with his White peers in the game of uplift suasion, in an attempt to prove “to the world that Negroes were just like other people.” He would go on to hike and reach the summit of the European intellectual world. However, he did not like what he saw when he reached the top.
2 IN THE 1870S and 1880s, no matter what Willie and other young Blacks like him achieved in school and in life, they were not changing the minds of the discriminators. The discriminators were subscribing to Social Darwinism and to the idea that Blacks were losing the racial struggle for existence. For ages, enslavers had pictured Black people as physically hardy, hardy enough to survive the heat of southern enslavement. With emancipation, racist ideas progressed to suit this new world. Discriminators started picturing Blacks as weak, too weak to survive in freedom, beings that desperately needed to learn to be strong without their masters and government assistance.
3 In 1883, the US Supreme Court declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. Civil rights activists loudly protested the funeral of the Reconstruction era, but not loud enough for a fifteen-year-old lad in Great Barrington. Willie Du Bois launched his publishing career, complaining about local indifference to the Court ruling in T. Thomas Fortune’s immensely popular Black newspaper, the New York Globe.
4 Drowning out the young Willies and the older Fortunes in 1883, the united North and South hailed the decision to trash the 1875 Civil Rights Act.
The New York Times applauded the Supreme Court’s “useful purpose in . . .
undoing the work of Congress.” In the majority opinion, Justice Joseph Bradley wrote that the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments did not bestow on Congress any power to prohibit discrimination in privately run public accommodations, but only “state action” that denied equal protection of the laws. “When a man has emerged from slavery and with the aid of beneficent legislation has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state,” Bradley concluded, “there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be a special favorite of the laws, and when his rights . . . are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men’s rights are protected.” A mere citizen without special favors protected in the ordinary modes? Did Justice Bradley not understand that Black people only wanted to be mere citizens? Did Justice Bradley not understand that their rights were not being protected from planters and Klansmen?
5 Maybe the New York–born Bradley was indeed in the dark, especially if he believed the optimistic propaganda of what was being billed as the “New South.” Atlanta Constitution editor Henry W. Grady was the chief propagandist of the New South in the 1880s. “The friendliness that existed between the master and slave . . . has survived war, and strife, and political campaigns,” Grady imagined. Methodist bishop and Emory College president Atticus Haygood also marketed the New South in speeches across the country, and in his popular 1881 book, Our Brother in Black. The “great majority of the slaves did truly love the white people,” Haygood presumed.
White enslavers taught them labor habits, English, the principles of free institutions, and Christianity. Whites must continue the elevating legacy of slavery in a nicely segregated free labor society, Haygood instructed. How could wise Whites teach unwise Blacks if the races were separated? Haygood disregarded the contradiction.
6 But an Episcopal bishop, Thomas U. Dudley, could not. He opposed racial “separation” because it would mean “continued and increasing degradation and decay” for Blacks. Their hope for salvation must come from association [with White people],” Dudley stressed. A famous New Orleans novelist of prewar Creole life, George Washington Cable, also challenged these New South segregationists, inviting their wrath. In April 1885, Grady issued his “official” reply in Century Magazine to Cable and other assimilationist and antiracist critics: “The assortment of races is wise and proper, and stands on the platform of equal accommodations for each race but separate.” With that statement, Grady birthed the New South’s defense of racial segregation. The system of separation had been created to ensure racial inequality, yet Grady propagated the notion that it was intended to ensure racial equality and bring racial progress. Truth never did stop the concocters of racist ideas. Grady had a separate-but-equal brand to invent, to defend, and to sell to the American mind. And millions of Americans bought it in the 1880s.
7 In buying this New South, Americans had adopted a new tool for blaming racial disparities on Black people: faith in racial progress (and ignoring the simultaneous progression of racism). It was being taught that American slavery had developed those backward people who had been brought over from the wilds of Africa. Northern missionaries and New South stalwarts, it was said, were developing those backward people who were now freed from the wilds of slavery. And the Reconstruction Amendments, claimed the proponents of the New South, had indeed lessened racial discrimination and brought on equal opportunity. All this racist propaganda coalesced into an indelible postwar faith in racial progress, specifically, that “prejudice against color is slowly but surely dying out,” as a Philadelphia newspaper reported in 1888. An aversion “to industry and frugality”—not discrimination—caused the socioeconomic disparities between the races, the newspaper stated.
“Racial progress” became the most powerful racist rejoinder to antiracists, who were still pointing out discrimination and disparities. The New South really became the New America of racial progress.
8 Social Darwinists, conjuring Black regression since slavery, and Confederate holdovers of the Old South rejected the New South’s racial progress brand and the separate-but-equal formulation. The Reverend Robert L. Dabney, one of southern Presbyterianism’s most influential intellectuals and an old Confederate Army chaplain, argued that only enslavement could provide Black people with a civilizing education. Lawyer-turned-writer Thomas Nelson Page spent his writing career sharply contrasting what he considered the hard, industrializing capitalism and the disobedient African of the New South with the soft, agricultural capitalism and the obedient African of the Old South. Through his short story collection In Ole Virginia, or Marse Chan and Others (1887), Page pioneered the postwar plantation school of fiction—a carbon copy of the prewar idyllic plantation fiction—reimagining his lovely childhood days surrounded by happy captives on his Virginia plantation. And then, in 1889, the most popular anti–New South book appeared, The Plantation Negro as a Freeman. Harvard alumnus Philip Alexander Bruce, Page’s brother-in-law, claimed that Black people, “cut off” from their civilizing White masters, had degenerated back into the “African type,” leading to “bold and forward” Black women advancing on White men, Black male criminals raping White women (compelling White men to lynch them), and Black parents producing problem children who were “less inclined to work.” 9
AS A TEENAGER, Willie Du Bois had dreamed of going to Harvard.
Charitable local Whites, unwilling to send their town’s extraordinary Negro to the nation’s best historically White college, raised funds in 1885 to send him to the nation’s best historically Black college: Fisk University of Nashville.
Controlled by White philanthropists and instructors, Fisk was one of the nation’s preeminent factories of uplift suasion and assimilationist ideas. Du Bois consumed these ideas like his peers and started reproducing them when he became the editor of Fisk’s student newspaper, The Herald. In one of his published pieces, he eagerly reviewed the first full-length history of African Americans, George Washington Williams’s History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. “At last,” Du Bois rejoiced, Black people “have a historian”!
10 Other reviews of the book, which was first released in 1883, were also favorable. But one critique from the Magazine of American History—saying that Williams was “not sufficiently restrained”—signified the conundrum that many Black revisionist scholars would face in future decades. When Black revisionists chose not to revise, then they seemingly allowed racist studies excluding or denigrating Blacks to stand for truth. When they did revise racist scholarship, they apparently lacked objectivity. Only White scholars apparently could be “sufficiently restrained” to write on race: only racist studies reflected scholarly truth.
11 Williams’s major antiracist (and sexist) historical revision had been to show that Black (male) Americans had played an integral part in US history.
He challenged the racist ideas of scholars arguing that Black people had regressed since slavery with his own racist ideas of the “weak Black man” and the “strong Black woman.” Williams liberally cited from the 1864 tract Savage Africa. “If the women of Africa are brutal,” he wrote, “the men of Africa are feminine.” According to Williams’s assimilationist reading of history, freedom had facilitated Black adoption of civilized values and norms, of “better and purer traits of character.” Black women “have risen to take their places in society.” Black men were again becoming “enduring in affection, and benevolent to a fault.” 12 Du Bois embraced Williams’s History and seemed to have been influenced by the book’s assimilationist ideas and gender racism. In his Fisk graduation speech in June 1888, Du Bois offered the founder and first chancellor of Germany, Otto von Bismarck, as a model for Black leadership.
Bismarck was well known for bringing together dozens of communities to form the mighty Germany in 1871. Du Bois said that Bismarck’s Second Reich “should serve as a model for African-Americans ‘marching forth with strength and determination under trained leadership.’” He did not mind that Bismarck had hosted the Berlin Conference in 1885, where European colonizers had partitioned Africa on the dishonest pretext that they were bringing civilization to the continent. “I did not understand at all, nor had my history courses led me to understand,” he later admitted, that colonialism had so viciously exploited African raw materials and labor. “I was blithely European and imperialistic in outlook.” 13 After Fisk, Du Bois was able to pursue his dream to attend Harvard. He left for the North in 1888 at a time when racist southerners were calmly debating two paths for the Negro—Should they be carefully civilized, or rigidly segregated from Whites? As the New South Democrats tried to hold off Jim Crow Democrats, Republicans regained the President’s House and Congress in the 1888 elections. In his First Message to Congress in 1889, President Benjamin Harrison asked, “When is [the Negro] in fact to have those full civil rights which have so long been his in law?” 14 Never—as far as Jim Crow segregationists were concerned. CHAPTER 22
Southern Horrors
SOUTH CAROLINA SENATOR Matthew Butler and Alabama senator and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon John Tyler Morgan introduced a congressional bill on January 7, 1890, to fund Black emigration to Africa. It was an ingenious solution to the class and racial problems of big southern landowners. Withering under a southern agricultural depression, many White “dirt farmers” were raging against the Black farmers; others were joining with Blacks to rage against White landowners in the rising interracial, antiracist populist movement. The colonization bill was a deflective measure. It pointed White farmers to southern Blacks—and not rich White landowners—as the chief cause of the southern agrarian depression. White farmers could easily see how the mass ejection of southern Blacks would increase their own labor value.
1 Americans were probably more open to colonization in 1890 than at any time since Abraham Lincoln’s urgings during the Civil War. Caribbean-born Liberian diplomat Edward Wilmot Blyden was touring the United States proclaiming that African Americans had been schooled and preserved by slavery for their divine mission to redeem Africa. “God has a way of salting as well as purifying by fire,” Blyden wrote in the American Colonization Society’s journal in 1890. The writings of Henry Morton Stanley, the nineteenth century’s most famous English-speaking explorer of Africa, were in mass circulation. Nearly every English speaker interested in Africa read Stanley’s Through the Dark Continent (1878), and nearly everyone who read Stanley came away viewing African people as savages, including novelist Joseph Conrad, who authored the classic Heart of Darkness in 1899. The White character’s journey up the Congo River “was like traveling back to the earliest beginning of the world”—not back in chronological time, but back in evolutionary time.
2 In his January 1890 speech before the Senate to push the colonization bill, John Tyler Morgan read from Henry Morgan Stanley. Under White tutelage, African Americans had been civilized to a level from which they could now pull Africa out of the depths of barbarism, Morgan said. He hoped that potential Black emigrants would “be as kind and patient and generous towards their own kindred as we [White southerners] have been to them.” Although millions of American citizens supported the bill, the austere opposition held the day, and it never became law.
3 Watching this colonization debate unfold only emboldened a zealous Democrat in Omaha, Nebraska. Walter Vaughan, the son of Alabama slaveholders, believed that his scheme would benefit the “tattered condition” of the emancipated people who, in his mind, had been well cared for during slavery. The business owner proposed that the federal government provide pensions for ex-slaves (who would then spend their money buying things from struggling White southern businesses). Vaughan convinced his congressman, Republican William J. Connell, to introduce the ex-slave pension bill in 1890. With Frederick Douglass as one of the few supportive Black elites, the reparations bill died a quiet death.
And yet, Vaughan continued to press for ex-slave pensions. He published the pamphlet Freedmen’s Pension Bill: A Plea for American Freedmen, and soon, 10,000 worn copies of it were being passed from hand to hand in poor Black communities in the South and Midwest. Callie House, an ex-slave and washerwoman in Tennessee, came across the pamphlet in 1891, and then she helped formulate the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, based in Nashville, Tennessee. Claiming hundreds of thousands of members, this organization gave birth to the reparations movement of the 1890s, a movement demanding restitution for the unpaid labors of American slavery. The movement was furiously supported by antiracist poor Blacks, and furiously opposed by the same class racism that had prevented Congress from giving Blacks their forty acres and a mule after the Civil War. Black elites, joining their White peers, typically ignored or castigated reparations bills. Economic injustices affecting low-income Blacks took a back seat to education and voting injustices among Black elites. “The most learned negroes,” Callie House scolded, “have less interest in their race than any other negro as many of them are fighting against the welfare of their race.” 4
ON JUNE 25, 1890, W. E. B. Du Bois spoke at his Harvard graduation ceremony. He had now excelled, and had graduated from the most prestigious historically Black college and the most prestigious historically White college in the United States. He felt he was showing off the capability of his race. Du Bois’s “brilliant and eloquent address,” as judged by the reporters, was on “Jefferson Davis as Representative of Civilization.” In Du Bois’s rendering, Jefferson Davis, who had died the year before, represented the rugged individualism and domineering European civilization, in contrast to the rugged “submission” and selflessness of African civilization. The European “met civilization and crushed it,” Du Bois concluded. “The Negro met civilization and was crushed by it.” According to Du Bois’s biographer, the Harvard graduate contrasted the civilized European “Strong Man” to the civilized African “Submissive Man.” 5 Du Bois had clearly been influenced by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s postwar New England, where ideas on race seemed to start and end in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. At Harvard, he had also been influenced by one of the professors, the historian Albert Hart, a hard-line moralist who deemed character—the “inner man not the outer”—as the key to social change. Du Bois consumed from Hart and other assimilationists the racist idea that African Americans had been socially and morally crippled by slavery (and Africa). Du Bois had more faith in future development than his professor did. In his 1910 travel book The Southern South, Hart claimed that “the Negro is inferior, and his past history in Africa and in America leads to the belief that he will remain inferior.” Thinking about Du Bois specifically, Hart reduced his talents to his European ancestry. Du Bois was “living proof,” Hart wrote confidentially, “that a mulatto may have as much power and passion as any white man.” 6 In the fall of 1890, Du Bois entered Harvard’s history doctoral program to study under Hart and continue to prove Black capability. Soon, though, he would have the opportunity to provide even greater proof. Around the time he entered graduate school, former president Rutherford B. Hayes, the director of the Slater Fund for the Education of Freedmen, offered to underwrite the European education of “any young colored man” talented enough for the undertaking, if such a person existed. “Hitherto,” Hayes told a Johns Hopkins audience, “their chief and almost only gift has been that of oratory.” Du Bois stepped up to the intellectual challenge. Two years later, he enrolled at the University of Berlin, which at the time was the most distinguished university in the European world.
7
THE DAY BEFORE Du Bois’s Harvard commencement address, a young Massachusetts congressman, Henry Cabot Lodge, introduced the Federal Elections Bill. Unlike reparations, this bill garnered the support of Black elites. Its purpose was to mandate federal supervision of elections when local voters petitioned Washington about voter fraud. Also called the “Force Bill,” the proposed legislation infuriated the southern segregationists who were listening to Lodge’s speech at the US Capitol. Lodge questioned the wisdom of the Fifteenth Amendment but said it was still a “federal responsibility to protect it.” “If any State thinks that any class of citizens is unfit to vote through ignorance, it can disqualify them,” he said. “It has but to put an educational qualification into this constitution.” House Republicans banged their hands together, and Lodge felt pleased as the applause guided him to his seat. House Democrats were silent, some probably jotting down and storing away his final statement. The Atlanta Constitution blasted the proposed voting rights bill as the “stillborn child of hate!” Segregationists were clearly already classing bills against racial discrimination as hateful.
Mississippi Democrats remembered Lodge’s closing statement when they gathered for their constitutional convention on August 12, 1890. Surprising Lodge, Mississippi Democrats adapted the North’s anti-poor literacy test, reformulating it into an anti-Black and anti-poor literacy test for their fourth constitution. The highly subjective “understanding clause” asked for someone to interpret something in the Mississippi constitution, allowing racist registrars to pass ignorant Whites into voting, and fail knowledgeable Blacks into not voting. When the new constitution went into effect on November 1, 1890, antiracist White lawyer and activist Albion Tourgee immediately recognized it as “the most important event” in American history since South Carolina had seceded from the Union. Over the next decade, the progression of racism came to all the former Confederate states and even several border states. They all followed Mississippi’s example, instituting race-veiled voting restrictions, from literacy tests to poll taxes, that would purge their voting rolls of the remaining Black (and many poor White) voters without saying a racial word. The South, once again, defied the US Constitution—this time, without firing a single shot, and without northern retaliation.
8 Blocked by a filibuster of Democratic senators, the Force Bill never passed, angering Frederick Douglass. But Du Bois remained calm and focused on the moral struggle of uplift suasion. “When you have the right sort of black voters, you will need no election laws,” Du Bois wrote in the New York Age. “The battle of my people must be a moral one, not a legal or physical one.” Black Americans were hardly losing any moral or cultural battles. They were being violently and nonviolently defeated in political and economic battles, as Du Bois would soon learn.
9 The defeat of the Force Bill ended Republican efforts to enforce the Thirteenth (emancipation) and Fourteenth (civil rights) and Fifteenth (voting) Amendments. If the Bargain of federal noninterference was consummated in 1876, then after years of northern and southern reticence, it became the undisputed national policy in the 1890s and in the first decade of the twentieth century. A series of separate but (un)equal laws was instituted, segregating nearly every aspect of southern life, from water fountains, to businesses, to transportation—all to ensure White solidarity and Black submission and to ensure cheap Black labor. These separate and inferior Black facilities fed Whites and Blacks alike the segregationist idea of Blacks being a fundamentally separate and inferior people.
Segregationist ideas and organizing became a fact of American life in everything from the women’s movement, where segregationist women were welcomed into the new National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1890, to the nation’s newest leading labor association, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which was a hotbed of discriminators. AFL president Samuel Gompers lectured Black workers that “organized labor” was not “antagonistic to the colored race.” He claimed to know of only a “few instances . . . where colored workers are discriminated against.” Gompers increasingly blamed Black workers for their depressed economic condition in order to exonerate the discriminatory actions of his unions.
10 Black people did not sit idly by during this segregationist organizing.
Black resistance caused lynchings to spike in the early 1890s. However, the White lynchers justified the spike in lynchings as corresponding to a spike in Black crime. This justification was accepted by a young W. E. B. Du Bois, by the middle-aged, ambitious principle of Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, Booker T. Washington, and by a dying Frederick Douglass. It took a young antiracist Black woman to set these racist men straight. Mississippi-born Memphis journalist Ida B. Wells recoiled from the lynching of friends and the sheer number of lynchings during the peak of the era in 1892, when the number of Blacks lynched in the nation reached a whopping 255 souls. She released a blazing pamphlet in 1892 called Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. From a sample of 728 lynching reports in recent years, Wells found that only about a third of lynching victims had “ever been charged with rape, to say nothing of those who were innocent of the charge.” White men were lying about Black-on-White rape, and hiding their own assaults of Black women, Wells raged.
11 Wells knew that immoral constructions about Black women hindered them from fully engaging in the burgeoning women’s club moral movement that cascaded across the 1890s. “I sometimes hear of a virtuous Negro woman, but the idea is absolutely inconceivable to me,” wrote an anonymous “southern White woman” in The Independent. Oberlin graduate and teacher Anna Julia Cooper took it upon herself to defend Black womanhood and encourage Black women’s education in A Voice from the South in 1892. Like Wells, Cooper wrote in the antiracist feminist tradition. “The colored woman of to-day occupies, one may say, a unique position in this country,” Cooper explained. “She is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or unacknowledged factor in both.” And yet, Cooper did espouse some class racism. She praised, for instance, the “quiet, chaste dignity and decorous solemnity” of the Protestant Episcopal Church, while demeaning the “semi-civilized religionism” of low-income Black southerners.
12
SOUTHERN WHITE MEN were “shielding” themselves “behind the plausible screen of defending the honor [of their women]” through lynchings in order to “palliate” their record of hate and violence, Ida B. Wells maintained in Southern Horrors, and again during her 1893 anti-lynching tour of England. Her speaking tour was an embarrassment to White Americans. In her work, Wells more or less condemned the strategy of uplift suasion and championed armed Black self-defense to stop lynchings. “The more the AfroAmerican yields and cringes and begs,” she declared, “the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged, lynched.” 13 The pro-lynching president of the Missouri Press Association, James Jacks, published an open letter to attack Wells—and all Black women, who, in his view, were nothing but thieves and prostitutes. If Jacks hoped to silence Wells and her sisters, then his plan backfired. By the summer of 1896, inflamed Black club women had united under the banner of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) to defend Black womanhood, challenge discrimination, and lend power to self-help efforts. But some, if not most, of the self-help efforts of these mostly elite reformers encouraged the assimilation of White women’s mores. They were based on the same old historical racism that said that low-income Black women had been morally and culturally ruined by slavery. “Lifting As We Climb” became the NACW motto.
14
AFTER TWO YEARS of study abroad in Germany, W. E. B. Du Bois returned to the United States in 1894. Slater Fund officials declined to extend funding for his study abroad, which would have enabled him to defend his economics doctoral thesis. Though he intended to prove Black educational capacity, to Slater Fund officials, he looked like a special education teacher pursuing a physics doctorate. No matter what Du Bois did, he could not persuade away racist ideas. If Blacks pursued the European world’s most prestigious degree, they were looked upon as stupid for doing so. If they did not pursue it, then they did not have the natural talent, as Rutherford B. Hayes said in 1890, provoking Du Bois. Even Du Bois’s settling for being the first African American to earn a Harvard history doctorate in 1895 brought on racist ridicule. In elite White circles, Du Bois became known as one of those “half dozen Negroes” who had allowed Harvard “to make a man out of semibeast,” as New Yorker Franklin Delano Roosevelt exulted as a Harvard freshman in 1903.
15 Though Du Bois’s educational success in Germany did not prove much of anything to American producers and consumers of racist ideas, Du Bois did prove something to himself. He had grown more accustomed to meeting “not white folks, but folks.” He mentally climbed in Germany and stood on an equal plane with White people. But his new antiracist mind-set of not looking up at White people did not stop him from looking down at supposedly lowclass Black people. It would take Du Bois much longer to see not low-class Black folks, but folks on an equal human plane with him and the rest of the (White) folks.
16 Du Bois accepted a position in 1894 teaching Greek and Latin at the A.M.E. Church’s flagship college in Ohio, Wilberforce. He was determined “to begin a life-work, leading to the emancipation of the American Negro.” Somehow, some way, he maintained his faith that American racism could be persuaded and educated away. “The ultimate evil was stupidity” about race by “the majority of white Americans,” he theorized. “The cure for it was knowledge based on scientific investigation.” 17 Whereas Du Bois wanted to educate Americans about the capacity of Black people for the higher pursuits, Booker T. Washington, the calculating thirty-eight-year-old principal of Tuskegee, wanted Black people to publicly focus on the lower pursuits, which was much more acceptable to White Americans. Booker T. Washington claimed the vacancy of race leadership that had been vacated upon Frederick Douglass’s death in 1895. Ida B. Wells would have been a better replacement, but she was a woman, and too antiracist for most Americans. In private, Washington supported civil rights and empowerment causes across the South throughout his career. In public, his talking points reflected the New South racism that elites enjoyed hearing.
18 At the opening of the Cotton States International Exposition on September 18, 1895, Washington delivered the “Atlanta Compromise.” He asked southern Whites to stop trying to push Blacks out of the house of America, and to allow them to reside comfortably in the basement—to help them to rise up, knowing that when they rose, the whole house would rise. Many of the landowners in the Atlanta audience had spent their lifetimes trying to convince their Black sharecroppers “to dignify and glorify common labour.” So when Washington beckoned to them with the words, “It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top,” they were overjoyed. Rest assured, Washington said, “the wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly.” 19 Amid the excited applause from thousands, the waving handkerchiefs, the flowers pulled from White women’s bosoms that showered Washington when he finished, New South editor Clark Howell of the Atlanta Constitution sprinted up to the speakers’ platform. He shouted, “That man’s speech is the beginning of a moral revolution in America!” Washington’s words were telegraphed to every major newspaper in the nation. Editors published raving reviews. Democratic president Grover Cleveland arrived in Atlanta and called Washington the “new hope” for Black people. “Let me heartily congratulate you upon your phenomenal success at Atlanta,” W. E. B. Du Bois glowed in a telegram on September 24, 1895. “It was a word fitly spoken.” 20 Not every Black commentator was like Du Bois, applauding Washington, however. Calvin Chase of the Washington Bee did not see compromise, but “death to the Afro-American and elevating to white people.” Death or not, Booker T. Washington grasped the national acclaim, attracted philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie, and built the “Tuskegee Machine,” an institution that over the next decade ruled Black colleges, businesses, newspapers, and political patronage. And a year after Washington had loudly issued the Atlanta Compromise with southern segregationists, the US Supreme Court quietly followed suit.
21 For years, the US Supreme Court had been stuffed with northern-born corporate lawyers happily wielding the Fourteenth Amendment to cut down laws violating the “liberty” and “civil rights” of capital to dictate the wages and working conditions of labor. The Court provided no such protections for the liberty and civil rights of workers, women, immigrants, and Black people.
On May 18, 1896, the Court ruled 7–1 in Plessy v. Ferguson that Louisiana’s Separate Car Act—and other new Jim Crow laws—violated neither the Thirteenth nor the Fourteenth Amendments. The biracial Homer Plessy had challenged the law requiring Louisiana railroads to provide “equal but separate accommodations” for White and Black passengers. New Orleans judge John H. Ferguson had claimed that the “foul odors of blacks in close quarters” made the law reasonable. The Louisiana Supreme Court and the US Supreme Court upheld Ferguson’s ruling.
In his majority opinion, Supreme Court Justice Henry Billings Brown relied on racist ideas to support a policy that was clearly discriminatory in intent. It was his job to obscure those intentions. Justice Brown evaded the politics of the Louisiana Separate Car Act, evaded the discriminatory intent, and evaded the obvious shoddiness of the railcars for Blacks, and instead semantically classed it a “social law” that merely recognized the social “distinction” between the races. “If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane,” wrote the former Detroit corporate lawyer. The lone dissenting voice to the Plessy ruling was hardly an antiracist voice. Though he did not doubt that Whites would forever be “the dominant race in this country,” Justice John Harlan of Kentucky wrote, “in the view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” On May 18, 1896, the New York Times buried the Plessy decision in a third-page column focusing on railroad news, reflecting the case’s marginal news coverage and the nation’s marginal awareness of its significance. The Plessy decision legalized what was already assumed by the New South and America: separate but unequal, and branded it equal for courts and consciences to stop antiracist resistance. The social conscience of America was a significant political factor during this period. It was the beginning of the Progressive era.
22 Though it is popularly remembered as a time of heartfelt social concern and awareness, in reality the Progressive era was rigged by elite White men and women. It was dominated, at least from the standpoint of its elite funders and organizers, by a desire to end the social strife caused by industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and inequality in the 1880s and 1890s. Cotton Mather’s blessings of order through benevolence still held the philanthropist’s ear from Boston to Atlanta after all these years. The projected benevolence of the Plessy ruling and the Atlanta Compromise seemed to bring a finality to the disorder of the “Negro problem.” Indeed, the finality of the “Negro problem” as the nineteenth century closed meant a United States dead set on playing down the southern horrors of discrimination and playing up what was wrong with Black people.
23 CHAPTER 23
Black Judases
AFTER PLESSY V. FERGUSON reportedly solved the “Negro problem,” British physician Havelock Ellis proclaimed that a new question had presented itself. “The question of sex,” he said, “with the racial questions that rest on it—stands before the coming generations as the chief problem for solution.” It was an overly ambitious prediction in the first medical treatise on homosexuality, Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897). Western nations were still not ready to sufficiently deal with the reality of multiple sexualities, at least not in public. Ellis nevertheless tried to put sexuality on the Progressive era’s agenda. This self-described friend of the yet unnamed LGBT community popularized the term “homosexual,” classifying it as a congenital physiological abnormality (or “sexual inversion”). Ellis aimed to defend homosexuality against the “law and public opinion” that regarded homosexuals as criminals in the late nineteenth-century English-speaking world.
1 Similarly, racist scholars had long conceived of Blacks as criminals, and of Blackness as a physiological abnormality, debating all along about whether it was congenital. “Sexologists,” inspired by scholars of race, were already using the comparative anatomy of women’s bodies to concoct biological differences between sexualities at the turn of the century. While racist scholars were distinguishing between the “free” and prominent clitorises of “negresses” and the “imprisonment” of the clitoris of the “Aryan American woman,” homophobic scholars started claiming that lesbians “will in practically every instance disclose an abnormally prominent clitoris. This is particularly so in colored women.” 2 To sexist thinkers in the late nineteenth century, the more prominent the clitoris, the less chaste the woman, and the less chaste the woman, the lower the woman on the hierarchical scale of womanhood. Hence the convergence of racist, sexist, and homophobic ideas that deemed both White lesbians and Black heterosexual women to be more chaste, and higher on the scale of womanhood, than Black lesbians, who reportedly had the largest clitorises.
When men, Black heterosexual women, or White lesbians viewed Black lesbians, bisexuals, or transgender women as biologically or socially inferior, as less chaste, they were speaking at the intersection of racist, sexist, and homophobic ideas. They were articulating queer racism.
But it was difficult to find a scholar willing to engage sexuality, let alone sexuality and race—and increasingly, even race. W. E. B. Du Bois had begun his career trying to present solutions to the “Negro problem” to White intellectuals. But many of these intellectuals now felt it had been solved by Plessy—or it would be solved, by the natural selection of evolution or extinction. A statistician for the Prudential Insurance Company predicted the imminent extinction of Black people in his epic book that relied on the 1890 census figures. Unlike the Plessy ruling, Frederick Hoffman’s Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro received plenty of attention in 1896.
Packed with statistical tables and published by the American Economic Association, the book was a pioneering work in American medical research, and it catapulted Hoffman into scientific celebrity in the Western world as the heralded father of American public health. At “the time of emancipation,” he wrote, southern Blacks were “healthy in body and cheerful in mind.” “What are the conditions thirty years after?” Well, “in the plain language of the facts,” free Blacks were headed toward “gradual extinction,” pulled down by their natural immoralities, law-breaking, and diseases. Hoffman supplied his employer with an excuse for its discriminatory policies concerning African Americans—that is, for denying them life insurance. White life insurance companies refused to insure a supposedly dying race. Yet another racist idea was produced to defend a racist policy.
3 In a critical book review, W. E. B. Du Bois argued that Frederick Hoffman had manipulated statistics to present his prediction of Black extinction.
Hoffman’s native Germany, Du Bois pointed out, had death rates that matched or exceeded that of African Americans. Were Germans headed toward extinction? Du Bois mockingly asked, before rejecting Hoffman’s supposition that higher Black death rates indicated imminent Black extinction. But Du Bois could not reject Hoffman’s supposition that higher Black arrest and prison rates indicated that Blacks actually committed more crimes. Not Hoffman, not Du Bois, no one really knew the actual crime rates—all of the instances of Americans breaking the law, whether caught or not. But the higher Black arrest and prison rates substantiated the racist ideas of more Black crime. And these racist ideas spun the cycle of racial discrimination in the criminal justice system, more suspicions of Black people, more police in Black neighborhoods, more arrests and prison time for Black people, and thus more suspicions, and on and on.
In all of his intellectual power, Du Bois proved unable to stop the cycle of racial profiling and crime statistics and racist ideas. He substantiated the disparities in arrest and prison rates through both antiracist (“dogged AngloSaxon prejudice” had “subjected [Blacks and Whites] to different standards of justice”) and racist explanations (the “dazed freedman” lacked a moral foundation). Du Bois was far from alone. None of the scholars who became members of the first national Black intellectual group, the American Negro Academy, formed in 1897, could reject the statistics, or refute them as indicators of greater Black crime. Instead, they accepted the numbers as fact and tried to push against the stereotypes of criminal Blacks through education and persuasion, thus reproducing the racist ideas they were working to eliminate.
4 For instance, in his 1897 address for the opening meeting of the American Negro Academy, entitled “The Conservation of Races,” Du Bois put forth the argument of biologically distinct races with distinct histories, characteristics, and destinies. African Americans were “members of a vast historic race that from the dawn of creation has slept, but half awakening in the dark forests of its African fatherland,” he said. “The first and greatest step toward the settlement of the present friction between the races,” that is, toward social equilibrium, he said, “lies in the correction of the immorality, crime, and laziness among the Negroes themselves, which still remains as a heritage of slavery.” The speech was hastily published, circulated, and acclaimed. Du Bois and the American Negro Academy hoped the pamphlet would refute the popular conception of the destructive, decaying, dying African in the postPlessy, post-Hoffman era. But it was riddled with racist ideas, speaking of “blood” races, race traits, backward Africa, imbruting enslavement, criminally minded and effeminate African American men, strong Europeans, and the idea that African Americans were superior to continental Africans. Du Bois reinforced as much racism as he struck down.
5 Du Bois was also working on a more antiracist tome, however. As a visiting researcher at the University of Pennsylvania in 1896 and 1897, he worked on The Philadelphia Negro, a thoroughly antiracist “social study” about racism being “the spirit that enters in and complicates all Negro social problems.” And yet, he was unrestrained in his moral attacks on the poor, on Black criminals, and on women, saying, for example, that it was “the duty of Negroes” to “solve” the problem of Black female “unchastity.” Though the book is now regarded as a classic sociological text, only a few academic journals reviewed it upon its release in 1899. One anonymous reviewer, in the leading American Historical Review, commended Du Bois for “laying all necessary stress on the weakness of his people,” and then ridiculed him for believing that these supposed weaknesses could be cured. Reading this review, Du Bois should have gathered that when he tried directing his readers from the crossroads of racist and antiracist ideas, they oftentimes would not reach his desired antiracist destination. Then again, Du Bois, like his elite Black peers, hardly considered their attacks on the Black poor and Black women to be racist.
6 Whatever Du Bois achieved, whatever he published, he failed to gain the following—or the financial support—of northern philanthropists that Booker T. Washington enjoyed. On his fund-raising travels, Washington had a knack for putting White audiences at ease by sharing his famously funny (or infamously offensive) southern “darky” jokes. Washington gave wealthy Whites what they wanted—a one-man minstrel show—and they gave him what he wanted—a check for Tuskegee. Washington somehow demeaned Black people as stupid for an hour and then received donations to educate those same stupid people.
7 Washington was ingeniously playing the racial game, but it was a dangerous game to play at the end of the nineteenth century. A surge of racist violence to snatch Black economic and political power spread from North Carolina in 1898 to Georgia in 1899. Du Bois witnessed some of this violence in Georgia. He had taken a professorship at Atlanta University in 1897, and had started spearheading annual scientific studies on all aspects of southern Black life. But in April 1899, he became heartbroken over his inability to prevent the infamous lynching near Atlanta of Sam Hose, who had killed an oppressive White employer in self-defense. In August, armed Blacks in coastal Georgia’s McIntosh County drove back a lynching mob. “One could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved; and secondly, there was no such demand for scientific work of the sort that I was doing as I had confidently assumed would be easily forthcoming,” Du Bois later wrote. Firmly believing “that the majority of Americans would rush to the defense of democracy . . . if they realized how race prejudice was threatening it,” Du Bois adopted a more aggressive commitment to educational persuasion.
8 In July 1900, he attended the First Pan-African Conference in London, sponsored by Booker T. Washington. “To be sure, the darker races are today the least advanced in culture according to European standards,” said Du Bois in assimilationist style. But they had the “capacity” to one day reach those “high ideals.” And so, “as soon as practicable,” Du Bois proclaimed, there should be decolonization in Africa and the Caribbean.
9 Du Bois’s rationale for gradual decolonization—Black nations were not ready for independence—echoed the old racist rationales for gradual emancipation—Black people were not ready for freedom. Du Bois echoed those proclaiming in 1899 that Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, the colonies the United States had received from winning the 1898 SpanishAmerican War, were not ready for independence. Segregationists and antiracists opposed, while assimilationists supported, the formal launching of the American Empire. In a poem printed in McClure’s Magazine in 1899, the literary prophet of British imperialism, Rudyard Kipling, urged Americans to “Take up the White Man’s burden— / Send forth the best ye breed— / Go send your sons to exile / To serve your captives’ need / To wait in heavy harness / On fluttered folk and wild— / Your new-caught, sullen peoples / Half devil and half child.” 10 Imperial assimilationists won the debate among the mostly White male electorate, if President William McKinley’s successful reelection campaign in 1900 was any indication. His running mate, Theodore Roosevelt, declared, in 1901, “It is our duty toward the people living in barbarism to see that they are freed from their chains, and we can free them only by destroying barbarism itself.” While US leaders publicly debated the colonial peoples’ capacity for civilization and assimilation, they privately debated military bases, puppet politics, natural resources, foreign markets, and war costs. This public humanitarian debate, which was also a private political-economic debate, became a twentieth-century staple as the American Empire publicly and privately warred to extend its sphere of influence. At home and abroad, a profound political racism cast non-Whites as incapable of self-rule, or capable of self-rule one day—in order to justify both their subjection and the resulting socioeconomic disparities. Some Black newspaper editors saw through the mask, connecting the nation’s foreign racial policy to its domestic racial policy. They blasted the “robbers, murderers, and unscrupulous monopolists,” to quote the Salt Lake City Broad Ax in 1899. The federal government “could not deal justly with dark-skinned peoples,” another paper blared, “as evidenced by its do-nothing record at home.” 11 In this new American Empire, American racist ideas went through what seemed very much like a revolving door, constantly going out into the colonizing world and then coming back into the country after conditioning the immigrant minds of the people arriving in the United States in the early 1900s. When Irish, Jewish, Italian, Asian, Chicana/o, and Latina/o people in America were called anti-Black racial epithets like “greasers” or “guineas” or “White niggers,” some resisted and joined in solidarity with Black people.
But most probably consumed the racist ideas, distancing themselves from Black people. Blacks in the early twentieth century would joke that the first English word immigrants learned was “nigger.” 12
ON JANUARY 29, 1901, the lone Black representative, George H. White of North Carolina, gave his farewell address to Congress. About 90 percent of the nation’s Black people resided in the South, but they were no longer represented by Black politicians in the state legislatures and in Congress.
Their mass disenfranchisement, and charges of incompetency leveled against Black politicians by White ones, had made sure of that. “This, Mr. Chairman, is perhaps the negroes’ temporary farewell to the American Congress,” said White, “but let me say, Phoenix-like he will rise up someday and come again.” Not many believed him. As White trotted out of the hall, the leading American historians and political scientists looked upon him as the Reconstruction era’s final defective product in the nation’s capital.
13 At the time, William Archibald Dunning reigned as the director of Columbia University’s preeminent Dunning School of Reconstruction history.
The school was at the forefront of an academic revolution highlighting the “objective” use of the scientific method in the humanities. “For the first time meticulous and thorough research was carried on in an effort to determine the truth rather than to prove a thesis,” was how one historian described the impact of the Dunning School in the American Historical Review in 1940.
The “truth,” though, meant Dunning school historians of the Reconstruction era chronicling the White South as victimized by the corrupt and incompetent Black politicians, and the North mistakenly forcing Reconstruction before quickly correcting itself and leaving the noble White South to its own wits.
“All the forces that made for civilization were dominated by a mass of barbarous freedmen,” Dunning supposed in his 1907 classic, Reconstruction: Political and Economic, 1865–1877.
14 Dunning trained a generation of influential southern historians who became department chairs and dominated the discipline of history for decades in the twentieth century. His most notable student was Georgia native Ulrich Bonnell Phillips. In American Negro Slavery (1918), along with eight more books and a duffel bag of articles, Phillips erased the truth of slavery as a highly lucrative enterprise dominated by planters who incessantly forced a resisting people to labor through terror, manipulation, and racist ideas. Instead he dreamed up an unprofitable commerce dominated by benevolent, paternalistic planters civilizing and caring for a “robust, amiable, obedient and content” barbaric people. Phillips’s pioneering use of plantation documents legitimated his racist dreams and made them seem like objective realities. Phillips remained the most respected scholarly voice on slavery until the mid-twentieth century.
15 Until midcentury, the Dunning School’s fables of slavery and Reconstruction were transferred into schoolbooks, or at least into those that mentioned Black people at all. Most textbook writers excluded Black people from schoolbooks as deliberately as southern Democrats excluded them from the polls. But the greatest popularizer of the Dunning story of Reconstruction was none other than a novelist, Thomas Dixon Jr. In one of his earliest memories, Dixon witnessed a lynching in his North Carolina town. “The Klan are . . . guarding us from harm,” his mother told him that night, indoctrinating him into the racist justification for White terror. When he came of age, Dixon wept at the “misrepresentation of southerners” inflicted by northerners upon seeing a theatrical version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Vowing to share the “true story,” he composed a “Reconstruction Trilogy” of best-selling novels—The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden—1865–1900 (1902), The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), and The Traitor: A Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire (1907). His goal was “to teach the North . . . what it has never known—the awful suffering of the white man during the dreadful Reconstruction period[,] . . . [and] to demonstrate to the world that the white man must and shall be supreme.” In the fictional trilogy, which was taken as historical fact by millions, Dixon posed Reconstruction as a period when corrupt, incompetent northerners and Black legislators ruled, terrorized, disenfranchised, and raped southern Whites until they were redeemed by the might and virtue of the Ku Klux Klan. Nothing arrested the national mind in the hazards of Black voting, nothing justified the do-nothing attitude, better than this racist fiction of Reconstruction, whether it was written by novelists or by scholars.
16
AS THE ALL-WHITE, all-male Congress settled into Washington in 1901, these White men were able to ease any twinges of guilt they may have felt by reading Booker T. Washington’s hit autobiography, Up from Slavery.
Washington expressed faith in God, took personal responsibility, worked mightily hard, overcame incredible hardship, and saw racial progress and “White saviors” at every turn. “White Savior” stories were fast becoming a fixture in American memoirs, novels, and theatrical productions. They were enjoyed by Americans of all races as hopeful signs of racial progress.
Individual stories either reflected or deflected common realities. The individual White Savior stories cleverly deflected the reality of White saviors for a few, and White discriminators for the many, along with the reality of racial progress for a few, and deferred progress for the many.
17 The release of Up from Slavery in February 1901 allowed Booker T.
Washington to stand at the height of his career. W. E. B. Du Bois watched the national ovation for Washington’s memoir. As the praise carried on into the summer of 1901, and as Du Bois looked up at Washington on the White pedestal of Black leadership, it all started to become too much for him to bear in silence. In his review of Up from Slavery in Dial on July 16, 1901, Du Bois fired the first shot in the civil war between Washington’s Tuskegee Machine and Du Bois’s elite civil rights activists.
In addition to scolding Washington for his “accommodation,” Du Bois scolded those leaders “who represent the old ideas of revolt and revenge, and see in migration alone an outlet for the Negro people.” A.M.E. bishop Henry McNeal Turner had for years preached that God was a “Negro,” but he urged African Americans to migrate to Africa so that they could leave all the discriminatory policies behind. Du Bois reduced all back-to-Africa efforts, including those on Black terms, and violent protests against enslavers and reenslavers to revenge and hate. Antiracists were not defending Black humanity and freedom, he said, as Ida B. Wells had so eloquently advocated doing. It was customary for assimilationists to charge antiracists as being like segregationists—all hate-filled and irrational. These fabricated labels would marginalize antiracists throughout the twentieth century, would one day even marginalize the elderly antiracist Du Bois. But in 1901, Du Bois began to criticize the accommodators and the antiracists in part for his own purposes: in order to set the stage for his “large and important group” opposing the Tuskegee Machine, those reformist assimilationists seeking “selfdevelopment and self-realization in all lines of human endeavor” in order to allow Blacks, eventually, to take their place alongside the people of other races.
18 Washington’s Up from Slavery remains an American classic. However, in 1901, another book, released weeks before Up from Slavery, received much more praise: The American Negro: What He Was, What He Is, and What He May Become. For years, William Hannibal Thomas had tried to desegregate White institutions; he had preached, taught, and written to uplift Blacks, eliminate racial distinctions, and forge a world where Black people would be accepted by White people as their own. And yet, according to a prerelease preview by the New York Times, Thomas had presented “his subject without an atom of sentimentality.” Thomas described a Black “record of lawless existence, led by every impulse and passion,” especially immorality and stupidity. Ninety percent of Black women, he said, were “lascivious by instinct and in bondage to physical pleasure”; they were living lives of filth “without parallel in modern civilization.” Thomas thought at the junction between assimilationist and segregationist ideas. He argued that a minority of Blacks—by which he meant himself and his kind—had overcome their inferior biological inheritance. These extraordinary Negroes showed that “the redemption of the negro [was] . . .
possible and assured through a thorough assimilation of the thought and ideals of American civilization.” Thomas advocated restricting the voting rights of naturally corrupt Blacks, policing naturally criminal Blacks, placing Black children with White guardians, and pursuing uplift suasion. Blacks should conduct themselves “so worthily as to disarm racial antagonism,” he advised.
19 As Thomas tried to distance himself from Blackness through The American Negro, it was, ironically, his very Blackness that caused White Americans to shower him with the adoration he so desired. Since racist ideas deemed every individual Black person an expert and representative of the race, Black people like Thomas had always proved to be the perfect dispensers of racist ideas. Their Blackness made them more believable. Their Blackness did not invite defensive mechanisms to guard against their racist ideas about Black inferiority.
Racist Americans, from the nation’s most eminent sociologists to ordinary readers, hailed The American Negro as the most authoritative, believable, and comprehensive tract ever published on the subject, better than Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro. William Hannibal Thomas was placed “next to Mr.
Booker T. Washington” as “the best American authority on the negro question,” said the New York Times. Within Black America, however, Thomas became known as “Black Judas.” Activist Addie Hunton actually classed Thomas a “Judas Iscariot” in her piece “Negro Womanhood Defended.” Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois hated the book. “Mr. Thomas’s book,” Du Bois charged in his review, was a “sinister symptom” of the age, which desired nothing more for “the Negro” than to “kindly go to the devil and make haste about it,” so that the “American conscience [could] justify three centuries of shameful history.” After Black leaders dug up dirt on Thomas and destroyed his credibility, he fell into obscurity. He passed away as a Black man in 1935. He never did become White.
20 ON OCTOBER 16, 1901, the newly sworn-in President Theodore Roosevelt, hearing that Booker T. Washington was in town, invited “the most distinguished member of his race in the world” over to the President’s House for family supper. Roosevelt did not think much of the invite, clearly unaware of the mood of segregationists. When Roosevelt’s press secretary casually notified Americans the next day of Washington’s visit, the social earthquake was immediate and loud. Black Americans were beside themselves in glee, and many fell in love with Theodore Roosevelt. But to segregationists, Roosevelt had crossed the color line. “When Mr. Roosevelt sits down to dinner with a negro he declares that the negro is the social equal of the white man,” stammered a restrained New Orleans newspaper. South Carolina senator Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman was not restrained: “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger,” he said, “will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again.” Tillman showed in this statement the real purpose of lynchings: if racist ideas won’t subdue Blacks, then violence will. Roosevelt learned his lesson, and he never invited a Black person to the President’s House again. But he failed to quiet segregationists by officially naming the president’s residence the “White House.” Blacks were beasts—segregationist books were declaring in the early years of the twentieth century, starting with Mississippi professor Charles Carroll’s The Negro a Beast (1900)—and beasts should not be dining at the “White House.” 21 In the midst of this overpowering segregationist discourse, W. E. B. Du Bois had the audacity to publish the most acclaimed book of his career.
Released on April 18, 1903, the book title decreed in profoundly antiracist fashion that Blacks were not soulless beasts. Black folk were fully human, and Du Bois made Americans “listen to the strivings in the souls of black folk.” Decades later, James Weldon Johnson, the composer of the “Black National Anthem,” sang the praises of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk for having more impact “upon and within the Negro race than any other single book published in this country since Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” It was a perfect comparison. Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Du Bois’s fourteen essays drilled much deeper into the American mind the racist construction of complementary biological race traits, of the humble, soulful African complementing the hard, rational European. Blacks should be fostering and developing “the traits and talents of the Negro,” Du Bois proposed, “in order that some day on American soil two world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack.” Black people were “the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.” 22 It was a racist idea to suppose that the racial groups were not equal, and that a racial group lacked certain human characteristics. In 1903, White people did not lack “simple faith and reverence,” and Black people did not lack materialism and “smartness.” Ironically, many of the northern defenders of slavery and abolition, and now Jim Crow and civil rights, had attested to the “simple faith” of humble Blacks and the “smartness” of strong Whites. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois tried to revolutionize the dividing ideal of race into the “unifying ideal of race.” This “unifying ideal of race” would not only heal the United States, he argued, but also heal the souls of Black folk. In the book’s most memorable passage, he explained further:
This American world . . . yields [the Negro] no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this doubleconsciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
Blacks must therefore reckon with the fact that “the history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self,” Du Bois wrote. “He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American.” 23 It was as if many of his Black readers had been straining all these years to do precisely what he had described. Du Bois’s theory of double-consciousness finally gave many of them the glasses they needed to see—to see themselves, to see their own inner struggles. Just as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book met many White folk where they were, at the warring crossroads between segregationist and assimilationist ideas, Du Bois met many Black folk where they were, at the warring crossroads between assimilationist and antiracist ideas. Du Bois believed in both the antiracist concept of cultural relativity— of every person looking at the self from the eyes of his or her own group— and the assimilationist idea of Black individuals seeing themselves from the perspective of White people. In Du Bois’s mind, and for so many like-minded people, this double-desire, or double-consciousness, yielded an inner strife, a conflict between pride in equal Blackness and assimilation into superior Whiteness.
While his opening essay was timeless, his timely case against “Mr.
Booker T. Washington and Others” carried the book into controversy in 1903. Du Bois had given his opening argument against the Tuskegee Machine two years earlier, and there was no leaving the courtroom now. After again disparaging Washington’s accommodators, and then the singly conscious antiracists, Du Bois asserted the standing of his doubly-conscious group, which he named the Talented Tenth—the top 10 percent of Black America.
They knew “that the low social level of the mass of the race is responsible for much discrimination against it,” but they also knew, along with the nation, “that relentless color-prejudice is more often a cause than a result of the Negro’s degradation.” The Talented Tenth sought “the abatement of this relic of barbarism and not its systematic encouragement.” 24 Du Bois identified the Talented Tenth in another published piece in 1903 that was riddled with more assimilationist ideas and class racism. “There are in this land a million men of Negro blood . . . [who] have reached the full measure of the best type European culture,” Du Bois judged. It was the duty of this “aristocracy of talent and character” to lead and civilize the masses, to filter culture “downward,” and to show “the capability of Negro blood.” However, he complained, “as this Talented Tenth is pointed out, the blind worshippers of the Average cry out in alarm: ‘These are exceptions, look here at death, disease and crime—these are the happy rule.’ Of course they are the rule, because a silly nation made them the rule.” Du Bois fumed about the extraordinary-Negro conception, this “silly” conceptual loophole to uplift suasion. But, somehow, he kept his own faith in the potential of the silly strategy of uplift suasion.
25 Du Bois’s call to arms in The Souls of Black Folk to strike down those accommodating to Jim Crow was as insightful and impassioned (and racist) as William Lloyd Garrison’s call to arms to strike down the colonizationists accommodating slavery. And segregationists and accommodators instantly knew it. “This book is indeed dangerous for the negro to read,” admitted the Nashville American. The Outlook chided Du Bois, rather accurately, for being “half ashamed of being a negro.” Then the reviewer held up Booker T.
Washington, rather inaccurately, as unashamed. The Tuskegee Machine tried to suppress the book, to no avail. Black newspapers, free of Washington, usually shouted the same thing: “SHOULD BE READ AND STUDIED BY EVERY PERSON, WHITE AND BLACK,” as the Ohio Enterprise put it in a headline. University of Pennsylvania sociologist Carl Kelsey, speaking for racist White scholars, admonished Du Bois for emphasizing “the bad,” the discrimination. Prejudice “will cease,” Kelsey wrote, “when the blacks can command the respect and sympathy of the whites.” 26 In the aftermath of The Souls of Black Folk and Du Bois’s Talented Tenth essay, racial reformers and scholars of race, whether White or Black, whether applauding or critiquing Du Bois, seemed to have formed a consensus on the solution to the “Negro problem.” They spoke of the need for more strident uplift suasion, for upwardly mobile Talented Tenths persuading away the racist ideas of White folk. The strategy remained deeply racist. Black people, apparently, were responsible for changing racist White minds. White people, apparently, were not responsible for their own racist mentalities. If White people were racist and discriminated against Blacks, then Black people were to blame, because they had not commanded Whites’ respect? Uplift suasion had been deployed for more than a century, and its effect in 1903? American racism may have never been worse. But neither its undergirding racist ideas, nor its historical failure, nor the extraordinary Negro construction ensuring its continued failure had lessened the faith of reformers. Uplift suasion had been and remained one of the many great White hopes of racist America. CHAPTER 24 Great White Hopes
IN MAY 1906, W. E. B. Du Bois welcomed to Atlanta University the nation’s most eminent anthropologist, a Columbia University professor who was actually questioning segregationist ideas of Blacks as beasts. Franz Boas had emigrated from Germany in 1886, when American racial classifiers were almost uniformly identifying the “organic inferiority,” or Blackness, of his Jewish people. The “predominant mouth of some Jews,” one anthropologist maintained, was “the result of the presence of black blood.” Boas’s own experiences with anti-Semitism had shaped his hostility to segregationist ideas of biologically distinct races (and ethnicities), of the natural human hierarchy of racial and ethnic groups—that is, ideas positioning Whites over Blacks, and further positioning lily-White Anglo-Saxons over semi-White Jews.
1 Franz Boas attended Du Bois’s Atlanta University conference on “The Health and Physique of the Negro-American.” Scholars questioned or rejected the widely held impression that races were biologically distinct, and that cardiologists could actually distinguish “Black blood,” and that below the skin and hair, doctors and scientists could actually distinguish a Black body, or a “Black disease.” Du Bois presented, but he also learned about the absence of scientific proof for his long-held biological race concept.
2 Two days after the May 1906 conference, Boas delivered Atlanta University’s commencement address. “To those who stoutly maintain a material inferiority of the Negro race,” he proclaimed, “the past history of your race does not sustain [that] statement.” Boas then astonished Du Bois and probably many of his Black students by recounting the glories of precolonial West African kingdoms like those of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay.
Boas awakened Du Bois from the paralysis of his historical racism, or, as Du Bois explained it, “from the paralysis of the commonly held judgement taught to me in high school and in two of the world’s great universities”: that Africans had “no history.” 3 Du Bois’s intellectual high, that May, came crashing down with Black America by the end of the year. The day after Republicans used Black votes to regain the House in the 1906 midterm elections, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the dishonorable discharge (and loss of pensions) of 167 Black soldiers in the 25th Infantry Regiment, a Black unit that had been a huge source of Black pride. A dozen or so members of the regiment had been falsely accused of murdering a bartender and wounding a police officer in the horrifically racist town of Brownsville, Texas, on August 13, 1906.
Overnight, the most popular US president in Black communities since Abraham Lincoln became the most unpopular. “Once enshrined in our hearts as Moses,” shouted out a Harlem pastor, the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr., Roosevelt was “now enshrouded in our scorn as Judas.” In the final days of 1906, it was hard to find an African American who was not spitting ire at the Roosevelt administration. Roosevelt’s efforts to regain Black support with new Black federal appointments failed. Sounding the indignation of the observant press, the New York Times reported that “not a particle of evidence” had been given to prove the men were guilty. Roosevelt was defiant in his Annual Message to Congress on December 3, 1906 (defiant in his crude attempts to gain southern White voters). He warned “respectable colored people . . . not to harbor criminals,” meaning the criminals of Brownsville.
And then he turned to lynchings: “The greatest existing cause of lynching is the perpetration, especially by black men, of the hideous crime of rape.” 4 President Roosevelt was speaking to a national choir of scholars. In Pure Sociology (1903), Brown sociologist and former abolitionist Lester Ward had claimed that Black men who lusted after and raped White women and the White mobs who lynched them in retaliation were both ordered by their racial nature to do so. In Lynch Law (1905), Wellesley economist James Elbert Cutler argued that in executing criminals, the White mobs were “merely [acting] in their sovereign capacity.” Even Du Bois complained, in a 1904 Atlanta University study (“Some Notes on Negro Crime, Particularly in Georgia”), that there were “enough well authenticated cases of brutal assaults on women by black men” to “make every Negro bow his head in shame.” Negroes must recognize, he said, their responsibility for their own so-called worst classes.
5 When Black criminality ceased, lynchings would cease, and Black criminality could cease through education at “schools like Hampton and Tuskegee,” President Roosevelt suggested. While in past years Booker T.
Washington had rejoiced when Roosevelt had promoted his program, this time he probably felt uneasy. Given advance notice, Washington begged Roosevelt to reconsider the discharge, knowing the Tuskegee Machine would also feel the wrath of Black America. As Washington fell with Roosevelt, Du Bois’s Talented Tenth rose in influence.
6
THEODORE ROOSEVELT DID not become toxic in White communities.
His groomed presidential successor, William Howard Taft, cruised to victory, weeks before African Americans lauded a victory of their own on December 26, 1908. At the center of the victory was a Texas-born colored heavyweight champion, the first counterpunching boxer in a sport of brawlers, who had finally received his shot at the heavyweight championship and knocked out Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia. “No event in forty years has given more satisfaction to the colored people of this country than has the signal victory of Jack Johnson,” reported the Richmond Planet. Almost immediately, the cry for a “Great White Hope” went up to redeem Whiteness. All eyes turned to retired heavyweight champion James J. Jeffries.
When the freely smiling Jack Johnson stepped from the CanadianAustralian liner onto the docks of Vancouver on March 9, 1909, American reporters peppered him with questions about whether he would fight Jeffries.
And then they noticed the most newsworthy element of all for racist America: the champion’s “white wife, a former Philadelphia woman who threw in her lot with him,” as newspaper readers found out in the Associated Press dispatch.
Jack Johnson’s earlier “heartaches” with two Black women had caused him to date primarily White women. Johnson loathed that “no matter how colored women feel toward a man, they don’t spoil him and pamper him and build up his ego.” White women did, and thus they were superior partners, in Johnson’s version of gender racism. In actuality, some White women refused to build up their man’s ego, while some Black women catered to their man’s ego. But by 1909, the gender racism of the submissive White woman and the hard Black woman was attracting patriarchal Black men to White women— just as the gender racism of the weak Black man being unable to handle the hard Black woman had attracted some Black women to the strong White man; and just as the gender racism of hypersexual Black people, embodied in the large penis or buttocks, attracted some White people to Black people; and just as the assimilationist belief that the Whiter and straighter the skin and hair, the more beautiful a person was, attracted Black people to (light and) White people. All these racist myths only hardened over the next century as Americans became better able to act on their interracial attractions in public.
What did love have to do with those interracial attractions based in racist ideas? Only the couples knew. There were many interracial relationships not based in racist ideas. But how many were, and how many were not? Only the couples knew.
The most famous Black man in America quickly became the most hated Black man in America. By 1908, Johnson had won three of the four greatest prizes of patriarchal White masculinity—wealth, the heavyweight title, and the White woman. Taft winning the White House hardly could calm the fury of White men, especially when Jack Johnson went on to flaunt his White woman, his wealth, and his title.
7 “If the black man wins, thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory as justifying claims to much more than mere physical equality with their white neighborhoods,” predicted a writer in the New York Times months before the biggest sporting event in American history on July 4, 1910. It was the first to be reported live through wireless telegraphy. The former heavyweight champion, the mammoth Jim Jeffries, dubbed the “Great White Hope,” came out of retirement to seek the heavyweight title for the White race and win it back from the nation’s most hated and beloved man, Jack Johnson. The match was held in Reno, Nevada, before 12,000 raging White spectators. Johnson knocked Jeffries out in the fifteenth round, sending a surge of excitement through Black America and a surge of fury through racist America. Racist mobs tried to beat Black bodies back down, and racist writers tried to beat Black minds back down. “Do not swell your chest too much,” warned the Los Angeles Times. “No man will think a bit higher of you because your complexion is the same as that of the victor at Reno.” Later, in Knuckles and Gloves (1922), London boxing aficionado John Gilbert explained that White men were “at a disadvantage” in boxing because of their “physical inequality.” The US government soon accomplished what White boxers failed to do: knocking out Jack Johnson, though only in a metaphorical sense. He was arrested on trumped-up charges of transporting a prostitute (or rather a White woman) across state lines. After skipping bail, he lived abroad for seven years before turning himself in, and then he spent almost a year in jail.
8
WITH RACIST AMERICANS hungry for the restoration of superior White masculinity after Johnson knocked it down and out, a pulp fiction writer served them what they needed. Edgar Rice Burroughs, who lived in Johnson’s stomping ground of Chicago, had been moved by Henry Morgan Stanley’s nineteenth-century productions of Africa’s savagery. In All-Story Magazine in October 1912, Americans first tasted Burroughs’s novel Tarzan of the Apes.
Tarzan tells the story of an orphan infant of White parents abandoned in Central Africa who is raised by the she-ape Kala in a community of apes. The orphan, John Clayton, is named “Tarzan” by the apes; it means “White skin” in their language. As he grows up, Tarzan becomes the community’s most skilled hunter and warrior, more skilled than any of the nearby ape-Africans.
He eventually finds his parents’ cabin and teaches himself to read. In subsequent stories, Tarzan protects a White woman named Jane from ravishing Black men and apes all around her. Tarzan goes on to teach his children, the Africans, how to fight and grow food.
It is hard to imagine a more famous fictional character during the twentieth century than Tarzan—and it is hard to imagine a more racist plot than what Burroughs wrote up in the Tarzan adventure series books, which he was writing and publishing almost up until his death in 1950. The plot became a Hollywood staple, reappearing again and again, most recently in the 2009 blockbuster Avatar. Burroughs made the association between animals, savages, and Africa permanent in the American mind. The defining message of the Tarzan series was clear: whether on Wall Street or in the forests of Central Africa, swinging through Greek literature or swinging from trees, White people will do it better than the African apelike children, so much better that Whites will always, the world over, become teachers of African people. Forget Jack Johnson’s heavyweight title, White men had something better now. They had Tarzan, the instant sensation, a cultural icon for the ages, the character that inspired comic strips, merchandise, twenty-seven sequels, and forty-five motion pictures, the first appearing in 1918.
9
W. E. B. DU BOIS couldn’t have cared less about Jack Johnson and boxing in 1909. He was worried about his biography of the antislavery activist John Brown. The darling of White liberal America—the publisher of the Evening Post and The Nation and the grandson of William Lloyd Garrison—had also published a biography of Brown that year. Oswald Garrison Villard’s biography was widely hailed as definitive and it sold well. Du Bois’s sales were as disappointing as the reviews. Black scholars were routinely ignored by the White media and by White readers, even when they had nationally recognizable names, like Du Bois. “We rated merely as Negroes studying Negroes,” Du Bois recalled, “and after all, what had Negroes to do with America or science?” What did science have to do with the fierce fight against the Tuskegee Machine and Jim Crow segregation? “What with all my dreaming, studying, and teaching was I going to do in this fierce fight?” Du Bois asked. Losing faith in scientific persuasion, he decided to “lead and inspire and decide.” He left Atlanta University in the summer of 1910 and moved to New York to become the founding editor of The Crisis, the organ of the recently founded National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
10 At the NAACP, Du Bois butted heads with Oswald Garrison Villard, who along with Du Bois was one of the co-founders of the new organization. Like his grandfather, Villard was more of an assimilationist than an antiracist, and he looked upon Black people as social problems. Then again, while his grandfather had loved aggressive antiracist Blacks, such as early Black feminist Maria Stewart, Villard “naturally expected” African Americans “to be humble and thankful or certainly not assertive and aggressive,” Du Bois accurately noted. For instance, Villard tried, unsuccessfully, to push Ida B.
Wells-Barnett out of the Committee of Forty, which had been responsible for organizing the NAACP.
11 Assimilationists and antiracists launched the NAACP at a crucial moment.
Segregationists had just launched their eugenics movement, demonstrating the progression of their racist policies and the racist ideas to justify them. Social Darwinism had fully immigrated to the United States. In 1910, former University of Chicago biologist Charles Davenport secured some financial support from a railroad heiress to establish the Eugenics Record Office at the nation’s first center dedicated to improving the nation’s genetic stock, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. Davenport was the son of an abolitionist and had studied at Harvard during Du Bois’s tenure. Davenport sought to prove one of the most oppressive figments of the human imagination: that personality and mental traits were inherited, and that superior racial groups inherited superior traits.
“So you see that the seed sown by you is still sprouting in distant countries,” Davenport wrote to England’s pioneering eugenicist Frances Galton, Darwin’s cousin, in 1910. And the vines of eugenics surely sprouted after 1910, watered incessantly by Davenport and the 250 eugenicists whom he trained. “Permanent advance” would only come about by “securing the best ‘blood,’” he wrote in the movement’s manifesto, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (1911). The eugenics movement quickly rushed into American popular culture: in Better Babies contests, in magazines, in college courses, in popular lectures, and in a society assessing moguls and criminals as having good or bad genes, good or bad “blood.” It did not matter that people did not change after blood transfusions. Nor did it matter that eugenicists never uncovered any evidence proving that heredity shaped behavior. The eugenics movement created believers, not evidence. Americans wanted to believe that the racial, ethnic, class, and gender hierarchies in the United States were natural and normal. They wanted to believe that they were passing their traits on to their children.
12 As eugenics gained ground, Du Bois used The Crisis to combat the movement and to publicize “those facts and arguments which show the danger of race prejudice.” As part of that agenda, he printed a piece by Franz Boas, prepping readers for Boas’s 1911 magnum opus, The Mind of Primitive Man. Boas echoed the old creed of assimilationists in The Mind of Primitive Man: rejection of the segregationist “theory of hereditary inferiority” and belief that the “complete loss” of African cultures and the pressures of slavery and discrimination had made Black people inferior. “In short, there is every reason to believe that the negro when given facility and opportunity, will be perfectly able to fulfill the duties of citizenship as well as his white neighbor,” Boas wrote. “It may be that he will not produce as many great men as the white race, and that his average achievement will not quite reach the level of the average achievement of the white race; but there will be endless numbers who will be able to outrun their white competitors.” 13 “North American negroes . . . in culture and language,” Boas said, were “essentially European.” Boas was “absolutely opposed to all kinds of attempts to foster racial solidarity,” including among his own Jewish people. He, like other assimilationists, saw the United States as a melting pot in which all the cultural colors became absorbed together (into White Americanness).
Ironically, assimilationists like Boas hated racial solidarity, but kept producing racist ideas based on racial solidarity.
14 Boas composed a preface for another popular book in 1911, Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York, by NAACP co-founder and scholar Mary White Ovington. While pointing out some racial discrimination, she put a new statistical spin on the old racist stereotype of the oversexed, irresponsible Black woman. The higher the ratio of Black women to men, she said, made these “surplus women” prone to prostitution and prone to playing “havoc with their neighbors’ sons, even with their neighbors’ husbands.” Along the same lines, social-work forerunner Jane Addams alleged, in The Crisis, that Black mothers were less able than Italian mothers to control their girls’ sexual behavior. Ida B. Wells-Barnett could not let these attacks from White women go by unchecked. Black women, she wrote, had the “same love for husbands and children, the same ambitions for well-ordered families that white women have.” 15 As part of his effort to expand readership and demonstrate the capability of Black folk, Du Bois unveiled a popular section in The Crisis on Black firsts in June 1911—those individual Black professionals breaking through racial barriers. As America desegregated over the next century, praises rained down on Black firsts, such as hair industry mogul Madame C. J. Walker, and Chicago Defender founder Robert Abbott, who became the first Black millionaires. At their antiracist best, praises for Black firsts turned into demonstrations against racial discrimination, and demands for Black seconds and tenths and thirtieths. At their racist worst, Americans held up Black firsts as extraordinary Negroes, or as signposts of racial progress. As more Blacks broke free from the discriminatory barriers, society could find more ways to ignore the barriers themselves, and could even argue that something else was holding Black people back. With every Black first, the blame shifted to those Black people who failed to break away. Du Bois’s The Crisis tried to assign blame to both: the Black have-nots, and the discriminatory barriers. But accommodating Black firsts advocated for a greater Black work ethic as a better social policy than action against discriminatory bars. If some could break away, the logic went, then all could, if they worked hard enough. Racist logic didn’t have to be logical; it just had to make common sense. And so, as much as Black firsts broke racial barriers, the publicity around Black firsts sometimes, if not most times, reinforced racist ideas blaming Blacks and not the remaining discriminatory barriers.
16
BY 1913, THE CRISIS had accumulated a captivated audience: captivated by the leadership of the Talented Tenth and the NAACP, captivated by popular sections of the publication, such as Black firsts, and captivated, more than anything else, by the brilliant editorial pen of W. E. B. Du Bois. In March, Du Bois joined the rest of the publishing nation in reporting on the first major suffrage parade in Washington, DC, organized by the segregated National American Woman Suffrage Association. In their march down Pennsylvania Avenue, 5,000 suffragists faced a funnel of White male policemen and hecklers. In The Crisis, Du Bois reported the “remarkable” contrast between the nasty White male opposition and the reportedly respectful Black male observers. In a rush of biting anti-assimilationist sarcasm, he asked his Black male readers: “Does it not make you burn with shame to be a mere black man when such mighty deeds are done by the Leaders of Civilization? Does it not make you ‘ashamed of your race’? Does it not make you ‘want to be white’?” 17 A few years later, Du Bois published a forum on women’s suffrage, particularly for the Black woman. Not many of the Black contributors advanced the popular (and sexist) argument of White suffragists: that women’s innate (childlike) morality gave them a distinct entitlement to the vote. But educator Nannie H. Burroughs took this argument and refashioned it. She was one of the more articulate and hard-nosed leaders of her time.
Back in 1904, Burroughs had indicted racist colorism in “Not Color But Character.” There were legions of Black men “who would rather marry a woman for her color than her character,” Burroughs charged. And so, Black women went about trying to change their appearance, straightening their hair and bleaching their skin to look like White women. “What every woman who . . . straightens out needs, is not her appearance changed but her mind changed,” Burroughs charged. “If Negro women would use half of their time they spend on trying to get White, to get better, the race would move forward.” 18 On the suffrage issue in The Crisis forum, Burroughs skipped over into racist ideas, and especially into the idea of the weak Black male selling out his vote (and the strong Black woman not selling out hers). This gender racism had been articulated by everyone from Anna Julia Cooper to Frances Ellen Harper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and southern segregationists James K.
Vardaman and Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman. Immoral, corrupt, and weak Black men had “bartered and sold” the vote, Burroughs argued. “The Negro woman . . . needs the ballot to get back, by the wise use of it, what the Negro man has lost by the misuse of it,” Burroughs argued. In claiming that Black women would not have sold out their votes, Burroughs was simultaneously rewriting history and regarding Black women as politically superior to Black men. She was ignoring the history of Black male and female resistance to the ambush of laws, violence, and economic intimidation that forcibly stole Black male voting power.
19 Then again, Burroughs may have still been upset about that loud minority of Black male voters who went for the Democrat in the 1912 presidential election. Though Woodrow Wilson, a Virginia-born Democrat, was a former Princeton political scientist who had made a name for himself conjuring up the Black terrors of Reconstruction and defending the re-enslaving White South, he had secured Du Bois’s vote and the votes of thousands of other Black men by pledging moderation on race. Once in office, Wilson gave southern segregationists a dominant influence in his administration, while encouraging Blacks to focus on uplift suasion. W. E. B. Du Bois felt hoodwinked. An American politician had once again played Black voters like a drum, and forced them to hear the deadening beat of segregation in Washington, DC, and federal offices across the South.
20 During his first term, Wilson enjoyed the first-ever film screening at the White House, and the selection was a stark symbol of his ideas about race.
The 1915 film was Hollywood’s first feature-length studio production, D. W.
Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, based on Thomas Dixon’s popular novel The Clansmen. The film signaled the birth of Hollywood and of the motionpicture industry in the United States. It became the newest visual medium by which to circulate racist ideas, eclipsing the fading minstrel shows. The silent film depicted Reconstruction as an era of corrupt Black supremacists petrifying innocent Whites. At the climax, a Black male rapist (played by a White actor in blackface) pursues a White woman into the woods until she leaps to her death. “Lynch him! Lynch him!” moviegoers shouted in Houston, and nearly one hundred Blacks were actually lynched in 1915. In the end, the victim’s brother in the film organizes Klansmen to regain control of southern society. A White Jesus—brown-haired, brown-eyed, and white-robed— appears to bless the triumph of White supremacy as the film concludes.
21 “It is like writing history with lightning,” Wilson reportedly said after the film. “And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” Millions of White northerners and southerners packed movie houses beginning on February 8, 1915, to watch the widely believed truth of the Reconstruction era. By January 1916, more than 3 million people had viewed the film in New York alone. It was the nation’s highest-grossing film for two decades, and it enabled millions of Americans to feel redeemed in their lynchings and segregation policies. The film revitalized the Ku Klux Klan, drawing millions of Americans by the 1920s into the club that terrorized Jews, immigrants, socialists, Catholics, and Blacks.
Angry at its terrible lies, Black communities everywhere protested The Birth of a Nation. In the final days of his life, Booker T. Washington tried to accomplish behind the scenes what the NAACP and other civil rights groups were trying to do openly: block its showing. They failed. Du Bois took a different approach, challenging the film’s historical racism in his sweeping history The Negro, published right on time in 1915. He tore up the fairytales of the non-African ancient Egypt, the absence of sophisticated pre-modern African states, the horrors of Reconstruction, and so on. He had seemingly dropped his biological concept of race. But he had not dropped his racist notions about the traits of the Negro, whom he termed “the most lovable of men.” 22 For all the northern activists’ efforts to block The Birth of a Nation—or to rewrite the history it depicted, or to challenge the mass disenfranchisement of Black men that it endorsed—southern Black activists did infinitely more.
They protested southern segregationists with their feet. By the time they finished, they had indeed given birth to a new nation. CHAPTER 25
The Birth of a Nation
“WAR IS HELL but there are things worse than Hell, as every Negro knows.” W. E. B. Du Bois had a knack for packaging the complex feelings of Black folk into words. After World War I cut off immigration from Europe, labor recruiters from northern industries headed into southern towns searching for a new labor supply. Even if The Birth of a Nation had never appeared before excited southern audiences, southern Blacks would probably have still been all ears to northern industrial recruiters.
1 Then again, southern Blacks did not need these recruiters to entice them to escape a place that in some ways was worse than hell. During the Great War, Black people once again used their legs as activism, escaping from rural towns to southern cities, from southern cities to border-state cities, and from border-state cities to northern cities in what became known as the “Great Migration.” In the first mass antiracist movement of the twentieth century, migrants eschewed beliefs in the New South’s racial progress, in the notion of Jim Crow being better than slavery, and in the claim that Blacks’ politicaleconomic plight was their fault. Segregationists tried to slow the migration through racist ideas, ideas put into action when they terrorized northern labor recruiters, when they arrested migrants, and even when they tried to improve labor conditions. But nothing and no one could stop this movement.
When migrants reached northern cities, they faced the same discrimination they thought they had left behind, and they heard the same racist ideas. The Black and White natives of northern cities looked down on the migrants and their different (though equal) southern or rural cultural ways as culturally backward. They looked at their families as dysfunctional. And they called these migrants, who had moved hundreds of miles seeking work and a better life, lazy.
In 1918, Harvard-trained historian Carter G. Woodson, who had just founded the first Black history journal and professional association, correctly predicted that “the maltreatment of Negroes will be nationalized.” Migrants faced segregation in the northern “receiving stations,” as journalist Isabel Wilkerson termed them in 2010. Racist Harlemites, for instance, organized to fight off what they called the “a growing menace” of “black hordes,” and ended up segregating their communities. Over the course of six decades, some 6 million Black southerners left their homes, transforming Black America from a primarily southern population to a national and urban one, and segregationist ideas became nationalized and urbanized in the process.
2 The Great Migration overshadowed a smaller migration of people from the Caribbean and Africa to the United States. A young, well-read, charismatic Jamaican with a passion for African people and an understanding of racism arrived in New York in March 1916 to raise funds for a school in Jamaica. Seeking out Du Bois, the stocky, dark-skinned Marcus Mosiah Garvey visited the New York offices of the NAACP. Du Bois was absent, and Garvey was “unable to tell whether he was in a white office or that of the NAACP.” The plethora of White and biracial assimilationists on the NAACP’s staff, and all the biracial assimilationists in leadership positions in Black America, no doubt contributed to Garvey’s decision to remain in Harlem and build his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) there. His organizing principles were global African solidarity, the beauty of dark skin and African American culture, and global African selfdetermination. “Africa for the Africans,” he liked to say. His UNIA quickly attracted antiracists, Black working people, and Black migrants and immigrants who did not like the colorism, class racism, assimilationism, and nativism of the NAACP and the Talented Tenth.
3 Marcus Garvey and his admirers were not the only people observing the growing population and power of biracial Americans. Scholars were taking note. Two years after Garvey’s jarring visit to the NAACP’s headquarters, sociologist and eugenicist Edward Bryon Reuter finished The Mulatto in the United States (1918). From his base at the University of Iowa, Reuter made a name for himself arguing that anything Black people achieved was in fact the achievement of biracial people. He situated biracial people as a sort of racial middle class, below superior Whites, but above inferior “full Blacks,” as they were called. (Biracial people often rejected the racist idea of their inferiority to Whites, but some consumed and reproduced the racist idea of their superiority to Blacks.) Reuter stamped biracial people as a “peculiar people”—despite their success—around the same time that homosexuals were being marked as a “peculiar people.” 4 Reuter reinforced the fundamentally racist idea that biracial people were abnormal. Homosexuals, like biracial people, also were considered abnormal, and the two were sometimes considered in the same breath as “peculiar people” situated in an in-between state. “Between the whitest of men and the blackest negro stretches out a vast line of intermediary races,” proclaimed one of the earlier advocates of homosexual rights, Xavier Mayne, in The Intersexes (1908). “Nature abhors the absolute, delights in . . . the half-steps, the between-beings.” Passing bisexuals and biracial people quietly disrupted the so-called normality of heterosexuality and racial purity.
5 Eugenicists promoting the need for maintaining the purity of the White race endlessly berated interracial reproduction. In an explosive wartime book published in 1916 called The Passing of the Great Race, New York lawyer Madison Grant constructed a racial-ethnic ladder with Nordics (the new term for Anglo-Saxons) at the top and Jews, Italians, the Irish, Russians, and all non-Whites on lower rungs. He reconstructed a world history of rising and falling civilizations based on the “amount of Nordic blood in each nation.” “[The] races vary intellectually and morally just as they do physically,” Grant suggested. “It has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes and going to school and church does not transform a Negro into a white man.” This segregationist passionately told assimilationists that their efforts were bound to fail. Black people were incapable of development and could not become White. Grant revised and reissued his book three times in five years and it was translated into several foreign languages. Publishers were barely able to supply the voracious demand for segregationist ideas and for the dashing eugenicist movement as White theorists attempted to normalize the social inequities of the day.
6 When Germany surrendered in the Great War, an embittered Austrian soldier sprinted into German politics, where he gained some cheers for his nasty speeches against Marxists and Jews. In 1924, Adolf Hitler was jailed for an attempted revolution. He used the time in prison—and Madison Grant’s book—to write his magnum opus, Mein Kampf. “The highest aim of human existence is . . . the conservation of race,” Hitler famously wrote. The Nazi czar later thanked Grant for writing The Passing of the Great Race, which Hitler called “my Bible.” 7 Eugenicist ideas also became part of the fledgling discipline of psychology and the basis of newly minted standardized intelligence tests.
Many believed these tests would prove once and for all the existence of natural racial hierarchies. In 1916, Stanford eugenicist Lewis Terman and his associates “perfected” the IQ test based on the dubious theory that a standardized test could actually quantify and objectively measure something as intricate and subjective and varied as intelligence across different experiential groups. The concept of general intelligence did not exist. When scholars tried to point out this mirage, it seemed to be as much in the eye of the beholder as general beauty, another nonexistent phenomenon. But Terman managed to make Americans believe that something that was inherently subjective was actually objective and measurable. Terman predicted that the IQ test would show “enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture.” Standardized tests became the newest “objective” method of proving Black intellectual inferiority and justifying discrimination, and a multimilliondollar testing industry quickly developed in schools and workplaces.
8 IQ tests were administered to 1.75 million soldiers in 1917 and 1918.
American Psychological Association president and Princeton psychologist Carl C. Brigham used the results of the army intelligence tests to conjure up a genetic intellectual racial hierarchy, and a few years later, he constructed the SAT test for college admissions. White soldiers scored better, and for Brigham that was because of their superior White blood. African Americans in the North scored better than African Americans in the South, and Brigham argued that northern Blacks had a higher concentration of White blood, and that these genetically superior African Americans had sought better opportunities up North because of their greater intelligence.
9
AN ARMISTICE SIGNED on November 11, 1918, ended the fighting in World War I. It took six months of negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference for colonial powers to come to an agreement on the Treaty of Versailles. W. E.
B. Du Bois ventured to Paris in 1918 and sent back gripping letters and editorials to The Crisis. He shared the racism faced by Black soldiers, adding to the wartime press reports filled with stories of Black heroism. But this storyline of Black heroism changed in White newspapers to the storyline of Black deficiency when the officers, who were disproportionately White and southern, returned to the United States and began telling their own war stories to reporters. As a collection, Du Bois’s Parisian dispatches and activities displayed his lingering double-consciousness of assimilationism and antiracism. Du Bois witnessed steadily fierce opposition among the victors at the Paris Peace Conference to granting independence to colonial peoples. In “Reconstruction and Africa,” published in the February 1919 issue of The Crisis, Du Bois rejected, in antiracist fashion, the notion that Europe was the “Benevolent Civilizer of Africa.” He declared, “White men are merely juggling with words—or worse—when they declare that the withdrawal of Europe from Africa will plunge the continent into chaos.” On the other assimilationist hand, Du Bois helped organize the First Pan-African Congress that month in Paris, which called on the Paris Peace Conference to adopt “gradual” decolonization and civil rights. Du Bois desired a “chance for peaceful and accelerated development of black folk.” 10 At long last, the parties signed the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919.
The massive German state was forced to pay reparations. France, Belgium, South Africa, Portugal, and England received Germany’s prized African colonies. The League of Nations was created to rule the world. The Wilson administration joined with England and Australia in rejecting Japan’s proposal that the League’s charter confess a commitment to the equality of all peoples. At least President Wilson was being honest. He feared that the relatively good treatment Black soldiers had received in France had “gone to their heads.” To Wilson’s racist Americans, there was nothing more dangerous than a self-respecting Black person with antiracist expectations of immediate equality, rather than the gradual equality of assimilationists or the permanent inequality of segregationists. In 1919, many Black soldiers returned to their towns, with antiracist expectations, as New Negroes. And they were greeted by New Negroes, too.
11 These New Negroes heeded Du Bois’s plea. “By the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, long, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land,” Du Bois wrote in “We Return Fighting,” in The Crisis of May 1919. The same US Postal Service that for decades had delivered White newspapers doused in lynching kerosene refused to deliver this Crisis, judging Du Bois’s words as “unquestionably violent and extremely likely to excite a considerable amount of racial prejudice (if that has not already reached its maximum amongst the Negroes).” Du Bois’s own false 1901 construction of antiracists as being filled with revenge and anger against White people—instead of anger against racist ideas and discrimination—had finally come back to bite him. He had spent his early years urging Black people to calmly focus their efforts on their own moral uplift, on uplift suasion, to change racist minds. He had tried to provide White Americans with the scientific facts of racial disparities, and he had believed that producers of racist ideas and policies could be persuaded through reason to end their production. He had spent his early years ridiculing leaders like Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Bishop Henry McNeal Turner as unwise, as violent, and as prejudiced when they had passionately called on Black people to fight. But every year, as the failures of education and persuasion and uplift piled up, Du Bois’s urgings for Black people to protest and fight became stronger and more passionate. But then, he had to face the same criticism and censorship that he had dished out to others earlier in his career. After a week’s delay, postal officials finally delivered The Crisis. They had found there were even more dangerous antiracist and socialist publications being edited by New Negroes, including Marcus Garvey’s The Negro World.
How did those Americans still packing movie houses to watch Tarzan and The Birth of a Nation, who were still spending their afternoons reading The Passing of the Great Race, or attending Klan events, or trying to segregate away Black migrants, respond to the New Negro? James Weldon Johnson described their response during that year of 1919 as the “Red Summer” for all the blood that spilled in the deadliest series of White invasions of Black neighborhoods since Reconstruction. Since racist ideas were not working on New Negroes, violence came rushing forth in at least twenty-five US cities, as if to remind the assertive New Negro of White rule. “If we must die, let it not be like hogs,” Claude McKay’s booming poem of self-defense shouted in July. “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, / Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” 12 Racist White newspapers, as was customary then as it is today, tended to depict the Black victims as criminals, and the White criminals as victims.
Black newspapers, as was also customary after dramatic shows of selfdefense, tended to play up the redemption of Black masculinity. “At last our men had stood like men, struck back, were no longer dumb driven cattle,” one Black woman rejoiced in The Crisis. For racist White commentators, the Black men who supposedly instigated the Red Summer were beastly cattle; to racist Black commentators, these formerly beastly cattle, by striking back, had proven themselves to be men after all. Racist ideas inflamed both sides in the Red Summer, and gender racism came out of the smoke, especially the horrible coughing silence about all those courageous Black women who had defended their men and children and communities.
13 The Wilson administration somehow conflated the Red Summer with the postwar Red Scare, blaming anticapitalists for the carnage instead of violent White racists. On September 27, 1919, 128 alienated White socialists, inspired by the recent Russian Revolution, gathered in Chicago to form the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). “The racial oppression of the Negro is simply the expression of his economic bondage and oppression, each intensifying the other,” the CPUSA’s program declared, sounding eerily like the founding racial program of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) in 1903. Since then, SPA leaders, such as the party’s five-time presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs, had tended to say that there was “no negro question outside of the labor question.” Like their SPA predecessors, CPUSA officials would also go on to raise capitalist exploitation over racial discrimination, instead of leveling and challenging them both at once. In their incomplete reading of the world’s political economy, racism emerged out of capitalism, and therefore the problem of capitalism came before the problem of racism. The Communists theorized that if they killed capitalism, racism would die, too—not knowing that capitalism and racism had both emerged during the same long fifteenth century, and that since then, they had been mutually fortifying each other while developing separately. The Communist of the CPUSA admonished Blacks (and Whites) during the Red Summer to “realize their misery is not due to race antagonism, but the CLASS ANTAGONISM” between big business and labor.
14 Big business was certainly producing and reproducing racist policies and ideas to divide and conquer the working class, decrease its labor costs, and increase its political power. However, the CPUSA downplayed or ignored the ways in which White laborers and unions were discriminating against and degrading Black laborers to increase their own wages, improve their own working conditions, and bolster their own political power. And why would White labor not continue ruling Black labor if labor gained political and economic control over capital in the United States? The Communists did not address that; nor did they address their own racist ideas during these formative years, which were pointed out by the antiracist Blacks joining their ranks. In seeking to unify the working class, CPUSA leaders focused their early recruiting efforts on racist White laborers. They refused to update Karl Marx’s scriptures to account for their deeply racialized nation in 1919.
CPUSA officials typically stayed silent on what it might mean for the future of racism if a Communist revolution took place that did not simultaneously support a revolution against racism.
15 W. E. B. Du Bois was inspired by the red hot summer like never before, and not just because he was excited about the New Negro, or because he started closely reading (and updating) Karl Marx. In February 1920, he put out the searing essays of Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. Du Bois had wearily come to realize that the segregationist “belief that black folk are subhuman” was not based on any lack of knowledge: “It is simply passionate, deep-seated heritage, and as such can be moved by neither argument nor fact.” In moving away from educational persuasion, Du Bois finally began to turn instead toward a singly antiracist consciousness. But he did not quite reach it. Instead he wrote: “European culture—is it not better than any culture that arose in Africa or Asia? It is.” 16 After relegating modern African and Asian cultures, Du Bois spoke out against “The Damnation of Women.” In Darkwater, Du Bois did something for Black women that was rarely done: for “their worth” and “their beauty” and “their promise, and for their hard past, I honor the women of my race,” he said. But in honoring the Black woman, he dishonored non-Black women and Black men, especially in their roles as mothers and fathers. He described one global unhappy family. “The father and his worship is Asia; Europe is the precocious, self-centered, forward-striving child; but the land of the mother is and was Africa,” he wrote. Nowhere was a mother’s love stronger and deeper than in Africa. W. E. B. Du Bois—the son of a single mother—not surprisingly declared, “It is mothers and mothers of mothers who seem to count, while fathers are shadowy memories.” 17 Du Bois followed in the long line of reformers who played up in Black people what racists played down—in his case, he turned the global projection of the Black woman as the immoral anti-mother, the anti-woman, into the global projection of the Black woman as the moral super-mother, the superwoman. But whether redeeming or degrading Black women, such projections spun reality, generalizing the behavior of immoral individuals or motherly individuals, and in the process propagating racist ideas. An antiracist sketch of Black women would have depicted the same diversity of motherly and unmotherly behavior found in all equally imperfect female racial groups.
For decades, diverse sketches of Black feminine behavior had swayed heads and hips, minds and hearts, in buoyant juke joints. Months after the release of Du Bois’s Darkwater, Mamie Robinson brought out the first recording of the great antiracist art form of the 1920s. “Crazy Blues” became a best seller. Record companies capitalized on the blues craze among Black and White listeners alike. Robinson, “Ma” Rainey, Ida Cox, and Bessie Smith sang about Black women as depressed and happy, as settling down and running around, as hating and loving men, as gullible and manipulative, as sexually free and sexually conforming, as assertive and passive, as migrating and staying, as angels and as “Wild Women.” Blueswomen and their male counterparts embraced African American cultural ways, despised the strategy of trying to persuade Whites that Blacks were okay, and were therefore despised by Talented Tenth assimilationists.
18
FOR ALL ITS assimilationist ideas, Du Bois’s Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil was still too well spiced with antiracism for the bland tastes of racist readers. Northern, southern, and foreign racist reviewers almost unanimously condemned the book as a bitter madman’s “hymn of racial hate,” or “what the southerner would write if he turned negro,” as the socialist Harold Laski of the London School of Economics put it. Meanwhile, the overwhelming response of Black readers, including the legions of common sharecroppers and domestics, was that it was “a milestone in the history of the Negro race,” as the Washington Bee attested. Some antiracist New Negroes did not like some of the bland moralizing and class racism of Darkwater. Yale alumnus William Ferris, the editor of Garvey’s The Negro World, said Du Bois looked down on the Black masses and their ailments “from the heights of his own greatness.” 19 It was a charge hardly anyone could deny, especially after Du Bois’s views on Marcus Garvey became known. Garvey’s movement would collapse “in a short time,” Du Bois had allegedly said, and “his followers are the lowest type of Negroes, mostly from the West Indies.” The reporter who published this quotation exhibiting class and ethnic racism probably caught Du Bois in a rancorous mood that August 1920. All month long, Du Bois had had to watch and listen to the massive parades and meetings of the first international convention of Garvey’s UNIA. “We shall now organize the 400,000,000 Negroes of the world into a vast organization to plant the banner of freedom on the great continent of Africa,” Garvey had blared on August 2, 1920, to the UNIA convention’s 25,000 enraptured delegates at Madison Square Garden. The bombastic convention left the activist African world in wondrous awe for months. Du Bois and the Talented Tenth, however, felt deeply threatened by Garvey’s exposure of the touchy reality of light skin privilege. “Garvey is an extraordinary leader of men,” Du Bois admitted in The Crisis at the end of 1920. But it had been a mistake for him to try to bring Caribbean color politics to the United States. “American Negroes recognized no color line in or out of the race,” Du Bois said, “and they will in the end punish the man who attempts to establish it.” 20 It was probably the silliest statement of Du Bois’s serious career. He sounded as oblivious as the racists who had angered him for decades by discounting the existence of the racial line. In denying the color line, Du Bois discounted the existence of color discrimination, in effect blaming darker Blacks for their disproportionate poverty. Du Bois had eyes. He knew light skins dominated the most desirable political and economic positions available to Blacks. In his own Talented Tenth essay in 1903, he had mentioned twentyone present and past Black leaders, and all of them except Phillis Wheatley had been biracial. No Ida B. Wells-Barnett or Callie House appeared. He probably heard the circulating Black children’s rhyme: “If you’re white, you’re right / If you’re yellow, you’re mellow / If you’re brown, stick around / If you’re black, get back.” Du Bois knew that elite, light-skinned folks were still using brown paper bags and rulers to bar dark-skinned folks from churches, jobs, civic groups, historically Black colleges, Black fraternities and sororities, and even neighborhoods and other types of gatherings.
21 Du Bois was probably not oblivious. More likely, he and his light-skinned peers felt their color privilege was threatened by discussions of colorism and color equality, not unlike Whites who felt their racial privilege threatened by discussions of racism and racial equality. And so, Du Bois copied his enemies: he used racist ideas and his punishing power to silence the antiracist challenge to color discrimination.
THE CONFLICT BETWEEN Du Bois and Garvey reached its peak in the early 1920s, when they sparred over the question of interracial relations. In October 1921, President Warren G. Harding went to Birmingham to hunt up southern support, and he insisted that “racial amalgamation there cannot be.” While The Crisis reprimanded Harding for rejecting interracial relations, Garvey hailed the president for his endorsement of racial separatism. In contrast to Madison Grant’s eugenicists, who were advocating White racial purity, and opposing interracial reproduction due to the intrusion of inferior Black blood, Garvey advocated Black racial purity, opposing interracial reproduction due to the intrusion of different White blood. Assimilationists often erroneously confused Garvey’s separatists, who actually believed in separate but equal, with segregationists, who really believed in separate but unequal. It was Garvey’s assimilationist opponents who were constructing Black integration into White spaces as progress. And these assimilationists also were conjoining Garvey’s separatist efforts of racial solidarity with segregationist efforts to maintain the racial exclusion of inferior peoples.
Garvey’s assimilationist opponents failed to realize that there was nothing inherently tolerant or intolerant about Americans voluntarily separating themselves or integrating themselves. Americans routinely did separate and integrate themselves, voluntarily, based on religion, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, profession, class, race, and social interests. Separatist organizing can be racist (and when it is, it turns into segregation), if the emphasis is on excluding inferior peoples. Interracial organizing can be racist (and when it is, it turns into assimilation), if the emphasis is on elevating inferior Blacks by putting them under the auspices of superior Whites. That was Garvey’s somewhat false impression of the interracial program of the NAACP.
22 Du Bois and Garvey represented a larger and nastier battle within Black America among assimilationists, antiracists, and separatists, between the classes, between natives and West Indians, between nationalists and PanAfricanists, and between light skins and dark skins. But Garvey had a much bigger enemy trying to silence him: the US government. In June 1923, he was convicted of mail fraud. Out on bail, he ventured to Liberia—as did Du Bois.
Upon his return, Du Bois’s anger and sense of privilege got the better of him when in May 1924 he called Garvey the “most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and in the world.” With his days of freedom numbered, Garvey struck back against Du Bois and the Talented Tenth when he presided over the UNIA convention that August. His antiracist affirmations had turned to blisteringly racist ridicule. Black people were “the most careless and indifferent people in the world,” Garvey proclaimed to thousands at Madison Square Garden. Appeals exhausted, six months later Garvey walked into federal prison, only to be deported three years later.
23 Weeks before Garvey’s final UNIA convention, delegates gathered for the Democratic National Convention of 1924 at that very same Madison Square Garden. The Democrats came within a single vote of endorsing the antiBlack, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic platform promulgated by the powerful Ku Klux Klan. The platform would have been anti-immigrant, too, if Congress had not passed the Immigration Act on a bipartisan vote earlier in the year. It was authored by Washington State Republican Albert Johnson, who was wellschooled in anti-Asian racist ideas and well-connected to Madison Grant.
Politicians seized on the powerful eugenicist demands for immigration restrictions on people from all countries outside of Nordic northwestern Europe. President Calvin Coolidge, the Massachusetts Republican who replaced Harding after his sudden death in 1923, happily signed the legislation before his reelection. “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” Coolidge wrote as vice-president-elect in 1921.
“The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides.” 24 After passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, eugenicists quickly turned back to focusing on the segregation of non-Nordics in the United States.
Ironically, the act’s side effects slowed the pace of the eugenic agenda. The act reduced Nordic fears of non-Nordics taking over the country, and it energized the intellectual struggle of the assimilationists to get non-Whites to comply with White ideals of American homogeneity. The Catholic, proimmigrant Knights of Columbus Historical Commission even financed the publication of several books focusing on the contributions of different racial and ethnic groups. These included The Germans in the Making of America (since the Germans were hated in the interwar period), The Jews in the Making of America, and Du Bois’s The Gift of Black Folk: The Negro in the Making of America (1924).
Unlike eugenicists and assimilationists, Du Bois desired a multiracial pluralism, where differences were acknowledged, embraced, and equalized in antiracist fashion, not graded, suppressed, and ignored. But instead of merely sharing the cultural differences of African American spirituality, artistry, and music, Du Bois graded Black people himself in racist fashion, echoing the view of the nation’s leading urban sociologist, Robert Park of the University of Chicago. The Negro was “primarily an artist, loving life for its own sake,” Park wrote. “He is, so to speak, the lady among races,” and was interested in “physical things rather than . . . subjective states and objects of introspection.” Du Bois likewise said the Negro had an unmatched sense of “sound and color,” along with “humility” and “a certain spiritual joyousness: a sensuous, tropical love of life, in vivid contrast to the cool and cautious New England reason.” After all these years, Du Bois was still helping to reinforce Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ideas on the soft Black soul and the hard White mind. It seemed that nothing could erase this wholeheartedly racist idea from the mind of W. E. B. Du Bois. And when he attended a historic event in March 1924, Du Bois probably felt that his longtime advocacy of Blacks’ superior artistic gifts was finally paying off. He had hoped that Black artists could use the media and their creativity to persuade away racist ideas. Yet another faint hope in persuasion was about to fail another test.
25 CHAPTER 26
Media Suasion
ON THE EVENING of March 21, 1924, W. E. B. Du Bois walked into a dazzling artistic gathering at Manhattan’s Civic Club. Howard University philosopher Alaine LeRoy Locke was master of ceremonies. Cultural advancement would “prove the key to that reevaluation of the Negro which must precede or accompany any considerable further betterment of race relationships,” Locke prophesied in the era’s definitive anthology, The New Negro (1925). He proposed media suasion by “our talented groups” to persuade away racist ideas. Twenty-year-old New York University student and poet Countee Cullen, who was also committed to media suasion, was one of more than a dozen Black artists—most notably novelist Jessie Fauset— present to meet and receive advice from the Talented Tenth and the White publishers in attendance that evening. Cullen, who was dating Du Bois’s daughter, Yolande, ended the Harlem Renaissance’s coming-out party in a flurry of poems and ovations.
1 Du Bois helped rouse the Harlem Renaissance artistic movement and was even more instrumental in rousing the activism of New Negro students. They protested against the remnants of the Tuskegee approach to schooling and against the efforts of all historically Black colleges that had been set up to “train servants and docile cheap labor,” as Du Bois said in a critique published in The American Mercury in October 1924. Striking first at Florida A&M in 1923, and then Fisk in 1924, Howard in 1925, and Hampton in 1927, and dozens of other HBCUs in between, New Negro campus activists also protested the rules of morality imposed by the colleges to regulate and civilize the supposed barbaric, oversexed, undisciplined Black students (and keep them out of harm’s way of Klansmen). On February 4, 1925, more than one hundred Fisk strikers ignored curfew and stormed through campus chanting “Du Bois! Du Bois!” and “Before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave!” By the time the protest fever subsided at the end of the decade, many of the rules had been expunged, and HBCU curricula, aside from a handful of Negro Studies courses, were hardly distinguishable from the curricula at historically White colleges and universities (HWCUs). Accommodators and antiracists were upset, but assimilationists were delighted.
2
A CADRE OF Harlem’s young and talented Black artists refused to take direction from W. E. B. Du Bois. They called themselves the “Niggerati” in 1926, clearly showing little interest in assimilation or in media suasion. The Niggerati included novelist Wallace Thurman, who was best known for his fictional tribute to dark beauty, The Blacker the Berry (1929), and Florida native Zora Neale Hurston, who would study with Franz Boas, reject his assimilationism, and become the penultimate antiracist mouthpiece of rural southern Black culture. These youngsters were formulating a literary and social space of total artistic freedom and tolerance for differences in culture, color, class, gender, race, and sexuality. The Niggerati was quite possibly the first known fully antiracist intellectual and artistic group in American history.
Its members rejected class racism, cultural racism, historical racism, gender racism, and even queer racism, as some members were homosexual or bisexual. Not that they were bold enough to come out as such: Alaine LeRoy Locke, Bessie Smith, and Ma Rainey were among the many Harlem Renaissance headliners leading double lives in closeted homophobic America, privately affirming negated Black sexualities as they publicly affirmed Black negated artistry.
3 In The Nation in June 1926, a twenty-four-year-old poetic sensation— another headliner who was quite possibly in the sexual closet—laid out the Niggerati’s antiracist philosophy in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” The “urge within the race towards whiteness . . . and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible” was the “mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art,” wrote Langston Hughes. Hughes was reacting to the words of another poet who had told him “I want to be a poet—not a Negro poet,” probably referring to Countee Cullen, Du Bois’s future son-in-law.
Hughes went on to describe the upbringing of the “young poet” in a typical Black middle-income home, where the mother often told misbehaving children, “Don’t be like niggers,” and the father married the “lightest woman he could find” and told them, “Look how well a white man does things.” In the home, they read White newspapers; they attended White theaters and schools; and they favored churches for light-skinned blacks. They aspired to “Nordic manners, Nordic faces, Nordic hair, Nordic art,” said Hughes, as “the whisper of ‘I want to be white’ runs silently through their minds.” This was “a very high mountain indeed for the would-be racial artist to climb in order to discover himself.” It stopped the Negro artist from seeing the “beauty of his own people,” Hughes added.
In the lives of the “low-down folks,” who did not “particularly care whether they are like white folks,” there was “sufficient matter to furnish a black artist,” as his friend Zora Neale Hurston’s career would show. The Negro artist did not have to touch “on the relations between Negroes and whites.” The only duty Hughes dropped onto the “younger Negro artist” was to “change through the force of his art that old whispering ‘I want to be white,’ hidden in the aspirations of his people, to ‘Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro—and beautiful”—and “ugly too.” 4 If Langston Hughes focused his antiracist creative energy on persuading Black people away from assimilationist ideas, and if Countee Cullen focused his assimilationist creative energy on persuading White people away from segregationist ideas, then Du Bois remained doubly focused on both. But in 1926, Du Bois’s attention veered much more into persuading White people.
And so Du Bois viewed Hughes’s essay, and then his endorsement of Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven, released in August 1926, as utterly traitorous.
Van Vechten was the Harlem Renaissance’s most ubiquitous White patron, a man as curiously passionate about being around and showing off Black people as zookeepers are about being around and showing off their exotic pets. In the past few years, European artists arriving in New York had been calling on Van Vechten to take them on the “safari” of Harlem, as the tourists and tour guide more or less understood it. Now, Van Vechten gave them the tour in a book, Nigger Heaven.
Van Vechten’s novel is a melodramatically tragic love story of boy meets girl, but with all that genre’s affection, seduction, obstruction, betrayal, and death winding through the pitfalls of racial discrimination. It portrays the vivaciously lurid debauchery of the jazz clubs and cabarets of Black commoners; the solemn pretentiousness of the finely lit homes of educated, assimilated Black elites; and the politically correct intellectuals who debated “the race problem.” The bitter racial line of negative Black reviews and positive White reviews could not have been starker. Nigger Heaven—from its outrageous title to the outrageous extremes of Black decadence and pomposity it delineated—felt like “a blow in the face” to W. E. B. Du Bois and the Talented Tenth. It was nearly as powerful a blow as the one that had been delivered by William Hannibal Thomas’s The American Negro in 1901.
A Black professorial character in Nigger Heaven claims, in a dig at media suasion, that the advance of Black artists in White circles will not change White opinions: “Because the white people they meet will regard them as geniuses, in other words, exceptions.” 5 Nothing worse rained down from Nigger Heaven than Van Vechten’s outrageously untrue indictment of assimilated Blacks as spoiled, along the same line of thought that globe-trotting racists like to frame tropical “exotic” lands as being spoiled by White developers. The virginal and pure (and assimilated) gospel singer Mary Love, for example, had “lost or forfeited her birthright, this primitive birthright . . . that all civilized races were struggling to get back to,” Van Vechten narrated in Nigger Heaven. She mourned that loss and yearned to rediscover it: “This love of drums, of exciting rhythms . . .
this warm, sexual emotion. . . . We are all savages, she repeated to herself, all, apparently, but me!” 6 In reducing Negro artists’ gifts to their racial nature, Van Vechten was implying that there was no intellectual ingenuity, or constant rehearsing, or endless refinement of the ear, needed to master the sophisticated grandeur of music and dance performance in blues and jazz. Blacks were natural singers and dancers and musicians (and all those Black people who could not sing, dance, and play were apparently not really Black). It was an idea later reinforced by John Martin, who became America’s first major dance critic when he joined the New York Times in 1927. He reasoned that for Blacks, the ability to dance was “intrinsic” and “innate.” They had natural “racial rhythm,” and struggled to learn the more technical dance styles, such as ballet. What Van Vechten and Martin posed as assimilated Blacks’ tragic dilemma was stingingly racist: they could never quite reach the greatness of White civilization, but they were running away from the greatness of their natural savagery.
7 Van Vechten made Harlem seem so exciting and exotic that White readers made Nigger Heaven a runaway best seller. Whites started pouring into Harlem—into Black America—to see, hear, and touch the supposed primitive superior birthright of Black artistry and sexuality. They flooded into clubs like Harlem’s “Jungle,” or went over to watch an exhibition of the newly established Harlem Globetrotters. In 1927, these Black showmen started running up and down the basketball court in a “natural rhythm,” emitting jungle sounds and wild bursts of laughter like frivolous, dishonest, lazy children in need of “mature white handling.” They found that handler in the club’s founder, Abe Saperstein.
8 In Nigger Heaven and in the blues art form in general, Black commoners were sometimes portrayed before White Americans as sexual, uneducated, lazy, crude, immoral, and criminal. This image brought on more debates about uplift and media suasion. Many Black elites agonized every time they saw “negative” Black portrayals in the media, convinced that these portrayals were reinforcing stereotypes and constituted the lifeblood of racist ideas.
They religiously believed that if only Whites saw more “positive” Black portrayals, ones that were chaste, educated, refined, moral, and law-abiding, then racist ideas would wither away and die. And although Black elites did not want Whites to view the negative media portrayals of Black commoners as representative of Black elites like them, they themselves often viewed such portrayals as representative of Black commoners.
9 Black commoners and their elite antiracist defenders, in contrast, saw the diverse truth of Black people in the portrayals and in their artistry. They cared little about the impact on racist ideas and enjoyed Nigger Heaven and the blues. And they should not have cared. The Americans who were generalizing the “negative” behavior of the individual Black characters in Nigger Heaven or the blues were showing that they had already consumed racist ideas. The Talented Tenth’s attempt at media suasion was a lost cause from the start.
While “negative” portrayals of Black people often reinforced racist ideas, “positive” portrayals did not necessarily weaken racist ideas. The “positive” portrayals could be dismissed as extraordinary Negroes, and the “negative” portrayals could be generalized as typical. Even if these racial reformers managed to one day replace all “negative” portrayals with “positive” portrayals in the mainstream media, then, like addicts, racists would then turn to other suppliers. Before Nigger Heaven and the blues, racists found their supply of reinforcing drugs in the minstrel shows, in science, in generalizing any negativities they saw in their interactions with any Black person.
The cross-class, cross-generational, cross-ideological portrayals debate was on in the 1920s, and it was centered in the portrayals of blues and then jazz, in Nigger Heaven, and then in Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem in 1928. Home to Harlem, the first Black-authored best seller, made Du Bois feel “distinctly like taking a bath.” Raging, Du Bois released his own Dark Princess: A Romance that year, portraying strong, intelligent women and sensitive, intelligent men, as he always did in his fiction, seemingly unaware that he, too, was reinforcing racist ideas.
10 Du Bois was reinforcing assimilationist ideas, and in the 1920s these ideas were advancing on American northern minds—particularly among intellectuals. The acceptance of those ideas appeared to be the by-product of the ongoing Great Migration of Black folk out of the segregated South, the ongoing activism of New Negroes to desegregate the North and northern scholarship, and the ongoing reproduction of Black folk. The advance was not the by-product of Talented Tenth activists successfully persuading racist Americans that Black domestics and farmers could live and work in the industrial North. Migrants to the North were forcibly breaking out of the confines of agricultural and domestic labor in the segregated South, and thus the racist ideas justifying those confines. In 1928, some of the leading race scholars came together to publish a landmark special issue on “The Negro” in the prestigious Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Over the past fifteen years, the Annals editor wrote, “students of race as well as laymen have had to discard or even reverse many of their theories.” The Great Migration had “upset” the “widely accepted theory” that segregating Blacks in their “tropical nature” would solve the Negro problem.
Black people “of both sexes” had demonstrated their ability to work in industrial occupations formerly thought to be beyond them. And the theory of poor Black health causing “extinction through degeneracy,” the editor said, had “suffered severe shocks”: “The old theories concerning absorption through biological assimilation have been unable in their original form to withstand the tests of research.” Moreover, “[Black] ethical and moral standards are developing,” the editor beamed, in assimilationist fashion. In short, the most prestigious social scientific journal in American academia symbolically announced the retreat of segregationist ideas. Segregationists had dominated American academe for nearly a century, since the pre–Civil War days of Samuel Morton and the polygenesists.
11 The special issue comprised a star-studded lineup of Black and White male scholars, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Robert Park, and esteemed University of Pennsylvania sociologist Thorsten Sellin. Sellin disclosed the “unreliability” of racial crime statistics for assessing actual levels of crime.
“The colored criminal does not as a rule enjoy the racial anonymity which cloaks the offenses of individuals of the white race,” Sellin wrote. “In setting the hall-mark of his color upon him, his individuality is in a sense submerged, and instead of a mere thief, robber, or murderer, he becomes a representative of his race.” And yet Sellin could not go as far as antiracist New Negro criminologists and concede that the “Negro’s real criminality is lower or as low as the white’s.” 12 Walter White, who on several occasions in the 1920s courageously “passed” to conduct brilliant NAACP investigations of southern lynching parties, suggested that the “color line” existed not only in America, but also in Europe and South Africa, and in “approximately the same proportions.” Possibly to remain politically correct, he did not mention Communist Russia, where state views on race did not approximate the other colonizing European nations. In the summer of 1928, the Sixth Congress of the Soviet Comintern declared that “the Party must come out openly and unreservedly for the right of Negroes to national self-determination in the southern states, where the Negroes form a majority of the population.” 13 American Communists were stirred to action. The “central slogan” of the party should be: “Abolition of the whole system of race discrimination”, blared The Communist. For Black labor activists, the Comintern’s 1928 statement (and expanded version in 1930) sounded like a lifeline for drowning Black labor. When American Federation of Labor head Samuel Gompers died in 1924, William Green continued his policy of saying Blacks were welcome in the AFL and denying the existence of racial discrimination in the ranks of labor unions. In doing so, Green effectively blamed Blacks for segregated unions and for their disproportionate placement at the bottom of labor pools.
14
CLAUDE G. BOWERS probably did not read the essays in the special issue of Annals. His attention was focused elsewhere in November 1928—on the election returns. Bowers was the editor of the New York Post, a prominent biographer of Thomas Jefferson, and as aggressively loyal to the Democratic Party as anyone. Angrily watching the GOP snatch southern states in the presidential election, he decided to remind White southerners that the Republicans had been responsible for the horror of Reconstruction. His bestselling book, published in 1929, was called The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln. “Historians have shrunk from the unhappy tasks of showing us the torture chambers,” he said, where guiltless southern Whites were “literally” tortured by vicious Black Republicans. We will never know just how many Americans read The Tragic Era, and then saw The Birth of a Nation again at their local theaters, and then pledged never to vote again for the Republican Party, never to miss a lynching bash, and never to consider desegregation—in short, never to do anything that might revive the specter of Blacks voting on a large scale and Whites being tortured. But there were many of them. More than any other book in the late 1920s, The Tragic Era helped the Democratic Party keep the segregationists in power for another generation.
15 “It seems to me that the Tragic Era should be answered—adequately, fully, ably, finally[,] & again it seems to me Thou art the Man!” Du Bois received this encouragement to answer the book from the legendary Black educator Anna Julia Cooper. Du Bois dove into his research for the book he later considered to be his best, better even than The Souls of Black Folk.
America could never have a truthful history “until we have in our colleges men who regard the truth as more important than the defense of the white race,” Du Bois concluded in Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880, published in 1935. Far from a tragic era, Du Bois argued, Reconstruction was the first and only time the United States had ever truly tasted democracy.
After the Civil War, Black and White commoners came together to build democratic state governments providing public resources for the masses of southerners. White elites overthrew these governments by securing the loyalty of White commoners, a feat accomplished not by offering them higher wages, but by holding up the rewards of the lucrative “public and psychological wage.” From Du Bois, historians now term these rewards the “wages of whiteness”: they were the privileges that would accrue to Whites through application of racist ideas and segregation. And to receive them, White laborers needed only stand shoulder to shoulder with White elites on lynched and raped and exploited Black bodies.
16 To a New Yorker reviewer, Du Bois took the “odd view, in distinction to most previous writers, that the Negro is a human being.” Du Bois’s Reconstruction history “changed or swept away” our “familiar scenes and landmarks,” wrote the reviewer for Time. But Du Bois did not blunt the appeal of The Tragic Era among southern segregationists. It is unlikely that racist readers would have their minds changed by a Black scholar. Indeed, it would take the legitimacy of a White historian and native southerner, historian Howard K. Beale of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to break the consensus of Columbia’s Dunning School in 1940.
17
THOUGH HIS BOOK certainly helped, Claude Bowers did not necessarily need to write The Tragic Era to break the back of the Republican Party. On October 29, 1929, the stock market crashed, ending the decades-long dominion of the pro-business GOP. The Great Depression hit the South and Black America particularly hard. “No jobs for niggers until every white man has a job,” became the Deep South’s slogan. In the North, Black migrants and natives were often found standing on “slave markets,” as these street corners were called in northern cities. White employers would come by and choose the cheapest day laborers. Sexual and fiscal exploitation were rampant.
18 In the midst of the Great Depression, with so many Americans suffering, it became harder to embrace eugenics—harder to blame one’s economic plight on hereditary factors. Assimilationists took advantage of this lull and continued to assume control of the scientific community. Franz Boas blasted segregationists in his presidential address before the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1931. Princeton psychologist Carl C.
Brigham confessed in 1932 that his earlier findings about IQ tests determining genetic Black inferiority were “without foundation” (although the use of Brigham’s SAT test only expanded). Scientific disciplines split into bickering factions, with geneticists distancing themselves from eugenicists. Meanwhile, eugenics was kept afloat by Nazi Germany and by the American birth control movement, the latter run by Margaret Sanger and her American Birth Control League.
19 Physical anthropology, a discipline studying biological racial distinctions, had split off from cultural anthropology, which studied cultural distinctions.
Boas was at the helm of cultural anthropology; the anthropologists at the helm of physical anthropology were Earnest A. Hooton and Carleton S. Coon at Harvard. In 1931, Hooton authored Up from the Ape, which became a staple in physical anthropology courses over the next few decades. “Physical characteristics,” Hooton explained, “which determine race are associated, in the main, with specific intangible and non-measurable but nevertheless real and important, temperamental and mental variations.” 20 Many of Hooton’s students entered the health-care sector, where segregationist ideas of biological races were rampant, and where workers were still treating diseases differently by race. Syphilis harmed Blacks much more than it did Whites, argued syphilis “expert” Thomas Murrell in Journal of the American Medical Association in 1910. But this theory had never been definitively proven. So in 1932, the US Public Health Service began its “Study of Syphilis in the Untreated Negro Male.” Government researchers promised free medical care to six hundred syphilis-infected sharecroppers around Tuskegee, Alabama. They secretly withheld treatment to these men and waited for their deaths, so they could perform autopsies. Researchers wanted to confirm their hypothesis that syphilis damaged the neurological systems of Whites, while bypassing Blacks “underdeveloped” brains and damaging their cardiovascular systems instead. The study was not halted until the press exposed it in 1972.
21 Hooton’s Up from the Ape received a complement when King Kong appeared on the big screen in 1933. The film shares the adventure tale of a colossal, primordial, island-dwelling ape who dies attempting to possess a young and beautiful White woman. Americans scraped their pennies together, took their minds off the Depression, and gave the film stunning box-office sales. Reviewers were captivated. “One of the most original, thrilling and mammoth novelties to emerge from a movie studio,” radiated the Chicago Tribune. Actually, King Kong was nothing but a remake of The Birth of a Nation, set in the island scenery of Tarzan, and then New York. But King Kong did not invite the controversy of The Birth of a Nation. The filmmakers had veiled the physically powerful Black man by casting him as the physically powerful ape. In both films, the Negro-Ape terrorizes White people, tries to destroy White civilization, and pursues a White woman before a dramatic climax—the lynching of the Negro-Ape. King Kong was stunningly original for showing images of racist ideas—without ever saying a word about Black people, like those southern grandfather clauses, poll taxes, and understanding clauses that had disenfranchised Black people.
22 Black critics struggled to condemn King Kong, but they had no trouble launching an attack on NBC’s radio comedy program Amos ’n’ Andy. More than 40 million White and Black listeners tuned in nightly in the 1930s to hear “The Perfect Song” from the score of The Birth of a Nation, and then Amos and Andy came on. The stereotypical characters included Coons, Toms, Mammies, and even a nagging, assertive, emasculating Sapphire—the first major media representation of an angry Black woman. While racist listeners laughed at the characters, antiracist listeners laughed with them, especially the profoundly likeable and imperfectly human main characters played by two White minstrel-show veterans, who shared the relatable troubles, fears, frustrations, and restrictions of urban Black life in the Great Depression.
Those African Americans who turned up their noses at Amos ’n’ Andy usually also despised Hollywood’s first Black celebrity: Stepin Fetchit, who played a series of roles depicting the “laziest man in the world.” Stepin Fetchit starred in Hearts in Dixie (1929), the first studio production to boast a majority Black cast. He was clever, for in all of his laziness, Fetchit’s characters hardly ever did any work, and the exasperated White characters were compelled to do the work themselves. Antiracist Blacks loved Fetchit’s character. He was a trickster of racists, harkening back to slavery’s tricksters.
23 Economically depressed Black folk had to find some way to eat, some way to lessen their oppressive workloads in the nastiest and most taxing jobs, even if it meant feigning laziness. They did not find much help from the government, receiving the same Old Deal of racial discrimination. NAACP chapters tried to assist, but their membership and resources took a drastic plunge. And the association’s national office was busy heading away from Du Bois and the struggles of poor Black folk. CHAPTER 27
Old Deal
W. E. B. DU BOIS did not share the vision of the new executive secretary of the NAACP in 1933, Walter White. Du Bois envisioned an association of common people like the Scottsboro Boys, the nine Black teenagers falsely convicted in 1931 by an all-White Alabama jury of gang-raping two young White women on a train. These poor, dark, unschooled, unassimilated teens— whom activists around the world rallied to free—did not necessarily suit Walter White’s vision. He wanted to transform the NAACP into a top-down litigating and lobbying outfit that put “refined” folks like himself before courts and politicians to persuade the White judges and legislators to end racial discrimination. Walter White, who sometimes passed as White, envisioned what a young, doubly-conscious Du Bois had envisioned. But in 1933, a sixty-five-year-old Du Bois had almost completely turned to antiracism.
1 Du Bois escaped the internal battles of the NAACP offices for a fivemonth visiting professorship at his old stomping ground, Atlanta University.
With the Great Depression spinning nearly every thinker onto economic matters, Du Bois taught two courses that spring semester of 1933 and mailed off two pieces to The Crisis on Marxism and the Negro. Howard’s orthodox Marxist economist Abram Harris begged Du Bois to reconsider his intertwining of Marxist and antiracist ideas, saying that Marx had not fully addressed the racial issue, despite his famous declaration that “labor in a white skin can never be free as long as labor in a black skin is branded.” But the present depressing reality, not an old theory, convinced Du Bois it was time to break ground on the ideology of antiracist socialism. In one of the 1933 articles, he described the United States as a “post-Marxian phenomenon” with a White “working-class aristocracy.” At the end of the decade, Du Bois would expound on his antiracist socialism in Dusk of Dawn (1940). “Instead of a horizontal division of classes, there was a vertical fissure, a complete separation of classes by race, cutting square across the economic layers,” Du Bois put forward. The vertical cutting knife was constructed of centuries of racist ideas. “This flat and incontrovertible fact, imported Russian Communism ignored, would not discuss.” 2 Du Bois’s antiracist socialism reflected his disenchantment with not just capitalism, but assimilationist thinking. In June 1933, Du Bois challenged those HBCU educators who were copying White college curricula during a commencement address at his alma mater, Fisk. Du Bois knew Thurgood Marshall’s class of 1929 at Lincoln University, in Pennsylvania, had overwhelmingly voted against the acquisition of Black professors and “Negro Studies,” explaining their votes through racist ideas. The antiracist calls for Negro Studies at Negro colleges kept coming from Du Bois, from Langston Hughes, and from the 1926 architect of the popular Negro History week, Carter G. Woodson. In his 1933 book, Woodson called attention to the subject. In his title, he called it The Mis-Education of the Negro. “It was well understood that . . . by the teaching of history the white man could be further assured of his superiority,” Woodson wrote. “If you can control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his action. . . . If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself”; and “if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.” And so assimilationist Black scholars were demanding the back door, decelerating the advance of Negro Studies in the 1930s.
3 The more antiracist W. E. B. Du Bois became, the more he realized that trying to persuade powerful racists was a waste of time, and the more certain he felt that Black people must rely on each other. What probably solidified the need for Black solidarity in Du Bois’s mind the most was studying the remedies for the Great Depression coming out of Washington. After taking office, President Franklin D. Roosevelt powered through what he called the “New Deal,” the flurry of government relief programs, job programs, labor rights bills, and capitalism-saving bills passed from 1933 to 1938. To secure the congressional votes of southern Democrats, Roosevelt and northern Democrats crafted these bills such that, to southern Blacks, they seemed more like the Old Deal. Just like in the old days before Roosevelt, segregationists were given the power to locally administer and racially discriminate the relief coming from these federal programs. And segregationists made sure that farmers and domestics—Blacks’ primary vocations—were excluded from the laws’ new job benefits, like minimum wage, social security, unemployment insurance, and unionizing rights. Not to be denied, Black southerners secretly joined sharecropper and industrial unions organized inside and outside of the CPUSA to fight for their own New Deal in the 1930s. Alabama Blacks during the Depression blended their homegrown antiracist socialism and Christian theology in a popular saying: “And the day shall come when the bottom rail shall be on top and the top rail on the bottom. The Ethiopians will stretch forth their arms and find their place under the sun.” 4 Northern Blacks joined the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which emerged in 1935. Some unions supported them in their dual fight against capitalism and racism. Other unions handed Black workers the Old Deal: in order to join the unions, “the Negroes will have to forget they are Negroes” and stop talking about that race stuff. These racist unions refused to do what could bring that about, eliminating racial discrimination.
5 Next to employment, there may have been no more devastating area of discrimination than housing. The Roosevelt administration’s new Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) handed Black residents the Old Deal when these agencies drew “colorcoded” maps, coloring Black neighborhoods in red as undesirable. The maps caused brokers to deny residents new thirty-year mortgages and prevented Black renters from purchasing a home and acquiring wealth. But, of course, the discrimination was ignored or discounted, and the fiscal habits of Black people were blamed for the growing fiscal inequities and segregation created by the policies. Discrimination for Blacks and government assistance for Whites usually won the day.
6 Although they received disproportionately less than Whites, Black Americans, especially northerners, did receive some assistance from the New Deal, more than they had from any other federal government program in recent memory. Grateful Black Republicans flocked to Roosevelt’s Democratic Party. They were enticed also by Roosevelt’s famed “Black cabinet” of forty-five Blacks in his administration. But no one endeared Black Americans more to the Roosevelt administration, and thereby to the Democratic Party, than FDR’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1934, the First Lady publicly endorsed the anti-lynching measure lying in Congress’s intensive care unit. She befriended the only woman in the “Black cabinet,” Mary McLeod Bethune, and the NAACP’s Walter White, and rejoiced about the Black gifts “of art and of music and of rhythm” that “come by nature to many of them.” 7 President Roosevelt made 1933 a pivotal year in the economic history of the United States, pushing through a series of economy-jump-starting bills during his first one hundred days in office. It could have also been a pivotal year in the racial history of the United States, but Roosevelt was too beholden to his party’s segregationists. Meanwhile, powerful Blacks were too beholden to assimilationists or persuasion tactics for Du Bois’s igniting articles to spark an antiracist movement. In the September 1933 issue of The Crisis, Du Bois published “On Being Ashamed,” a look back at the lifelong course of his own thinking, which he generalized as Black America’s thinking. From emancipation to around 1900, the “upper class of colored Americans,” he said, had striven “to escape into the mass of Americans,” practically “ashamed” of those who were not assimilating. But since then, “colored America has discovered itself,” and Du Bois had discovered himself and his singular antiracist consciousness. Again in the November Crisis, Du Bois admonished the “large number of American Negroes who in all essential particulars conceive of themselves as belonging to the white race.” And then, in the January 1934 issue, he surprised readers who were used to his integrationist politics by publishing “Segregation.” Following Marcus Garvey, Du Bois distinguished between voluntary and nondiscriminatory separation and involuntary and discriminatory segregation. Opposition to voluntary Black separation should not come from racist ideas, he insisted, or from “any distaste or unwillingness of colored people to work with each other, to cooperate with each other, to live with each other.” 8 Scores of Black newspapers reported reactions to the pieces, which ranged from approval to confusion to rage. Assimilationists who finally felt they were making some headway desegregating northern White America, religious believers in uplift suasion, and those who were stubbornly committed to the political racism that Black advancement could only come from White hands all looked upon Du Bois as a traitor. “The vast majority of the Negroes in the United States are born in colored homes, educated in separate colored schools, attend separate colored churches, marry colored mates, and find their amusements in colored YMCA’s and YWCA’s,” Du Bois went on to argue in 1934. Instead of using our energy to break down the brick walls of White institutions, why not use our energy refurbishing our own? Du Bois’s bosses at the NAACP and the presiding officers of the National Association of Colored Women did not agree. Among the older or richer or more assimilated or more doctrinaire voices of the Talented Tenth, Du Bois was “slipping,” as the Philadelphia Tribune editorialized.
9 But with each essay, Du Bois was winning the respect of a new generation. Carter G. Woodson, Zora Neale Hurston, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Langston Hughes all agreed with his assessments. And to the unionized southern sharecroppers, the migrants laughing at Amos ’n’ Andy and Stepin Fetchit, and the workers and students preparing to organize the National Negro Congress and its youth offshoot, the Southern Negro Youth Congress, Du Bois had never been better. Bolstered by this support, Du Bois swung back at the critics who believed that assimilation and “accomplishment by Negroes [could] break down prejudice.” “This is fable,” Du Bois thundered in the April 1934 Crisis. “I once believed it passionately. It may become true in 250 or 1,000 years. Now it is not true.” Du Bois never again seriously promoted uplift suasion.
10
W. E. B. DU BOIS knew he was “entering the eye of one of the deadliest political storms in modern times” when his train rolled into Berlin on June 30, 1936. The new Atlanta University professor was on a research trip after being pushed out of the NAACP for advocating Black empowerment instead of integration and assimilation. It did not take long for Du Bois to write home that the Jew was the Negro in Germany’s second year of Adolf Hitler’s chancellorship.
11 Eleven days before Du Bois’s arrival, the German-born Max Schmeling had squared off at Yankee Stadium against the pride of African America—and the scorn of segregationist America—the undefeated Brown Bomber, Joe Louis. Since the days of Jack Johnson, White masculinity had attempted to redeem itself not just through Tarzan, but by classing Black boxers like Joe Louis as “the magnificent animal,” as the New York Daily News dubbed him before the bout. Stunningly, Schmeling knocked Louis out, inspiring the cheers of White supremacists from Brooklyn to Berlin. Two years later, Louis avenged the loss in the racial “Fight of the Century.” 12 Hitler aimed to project the supremacy of Aryan athleticism through hosting the 1936 Summer Olympics. The disinterested Du Bois remained away from Berlin for much of August, but Jesse Owens, a little-known son of Alabama sharecroppers, made history at the games. He sprinted and leaped for four gold medals and received several stadium-shaking ovations from viewers, Nazis included. When Owens arrived back in the states to a ticker tape parade, he hoped he had also managed to change Americans’ racist ideas.
That was one race he could not win. In no time, Owens was running against horses and dogs to stay out of poverty, talking about how the Nazis had treated him better than Americans.
13 If anything, Jesse Owens’s golden runs deepened the color line, and especially the racist ideas of animal-like Black athletic superiority. Racist Americans refused to acknowledge the extraordinary opportunities Blacks received in sports like boxing and track, and the fact that a disciplined, competitive, and clever mind, more than a robust physique, was what set the greatest athletes apart. Instead, athletic racists served up an odd menu of anatomical, behavioral, and historical explanations for the success of Black sprinters and jumpers in the 1932 and 1936 Olympics. “It was not long ago that his ability to sprint and jump was a life-and-death matter to him in the jungle,” explained University of Southern California legend Dean Cromwell, Owens’s Olympic track coach. But Jesse Owens did not possess the “Negroid type of calf, foot and heel bone” that supposedly gave Blacks a speed advantage, Howard anthropologist W. Montague Cobb found in 1936. Since some track stars could pass for White, “there is not a single physical characteristic, including skin color, which all the Negro stars have in common which definitely classify them as Negroes.” Cobb did not receive many admirers in a United States where people were convinced about the benefits of natural Black athleticism and biological distinctions. Almost everyone still believed that different skin colors actually meant something more than different skin colors.
14
HIS SIX MONTHS of cultural sightseeing, of learning about the political economies of Germany, Japan, China, and Russia, came to an end. In the second week of January 1937, W. E. B. Du Bois set his eyes on San Francisco Bay from the deck of the Tatsuta Mara. He once again entered the United States, where Franklin D. Roosevelt had forged a commanding coalition of liberals, labor, enfranchised northern Blacks, and southern segregationists to win the most lopsided presidential election in history. Fearful of alienating segregationists, Roosevelt did not use his power to ram the anti-lynching bill, which was still on life support, through Congress. “If you succeed in the passage of this bill,” Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo resounded on January 21, 1938, in opposition, then “raping, mobbing, lynching, race riots, and crime will be increased a thousandfold; and upon your garments . . . will be the blood of the raped” and the lynched. Bilbo proposed Black colonization abroad and praised the doctrines of Nazi Germany. But it was those very Nazi doctrines—and the mass murders of German Jews, which began in 1938—that were enraging White intellectuals and turning them off from Jim Crow. In December 1938, in a unanimous resolution, the American Anthropological Association denounced biological racism.
15 In denouncing racism, scholars first had to define it. Beginning around 1940, Columbia anthropologist Ruth Benedict, a student of Franz Boas, dropped the term “racism” into the national vocabulary. “Racism is an unproved assumption of the biological and perpetual superiority of one human group over another,” she wrote in Race: Science and Politics (1940). She excused her class of assimilationists from her definition, though, all those women and men who assumed the cultural and temporary superiority of one human group over another. As assimilationists took the helm of racial thought, their racist ideas became God’s law, nature’s law, scientific law, just like segregationist ideas over the past century. Assimilationists degraded and dismissed the behaviors of African people and somehow projected the idea that they were not racist, since they did not root those behaviors in biology, did not deem them perpetual, spoke of historical and environmental causes, and argued that Blacks were capable of being civilized and developed.
16 Aside from Benedict’s Race: Science and Politics, the most influential assimilationist scientific text of the era came from E. Franklin Frazier, the former student of assimilationist Robert Park. In 1939, the Howard University sociologist published a definitive study entitled The Negro Family in the United States. In his introduction, Frazier expressed a debt to Du Bois’s Atlanta University Study on the Negro American Family thirty years prior, when Du Bois had concluded that “sexual immorality is probably the greatest single plague spot among Negro Americans.” Du Bois returned the compliment by praising Frazier’s brilliance as a Black sociologist, showing some of the holdover of his assimilationist ideas.
17 Frazier painted broad strokes of the urban, non-elite Black family as an ugly, disordered, matriarchal albatross. He described absent fathers and unmarried working mothers leaving their children alone, sons growing into criminals, and daughters learning to imitate “the loose behavior of their mothers” and transmitting “moral degeneracy” from one generation to the next. In Frazier’s sexist view, male-headed, nuclear, two-parent families were ideal. In his racist view, Black families statistically fell short of White families in fashioning this ideal. This “disorganized family life” in Black neighborhoods was caused by racial discrimination, poverty, cultural pathology, and the introduction of the matriarchal Black family during slavery. Completely “stripped of his cultural heritage,” the slave became a brute, Frazier argued. The slave’s emergence “as a human being was facilitated by his assimilation” of his master’s culture. And now, Black “assimilation of . . . the more formal aspects of white civilization” is ongoing in urban areas, Frazier concluded. “Intermarriage in the future will bring about a fundamental type of assimilation.” 18 E. Franklin Frazier was hardly alone in his assimilationist preference for becoming White. Psychologists Mamie Clark and Kenneth Clark found that the majority of the 253 Black children in their study in 1940 and 1941 preferred the white doll over the dark doll. Some junior high school students associated light to medium skin tones with intelligence and refinement, and dark tones with meanness and physical strength. The lighter, the better, paralleled the assimilationist idea of the straighter, the better. Since the 1920s and the craze of the conk—short for the recipe called congalene—Black men had joined Black women in straightening their hair. One teenager, “Shorty,” gave his friend from Michigan his first conk in Boston in 1941 or 1942. “We both were grinning and sweating,” Malcolm Little remembered. He stood there, looking in the mirror, “lost in admiration of my hair now looking ‘white.’” Two decades later, Malcolm X reflected on his “first really big step toward self-degradation: when I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man’s hair.” Malcolm by then realized that he “had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are ‘inferior’—and white people ‘superior’—that they will even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look ‘pretty’ by white standards.” 19
THE SUDDEN WILLINGNESS to name and define racism did little to obliterate it, especially in popular culture. In 1939, MGM released Gone with the Wind, based on Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer-winning 1936 novel. Gone with the Wind shared the story of the strong-willed daughter of a Georgia enslaver pursuing a married man. Scarlett O’Hara’s lack of morality aside, the White enslavers are portrayed as noble and thoughtful; the slaves as loyal but shiftless, and unprepared for freedom.
African American protesters failed to stop the movie’s success. It was almost universally praised by White film critics for its superb cast of actors and actresses, characters that seemed oh so real, bringing the old Georgia plantation to life before their eyes. The film smashed box-office records as hard as it smashed the truth of slavery, and it received ten Academy Awards.
It supplanted The Birth of a Nation as a box-office leader, becoming the most successful film at the box office in Hollywood history. In the same way that Tarzan became the primary medium through which Americans learned about Africa, Gone with the Wind became the primary medium through which they learned about slavery. The only problem was that, in both cases, the depictions were woefully incorrect.
20 The loyal, loving Mammy in Gone with the Wind, one of the most adored characters in Hollywood history, was played by the actress Hattie McDaniel.
“By enjoying her servitude, [Mammy] acts as a healing salve for a nation ruptured by the sins of racism,” political scientist Melissa Harris-Perry explained in a 2011 analysis of the film. McDaniel received an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, a first for a Black person. After Hattie McDaniel, Hollywood producers loved to wrap bandanas around dark and hefty mammies in a parade of films in the mid-twentieth century. The stereotype masculinized Black femininity while emphasizing the ultra-femininity of their White counterparts on the screen. Light-skinned Black women saw either exotic or tragic mulattoes on movie screens. These characters failed to be assimilated into White womanhood, and failed to seduce White men.
21 In the face of these racist caricatures, W. E. B. Du Bois clung to the promise of a group of young Black writers he met in Chicago in 1940. “One feels a certain sense of relief and confidence in meeting such sturdy pillars of the day to come,” Du Bois glowed to New York Amsterdam News readers. It was his first time meeting the sturdiest pillar of all. Born and raised in Mississippi, the thirty-one-year-old pillar had migrated to Memphis and then had gone on to Chicago, where he acquainted himself with the work and students of assimilationist Robert Park. Richard Wright, who mused on the “cultural barrenness of black life” in his autobiography, Black Boy (1945), proved to be the novelistic equivalent of sociologist E. Franklin Frazier. Both gave the United States powerful exhibits into American discrimination. Both benefited from the North’s intellectual march onto the assimilationist avenue during the Depression.
22 Wright echoed Frazier’s racist historical account of enslaved Africans being stripped of their culture and their “gradual dehumanization to the level of random impulse and hunger and fear and sex,” as Wright said to a friend in 1945. Northwestern anthropologist Melville Herskovits disputed this theory in The Myth of the Negro Past in 1941, bringing on the critical wrath of E.
Franklin Frazier. African culture was no less resilient than European culture, and the cultural exchange went two ways, Herskovits maintained. African Americans created a strong and complex culture of European “outward” forms “while retaining inner [African] values,” he insightfully argued. Those who had consumed the myth of the Negro past were suffering from “race prejudice.” 23 Anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston was one of the few Black intellectuals writing for popular audiences who was not suffering from this race prejudice, this cultural assimilationism sweeping the academy in the 1930s and 1940s.
Since her youthful days in Harlem’s Niggerati, Hurston had struggled to make a living as a woman writer—and a Black woman writer at that. She had worked for a New Deal jobs program designed to put writers back to work, but had received less compensation than less qualified White writers. She had gone on to release Mules and Men (1935), the finest collection of Black folklore ever recorded. Mules and Men did not fit in the canon of media suasionist works that showed either harsh or stereotype-defying Black life, thus upsetting Howard University literary scholar Sterling Brown. Instead, Hurston’s collection revealed the unique, varied, and imperfect humanity of southern Black folk.
24 Mules and Men seemed almost like a nonfictional appetizer to the novel Hurston released in 1937. The new book carried the indelible title Their Eyes Were Watching God. In it, Hurston guided readers into the depths of rural Black culture in Florida through a protagonist named Janie Mae Crawford.
After escaping the domineering confines of two well-off but domineering men, Janie marries and finds love in the much younger and much humbler Tea Cake, and finally feels her “soul crawl out of its hiding place.” Their Eyes Were Watching God explores the precarious love life of a heterosexual Black woman at the intersection of sexism and racism. “Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out,” Janie’s grandmother tells her. “So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.” Hurston chose neither to glorify nor denigrate southern Black culture, probably knowing that media suasionists and assimilationists would be upset with her choices. But Hurston hardly cared. Instead, she took a revealing shot at the lunacy of Black assimilationists through her construction of Mrs.
Turner, a friend of Janie’s. “Anyone who looked more white folkish than herself was better than she was in her criteria,” Hurston narrated. “Mrs.
Turner, like all other believers had built an altar to the unattainable— Caucasian characteristics for all. Her god would smite her, would hurl her from pinnacles and lose her in deserts, but she would not forsake his altars.” 25 Hurston did not sell many copies, despite the largely positive (and racist) reviews from White critics. The novel reflects “normal” southern Negro life “with its holdovers from slave times, its social difficulties, childish excitements, and endless exuberances,” according to one New York Times reviewer. Their Eyes Were Watching God is filled “with a limitless sense of humor, and a wild, strange sadness,” hailed the New York Herald Tribune’s reviewer. While racist Whites enjoyed Hurston’s depictions of every Negro “who isn’t so civilized that he has lost the capacity for glory,” to quote a reviewer from the New York Herald Tribune, Alain Locke, the godfather of media suasion, demanded that Hurston stop creating “these pseudo-primitives who the reading public still loves to laugh with, weep over, and envy.” Richard Wright, drowning in all of his cultural racism, unable and unwilling to see her missives of antiracist feminism, and unable to see the politics of her love story, said the novel “carries no theme, no message, no thought.” It only exploited the “quaint” aspects of Black life. It was like a minstrel show in a book, Wright maintained, satisfying the tastes of White readers.
26 Hurston did not need to respond to these Black male critics. “I am not tragically colored,” she had already told the world. “There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it.” But the sobbing school was selling out books. By the end of the decade, Their Eyes Were Watching God was out of print, and Hurston had to find work as a maid.
27 Hurston was ahead of her time. When her time came in the 1970s, long after her death, and antiracist feminists rediscovered Their Eyes Were Watching God, they fittingly partook of their own self-defining love affair, like Janie. They self-defined the novel’s greatness in a literary world rejecting it, unabashedly thrusting the once-rejected novel into the conversation as one of the finest—if not the finest—American novels of all time.
28
IN CRITICIZING THE greatest antiracist novelist of the interwar era, Richard Wright made way for himself. When W. E. B. Du Bois first laid his eyes on Wright in 1940, he was laying his eyes on the author of Native Son, a novel Du Bois admired. Native Son received a Book-of-the-Month Club award, and it made Wright the toast of the literary world in the 1940s. The novel’s main character, the bewildered (and bewildering) Bigger Thomas, represented “many” Negroes who “had become estranged from the religion and folk culture of his race” and lived “so close to the very civilization which sought to keep them out,” Wright explained. Bigger Thomas “was hovering unwanted between two worlds.” Thomas ended up killing both worlds—as embodied in the calculating rape and murder of his Black girlfriend and impulsive murder of a White girl. Through Bigger Thomas, Wright offered a gripping assimilationist ultimatum in Native Son: if African Americans were not allowed into White civilization, then they would turn violent.
29 By the end of March 1940, Native Son had sold 250,000 copies and garnered rave reviews from Whites and Blacks alike—more sold books and rave reviews than Hurston and Langston Hughes had received in two decades.
Wright seemed untouchable until a twenty-four-year-old upstart Harlem writer began his literary coup with an essay, called “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” in 1949. This literary lightning bolt struck media suasion and the assimilationist underpinning of “social protest fiction,” with its original cornerstone, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and its latest cornerstone, Native Son. In “overlooking, denying, evading” the “complexity” of Black humanity for persuasion’s sake, these protest novels were “fantasies, connecting nowhere with reality,” wrote James Baldwin, five years before releasing his finest novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. Like Stowe’s Uncle Tom, Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas tragically “admits that possibility of his being sub-human, and feels constrained, therefore, to battle for his humanity.” What Blacks needed to do was “infinitely more difficult”: they had to accept their imperfectly equal humanity, Baldwin declared. “It is the peculiar triumph of society—and its loss—that it is able to convince those people to whom it has given inferior status of the reality of this decree.” 30 All these literary battles played out during and after the Second Great War. It was a war that ended with the global triumph of American power. It ended with the need to convince the decolonizing world of the reality of the newest American decree: that the United States should take its place as leader of the free world. CHAPTER 28
Freedom Brand
LIKE MANY ACTIVISTS, W. E. B. Du Bois reeled from the height of the Nazi Holocaust of Jews and other non-Aryans. After the United States entered World War II in 1942, Du Bois felt energized by Black America’s “Double V Campaign”: victory against racism at home, and victory against fascism abroad. The Double V Campaign kicked the civil rights movement into high gear, especially up North, and the long-awaited comprehensive study of the Negro financed by the Carnegie Foundation kicked it into yet another gear, especially down South.
In 1936, Carnegie Foundation president Frederick P. Keppel had briefly considered some White American scholars when he had decided to heed Cleveland mayor Newton Baker’s recommendation to sponsor a study on the “infant race.” But there was almost no consideration of Zora Neale Hurston or the elder statesmen, W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson. Although White assimilationists and philanthropists were taking over the racial discourse in the academy, they were customarily shutting out Black scholars as being too subjective and biased to study Black people. It was amazing that the same scholars and philanthropists who saw no problem with White scholars studying White people had all these biased complaints when it came to Black scholars studying Black people. But what would racist ideas be without contradictions.
1 Carnegie officials drew up a list of only foreign European scholars and White officials stationed in European colonies who they believed could complete the study “in a wholly objective and dispassionate way.” They ended up selecting the Swedish Nobel-laureate economist Gunnar Myrdal, bringing him to the United States in 1938. With $300,000 in Carnegie funds, Myrdal employed a classroom of leading Black and White scholars, including Frazier and Herskovits—seemingly everyone except Hurston, Du Bois, and Woodson.
2 In his two-volume, nearly 1,500-page study, published in 1944, Myrdal shined an optimistic light on what he termed, in his title, An American Dilemma. He identified the racial problem as a “moral problem,” as assimilationists long had since the days of William Lloyd Garrison. White Americans display an “astonishing ignorance about the Negro,” Myrdal wrote. Whites ignorantly viewed Negroes as “criminal,” as having “loose sexual morals,” as “religious,” as having “a gift for dancing and singing,” and as “the happy-go-lucky children of nature.” Myrdal convinced himself—and many of his readers—that ignorance had produced racist ideas, and that racist ideas had produced racist policies, and therefore that “a great majority of white people in America would be prepared to give the Negro a substantially better deal if they knew the facts.” W. E. B. Du Bois probably shook his head when he read this passage. “Americans know the facts,” he may have thought to himself, as he once wrote. Du Bois had been sharing the facts for nearly fifty years, to no avail.
3 Du Bois did enjoy most of the two volumes, including the devastating assault on the rationales of segregationists, the encyclopedic analysis of racial discrimination, and the fallacy of southerners’ separate-but-equal brand.
“Never before in American history,” Du Bois admitted, had “a scholar so completely covered this field. The work is monumental.” E. Franklin Frazier agreed in his two glowing reviews. He praised Myrdal’s “objectivity” and willingness to describe “the Negro community for what it was—a pathological phenomenon in American life.” 4 And yet one of Myrdal’s solutions to White racism was still Black assimilation. “In practically all its divergences, American Negro culture is . . .
a distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American culture,” Myrdal surmised. “It is to the advantage of American Negroes as individuals and as a group to become assimilated into American culture.” An American Dilemma did for cultural assimilationists what Darwin’s Origin of Species had done for Social Darwinists, what Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had done for abolitionists, what Samuel Morton’s Crania Americana had done for polygenesists, and what Robert Finley’s Thoughts on Colonization had done for colonizationists. The book inspired a cadre of key politicians, lawyers, judges, preachers, scholars, capitalists, journalists, and activists to power up the next generation of racist ideas and the assimilationist wing of the civil rights movement. To Myrdal, neither segregationist scholars, with their “preconceptions about the Negroes’ inherent inferiority,” nor antiracist scholars, who were “basically an expression of the Negro protest,” could be objective the way he and the new assimilationists could.
5
AS WORLD WAR II neared its end in April 1945, W. E. B. Du Bois joined representatives of fifty countries at the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco. He pressed, unsuccessfully, for the new UN Charter to become a buffer against the political racism of colonialism. Then, later in the year, Du Bois attended the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, England, and was fittingly introduced as the “Father of Pan-Africanism.” A sense of determination pervaded the Fifth Congress. In attendance were two hundred men and women, some of whom would go on to lead the African decolonization movements, like Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta. These delegates did not make the politically racist request of past Pan-African congresses of gradual decolonization, as if Africans were not ready to rule Africans. The antiracist “Challenge to the Colonial Powers” demanded immediate independence from European colonial rule.
6 The United States emerged from World War II, looked over at the ravaged European and East Asian worlds, and flexed its unmatched capital, industrial force, and military arms as the new global leader. Only the Communist Soviet Union seemed to stand in America’s way. The Cold War between capitalism and communism to win the economic and political allegiances of decolonizing nations, and of their markets and resources, had begun. In March 1946, Dean Acheson warned that the “existence of discrimination against minority groups in this country has an adverse effect on our relations with other countries.” Acheson was a source as reliable as they came. He had headed the State Department’s delegation at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, which rebuilt the international capitalist system. President Harry S. Truman, who took over after Roosevelt died in 1945, listened to Acheson’s warning that globally circulating reports of discrimination, fanned by the flames of Russian media outlets, were harming US foreign policy and causing doors to shut on American businessmen, especially in the decolonizing nonWhite nations.
7 President Truman was prepared to make some reforms, but southern segregationists fought tooth and nail to maintain the racial status quo.
Mississippi’s firebrand senator Theodore Bilbo, for one, did not get the memo from Acheson. “I call on every red-blooded white man to use any means to keep the niggers away from the polls,” Bilbo said on a reelection campaign stop in 1946. Bilbo’s call to arms ignited such a firestorm that when he won his election, the newly elected Republican majority blocked him from reentering the Senate in 1947. (His southern peers preaching “states’ rights” to keep Blacks from the polls were allowed to take their seats.) Not to be silenced, Bilbo retired to his estate in southern Mississippi and self-published Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization to rally the troops against egalitarians. “That the Negro is inferior to the Caucasian has been proved by six thousand years of world-wide experimentation,” Bilbo claimed.
8 Take Your Choice hit southern bookstores during a landmark publishing year, 1947. Howard historian John Hope Franklin’s sweeping history of Black folk, From Slavery to Freedom, was a milestone, and pushed hard against the racist version of history promoted by Bilbo and Columbia’s fading Dunning School. From Slavery to Freedom wasn’t wholly antiracist, though. Franklin began with the racist historical conception that slavery had induced Black inferiority. This assertion did at least counteract Jim Crow historians’ claims of enslavement as “a civilizing force.” But both historical pictures were wrong and racist—one started Black people in inferiority before slavery, and the other ended Black people in inferiority after slavery. And Franklin cast Black women and poor people as impotent spectators in the Negro’s “struggle for the realization of freedom.” Prodded by Black feminist historians like Mary Frances Berry, Nell Irvin Painter, Darlene Clark Hine, and Deborah Gray White, John Hope Franklin—and the historically male-centered field of African American history—spent the rest of the century trying to correct these mistakes in subsequent editions and books.
9 As Franklin set the new course of Black (male) historiography in 1947 (decades before Black women’s history set a newer course), Columbia evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky and anthropologist Ashley Montagu set the new course of Social Darwinism—away from eugenics. The Ukraine-born Dobzhansky had famously joined evolution and genetics by defining evolution as a “change in the frequency of an allele within a gene pool.” The England-born Montagu had succeeded his mentor, Franz Boas, as America’s most eminent anthropological opponent of segregation when Boas died in 1942. Montagu’s Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race topped the charts that year, with Americans still shuddering from news of the Holocaust. Montagu exposed the dangerous myth of biological racial hierarchy and shared the antiracist concept that “all cultures must be judged in relation to their own history . . . and definitely not by the arbitrary standard of any single culture.” Montagu did not always follow his own advice, however.
In his “example of cultural relativity,” he judged that in the past 5,000 years, while European cultures will have advanced, “the kingdoms of Africa have undergone comparatively little change.” 10 On June 6, 1947, these two commanding scholars published their groundbreaking article in the all-powerful Science journal. “Race differences,” Dobzhansky and Montagu wrote, “arise chiefly because of the differential action of natural selection on geographically separate populations.” They rejected eugenic ideas of fixed races, fixed racial traits, and a fixed racial hierarchy. Human populations (or races) were evolving, they argued, and changing genetically through two evolutionary processes: one biological, one cultural. It was not nature or nurture distinguishing humans, but nature and nurture. This formulation became known as the dualevolution theory, or the modern evolutionary consensus. The consensus held as evolutionary biology grew over the course of the century. It was an area of growth that sometimes complemented the growth of molecular biology, particularly after American James Watson and Brits Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin discovered the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) in 1953.
Segregationists and assimilationists still found ways to adapt dualevolution theory to suit their ideas about Black people. Segregationists could argue that African populations contained the lowest frequencies of “good” genes. Assimilationists could argue that European populations had created the most complex and sophisticated societies, and were the most culturally evolved populations. Dobzhansky and Montagu ended up dethroning the eugenicists in science but enthroning new racist ideas, as reflected in the globally reported United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Statements on Race in 1950 and 1951.
11 UNESCO officials had assembled in 1950 an international dream team of scholars in Paris to draw up the final rebuttal to Nazism and eugenicists worldwide. Virtually all of the scholars, including Montagu, Dobzhansky, E.
Franklin Frazier, and Gunnar Myrdal, had expressed assimilationist ideas— proof that even as the scientific establishment recognized segregationist ideas as racist, they still ensured that assimilationism endured and dominated the racial discourse. While claiming that no human populations had any biological evolutionary achievements, these assimilationists spoke of the “cultural achievements” of certain human populations in the 1950 UNESCO Race Statement. And then, in 1951, geneticists and physical anthropologists figured, in their revised statement: “It is possible, though not proved, that some types of innate capacity for intellectual and emotional responses are commoner in one human group than in another.” Segregationist scholars set out to prove these innate racial differences in intelligence.
12 Even before the UNESCO statements appeared on front pages from New York City to Paris, President Harry S. Truman had taken the initiative to improve race relations in the United States. Racial reform was a vital, though relatively unremembered facet of the “Truman Doctrine” that he presented to Congress on March 12, 1947. He branded the United States the leader of the free world and the Soviet Union the leader of the unfree world. “The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms,” Truman proclaimed. Branding itself the leader of the free world opened the United States up to criticism about its myriad unfree racial policies (not to mention its unfree class, gender, and sexual policies). The harsh treatment of non-White foreigners, the string of nasty postwar lynchings of returning soldiers, the anti-lynching activism of the internationally renowned artist Paul Robeson, NAACP charges of human rights violations before the United Nations—suddenly these unfree racial policies and actions became a liability.
Protecting the freedom brand of the United States became more important for northern politicians than sectional unity and securing segregationists’ votes.
In addition, exploiting foreign resources became more important for northern tycoons than exploiting southern resources. Cold War considerations and burgeoning activism suddenly forced civil rights onto the national agenda.
But, of course, a recounting of these economic and political considerations was not the race relations story—or the history—that the Truman administration wanted consumed. Race relations, as Gunnar Myrdal wrote, were moral problems in need of morally based, persuasive solutions.
13 In October 1947, Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights issued its 178-page report, To Secure These Rights. The commission praised Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, condemned the “moral dry rot” at the heart of America, and recommended civil rights legislation. “Our domestic civil rights shortcomings are a serious obstacle” in US foreign policy, the commission stated, using the now acting secretary of state Dean Acheson as a source. But Gallop pollsters found that only 6 percent of White Americans thought these rights should be secured immediately—only 6 percent, apparently, was antiracist in 1947.
14 On February 2, 1948, Truman urged Congress to implement the recommendations of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, regardless of the lack of support among White Americans. “[The] position of the United States in the world today” made civil rights “especially urgent,” Truman stressed. The backlash was significant. One Texas representative kicked off his winning US Senate campaign by rallying 10,000 supporters in Austin to view Truman’s civil rights proposals as “a farce and a sham—an effort to set up a police state in the guise of liberty.” Lyndon Baines Johnson did not, however, join the “Dixiecrats” who bolted from the Democratic Party on account of Truman’s civil rights agenda. The Dixiecrats ran South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond for president on a segregationist platform that read eerily like South Africa’s apartheid Nationalist Party, which rose to power in 1948.
15 Thanks in part to the support of Black voters, President Truman defeated both Thurmond and the runaway favorite, Republican Thomas E. Dewey, in the election that year. In voting for him, Black voters and civil rights activists were especially pleased with Truman’s use of executive power in 1948 to desegregate the armed forces and the federal workforce. Civil rights activists had other reasons to be hopeful that year. Jackie Robinson desegregated Major League Baseball, and around the same time, the National Football League and the National Basketball Association were also desegregated. For decades thereafter, Black baseball, football, and basketball professionals were routinely steered into positions that took advantage of their so-called natural animal-like speed and strength (apparently, nonathletic Black folk were not really Black).
16 Civil rights activists were also pleased when Truman’s Justice Department filed a brief for Shelley v. Kramer. The case was decided on May 3, 1948, with the Supreme Court holding that the courts could not enforce all those Whites-only real estate covenants proliferating in northern cities to keep out migrants and stop housing desegregation. “The United States has been embarrassed in the conduct of foreign relations by acts of discrimination taking place in this country,” the Justice Department’s brief stated. It was the first time the US government had intervened in a case to vindicate Black civil rights. It would not be the last. Truman’s Justice Department filed similar briefs for other successful desegregation cases in higher education during the 1940s and early 1950s, ever reminding the justices of the foreign implications of discrimination.
17 The Shelley v. Kraemer decision was hardly popular. In 1942, 84 percent of White Americans told pollsters they desired separate Black sections in their towns. They apparently had little problem with the overcrowded conditions in those Black neighborhoods. But the 1948 decision did galvanize the open housing movement—and open the floodgates of White opposition to desegregation—in cities all over the postwar United States. The open housing movement featured a motley collection of folks. There were upwardly mobile Blacks and antiracist housing activists struggling for better housing options.
There were racist Blacks who hated living in neighborhoods with inferior Black folks and dreamed of living next to superior White folks. And there were assimilationists who believed that integrated neighborhoods could facilitate uplift suasion, improve race relations, and solve the nation’s racial problems. White real estate agents and speculators exploited everyone’s racist ideas through blockbusting—the practice of convincing White owners to sell their homes at a reduced price, out of the fear that property values were on the verge of a steep drop due to Blacks moving in, only to resell at above-market value to Black buyers eager for better housing stock. Real estate agents and speculators easily scared White owners about the consequences of Blacks moving in, warning of “an immediate rise in crime and violence . . . of vice, of prostitution, of gambling and dope,” as Detroit’s most famous anti-openhousing activist put it. White neighborhoods became interracial and ended up almost all Black, and the changing demographics from White to Black quickly led to worsening conceptions of the same neighborhood. (By the end of the twentieth century, the opposite was occurring as Whites “gentrified” Black urban neighborhoods. Black neighborhoods became interracial and eventually ended up almost all White, with the changing demographics from Black to White quickly leading to improved conceptions of the same neighborhood. Apparently, the sight of White people marked a good neighborhood, whereas the sight of Black people in the same place marked a bad one, thus demonstrating the power of racist ideas.) 18 When racist ideas and policies did not keep Blacks out, urban Whites sometimes turned to violence in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. However, most urban Whites preferred “flight over fight.” Real estate agents, speculators, and developers benefited, selling fleeing Whites new suburban homes. America experienced an unprecedented postwar boom in residential and new highway construction as White families moved to the suburbs and had to commute farther to their jobs. To buy new homes, Americans used wartime savings and the benefits of the GI Bill, passed in 1944. It was the most wide-ranging set of welfare benefits ever offered by the federal government in a single bill. More than 200,000 war veterans used the bill’s benefits to buy a farm or start a business; 5 million purchased new homes; and almost 10 million went to college. Between 1944 and 1971, federal spending for former soldiers in this “model welfare system” totaled over $95 billion. As with the New Deal welfare programs, however, Black veterans faced discrimination that reduced or denied them the benefits. Combined with the New Deal and suburban housing construction (in developments that found legal ways to keep Blacks out), the GI Bill gave birth to the White middle class and widened the economic gap between the races, a growing disparity racists blamed on poor Black fiscal habits.
19 While urban Black neighborhoods in postwar America became the national symbol of poverty and crime, the suburban White neighborhoods, containing the suburban White houses, wrapped by white picket fences, lodging happy White families, became the national symbol of prosperity and safety. All of the assimilationist chatter in the media, in science, and in popular culture hardly reined in the segregationist backlash to the open housing movement, but it did do wonders uniting historically oppressed European ethnic groups in White suburbia. Ethnic enclaves in cities transfigured into multiethnic suburbs, the land where the Italians, Jews, Irish, and other non-Nordics finally received the full privileges of Whiteness.
“Neither religion nor ethnicity separated us at school or in the neighborhood,” remembered Karen Brodkin, a University of California at Los Angeles anthropologist whose Jewish family moved to Long Island, New York, in 1949.
20 NAACP chapters lent their support to the open housing movement. But engaging in activism was like walking a tightrope in postwar America. In 1950, Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy started leading a witch hunt for “Communists,” meaning virtually anyone critical of the dominant ideas of the day, such as capitalism, America’s pro-colonial policy abroad, northern assimilation, and southern segregation. Walter White and his right-hand man Roy Wilkins had to keep the NAACP’s legal activism and uplift suasion carefully within the status quo of anti-communism and assimilation. “The Negro wants change in order that he may be brought in line with the American standard,” Wilkins wrote in The Crisis in December 1951.
Meanwhile, antiracists and socialists, and certainly antiracist socialists, were being threatened, fired, arrested, and jailed on trumped-up charges. An eightytwo-year-old Du Bois was arrested (and exonerated) in 1951. The US State Department revoked Du Bois’s passport, as it did Paul Robeson’s, and attempted to silence the St. Louis–born Black dancer Josephine Baker in France, all to manage the freedom brand of the United States abroad.
21 But the State Department could not stop William Patterson, chairman of the short-lived Civil Rights Congress, from slipping into Geneva in 1951 and personally delivering a petition, entitled We Charge Genocide, to the United Nations Committee on Human Rights. Signed by Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Trinidadian journalist Claudia Jones (founder of England’s first Black newspaper), and almost one hundred others, the petition—and documentation of nearly five hundred brutal crimes against African Americans in the late 1940s—blasted the credibility of the self-identified leader of the free world.
The true “test of the basic goals of a foreign policy is inherent in the manner in which a government treats its own nationals,” the antiracists boomed from Switzerland to Swaziland.
22 Scurrying into damage control, the US State Department found some anti-communist, racist, unconditionally patriotic Blacks to go on speaking tours, such as Max Yergan, who became an outspoken defender of apartheid South Africa. In 1950 or 1951, a cadre of brilliant propagandists in what became known as the United States Information Agency (USIA)—the US foreign public relations agency—drafted and circulated a pamphlet around the world entitled The Negro in American Life. The pamphlet acknowledged the past failings of slavery and racism and declared that there had been racial reconciliation and redemption, made possible, of course, by the power of American democracy. These branders of the New America ingeniously focused on the history of racial progress (and not the racist present) and on Black elites (and not the Black masses) as the standards of measurement for American race relations. The question was not whether America had eliminated racial disparities. That was deemed impossible—just as the elimination of slavery was once deemed impossible. The question was whether the Talented Tenth were experiencing less discrimination today than yesterday. “It is against this background that the progress which the Negro has made and the steps still needed for the full solutions of his problems must be measured,” the pamphlet read. Over the past fifty years, there had emerged more Black “large landowners,” successful businessmen, and college students. Activism had not driven this “tremendous pace” of racial progress, but uplift and media suasion, The Negro in American Life imagined, evoking the imagination of Gunnar Myrdal. While fifty years ago, “the majority of whites, northern and southern, were unabashed in their estimate of the Negro as an inferior,” the growing “number of educated Negroes, and their journalists and novelists, have made the white community keenly aware of the cruel injustice of prejudice.” The Negro in American Life declared to the world that “today, there is scarcely a community where that concept has not been drastically modified.” In fact, there was scarcely a community in the early 1950s where prejudice was not fueling cruelly unjust White campaigns against open housing, desegregated education, equal job opportunities, and civil rights. The Negro in American Life displayed pictures of a desegregated classroom and community that few Americans would have recognized, while admitting “much remains to be done.” The pamphlet asked, given how bad things were, is it not amazing how far we’ve come? With every civil rights victory and failure, this line of reasoning became the standard past-future declaration of assimilationists: we have come a long way, and we have a ways to go. They purposefully sidestepped the present reality of racism.
23 The Negro in American Life attempted to win the hearts and minds—and markets and resources—of the decolonizing non-White world. Nothing would be better for our interests in Asia than “racial harmony in America,” said the US ambassador to India, Chester Bowles, at Yale in 1952. However, after the illustrious World War II general Dwight D. Eisenhower entered the White House in 1953, he discontinued the Truman Doctrine on civil rights. Racial discrimination was not a societal problem, but a failure of individual feelings, Eisenhower lectured. The solution lay not in force, but in “persuasion, honestly pressed,” and “conscience, justly aroused,” Eisenhower added. This pipe dream allowed the shrewd Eisenhower to conciliate northern readers of An American Dilemma and southern readers of Take Your Choice.
24 Before Truman left office, his Justice Department had submitted a brief for yet another desegregation case before the US Supreme Court, a combined case of five NAACP lawsuits against desegregated schools in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and Washington, DC. “It is in the context of the present world struggle between freedom and tyranny that the problem of race discrimination must be viewed,” the brief stated in support of desegregation.
The Court heard oral arguments in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka for a second time on December 8, 1953. At a White House dinner, Eisenhower invited his newly appointed chief justice, Earl Warren, and grabbed a seat next to the eminent lawyer defending the segregationists, John Davis, someone the president repeatedly praised as “a great man.” On a stroll to the coffee table, Eisenhower told Warren he could understand why southerners wanted to make sure “their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big black buck.” 25 On May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Warren, in his opinion of the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision, somehow agreed with the lower court’s finding that southern schools had “been equalized, or are being equalized.” Thus, for the Supreme Court, Brown v. Board of Education was about the psychological impact of separate schools on Black children. Warren found the answer in the social science literature, the recent explosion of studies trying to figure out why Black people had not assimilated and why the racial disparities still persisted. With the slavery-deforming-Black-people theory no longer sustainable in the early 1950s, assimilationists conjured up the segregationdeforming-Black-people theory. They cited the famous doll tests of psychologists Kenneth Clark and Mamie Clark, as well as popular books on the subject, such as The Mark of Oppression (1951) by two psychoanalysts.
Discrimination and the separation of the races, the assimilationists argued, had been having a horrible effect on Black personalities and self-esteem.
26 In his Brown opinion, Chief Justice Warren footnoted the famous doll tests as evidence of the negative impact of segregation on Black people. He felt sure enough to write, “To separate [colored children] from others of similar age and qualification solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” In short, “segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children.” It tended to retard their “education and mental development” and deprived “them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system,” Warren surmised. “We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” 27 Warren essentially offered a racist opinion in this landmark case: separate Black educational facilities were inherently unequal and inferior because Black students were not being exposed to White students. Warren’s assimilationist problem led to an assimilationist solution over the next decade to desegregate American schools: the forced busing of children from Black schools to inherently superior White schools. Rarely were White children bused to Black schools. By the 1970s, segregationist White parents from Boston to Los Angeles were opposing forced busing, spitting on reformers all types of racist vitriol, while antiracist Black parents were demanding two-way busing or the reallocation of resources from the over-resourced White schools to the under-resourced Black schools. These antiracist plans were opposed by both assimilationists and segregationists, who seemed to assume, like the Court, that majority-Black schools could never be equal to majority-White schools.
Not many Americans immediately recognized the assimilationist reasoning behind the Brown decision. But Zora Neale Hurston did. She was then sixty-four and living in Florida, and she was as sharp as ever despite her recent literary descent. “If there are not adequate Negro schools in Florida, and there is some residual, some inherent and unchangeable quality in white schools, impossible to duplicate anywhere else, then I am the first to insist that Negro children of Florida be allowed to share this boon,” wrote Hurston in the Orlando Sentinel. “But if there are adequate Negro schools and prepared instructors and instructions, then there is nothing different except the presence of white people. For this reason, I regard the ruling of the U.S.
Supreme Court as insulting rather than honoring my race.” Calling out civil rights leaders, she framed it a contradiction in terms to scream race pride and equality while at the same time spurning “Negro teachers and selfassociation.” Hurston’s widely reprinted letter was praised by segregationists and antiracists, but sparked only ire from assimilationists.
28 Despite its basis in racist reasoning, for many—and of course many did not actually read Warren’s opinion—the effect of the landmark decision overturning Plessy v. Ferguson honored Black people. “I have seen the impossible happen,” wrote W. E. B. Du Bois. USIA propagandists were as elated as Black folk. Within an hour of the announcement, the Voice of America broadcast the news to Eastern Europe. Press releases were drawn up in multiple languages. The decision “falls appropriately within the Eisenhower Administration’s many-frontal attack on global communism,” the Republican National Committee had to state on May 21, 1954, since Eisenhower refused to endorse Brown.
In the Jim Crow South, Mississippi senator James Eastland vowed— rallying the troops—that the South “will not abide by or obey this legislative decision by a political court.” And the segregationist resistance came so fast and so strong that when it came time for the Supreme Court to implement the Brown decision in 1955, for the first time in US history, the Court ended up vindicating a constitutional right and then “deferr[ing] its exercise for a more convenient time,” sending Du Bois and other activists into a rage. Still, southern segregationists closed ranks and organized “massive resistance” through violence and racist ideas. Apparently, they cared more about defending their separate-but-equal brand before America than defending the American-freedom brand before the world.
29 CHAPTER 29
Massive Resistance
THE MOST NOTORIOUS victim of what was to be called “massive resistance” to desegregation was fourteen-year-old Emmett Till on August 28, 1955. For hissing at a Mississippi White woman, hooligans beat Till so ruthlessly that his face was unrecognizable during his open casket funeral in his native Chicago. The gruesome pictures were shown around the enraged Black world. On March 12, 1956, nineteen US senators and seventy-seven House representatives signed a southern manifesto opposing the Brown v.
Board of Education decision for planting “hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding.” The Klan fielded new members, and elite segregationists founded White citizens councils. Southern schools ensured that their textbooks gave students “bedtime” stories, as historian C. Vann Woodward called them, that read like Gone with the Wind.
But the civil rights movement kept coming. W. E. B. Du Bois was stunned watching the unfolding Montgomery Bus Boycott during the 1956 election year. It was not the boycott’s initial mobilizer, Alabama State College professor Jo Ann Robinson, nor the boycott’s drivers, those walking Black female domestics, who surprised him. Any serious history student of Black activism knew that Black women were regularly driving forces. Du Bois was stunned by the twenty-seven-year-old figurehead of the boycott. A Baptist preacher as a radical activist? Du Bois had never thought his eighty-eightyear-old eyes would see a preacher like Martin Luther King Jr. Du Bois sent a message of encouragement, and King sent a grateful reply. King had read Du Bois’s books, and he later characterized him as “an intellectual giant” who saw through the “poisonous fog of lies that depicted [Black people] as inferior.” Du Bois also sent a proclamation to the Indian journal Gandhi Marg. King—in his strident commitment to nonviolent civil disobedience— could be the American Mahatma Gandhi.
1 King’s other favorite scholar penned the most controversial Black book of 1957, possibly of the entire decade. The gender racism of E. Franklin Frazier in Black Bourgeoisie, depicting White women as more beautiful and sophisticated than Black women, Black wives as domineering, and Black husbands as “impotent physically and socially,” was as manifest as his historical racism. “Slavery was a cruel and barbaric system that annihilated the negro as a person,” Frazier said. This theory resembled the racist thesis of historian Stanley Elkins in his smash hit Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959). And yet Frazier had overcome his cultural racism. The popular social science literature about the psychological effects of discrimination that molded the Brown decision had remolded Frazier’s old ideas of assimilation as psychological progress, and he now believed in assimilation as regression. No group of Black people held more firmly to assimilationist ideas, Frazier argued, than the Black bourgeoisie, who tried to “slough off everything . . . reminiscent of its Negro origin.” 2 Frazier sounded like the ministers of Elijah Muhammad’s quickly growing Chicago-based Nation of Islam (NOI) in the late 1950s. “They won’t let you be White and you don’t want to be Black,” the son of Garveyites, former convict, and the NOI’s new Harlem minister liked to say. “You don’t want to be African and you can’t be an American. . . . You in bad shape!” CBS’s Mike Wallace brought Malcolm X and the NOI to the attention of millions in the 1959 sensational five-part television series entitled The Hate That Hate Produced: A Study of the Rise of Black Racism and Black Supremacy. Elijah Muhammad and his ministers opposed assimilationists; instead, they preached racial separation (not Black supremacy), arguing that Whites were an inferior race of devils. Ironically, Black and White assimilationists, clothed in racism and hate for everything Black, condemned the Nation of Islam for donning racism and hate for everything White.
3 In Black Bourgeoisie, Frazier delivered the most withering attack on the Black middle class in the history of American letters, commercializing a new class racism: the Black bourgeoisie as inferior to the White bourgeoisie, as more socially irresponsible, as bigger conspicuous consumers, as more politically corrupt, as more exploitative, and as sillier in their “politics of respectability,” to use historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s recent term.
Despite, or rather because of, Frazier’s overreach into class racism, Black Bourgeoisie had a significant effect on the civil rights movement, galvanizing Martin Luther King’s generation of middle-class youngsters to break away from what Frazier termed their apathetic “world of make-believe.” 4 And this powerful force of youthful courage, growing more powerful by the day, was needed to resist the segregationist massive resistance that seemed to grow more massive with each passing day. Segregationists had stripped the Civil Rights Act of 1957 of its enforcement powers, making it practically a dead letter when it passed on August 29, 1957. On September 4, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus deployed the National Guard to block the Little Rock Nine from desegregating Central High School, defying a federal court order.
With the globally circulating sights and sounds of government troops defending howling segregationist mobs, Little Rock harmed the American freedom brand.
“Our enemies are gloating over this incident,” Eisenhower wailed in a nationally televised speech, “and using it everywhere to misrepresent our whole nation.” Eisenhower and his aides agonized for two weeks, seeking solutions that could keep both his political image in the South and the American image abroad intact, to no avail. On September 24, in a decision he later regarded as “the most repugnant act in all his eight years in the White House,” Eisenhower sent in federal troops to protect the Little Rock students as they entered the school. Some civil rights activists recognized the incredible power Cold War calculations had given them to embarrass America into desegregation. Still others believed and hoped that Gunnar Myrdal’s dictum was coming true: that the civil rights movement was persuading away racist ideas.
5
A NINETY-YEAR-OLD DU BOIS was hopeful, too, in another way. “Today, the United States is fighting world progress, progress which must be towards socialism and against colonialism,” he said, speaking to seven hundred students and faculty at Howard University in April 1958. Later in the year, having gotten his passport back, Du Bois toured Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and Communist China, where he happily met Chairman Mao Tsetung. When Mao started musing about the “diseased psychology” of African Americans, showing that he was attuned to the latest racist social science, Du Bois interjected. Blacks were not diseased psychologically; they lacked incomes, Du Bois explained, inciting a debate and a fusillade of questions from Mao. When Du Bois expressed some of his failures as an activist, Mao interjected. Activists only failed when they stopped struggling. “This, I gather,” Mao said, “you have never done.” 6 Martin Luther King Jr. had not stopped struggling, either. But Du Bois had soured on King, deciding in late 1959 that he was not the American Gandhi after all. “Gandhi submitted [to nonviolence], but he also followed a positive [economic] program to offset his negative refusal to use violence,” Du Bois said. At the time, Black critics were soundly blitzing King’s philosophy of nonviolence, but some were also taking the civil rights movement figurehead to task on some of his lingering racist ideas. In 1957, King received a letter for his “Advice for the Living” column in Ebony magazine. “Why did God make Jesus white, when the majority of peoples in the world are non-white?” Jesus “would have been no more significant if His skin had been black,” King responded. “He is no less significant because his skin was white.” The nation’s most famous Black preacher and activist prayed to a White Jesus? A “disturbed” reader ripped off a letter to Ebony. “I believe, as you do, that skin color shouldn’t be important, but I don’t believe Jesus was white,” the reader stated. “What is the basis for your assumption that he was?” With only a basis in racist ideas, King did not respond.
7 Du Bois and King had not let up on the pedal of struggle, and neither had college students. Four freshman at North Carolina A&T trotted into a Woolworths in Greensboro on February 1, 1960. They sat down at its restricted counter and remained until the store closed. Within days, hundreds of students from area colleges and high schools were “sitting in.” News reports of these nonviolent sit-ins flashed on screens nationally, setting off a sit-in wave to desegregate southern businesses. “Students at last to the rescue,” rejoiced Du Bois, urging them on. By April, students were staging sit-ins in seventy-eight southern and border communities, and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had been established.
8 If civil rights activists hoped that the attention they received would sway presidential candidates, they were disappointed. The Democratic nominee for president, a dashing Massachusetts senator, said as little about civil rights as possible, both on the campaign trail and in the first-ever televised presidential debates. John F. Kennedy excited activists by supporting the Democrats’ civil rights plank, but disappointed them by naming a suspected opponent of civil rights, Texas senator Lyndon B. Johnson, as his running mate.
Kennedy and his GOP opponent, Richard Nixon, both tried not to take sides. The civil rights and massive resistance movements were stirring debates in many forums, including the scholarly and artistic communities, which in turned further stirred the civil rights and the resistance movements.
An airline reservation agent in New York, who wrote fiction in her spare time, touched a chord among activists and sympathizers of the civil rights movement with a brilliantly crafted novel. Harper Lee did not expect the story of a young girl coming to terms with race relations in the South to become an instant and perennial best seller, or to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. To Kill a Mockingbird—about a White lawyer successfully defending a Black man wrongly accused of raping a White woman—became the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the civil rights movement, rousing millions of readers for the racial struggle through the amazing power of racist ideas. The novel’s most famous homily, hailed for its antiracism, in fact signified the novel’s underlying racism. “‘Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy,” a neighbor tells the lawyer’s strong-willed daughter, Scout. “That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” The mockingbird is a metaphor for African Americans. Though the novel was set in the 1930s, the teeming Black activism of that era was absent from To Kill a Mockingbird. African Americans come across as spectators, waiting and hoping and singing for a White savior, and thankful for the moral heroism of lawyer Atticus Finch.
There had been no more popular racist relic of the enslavement period than the notion that Black people must rely on Whites to bring them their freedom.
9 Civil rights activists waging sit-ins were hardly waiting on White saviors.
Then again, many of these students were expecting their noble campaigns of nonviolent resistance to touch the moral conscience of White Americans, who in turn would save southern Blacks from segregationist policies. That strategy sapped W. E. B. Du Bois’s pleasure with the civil rights movement. And activists desegregating southern businesses that low-income Blacks could hardly afford did not seem like racial progress to Du Bois, who refused to measure racial progress by the gains of Black elites. Du Bois had been waiting for a political-economic program to arise. He had been waiting for something like scholar Michael Harrington’s shocking anti-poverty best seller in 1962, The Other America. “A wall of prejudice is erected to keep the Negroes out of advancement,” Harrington wrote. “The more education a Negro has, the more economic discrimination he faces.” Harrington used statistics to show that uplift suasion did not work. Moreover, he pointed out that “the laws against color can be removed, but that will leave the poverty that is the historic and institutionalized consequence of color.” By the time Harrington tossed a war on poverty onto the Democrats’ agenda, Du Bois had left the country.
10 On February 15, 1961, a few days short of his ninety-third birthday, Du Bois received a note from President Kwame Nkrumah informing him that the Ghana Academy of Learning would financially support his long-desired Encyclopedia Africana. By the year’s end, Du Bois had arrived in Ghana. But within a few months, he suffered a prostrate infection. Nkrumah later came to Du Bois’s home for his ninety-fourth birthday dinner in 1962. When Nkrumah rose to depart, Du Bois reached for the president’s hand and warmly thanked him for making a way for him to end his years on African soil. Du Bois turned somber. “I failed you—my strength gave out before I could carry out our plans for the encyclopedia. Forgive an old man,” said Du Bois. Nkrumah refused. Du Bois insisted. Du Bois’s smile broke the somber silence, and Nkrumah departed in tears.
11
IT WAS LEADERS of decolonized nations like Kwame Nkrumah, who were friendly to the Soviet Union and critical of American capitalism and racism, that US diplomats were trying to attract (if not undermine). But the viciously violent southern response to civil rights protests was embarrassing the United States around the non-White world. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy tried to shift the movement’s energy from the humiliating direct-action protests to voter registration. He also established the Peace Corps, reportedly to “show skeptical observers from the new nations that Americans were not monsters.” Northern universities were trying to show that they were not monsters, either, by gradually opening their doors to Black students. Down south, the Kennedy administration sent in troops to desegregate the University of Mississippi, receiving applause from the international community that was not lost on JFK.
12
MOST AMERICANS DID not consider assimilationists to be racists. They did not consider northern segregation and racial disparities to be indicative of racist policies, and the avalanche of antiracist protests for jobs, housing, education, and justice from Boston to Los Angeles in 1963 hardly changed their views on the matter. The eyes of the nation, the world, and American history remained on the supposedly really racist region, the South. On January 14, 1963, George Wallace was inaugurated as the forty-fifth governor of Alabama. He had opposed the Klan as a politician and judge until he had lost to the Klan-endorsed candidate in the 1958 gubernatorial election. “Well boys,” Wallace said to supporters after the defeat, “no other son-of-a-bitch will ever outnigger me again.” Wallace joined the secret fraternity of ambitious politicians who adopted the popular racist rhetoric that they probably did not believe in private.
13 The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, the major television stations, and a host of other media outlets came to cover what reporters expected to be a nastily polarizing speech. George Wallace did not disappoint, showing off his new public ideology. “It is very appropriate that from this cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us time and again down through history,” he said. He was sounding one of the two timeworn American freedom drums: not the one calling for freedom from oppression, but the one demanding freedom to oppress. “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth,” he intoned, “ . . . I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” 14 Wallace became the face of American racism, when he should have been rendered only as the face of segregation. Harper Lee should have reigned as the face of assimilation in the literary world, while sociologists Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan should have reigned as the faces of assimilation in the scholarly world. In 1963, they published their best-selling book, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. Pulitzer Prize–winning Harvard historian Oscar Handlin, in his New York Times review of the book, hailed its treatment of Negroes as an “excellent” and “much-needed corrective to many loose generalizations.” This assessment typified the wild affirmations the book received from northern academics.
15 Native New Yorkers trained in postwar assimilationist social science, Glazer and Moynihan met one another while working in the Kennedy administration on poverty issues. Beyond the Melting Pot propagated a ladder of ethnic racism—that is, a hierarchy of ethnic groups within the racial hierarchy—situating the hard-working and intelligent Jews over the Irish, Italians, and Puerto Ricans, and West Indian migrants over the “Southern Negro” because of West Indians’ emphasis on “saving, hard work, investment, [and] education.” Glazer penned the chapter on the Negro, saying that “the period of protest” must be succeeded by “a period of selfexamination and self-help.” He claimed that “prejudice, low income, [and] poor education only explain so much” about “the problems that afflict so many Negroes.” As an assimilationist, Glazer, citing Frazier, attributed the problems to both discrimination and Black inferiority, particularly the “weak” Black family, the “most serious heritage” of slavery. From historical racism, Glazer turned to the class racism of Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie. Unlike the other middle classes, “the Negro middle class contributes very little . . . to the solution of Negro social problems,” he wrote. And from historical racism and class racism, he turned to cultural racism and political racism to explain why problems persisted in the Black community. “The Negro,” he said, “is only an American, and nothing else. He has no values and culture to guard and protect.” He criticized the Negro for insisting “that the white world deal with his problems because, he is so much the product of America.” In Glazer’s vivid imagination, the Negro insisted that “they are not his problems, but everyone’s.” And this, he said, was “the key to much in the Negro world,” that Blacks were not taking enough responsibility for their own problems.
16 Ironically, the actual “key to much in the Negro world” may have been the very opposite of Glazer’s formulation—the Negro may have been taking too much responsibility for the Negro’s problems, and therefore not doing enough to force the “white world” to end the discriminatory sources of the problems.
Elite Blacks, raised on the strategy of uplift suasion and its racist conviction that every Negro represented the race—and therefore that the behavior of every single Black person was partially (or totally) responsible for racist ideas —had long policed each other. They had also policed the masses and the media portrayals of Blacks in their efforts to ensure that every single Black person presented herself or himself admirably before White Americans. They operated on the assumption that every single action before White America either confirmed or defied stereotypes, either helped or harmed the Negro race.
Beyond the Melting Pot saluted the leadership of the National Urban League, the NAACP, and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) for their lobbying and legal activism. Glazer and Moynihan neither saluted nor mentioned the many local groups that were fiercely confronting segregationists in the streets in 1963. Nor did they mention the youngsters of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in Mississippi, Malcolm X in Harlem, or Martin Luther King Jr.
On April 3, 1963, King helped kick off a spate of demonstrations in Birmingham, bringing on the wrath of the city’s ruggedly segregationist police chief, “Bull” Conner. Nine days later, on Good Friday, eight White anti-segregationist Alabama clergymen signed a public statement requesting that these “unwise and untimely” street demonstrations cease and be “pressed in the courts.” Martin Luther King Jr., jailed that same day, read the statement from his cell. Incited, he started doing something he rarely did. He responded to critics in his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” published far and wide that summer. King attacked not only those Alabama preachers, but also the applauding audience of Beyond the Melting Pot. He confessed that he had “almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom” was not the segregationist, “but the white moderate . . . who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.” King explained that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” 17 No one knows whether the sickly W. E. B. Du Bois read King’s jailhouse letter. But just as Du Bois had done in 1903, and later regretted, in his letter King erroneously conflated two opposing groups: the antiracists who hated racial discrimination, and the Black separatists who hated White people (in groups like the Nation of Islam). King later distanced himself from both, speaking to a growing split within the civil rights movement. More and more battle-worn young activists had grown critical of King’s nonviolence and disliked the pains he took to persuade away the racist ideas of Whites. More and more, they were listening to Malcolm X’s sermons about self-defense, about persuading away the assimilationist ideas of Blacks, about mobilizing antiracists to force change. On May 3, 1963, these young people watched on television as Bull Connor’s vicious bloodhounds ripped the children and teenagers of Black Birmingham to pieces; as his fire hoses broke limbs, blew clothes off bodies, and slammed bodies into storefronts; and as his officers clubbed marchers with nightsticks.
The world watched, too, and the United States Information Agency reported back to Washington about the “growing adverse local reactions” around the world to the “damaging pictures of dogs and fire hoses.” Kennedy met with his top advisers to discuss this “matter of national and international concern.” He dispatched an aide, Burke Marshall, to Birmingham to help negotiate the desegregation accord that stopped the protests. Kennedy also sent soldiers to ensure safety for the desegregation of the University of Alabama on May 21, 1963. Governor George Wallace put on a show for his voters, standing in the schoolhouse door, admonishing the “unwelcome, unwanted and force-induced intrusion . . . of the central government.” State Department officials had to put in overtime when agitated African leaders critical of the United States met in Ethiopia on May 22, 1963, to form the Organization of African Unity. Secretary of State Dean Rusk sent out a circular to American diplomats assuring them that Kennedy was “keenly aware of [the] impact of [the] domestic race problem on [the] US image overseas and on achievement [of] US foreign policy objectives.” Rusk said Kennedy would take “decisive action.” On June 11, John F. Kennedy addressed the nation—or the world, rather —and summoned Congress to pass civil rights legislation. “Today we are committed to a worldwide struggle to promote and protect the rights of all who wish to be free,” Kennedy said. “We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it.” The eyes of the nation and the world turned to Washington’s legislators, who kept their eyes on the world. When the new civil rights bill came before the Senate Commerce Committee, Kennedy asked Secretary of State Rusk to lead off the discussion. Racial discrimination had “had a profound impact on the world’s view of the United States and, therefore, on our foreign relations,” testified Rusk. Non-White newly independent peoples were “determined,” he said, “to eradicate every vestige of the notion that the white race is superior or entitled to special privileges because of race.” By August 1963, 78 percent of White Americans believed that racial discrimination had harmed the US reputation abroad. But not many inside (or outside) of the Kennedy administration were willing to admit that the growing groundswell of support in Washington for strong civil rights legislation had more to do with winning the Cold War in Africa and Asia than with helping African Americans. Southern segregationists cited those foreign interests in their opposition. South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond refused “to act on some particular measure, because of the threat of Communist propaganda if we don’t,” as he fired at Rusk.
18 Kennedy’s introduction of civil rights legislation did not stop the momentum of the long-awaited March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Though it had been organized by civil rights groups, the Kennedy administration controlled the event, ruling out civil disobedience. Kennedy aides approved the speakers and speeches, a lineup that did not include a single Black woman, or James Baldwin or Malcolm X. On August 28, approximately 250,000 activists and reporters from around the world marched to the area between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.
Before Kennedy officials happily read the USIA’s report saying that numerous foreign newspapers contrasted the opportunity to march that had been “granted by a free society” with “the despotic suppression practiced by the USSR,” and before King ended the round of approved speeches with his rousing and indelible antiracist dream of children one day living “in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” and before Mahalia Jackson sang into the blazing throng of approved placards and television cameras, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins came as the bearer of sad news.
W. E. B. Du Bois had died in his sleep the previous day in Ghana, Wilkins announced. “Regardless of the fact that in his later years Dr. Du Bois chose another path,” Wilkins intoned, “it is incontrovertible that at the dawn of the twentieth century his was the voice calling you to gather here today in this cause.” The well-trained journalist at the helm of the NAACP reported the truth. Indeed, the younger Du Bois had called for such a gathering, hoping it would persuade and endear millions to the lowly souls of Black folk. And yes, the older Du Bois had chosen another path—the antiracist path less traveled— toward forcing millions to accept the equal souls of Black folk. It was the path of civil disobedience that the young marchers in the SNCC and CORE had desired for the March on Washington, a path a young woman from Birmingham’s Dynamite Hill was already marching upon and would never leave. Roy Wilkins did not dwell on the different paths. Looking out at the lively March on Washington, he solemnly asked for a moment of silence to honor the ninety-five-year movement of a man.
19 PART V
Angela Davis CHAPTER 30 The Act of Civil Rights
SUMMER TOURISTS HAD already left the gaudy beachside casinos in Biarritz by the time she arrived for her Junior Year in France Program. She had come a long way from her hometown of Birmingham and her Brandeis University campus outside of Boston. On September 16, 1963, Angela Davis walked with classmates in Biarritz and skimmed a Herald Tribune. She noticed a headline about four girls dying from a church bombing. It did not hit her at first. Then, suddenly, it registered. She stopped, closing her eyes in disbelief as her puzzled companions looked on. She pointed to the article. “I know them,” she spluttered out. “They’re my friends.” Avoiding her classmates and their perfunctory condolences, Davis kept staring at the familiar names in sadness and rage. Cynthia Wesley. Carole Robertson. Carol Denise McNair. Addie Mae Collins.
The only deceased girl Angela Davis did not know personally was Addie Mae. Angela’s mother, Sallye, had taught Denise in the first grade. The Robertson and Davis families had been close friends as long as she could remember. The Wesleys lived around the block in the hilly Birmingham neighborhood where Angela grew up.
1 Angela had been four years old when her parents, Sallye and B. Frank Davis, had desegregated that neighborhood in 1948. White families began moving out as Black families moved in. Some stayed and violently resisted.
Because of White resisters’ bombing of Black homes, the neighborhood was often called “Dynamite Hill.” But the bombings did not deter Angela’s parents, especially her mother.
Sallye Davis had been a leader in the Southern Negro Youth Congress, an antiracist Marxist organization that protested against economic exploitation and racial discrimination in the late 1930s and 1940s, drawing the admiration of W. E. B. Du Bois. On Dynamite Hill, Sallye and her husband nurtured Angela on a steady diet of anticapitalist and antiracist ideas. And so, when Angela started the first grade, she was struck by the inequities at lunchtime: hungry children without enough food had to sit there and watch other children eat. Like her mother, she gave to the hungry children. She grew up detesting the poverty all around her. And she grew up detesting the poverty of the assimilationist ideas all around her, deciding, “very early, that I would never —and I was categorical about this—never harbor or express the desire to be white.” 2 She ventured north in the fall of 1959 to attend an integrated high school in Manhattan, where her history teachers nurtured her to socialism. She joined a youth organization, called “Advance,” and picketed a Woolworths in solidarity with the rash of southern sit-ins in the spring of 1960. Davis stayed in the North for college, enrolling as one of the few Black students at Brandeis University in 1961. She wanted to continue her activism, but Brandeis’s White campus activists alienated her. “It seemed as if they were determined to help the ‘poor, wretched Negroes’ become equal to them, and I simply didn’t think they were worth becoming equal to,” she remembered.
3 Davis found other outlets. She attended the Eighth World Festival for Youth and Students in Helsinki, Finland, in the summer of 1962. When one of her favorite authors came for a lecture at Brandeis in October 1962, Davis captured a front-row seat. James Baldwin was nearing the publication of his luminous 1963 book for activists critical of the civil rights movement’s integrationist, persuasion, and nonviolent thrusts. He titled the manifesto The Fire Next Time, with an epigraph quoting an African American spiritual to put the title in context: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, / No more water, the fire next time!” 4 News of the Cuban missile crisis prematurely ended Baldwin’s lecture.
But later he gave a powerful speech at a hastily organized antiwar rally on Brandeis’s campus. Davis was there listening intently to Baldwin—and then to Brandeis’s sophisticated Marxist philosopher, who would become her intellectual mentor and who was fast becoming the intellectual mentor of the rapidly organizing “New Left”: Herbert Marcuse. Davis listened intently again when yet another towering mentor of 1960s youth came to speak at Brandeis. Davis could not relate to Malcolm X’s religious deprecations of Whites. But she “was fascinated,” she later said, “by his description of the way Black people had internalized the racial inferiority thrust upon us by a white supremacist society.” 5 By her junior year, Davis had gone to study in France, only to be thrust tragically back to Dynamite Hill by the murder of those four girls. Davis did not view the Birmingham church bombing on September 15, 1963, as an isolated incident carried out by southern White extremists. “It was this spectacular, violent event, the savage dismembering of four little girls, which has burst out of the daily, sometimes even dull, routine of racist oppression,” in Davis’s words. But Davis’s classmates in France—indoctrinated by the mythology of the antiracist North and racist South—refused to accept her persisting analysis of “why the whole ruling stratum in their country, by being guilty of racism, was also guilty of this murder.” 6 The nineteen-year-old Angela Davis was hardly alone in the world in her analysis of American race relations. The Birmingham murders signified the massive resistance to the civil rights movement and the naked ugliness of American racism. As the brutality turned negative eyes to the United States in the decolonizing world, the stakes were raised for civil rights legislation to reassure the American freedom brand, forcing Kennedy’s hand. President Kennedy announced his “deep sense of outrage and grief” over the Birmingham bombing. He launched an investigation, which caused his southern approval ratings to dip. Kennedy tried to boost his ratings two weeks later on a trip to Dallas. He never made it back to Washington.
7 On November 27, 1963, two days after JFK’s burial, the thirty-sixth president of the United States buried any lingering global fears that civil rights legislation had died with Kennedy. “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long,” declared Lyndon Baines Johnson to Congress. Civil rights had hardly topped Kennedy’s agenda, but activists and diplomats felt relieved.
8 On March 26, 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X came to watch the debate over the civil rights bill, meeting for the first and only known time at the US Capitol. Malcolm had recently been pushed out of the corrupted Nation of Islam. When he left Washington, he started warning American racists of the “ballot or the bullet.” At a church in Detroit on April 12, 1964, Malcolm offered his plan for the ballot instead of the bullet: going before the United Nations to charge the United States with violating the human rights of African Americans. “Now you tell me how can the plight of everybody on this Earth reach the halls of the United Nations,” Malcolm said, his voice rising, “and you have twenty-two million Afro-Americans whose churches are being bombed, whose little girls are being murdered, whose leaders are being shot down in broad daylight!” And America still had “the audacity or the nerve to stand up and represent himself as the leader of the free world . . . with the blood of your and mine mothers and fathers on his hands—with the blood dripping down his jaws like a bloody-jawed wolf.” 9
THE DAY AFTER the Detroit speech, Malcolm, who was Muslim, boarded a plane and embarked on his obligatory hajj to Mecca. After a lifetime in the theater of American racism that began with the lynching of his father, Malcolm X on this trip saw for the first time “all colors, from blue-eyed blonds to black-skinned Africans,” interacting as equals. The experience changed him. “The true Islam has shown me that a blanket indictment of all white people is as wrong as when whites make blanket indictments against blacks,” he said. From then on, he took on the racist wolves and devils, no matter their skin color. Though American media outlets reported his change, the narrative of Malcolm X as hating White people endured.
10 Malcolm returned to the States on May 21 in the middle of the longest filibuster in the Senate’s history—fifty-seven days. The senators who drove the filibuster were trying to stop the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Behind the scenes, supporters of the act agreed on outlawing future discrimination, but disagreed on what to do about past discrimination. Antiracists requested that the act’s fair employment provisions eliminate the established seniority rights of White workers. Assimilationists balked at the idea, while segregationists tried to make the request into a wedge issue. Segregationists knew White Americans were commonly refusing to acknowledge the accumulated gains of past discrimination—and nothing signified those gains in the labor market better than seniority. But the bill’s powerful assimilationist backers were adamant that it would not affect White seniority. “We don’t think that one form of injustice can be corrected or should be corrected by creating another,” AFL-CIO lawyer Thomas E. Harris said. Equating measures that healed inequities with measures that created inequities? It was as ridiculous as equating the harmful crime with the harmful punishment.
11 Harris believed that taking away Whites’seniority “would be unjust to the white workers” who had been building seniority in their jobs for many years.
However, not to do so would be unjust to the Negro workers who had been discriminated against for just as long. Not tackling the seniority question (and past discrimination) would be “akin to asking the Negro to enter the 100-yard dash forty yards behind the starting line,” argued the general counsel for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Carl Rachlin. But that was what the writers of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were largely asking the Negro to do.
And when the Negro lost the dashes and the racial disparities persisted, racists could blame the supposed slowness of the Negro, not the head starts of accumulated White privilege.
12 And so, as much as the Civil Rights Act served to erect a dam against Jim Crow policies, it also opened the floodgates for new racist ideas to pour in, including the most racist idea to date: it was an idea that ignored the White head start, presumed that discrimination had been eliminated, presumed that equal opportunity had taken over, and figured that since Blacks were still losing the race, the racial disparities and their continued losses must be their fault. Black people must be inferior, and equalizing policies—like eliminating or reducing White seniority, or instituting affirmative action policies—would be unjust and ineffective. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 managed to bring on racial progress and progression of racism at the same time.
The most transformative verbiage of the 1964 act was the wording that legislated against clear and obvious “intention to discriminate,” such as southern “Whites only” public policies. But what about those northern discriminators with private policies that had long kept Blacks out? What about those who were still blockbusting and segregating northern cities, and still creating, maintaining, and increasing racial inequities in wealth, housing, and education? If the northern backers of the act defined polices as racist by their public outcomes instead of their public intent, then they would be hardpressed to maintain the myth of the antiracist North and the racist South. By not principally focusing on outcome, discriminators had to merely privatize their public policies to get around the Civil Rights Act. And that is precisely what they did.
Though the members of Congress were aware of these privatizing forces, they chose not to explicitly bar seemingly race-neutral policies that had discriminatory public outcomes through racial disparities. On the urgings of segregationists, in fact, Congress actually provided the means for the progression of racism. Section 703(h) of Title VII allowed employers “to give and to act upon the results of any professionally developed ability test.” Though eugenicists had been discounted in mainstream America, members of Congress and their constituents had thoroughly embraced their standardized mental tests as having the capacity to assess what did not exist: general intelligence. In the job industry, in education, and in many other sectors of society, officials could justify their racial disparities by pointing to test scores and claiming they were not intending to discriminate. And to racist Americans, the racial gaps in the scores—the so-called achievement gap— said something was wrong with the Black test-takers—not the tests.
13 The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the first important civil rights legislation since the Civil Rights Act of 1875. It outlawed public, intentional discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in government agencies and facilities, public accommodations, education, and employment; established a federal enforcement structure; and empowered victims of discrimination to sue and the government to withhold federal funds from violators. Hours after President Johnson signed it into law on July 2, 1964, he appeared before television cameras to play up the American “ideal of freedom” for cynics in Los Angeles and Lagos and Lhasa. “Today in far corners of distant continents,” he proclaimed, “the ideals of those American patriots still shape the struggles of men who hunger for freedom.” Malcolm X had another take on the Civil Rights Act, echoing the thoughts of antiracist young minds like Angela Davis’s. If the government could not enforce the existing laws, he asked the Organization of African Unity conference in 1964, “how can anyone be so naïve as to think all the additional laws brought into being by the civil-rights bill will be enforced?” 14
THE PASSAGE OF the Civil Rights Act in 1964 hardly hurt Lyndon B.
Johnson’s commanding position for reelection during that election year.
Johnson did face an improbable challenge for the Democratic nomination from Alabama governor George Wallace, however. After taking a public stand for segregation the year before, Wallace had received more than 100,000 approving letters, mostly from northerners. Wallace realized, as he told NBC’s Douglas Kiker, “they all hate black people. . . . That’s it! . . . The whole United States is southern!” 15 During his campaign, George Wallace sounded more like the 1964 Republican nominee than LBJ. Arizona senator Barry Goldwater’s nomination for president signified his star power over the escalating conservative movement in American politics, powered by his 1960 charttopper, The Conscience of a Conservative. Inspiring millions of Democrats to turn Republican, including Hollywood movie star Ronald Reagan, Goldwater’s tract deeply massaged those Americans who had outgrown (or never needed) government assistance. Welfare “transforms the individual from a dignified, industrious, self-reliant spiritual being into a dependent animal creature without his knowing it,” Goldwater wrote without a shred of evidence. Many proud, dignified, industrious, self-reliant members of the White middle class, who had derived their wealth from the welfare of inheritance, the New Deal, or the GI Bill, accepted Goldwater’s dictum as truth, despite the fact that parental or government assistance had not transformed them or their parents into dependent animal creatures. After looking at White mothers on welfare as “deserving” for decades, these Goldwater conservatives saw the growing number of Black mothers on welfare as “undeserving”—as dependent animal creatures.
16 Barry Goldwater and his embryonic conservative movement hardly worried Johnson as he arrived on the beaches of Atlantic City for the Democratic National Convention in August 1964. But he was worried about those northern activists who had violently protested against police brutality and economic exploitation in urban summer rebellions from Harlem to Chicago. In the South, SNCC field agents had weathered Klan brutality during their “Mississippi Freedom Summer,” which brought hundreds of northern college students to teach in antiracist “Freedom Schools” and assist in organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). The interracial MFDP came to Atlantic City and requested to be seated in place of the regular Mississippi delegation, which everyone knew had been elected through fraud and violence. The MFDP’s electrifying vice chair, Fannie Lou Hamer, riveted the nation in her live televised testimony at the convention. “If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America? The land of the free and the home of the brave? Where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hook, because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings.” President Johnson called an emergency press conference to divert the networks away from Hamer’s transfixing testimony, and then later he offered the Freedom Party a “compromise”: two nonvoting seats accompanying the segregationist delegation. “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats!” bellowed Fannie Lou Hamer. MFDP and SNCC activists traveled home carrying a valuable lesson about power politics. Persuasion does not work.
“Things could never be the same,” SNCC’s Cleveland Sellers recalled.
“Never again were we lulled into believing that our task was exposing injustices so that the ‘good’ people of America could eliminate them. . . .
After Atlantic City, our struggle was not for civil rights, but for liberation.” Malcolm X’s empowerment philosophy of Black national and international unity, self-determination, self-defense, and cultural pride started to sound like music to the ears of the SNCC youths. At the end of 1964, Malcolm X returned from an extended trip to Africa to a growing band of SNCC admirers and a growing band of enemies.
17 On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was gunned down by some of those enemies at a Harlem rally. When James Baldwin heard the news in London, he was beside himself. “It is because of you,” he shouted at London reporters, “the men that created this white supremacy, that this man is dead!” From his nationally watched voting registration campaign in Selma, Alabama, Martin Luther King Jr. was reflectively restrained. “While we did not always see eye to eye on methods to solve the race problem, I always had a deep affection for Malcolm and felt that he had a great ability to put his finger on the existence and root of the problem.” On February 22, 1965, the New York Times banner headline read: “The Apostle of Hate Is Dead.” 18 Actor Ossie Davis christened Malcolm “our shining black prince” days later in his magnetic eulogy before the overflow crowd at Harlem’s Faith Temple of the Church of God in Christ. “Many will say . . . he is of hate—a fanatic, a racist,” Davis said. And the response would be, “Did you ever really listen to him? For if you did, you would know him. And if you knew him you would know why we must honor him.” 19 Antiracist Americans did honor him, especially after recordings and transcripts of his speeches began to circulate, and after Grove Press published The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Journalist Alex Haley had collaborated with Malcolm to write the autobiography, which was billed by Eliot FremontSmith of the New York Times as “a brilliant, painful, important book” upon its release in November 1965. Malcolm X’s ideological transformation—from assimilationist, to anti-White separatist, to antiracist—inspired millions.
Possibly no other American autobiography opened more antiracist minds than The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Malcolm condemned the half-truth of racial progress, bellowing that you don’t stick a knife in a person’s back nine inches, pull it out six inches, and say you’re making progress. “The black man’s supposed to be grateful? Why, if the white man jerked the knife out, it’s still going to leave a scar!” He argued that White people were not born racist, but that “the American political, economic and social atmosphere . . .
automatically nourishes a racist psychology in the white man.” He encouraged antiracist Whites who had escaped racism to fight “on the battle lines of where America’s racism really is—and that’s in their own home communities.” He ferociously attacked “the white man’s puppet Negro ‘leaders,’” who had exploited “their black poor brothers,” and who did not want separation or integration, but only “to live in an open, free society where they can walk with their heads up, like men, and women!” But nothing was more compelling than Malcolm X’s unstinting humanism: “I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” 20
ANTIRACIST AMERICANS HAD some reason to hope for justice when Congress took up the voting rights bill after hundreds of marchers were bludgeoned on a bridge outside of Selma on March 7, 1965. Yet even with a voting rights bill, the United States would not be finished, President Johnson had the courage to declare in his commencement address to Howard University graduates in June. “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains[,] and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” It was quite possibly the most antiracist avowal ever uttered from the lips of a US president. And Johnson was just getting started. “We seek not just freedom but opportunity,” he said. “We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.” Racial progress had come primarily for “a growing middle class minority,” while for poor Blacks, Johnson said, “the walls are rising and the gulf is widening.” In Johnson’s time—in the midst of civil rights legislation—racial disparities in unemployment had grown, income disparities had grown, and disparities in poverty, in infant mortality, and in urban segregation had all grown—as he pointed out at Howard University. Why had all this happened?
Johnson offered two “broad basic reasons”: one antiracist (“inherited poverty” and the “devastating” legacy of discrimination), and one racist (the devastation wrought by “the breakdown of the Negro family structure”).
21 Johnson’s Howard address raised the hopes of civil rights leaders, and it delighted Johnson’s assistant secretary of labor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose Beyond the Melting Pot was still widely read in urban sociology.
Moynihan in fact had composed Johnson’s speech with the ideas still fresh in his mind from an unpublished government report he had just completed.
Moynihan’s “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” which had reached Johnson’s desk by May 1965, statistically demonstrated that civil rights legislation over the past ten years had not improved the living conditions of most African Americans. But then, after all these antiracist revelations about the progression of racism, Moynihan had rambled into assimilationist ideas. He argued that discrimination had forced the Negro family into “a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.” Moynihan ended up following E. Franklin Frazier—his main scholarly source—in judging femaleheaded families as inferior (in sexist fashion), and in judging the Black family as a “tangle of pathology” (in racist fashion). He portrayed Black men as emasculated by discrimination. And since they were overburdened from assuming their societal roles as heads of households, they were more oppressed than Black women. They needed, Moynihan pleaded, national action.
22 On August 6, 1965, around the time the Moynihan report was leaked to the press, Johnson signed the momentous Voting Rights Act. Discriminators seeking a way around the Civil Rights Act of 1964 could have easily learned some lessons from voting discriminators, who had been hiding their intent for six or seven decades in their literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses, which were all void of racial language. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 not only banned these seemingly race-neutral policies, which had almost totally disenfranchised southern Blacks, but also required that all changes to southern voting laws now be approved by a federal official, who would ensure that they would not “have the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color.” The intent-focused Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not nearly as effective as the outcome-focused Voting Rights Act of 1965. In Mississippi alone, Black voter turnout increased from 6 percent in 1964 to 59 percent in 1969. The Voting Rights Act ended up becoming the most effective piece of antiracist legislation ever passed by the Congress of the United States of America. But the act was not without its loopholes. “We recognized that increased voting strength might encourage a shift in the tactics of discrimination,” Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach testified to Congress.
“Once significant numbers of blacks could vote, communities could still throw up obstacles to discourage those voters or make it difficult for a black to win elective office.” Katzenbach’s recognition of the fact that racist policies could progress in the face of racial progress proved prophetic.
23 CHAPTER 31
Black Power
IT DID NOT take long for the renewed progression of racism to show itself.
On August 9, 1965, three days after Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, Newsweek alarmed Americans by disclosing the findings of the leaked Moynihan report: “The rising rate of non-white illegitimacy,” the “runaway curve in child welfare cases,” and the “social roots” of the “American dilemma of race” were all from the “splintering Negro family.” A photograph of Harlem kids tossing bottles contained the caption, “A time bomb ticks in the ghetto.” The time bomb exploded two days later in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, when a police incident set off six days of violence, the deadliest and most destructive urban rebellion in history. In its aftermath, the victimized mockingbird that had attracted so much paternalistic compassion in the past few years became the aggressive panther that needed to be controlled.
1 As Watts burned, Angela Davis boarded a boat headed for Germany. She had come back from France, studied under philosopher Herbert Marcuse, and graduated from Brandeis. Now she was headed to Marcuse’s intellectual home of Frankfurt to pursue her graduate studies in philosophy. She “felt again the tension of the Janus head—leaving the country at that time was hard for me,” as she later said. But the antiracist struggle was globalizing, as she learned in France and would learn again in Germany. Shortly after she arrived, in September 1965, an international group of scholars gathered due north in Copenhagen for the Race and Colour Conference. Davis apparently did not attend. But if she had, she would have heard lectures on the racist role of language symbolism. Scholars pointed out everyday phrases like “black sheep,” “blackballing,” “blackmail,” and “blacklisting,” among others, that had long associated Blackness and negativity.
2 The language symbolism was no less striking in two new American identifiers: “minority” and “ghetto.” For centuries, racists had construed Black folk as minors to White majors, and that history could be easily loaded into their latest identifier of the supposed lesser peoples: minorities. The appellation only made sense as a numerical term, and as a numerical term, it only made sense indicating national population or power dynamics. But it quickly became a racial identifier of African Americans (and other nonWhites)—even in discussions that had nothing to do with national issues. It made no sense as another name for Black people, since most Black people lived, schooled, worked, socialized, and died in majority-Black spaces. The term only made sense from the viewpoint of Whites, who commonly related to Black people as the numerical minority in their majority-White spaces, and elite Blacks, who were more likely to exist as the numerical minority in majority-White spaces. And so, class racism—downgrading the lives of Black commoners in majority-Black spaces—became wrapped up in the term “minority,” not unlike a term that psychologist Kenneth Clark had popularized after putting aside brown and light dolls.
In 1965, Clark published his seminal text, Dark Ghetto. The term “ghetto” was known as an identifier of the ruthlessly segregated Jewish communities in Nazi Germany. Though social scientists like Clark hoped the term would broadcast the ruthless segregation and poverty that urban Blacks faced, the word quickly assumed a racist life of its own. “Dark” and “Ghetto” would become as interchangeable in the racist mind by the end of the century as “minority” and “Black,” and as interchangeable as “ghetto” and “inferior,” “minority” and “inferior,” “ghetto” and “low class,” and “ghetto” and “unrefined.” In these “dark ghettoes” lived “ghetto people” expressing “ghetto culture” who were “so ghetto”—meaning that the neighborhoods, the people, and the culture were inferior, low class, and unrefined. Class racists and some suburban Americans saw little distinction between impoverished Black urban neighborhoods, Black working-class urban neighborhoods, and Black middle-class urban neighborhoods. They were all ghettoes with dangerous Black hooligans who rioted for more welfare.
3 On January 9, 1966, the New York Times Magazine contrasted these rioting “ghetto” Blacks with the “model minority”: Asians. Some Asian Americans consumed the racist “model minority” title, which masked the widespread discrimination and poverty in Asian American communities and regarded Asian Americans as superior (in their assimilating prowess) to Latina/os, Native Americans, and African Americans. Antiracist Asian Americans rejected the concept of the “model minority” and fermented the Asian American movement in the late 1960s.
4 Assimilationists were negatively loading the terms “model minority” and “ghetto” with racist associations in 1966. Meanwhile, antiracists were quickly extracting negative associations from the identifier “Black,” foremost among them Stokely Carmichael. Carmichael had been born in Trinidad in 1941, and he had moved to the Bronx in 1952, the same year his idol, Malcolm X, was paroled from prison. In 1964, Carmichael graduated from Howard University.
By then, Malcolm’s disciples, Carmichael included, were loading the old identifier, “Negro,” with accommodation and assimilation—and removing ugliness and evil from the old identifier, “Black.” They were now passionately embracing the term “Black,” which stunned Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Negro” disciples and their own assimilationist parents and grandparents, who would rather be called “nigger” than “Black.” 5 As the new chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, Stokely Carmichael was one of the leaders of the Mississippi March Against Fear in the summer of 1966, alongside King and Floyd McKissick of the Congress of Racial Equality. The massive march careened through Mississippi towns, battling segregationist resisters, mobilizing and organizing locals, and registering the latter to vote. On June 16, 1966, the March Against Fear stopped in Greenwood, Mississippi, one of the buckles of the belt of majority Black southern counties still ruled by armed Whites. “We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothing,” Carmichael shouted at a Greenwood rally. “What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!” “What do you want?” Carmichael screamed. “BLACK POWER!” the disempowered Greenville Blacks screamed back.
6 Quickly blown by the fans of the American media, the maxim whisked through all the majority Black urban areas and rural counties that were politically controlled, economically exploited, and culturally denigrated by White assimilationists and segregationists. Antiracists, who would soon be reading Malcolm’s autobiography, had been looking for a concept to wrap around their demands for Black control of Black communities. They latched onto Black Power as firmly in the North as they did in the South, and Martin Luther King Jr. learned why later in the summer. After an open housing march on August 5, 1966, through a fuming White neighborhood in Chicago, King told reporters he had “never seen as much hatred and hostility on the part of so many people.” 7 There was nothing more democratic than saying that the majority, in this case the disempowered Black majority, should rule their own local communities, should have Black power. But just as sexists could only envision male or female supremacy, northern and southern racists could only envision White or Black supremacy. And the twenty urban rebellions that ensued in the summer of 1966 only confirmed for many racists that Black Power meant Blacks violently establishing Black supremacy and slaughtering White folks. Time, the Saturday Evening Post, the U.S. News and World Report, the New York Post, and The Progressive are a few of the many periodicals that condemned the start of the Black Power movement.
8 Even prominent Black leaders criticized Black Power. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP sang from the hymnal of assimilationist comebacks to antiracist ideas: he redefined the antiracist idea as segregationist and attacked his own redefinition. “No matter how endlessly they try to explain it, the term ‘Black power’ means anti-white power,” Wilkins charged at the NAACP’s annual convention on July 5, 1966. “It is a reverse Mississippi, a reverse Hitler, a reverse Ku Klux Klan.” Vice President Hubert Humphrey added his two licks at the convention. “Yes, racism is racism—and there is no room in America for racism of any color.” Riding the opposition to Black Power, Goldwater Republicans made substantial gains in the midterm elections of 1966.
9 Carmichael did not stop promoting Black Power, however. He traveled around the nation in the final months of 1966 to build the movement. In October, he gave the keynote address at a Black Power conference at the University of California at Berkeley. In nearby Oakland that month, two community college students, incensed that their peers were not living up to Malcolm X’s directives, had organized their own two-man Black Power conference. Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale composed the ten-point platform for their newly founded Black Panther Party for Self Defense, demanding the “power to determine the destiny of our Black Community,” “full employment,” “decent housing,” reparations, “an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people,” freedom for all Black prisoners, and “peace”—quoting Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. In the next few years, the Black Panther Party grew in chapters across the country, attracting thousands of committed and charismatic young community servants. They policed the police, provided free breakfast for children, and organized medical services and political education programs, among a series of other initiatives.
10 The growth of the Black Panther Party and other Black Power organizations in 1967 reflected the fact that Black youngsters had realized that civil rights persuasion and lobbying tactics had failed to loosen the suffocating stranglehold of police brutalizers, tyrannical slumlords, neglectful school boards, and exploitive businessmen. But nothing reflected that realization, and that effort to release the stranglehold, more than the nearly 130 violent Black rebellions from coast to coast between March and September that year. And yet racist psychiatrists announced that these “rioters” suffered from schizophrenia, which they defined as a “Black disease” that manifested in rage. To Moynihan-Report-reading sociologists, the male rioters were raging from their emasculation. Meanwhile, racist criminologists suggested that the rioters were exuding urban Blacks’ “subculture of violence,” a phrase Marvin Wolfgang used in 1967 for his classic criminology textbook.
11 A band of shrewd Goldwater politicians proclaimed that the “lazy” rioters demonstrated the need to reduce the welfare rolls and impose work requirements. But welfare mothers resisted. In September, the newly formed National Welfare Rights Association (NWRO) staged a sit-in in the chambers of the Senate Finance Committee, causing Louisiana senator Russell Long to blast the association as “Black Brood Mares, Inc.” Congress still passed the first mandatory work requirement for welfare recipients.
12
ANGELA DAVIS GREW restless in Frankfurt, Germany, reading about the surging Black Power movement, “being forced to experience it all vicariously.” Davis decided to return to the United States during the summer of 1967. She arranged to finish her doctorate at the University of California at San Diego, where philosopher Herbert Marcuse was teaching after being politically muscled out of Brandeis. In late July on her way home, she stopped in London to attend the Dialectics of Liberation conference, where Marcuse and Carmichael were the featured speakers. Her natural hairstyle stood out like a signpost, and she quickly nestled in with the small Black Power contingent.
13 When Davis arrived in southern California, she was itching to get involved in the Black Power movement. Like Black Power activists everywhere, she brought the movement to her backyard: she helped build UC San Diego’s Black Student Union. That fall, wherever there were Black students, they were building BSUs or taking over student governments, requesting and demanding an antiracist and relevant education at historically Black and historically White colleges. “The Black student is demanding . . . a shaking, from-the-roots-up overhaul of their colleges,” reported the Chicago Defender.
14 In November, Davis took the short trip up to Watts to attend the Black Youth Conference. Walking into the Second Baptist Church, she noticed the colorful African fabrics on the energetic and smiling young women and men who were calling each other “sister” and “brother.” It was her first real Black Power gathering in the United States. She felt exhilarated seeing Black as so beautiful.
Taking in the workshops, Davis learned that the minds of the attendees were as colorfully different as their adornments. Some activists were articulating Du Bois’s old, antiracist socialism, delighting Davis. Other activists talked about their back-to-Africa, separatist, anti-White, community service, or revolutionary aspirations. Some FBI agents posing as activists aspired to collect notes and broaden the ideological fissures. Some activists aspired to ferment a cultural revolution, destroying assimilationist ideas and revitalizing African or African American culture. Black Power appealed to activists of many ideological stripes.
15 Black Power even appealed to the face of the civil rights movement.
Indeed, the civil rights movement was transforming into the Black Power movement in 1967, if not before. “No Lincolnian Emancipation Proclamation, no Johnsonian civil rights bill” could bring about complete “psychological freedom,” boomed Martin Luther King Jr. at the annual convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) on August 16. The Negro must “say to himself and to the world . . . ‘I’m black, but I’m black and beautiful.’” King brought on a chilling applause from SCLC activists, who waved signs that read, “Black Is Beautiful and It Is So Beautiful to Be Black.” 16 King made his way out of the good graces of assimilationist America that year. Assimilationists still wanted to keep him in the doubly conscious dreams of 1963, just as they had wanted to keep Du Bois in the doubly conscious souls of 1903. But King no longer saw any real strategic utility for the persuasion techniques that assimilationists adored, or for the desegregation efforts they championed. He now realized that desegregation had primarily benefited Black elites, leaving millions wallowing in the wrenching poverty that had led to their urban rebellions. King therefore switched gears and began planning the SCLC’s Poor People’s Campaign. His goal was to bring poor people to the nation’s capital in order to force the federal government to pass an “economic bill of rights” committing to full employment, guaranteed income, and affordable housing, a bill that sounded eerily similar to the economic proposals on the Black Panther Party’s tenpoint platform.
The title of King’s speech at the SCLC convention was the title of the book he released in the fall of 1967: Where Do We Go from Here? “When a people are mired in oppression, they realize deliverance only when they have accumulated the power to enforce change,” King wrote. “Power is not the white man’s birthright; it will not be legislated for us and delivered in neat government packages.” The road to lasting progress was civil disobedience, not persuasion, King maintained. He bravely critiqued the all-powerful Moynihan Report, warning about the danger that “problems will be attributed to innate Negro weaknesses and used to justify neglect and rationalize oppression.” Moynihan assimilationists responded to King as firmly as they responded to segregationists, classifying the SCLC’s Poor People’s Campaign and King as extremist. King, they said, had become an anarchist. His own critique of antiracists as extremists and anarchists in his Birmingham Letter four years earlier had boomeranged back to hit him.
King’s book seemed to complement Stokely Carmichael’s coauthored Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, published shortly after Where Do We Go from Here? Carmichael and scholar Charles Hamilton gave innovative new names to two kinds of racism. They named and contrasted “individual racism,” which assimilationists regarded as the principal problem, and which assimilationists believed could be remedied by persuasion and education; and “institutional racism,” the institutional policies and collections of individual prejudices that antiracists regarded as the principal problem, and that antiracists believed only power could remedy.
17 And White American power did not appear up to the task. On January 17, 1968, President Johnson submitted his State of the Union to Congress.
Representatives and senators and their constituents were raging, raging not against discrimination, but against all the protests, whether nonviolent or violent, opposing the Vietnam War, racism, exploitation, and inequality. When Johnson thundered that “the American people have had enough of rising crime and lawlessness,” the applause was deafening. After three straight summers of urban rebellions, some of those applauding the speech, both in the Capitol and around the country, actually feared that a violent Black revolution could be on the horizon. And their fears were reflected in a new blockbuster film that broke box-office records weeks after Johnson’s address.
18 When White astronauts land on a planet after a 2,000-year journey, apes enslave them. One astronaut escapes, and in one of the iconic scenes in Hollywood history, at the end of the movie he comes upon a rusted Statue of Liberty. The astronaut—Charlton Heston—and the viewers realize with dismay that he is not light-years from home, but back on Earth. Planet of the Apes took the place of Tarzan in racist popular culture, inspiring four sequels between 1970 and 1973, three more in the twenty-first century, a television series, and a host of comic books, video games, and other merchandise—you name it, the franchise produced it. While Tarzan put on America’s screens the racist confidence of conquering the dark world that prevailed in the first half of the twentieth century, Planet of the Apes held up in full color the racist panic during the second half of the twentieth century of the conquered dark world rising up to enslave the White conqueror.
By 1968, both Democrats and Republicans had popularized the call for “law and order.” It became a motto for defending the Planet of the Whites.
“Law and order” rhetoric was used as a defense for police brutality, and both the rhetoric and the brutality triggered urban rebellions that in turn triggered more rhetoric and brutality. And no one could explain all of this better in early 1968 than a giant of a man and thinker and writer, the former convict turned Malcolm X disciple Eldridge Cleaver, who had become minister of information for the Black Panther Party. “The police are the armed guardians of the social order. The blacks are the chief domestic victims of the social order,” Cleaver explained. “A conflict of interest exists, therefore, between the blacks and the police.” Cleaver penned these words in what seemingly became the most heralded literary response of the era to the mobilizing law-and-order movement. In vividly angry, funny, disgusting, lucidly insightful detail, Cleaver described “a black soul which has been ‘colonized’” by “an oppressive white society.” Released in February 1968, 1 million copies of Soul on Ice were sold in no time. The New York Times named the part memoir, part social commentary one of the top ten books of the year. Soul on Ice was timely and frigidly controversial. Cleaver mused in the book on his bloodcurdling transformation from a “practice run” rapist of Black women to an “insurrectionary” rapist of White women and finally to an optimistic human rights revolutionary. “If a man like Malcolm X could change and repudiate racism, if I myself and other former Muslims can change, if young whites can change, then there is hope for America,” he concluded.
Cleaver’s book became the manifesto of Black Power masculinity to redeem the tragic colonized male, whose soul was “on ice,” whose being was the “Black Eunuch.” The book demonstrated that Black Power masculinity had in fact accepted the racist idea of the emasculated Black man, an idea popularized by the ever-popular Moynihan Report of 1965. For all his antiracist strikes on assimilationist ideas, prisons, and policing, for all his antiracist Marxist strikes on White supremacist capitalism and the Black bourgeoisie, Cleaver’s queer racism and gender racism were striking. Black homosexuals were doubly emasculated (and thus inferior to singularly emasculated White homosexuals): they were emasculated as Black men and emasculated through the “sickness” of homosexuality, Cleaver argued. In Cleaver’s gender racism, the Black woman and the White man were “silent” allies; the White man placed the White woman “on a pedestal” and turned “the black woman into a strong self-reliant Amazon.” And yet, Cleaver ended Soul on Ice with an impassioned love letter “To All Black Women, from All Black Men.” “Across the naked abyss of negated masculinity, of four hundred years minus my Balls, we face each other today, my Queen,” Cleaver wrote.
“I have Returned from the dead.” 19 For all of his gender racism, Cleaver was still uniquely antiracist in his regal attraction to Black women, and especially to his new wife, Kathleen Cleaver, the Black Panther Party’s national communications secretary. A product of a globetrotting military family, civil rights activism, and the SNCC, Kathleen was the first woman to enter the Panthers’ Central Committee. To all those Black men refusing to date or appreciate Black women, and viewing White women as superior, Eldridge was unequivocal in his disdain. This new generation of Jack Johnsons were shrewdly understood by the Martinique-born psychiatrist Franz Fanon, who had married a French woman before becoming one of the godfathers of Black Power masculinity by authoring the anticolonial grenade The Wretched of the Earth (1961). “By loving me [the white woman] proves I am worthy of white love,” Fanon wrote in Black Skin, White Masks (1952). “I am loved like a white man. I am a white man. . . . When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization.” And these Black assimilationist men—desiring to be White men, and constantly justifying that desire through imagining the wrongs of Black women—were quite numerous inside and outside of the Black Power movement in the late 1960s. Black men sought out White women because Black women’s intense self-rejection caused them to stop seeking male attention and let themselves go, as Black psychiatrists William Grier (father of comedian David Alan Grier) and Price Cobbs argued in an influential 1968 text, Black Rage.
20 Beliefs in pathological Black femininity and masculinity informed beliefs in the pathological Black family, which informed beliefs in pathological African American culture. They were like legs holding up the seat of America’s racist ideas. Sociologist Andrew Billingsley was one of the first scholars to strike at those legs. His seminal study, Black Families in White America, broke the ground on antiracist Black family studies in 1968. He refused to analyze Black families from the criteria of White families. “Unlike Moynihan and others, we do not view the Negro as a causal nexus in a ‘tangle of pathologies,’ which feeds on itself,” he wrote. Instead, he viewed the Black family as an “absorbing, adaptive, and amazingly resilient mechanism for the socialization of its children.” Billingsley made the same case about African American culture. “To say that a people have no culture is to say that they have no common history which has shaped and taught them,” Billingsley argued. “And to deny the history of a people is to deny their humanity.” 21 ON FEBRUARY 29, 1968, as Americans were reading Soul on Ice, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders released its final report on the urban rebellions of 1967. Back in July, LBJ created the commission to answer the questions, “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again?” With the nine White and two Black investigators representing groups hostile to Black Power and touting the new status quo motto, “law and order,” antiracists did not expect much from the Kerner Commission (named after its chair, Illinois governor Otto Kerner Jr.).
The conclusions of the Kerner Commission shocked the United States like the rebellions it investigated. The commission members unabashedly blamed racism for the urban rebellions. It said, “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” The racist mainstream media had failed America, the report concluded: “The press has too long basked in a white world looking out of it, if at all, with white men’s eyes and white perspective.” In the afterglow of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act—as the United States proclaimed racial progress—the Kerner Commission proclaimed the progression of racism in its most famous passage: “Our nation is moving towards two societies, one black, one white— separate and unequal.” 22 Everyone seemed to have an opinion about the 426-page document, and it was purchased by more than 2 million Americans. Richard Nixon blasted the report for exonerating the rioters, as did the racists whom Nixon was attracting to his presidential campaign. Martin Luther King Jr., in the midst of organizing his Poor People’s Campaign, christened the report “a physician’s warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life.” President Johnson felt that his own physicians had overblown White racism. And he was probably worried about the report’s damaging effects on the half-truth of racial progress and the costs of its prescription for life. The report recommended the allocation of billions of dollars to diversify American policing, to provide new jobs, better schools, and more welfare to poor Black communities, and to eradicate housing discrimination and construct affordable, fresh, and spaced-out housing units for the millions of Black residents who had been forced to live in rat-infested and deteriorating houses and high-rise projects. Johnson and his bipartisan peers deployed the cost excuse, in the midst of more costly deployments for the hated war in Vietnam.
Then again, Johnson did push through one recommendation: the creation of more police intelligence units to spy on Black Power organizations. The president created a second presidential commission on civil disorders later in the year, but this time, he selected the members more carefully. This commission recommended sharp increases in federal spending on police weapons, training, and riot preparation. Washington had no problem following through.
23
ANGELA DAVIS SPENT the morning of April 4, 1968, at the new office of the SNCC in Los Angeles. The newly organized SNCC chapter was her new activist home as she shuffled back and forth between Los Angeles and her doctoral studies at UC San Diego. In the afternoon of April 4, she made a printing run. That evening, she heard someone scream, “Martin Luther King has been shot!” In disbelief at first, she felt an overwhelming sense of guilt when she confirmed the news. Like other Black Power activists, she had cast King aside as a harmless leader—harmless in his religious philosophy of nonviolence. “I don’t think we had realized that his new notion of struggle— involving poor people of all colors, involving oppressed people throughout the world—could potentially present a greater threat to our enemy,” Davis remembered. “Never would any of us have predicted that he would be struck down by an assassin’s bullet.” Apparently, King knew. The night before, he gave quite possibly the most bone-chilling, hope-inspiring, courage-inducing speech of his legendary speaking career at the Mason Temple in Memphis. He spoke of the “human rights revolution,” of impoverished “colored peoples of the world” rising up demanding “to be free” in the Promised Land. “I may not get there with you,” he said, his voice arresting. “But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!” 24 Reeling from the assassination, Davis joined with the leaders of other local Black Power groups and organized a massive rally at the Second Baptist Church in Los Angeles. Attendees were urged to renew and escalate their fight against racism. As Davis saw it, “Racism was Martin Luther King’s assassin, and it was racism that had to be attacked.” She and her fellow rally organizers were intent on channeling the anger in Los Angeles away from physical confrontations with the well-equipped Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), which had many officers who had been recruited from the Deep South. They succeeded. But the fire this time was elsewhere. In the week following King’s assassination, more than 125 cities experienced another wave of urban rebellions, which led to another backlash of law and order from racist Americans. Aspiring presidents, including George Wallace and Richard Nixon, rode the backlash. Maryland governor Spiro T. Agnew quipped to Black leaders, “I call on you to publicly repudiate all black racists.
This, so far, you have been unwilling to do.” Agnew became such a celebrity that Nixon named him his running mate.
25 King’s death transformed countless doubly conscious activists into singly conscious antiracists, and Black Power suddenly grew into the largest antiracist mass mobilization since the post–Civil War period, when demands for land had been the main issue. The Godfather of Soul noticed Black America’s brand new bag. With segregationists saying they should not be proud, with assimilationists saying they were not Black, James Brown began in August 1968 to lead the chant of millions: “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” a smash hit that topped the R&B singles chart for six weeks. All these Black Power chants caused some African Americans to trash their racist color hierarchies within Blackness (the lighter, the better). Some activists ominously inverted the color hierarchy, judging one’s Blackness to be based on the darkness of the skin, the kinkiness of the hair, the size of the Afro, the degree of Ebonics fluency, or the willingness (of a light-skinned Black) to date a dark-skinned Black, or on whether someone wore Black leather or African garb or could quote Malcolm X. Antiracist Black Power activists engaged in the process of unearthing and trashing all of the deep-rooted assimilationist White standards. They were in the process of stopping Black people from looking at themselves and the world through what Du Bois had termed “the eyes of others” (and what the Kerner Commission had termed the “white perspective”). Antiracist Black Power compelled the controversial search for new standards, for Black perspectives, for Black people looking at themselves through their own eyes.
THE SEARCH FOR Black perspectives was especially taken up in schools and colleges, where Black student activists, educators, and parents were demanding the newest academic discipline, Black Studies. “When the focus in these classrooms is almost exclusively . . . white . . . and almost never black,” Barbara Smith argued to the faculty at Mount Holyoke College, “dissatisfaction among those students with historical and cultural roots which are not white and European is inevitable.” From 1967 to 1970, Black students and their hundreds of thousands of non-Black allies compelled nearly 1,000 colleges and universities spanning almost every US state to introduce Black Studies departments, programs, and courses. The demand for Black Studies filtered down into K–12 schools, too, where textbooks had presented African Americans to “millions of children, both black and white, as . . . sub-human, incapable of achieving culture, happy in servitude, a passive outsider,” as Hillel Black explained in The American Schoolbook in 1967. Early Black Studies intellectuals went to work on new antiracist textbooks. They weathered criticism from assimilationist and segregationist intellectuals of all races who looked down on Black Studies as separatist or inferior to the historically White disciplines. And they looked down on the new field for the same racist reasons they had looked down on historically Black colleges, institutions, businesses, groups, neighborhoods, and nations. Anything created by Black people, run by Black people, and filled by Black people, they thought, must be inferior. And if it was struggling to thrive, it must be the fault of those Black people. Racist ideas not only justified discrimination against Black people, but justified discrimination against Black establishments and against ideas promoted by Black activists, such as Black Studies.
26 Nevertheless, Black Studies and Black Power ideas in general began to inspire antiracist transformations among non-Blacks. White members of the antiwar Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and collectives of Hippies became sympathetic to Black Power and began pledging to “burn out the influence of racism from White Americans,” as a White leader of the Communist Party of the United States urged in 1968. In founding the Young Lords Party in 1968, Puerto Rican antiracists recognized the “high degree of racism [that] existed between Puerto Ricans and Blacks, and between lightskinned and dark-skinned Puerto Ricans,” as New York branch co-founder Pablo “Yoruba” Guzmán put it—a racist color hierarchy that existed within all the multicolored Latina/o and Chicana/o ethnicities. The emerging Brown Power movement challenged all these color hierarchies just as the emerging Black Power movement challenged the color hierarchies within all the multicolored Black ethnicities.
27
THE LOS ANGELES SNCC survived its office being ransacked by the LAPD after King’s assassination. But it could not survive the gender infighting that plagued many coed organizations. Black organizations had to contend with the popular theories of emasculated Black men from the Moynihan Report. Whenever Angela Davis and two other women asserted themselves, the group’s racist patriarchs inevitably started reverberating the myths of Black womanhood, saying they were too domineering and were emasculating them. Kathleen Cleaver faced similar problems in the Black Panther Party, as did Frances Beal in her New York SNCC office.
Beal had become involved in civil rights and socialist activism in college before living in France in the early 1960s. By December 1968, she was back in the states and helping to found the Black Women’s Liberation Committee in the SNCC. It was the first formal Black feminist collective of the Black Power movement. Beal provided Black feminists with one of their main ideological manifestoes, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” a 1969 position paper that circulated further the next year when it appeared in Toni Cade Bambara’s one-of-a-kind anthology, The Black Woman. “Since the advent of black power, Black men are maintaining that they have been castrated by society but that black women somehow escaped this persecution,” Beal pointed out. Actually, “the black woman in America can justly be described as a ‘slave of a slave’”—a victim of the double jeopardy of racial and gender discrimination. Beal cited labor statistics showing that non-White females accrued lower wages than White females, Black men, and White men—statistics that undermined the Frazier-Moynihan thesis that Black men were the most oppressed, a sensational thesis that had mobilized activists to defend the Black man. Beal’s thesis of Black women having it the worst was no less effective in mobilizing activists to defend the Black woman. The rise of Black feminism and Black patriarchy led to ideological showdowns inside and outside of Black Power organizations over who had it the worst.
28 In SNCC Los Angeles, the gender conflict—and then the Communist hunts—got so bad in 1968 that the chapter closed its doors by summer’s end.
Angela Davis then started seriously considering joining the Communist Party, a party she felt had not paid “sufficient attention to the national and racial dimensions of the oppression of Black people.” But the CPUSA’s new CheLumumba Club did. And this collective of Communists of color became Davis’s entryway into the Communist Party in 1968, and her leap into campaign work for the first Black woman to run for the US presidency, CPUSA candidate Charlene Mitchell.
29 In the 1968 presidential election, Mitchell squared off against Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey. Across from the Democrats ran the Republican presidential hopeful, Richard Nixon. His innovative campaign unveiled the future of racist ideas. CHAPTER 32
Law and Order
RICHARD NIXON AND his team of aides had carefully studied George Wallace’s presidential campaigns. They realized that his segregationist banter made him attractive only to “the foam-at-the-mouth-segregationists.” Nixon decided to appeal to these Wallace-type segregationists while also attracting all those Americans refusing to live in “dangerous” Black neighborhoods, refusing to believe that Black schools could be equal, refusing to accept busing initiatives to integrate schools, refusing to individualize Black negativity, refusing to believe that Black welfare mothers were deserving, and refusing to champion Black Power over majority-Black counties and cities— all those racists who refused to believe they were racist in 1968. Nixon framed his campaign, as a close adviser explained, to allow a potential supporter to “avoid admitting to himself that he was attracted by [the] racist appeal.” How would he do that? Easy. Demean Black people, and praise White people, without ever saying Black people or White people.
1 Historians have named this the “southern strategy.” In fact, it was—and remained over the next five decades—the national Republican strategy as the GOP tried to unite northern and southern anti-Black (and anti-Latina/o) racists, war hawks, and fiscal and social conservatives. The strategy was right on time. In a 1968 Gallup poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed Nixon’s campaign slogan: “Law and order has broken down in the country.” A Nixon television advertisement shrieked frightening music and frightening images of violent and bloodied activists. A deep voiceover says, “I pledge to you, we shall have order in the United States.” The ad “hit it right on the nose.
It’s all about those damn Negro–Puerto Rican groups out there,” Nixon reportedly said in private. In public, the tune was the same, save the racial lyrics. On September 6, 1968, before 30,000 applauding Texans, Nixon slammed the Supreme Court for having “gone too far in strengthening the criminal forces.” Thirty years before, Theodore Bilbo would have said strengthening “the nigger forces.” Campaign racism had progressed, and Nixon won the election.
2 IN THE FALL of 1969, with Charlene Mitchell’s campaign behind her, Angela Davis planned to quietly nestle into her first teaching position at the University of California at Los Angeles. The FBI had other plans. J. Edgar Hoover’s agents had launched an all-out, unapologetic war to destroy the Black Power movement that year. The FBI’s messenger at the San Francisco Examiner, Ed Montgomery, reported Davis’s membership in the Communist Party (and Students for a Democratic Society, and the Black Panther Party).
In the ensuing hubbub, California governor Ronald Reagan, eager to pick up points from the anti-Red, anti-student, anti-Black law-and-order voters, deployed an old anti-Communist regulation and fired the twenty-five-year-old Angela Davis. She appealed to the California courts, setting off a confrontation between the state’s racists and antiracists, Communists and antiCommunists, academic emancipators and academic enslavers. Angela Davis had entered into the public light. Her detractors framed her as hate-filled and biased, hate mail started filling up her mailbox, she received threatening phone calls, and police officers started harassing her. On October 20, 1969, California Superior Court judge Jerry Pacht ruled that the anti-Communist regulation was unconstitutional. Davis resumed her teaching post, and Reagan began searching for another way to fire her.
3 Sometime in February 1970, Davis’s Che-Lumumba Club received word of the campaign to free three Black inmates at Soledad State Prison near San Jose. With evidence only that they were Black Power activists, George Jackson, John Clutchette, and Fleeta Drumgo had been indicted for the murder of a prison guard during a racially charged prison fight. In 1961, the eighteen-year-old George Jackson had been sentenced to serve one year to life for armed robbery; allegedly he had used a gun to steal $70 from a gas station. He had been transferred to Soledad in 1969, after experiencing a political transformation akin to Malcolm X’s and Cleaver’s, but his prison activism turned his $70 conviction into a life sentence. Davis became very close to George Jackson and his serious younger brother, Jonathan, who had dedicated his life to freeing his brother.
4 Angela Davis spoke to a lively rally called “Free the Soledad Brothers” in Los Angeles within sight of the California Department of Corrections on June 19, 1970. It was the same day that Reagan’s Board of Regents once again fired Davis from UCLA, this time on the grounds that her political speeches were “unbefitting a university professor.” As evidence, Davis’s terminators had cited, among other things, her rebuke of UC Berkeley educational psychologist Arthur Jensen, who represented the revival of segregationist scholars in the late 1960s. There was “an increasing realization” in psychology that the lower Black IQ scores could not be “completely or directly attributed to discrimination or inequalities in education,” Jensen had written in the Harvard Educational Review in 1969. “It seems not unreasonable . . . to hypothesize that genetic factors may play a part in this picture.” The Regents admonished Davis for not practicing the “appropriate restraint in the exercise of academic freedom” in soundly critiquing Jensen, who had engaged, according to the Regents, in “years of study” before publishing the “lengthy article.” Academics, apparently, were only truly free to espouse racist ideas.
5 As reporters peppered Davis for a response to her firing at the rally, she connected her academic enslavement to the judicial enslavement of political prisoners. A photographer snapped a shot of Davis carrying a sign. It read: “SAVE THE SOLEDAD BROTHERS FROM LEGAL LYNCHING.” Jonathan Jackson stood behind her, holding another sign: “END POLITICAL REPRESSION IN PRISONS.” 6 On August 7, 1970, Jonathan Jackson walked into a courtroom in California’s Marin County, holding three guns, and took the judge, the prosecutor, and three jurors hostage. Aided by three inmates, whom he freed in the courtroom, the seventeen-year-old younger brother of George Jackson led the hostages at gunpoint to a van parked outside. Police opened fire. The shootout took the lives of Jackson, the judge, and two inmates. Police traced the ownership of one of Jackson’s guns to Angela Davis. A week later, Davis was charged with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy, and a warrant was issued for her arrest. Still grieving Jackson’s death, she saw the political repression on the wall—a death sentence if found guilty. She fled the massive womanhunt, a fugitive trying to avoid slavery or worse, like so many of her political peers and ancestors had done before her. J. Edgar Hoover, months before his death, placed the “dangerous” Davis on the FBI’s top ten most wanted list. The two pictures—one with shades, one without—on the “Wanted by the FBI” poster showcased the woman who became the iconic female activist of the Black Power movement.
7 It showed her famous Afro, too. But the era’s most popular Afro—the woman who really transformed the hairstyle from an anti-assimilationist political statement into a fashion statement—was the biggest, boldest, baddest, and Blackest woman, the movie star of Foxy Brown (1974) and Coffy (1973)—Pam Grier. The more African Americans let their Afros grow out like Grier’s in the early 1970s, the more they faced the wrath of assimilationist parents, preachers, and employers, who called Afros ugly, “a disgrace”—like going “back to the jungle.” African Americans were assimilationists not when they permed their own hair, but when they classified natural styles as unprofessional or aesthetically inferior to permed styles.
8 The Afro was ever present in Hollywood’s “Blaxploitation” genre of Black action-adventure films, a genre that peaked in popularity between 1969 and 1974. Facing economic ruin in the late 1960s, and mounting antiracist criticism of the Sidney Poitier–type characters prevalent in the integrationist film narratives of the 1960s, Hollywood decided to solve its economic and political woes by exploiting the popularity of Blackness. Blaxploitation’s kingpin was Melvin Van Peebles. His Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss in 1971 was the story of a bad Black stud who violently reacts to police repression, flees a massive police manhunt by using any weapon he can (including his penis), and escapes into the Mexican sunset. Along the way he is aided by Black children, preachers, gamblers, pimps, and prostitutes. The tornadoes of police repression over the past few years offscreen and the popular racist idea of the super-sexual, no-longer-emasculated Black male no doubt were factors helping the film become so enormously popular among African Americans.
But not all Blacks loved the film. In a literary explosion in Ebony, public intellectual Lerone Bennett Jr. judged it “neither revolutionary nor black” for romanticizing the poverty and misery of Black urban America. Bennett had a point. Whenever Black artists ordained financially deprived Black folk as the truest representatives of Black people, they were trekking through the back door into racist ideas. Too often, they regarded the world of poverty, hustling, prostitution, gambling, and criminality as the Black world, as if non-Blacks did not hustle, prostitute, deal drugs, gamble, and commit crimes at similar rates. And yet, whenever these artists humanized pimps, gangsters, criminals, and prostitutes, they were at their antiracist best. But those who made up the civil rights opposition to Blaxploitation films—in their unerring belief in media suasion—hardly looked for this humanist distinction. They simply saw unsavory stereotypes reinforcing Black characters offscreen. “The transformation from the stereotyped Stepin Fetchit to Super Nigger on screen is just another form of cultural genocide,” the civil rights Coalition of Blaxploitation charged in 1972.
9
THE WOMANHUNT CAUGHT up to Angela Davis in New York on October 13, 1970. Davis was jailed at the New York Women’s House of Detention. It was there, surrounded by incarcerated Black and Brown women, that Davis began developing her “embryonic Black feminist consciousness,” as she called it. It was that year, 1970, that the women’s movement at last reached the mainstream consciousness of the United States. Norma L.
McCorvey (under the alias Jane Roe) had filed suit in Texas to abort her pregnancy. When the Supreme Court legalized abortion in Roe v. Wade three years later, President Nixon professed there were only two “times when an abortion is necessary”: “when you have a black and a white or a rape.” 10 On August 25, 1970, Frances Beal and her sisters in the newly renamed Third World Women’s Alliance showed up with their placards (“Hands Off Angela Davis”), joining more than 20,000 feminists at the National Organization for Women (NOW) Strike for Equality in New York. Seeing the Beal poster, a NOW official rushed over and snapped, “Angela Davis has nothing to do with women’s liberation.” Beal snapped back, “It has nothing to do with the kind of liberation you’re talking about. But it has everything to do with the kind of liberation we’re talking about.” As novelist Toni Morrison explained in the New York Times Magazine months later, Black women “look at White women and see the enemy for they know that racism is not confined to white men and that there are more white women than men in the country.” Toni Morrison had just put out The Bluest Eye, an anti-assimilationist account of a Black girl’s zealous pursuit of “beautiful” blue eyes. Morrison’s debut novel was as moving fictionally as the real life account I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings (1969), Maya Angelou’s award-winning autobiographical journey from the thorny woods of racist ideas (where she wished she could wake up from her “black ugly dream”) into the clearing of antiracist dignity and resistance.
11
IN DECEMBER 1970, Angela Davis was extradited back to California. She spent most of her jail time awaiting trial in solitary confinement, where she read and responded to letters from her thousands of supporters, studied her case, and thought about America. She sometimes heard the chants of “Free Angela,” “Free all Political Prisoners.” Two hundred defense committees in the United States and sixty-seven defense committees abroad were shouting the same words. The defense committees formed a broad interracial coalition of supporters who believed that Nixon’s America had gone too far—too far in harassing, imprisoning, and killing hordes of antiracist, anticapitalist, antisexist, and anti-imperialist activists and condemning them for their ideas.
Those ideas, at the moment, were wrapped up in the mind and body of Angela Davis, a mind and body that Nixon’s and Reagan’s law-and-order America wanted dead.
12 The antiracist ideas that Davis embodied were argued in a different case before the Supreme Court around the time the police brought her back to California. In the 1950s, Duke Power’s Dan River plant in North Carolina had publicly forced its Black workers into its lowest-paying jobs. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Duke Power adopted private discrimination —requiring high school diplomas and IQ tests—that produced the same outcome: Whites receiving the bulk of its high paying jobs. On March 8, 1971, the Supreme Court ruled in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. that Duke Power’s new requirements had no bearing on job performance.
The Civil Rights Act “proscribes not only overt discrimination,” opined Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, “but also practices that are fair in form, but discriminatory in operation.” If the Griggs decision sounded too good for antiracists, then it was. It did not necessarily bar practices and policies that yielded racial disparities. Although Duke Power changed its policy on the day the Civil Rights Act took effect, the Supreme Court, astonishingly, upheld the appeals court supposition that there was no “discriminatory intent.” And Chief Justice Burger gave employers a loophole for the progression of racism.
“The touchstone is business necessity. If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes cannot be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited.” Racist employers could then simply ensure that their discriminatory hiring and promotion practices were related to job performance, and therefore, to business necessity.
13 The Griggs ruling hardly mattered to Black Power activists. They had no faith anyway that the US Supreme Court would outlaw the latest progression of institutional racism. Their attention was turned to their local struggles, the Davis case, and the largest Black convention in US history. Some 8,000 people attended the largest meeting of the six-year-old Black Power movement on March 10, 1972, in Gary, Indiana. The largest Black middle class in history was represented in that crowd—the New Black America. The emergence of these Black elites was the result of the activism and reforms of the civil rights and Black Power movements as well as of the strong economy of the 1960s. By 1973, the rate of Black poverty would dip to its lowest level in US history. Black income levels were rising and political-economic racial disparities closing before the recession hit in 1973.
14 By the opening of the Gary convention, Blacks had taken political control over many of the majority-Black cities and counties. But some Black voters had to learn the hard way that empowering a Black person in government did not automatically empower an antiracist. And so, the main demand of independents at the Gary convention—for an independent Black political party—would not have automatically been an antiracist upgrade over the current situation, marked by assimilationists in the Democratic Party. But self-serving Black politicians squashed the plan over the next few years anyway.
15
DAYS BEFORE THE mammoth Gary convention opened, Angela Davis’s trial finally began in California. “The evidence will show,” said prosecutor Albert Harris, “that her basic motive was not to free political prisoners, but to free the one prisoner that she loved.” The ownership of the gun, Davis’s flight, and her words of love in her diary and letters for George Jackson were supposed to convict her of first degree murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy.
All-White juries had convicted and meted out capital punishment for less. But not this jury, which acquitted Davis of all charges on June 4, 1972. She walked out of the clutches of the American penal system. But she walked out backward, looking at the women and men she left behind bars, and pledging the rest of her life to free them from slavery.
16 Despite the law-and-order movement against activists, fewer than 350,000 people were held in prisons and jails nationwide in 1972. This was far too many for Davis and the nation’s most well-respected criminologists, many of whom were predicting that the prison system would fade away. Sound antiprison activism and ideas were having their effect. In 1973, the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals called the prison system a “failure”—a creator of crime rather than a preventer. The commission recommended that “no new institutions for adults should be built and existing institutions for juveniles should be closed.” 17 After Davis’s acquittal, the more than 250 Free Angela defense committees received a communiqué from Davis. “Stay with us as long as racism and political repression” kept human beings “behind bars.” By May 1973, the defense committees had been organized into the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. President Nixon’s Watergate scandal heightened the contradictions on crime and prisons. All those Americans were serving prison terms, many of them for their political acts and views, while the champion of law and order, Richard Nixon, did not spend a day in prison for the Watergate scandal. When President Gerald Ford took office following Nixon’s resignation, he pardoned and immunized Nixon from prosecution.
18 In the fall of 1975, Davis returned to academia. It was five years later, but she was still the center of controversy. Alumni were irate when she joined the faculty of the Claremont Colleges Black Studies Center in southern California. She found that the marketplace of ideas was the same as when she had left: segregationists were still imagining genetic differences between the races, and assimilationists were still trying to ascertain why their only hope for Black uplift—integration—had failed. Assimilationist sociologist Charles Stember argued in Sexual Racism (1976) that the White man’s sexual jealousy of the hypersexual Black man was the basis for the failure of integration.
Sexual racism—the core of racism—was “largely focused” on the Black man, he maintained.
19 At the same time, Stember downgraded the sexual racism faced by Black women and practically ignored the sexual racism faced by Black LGBTs. But LGBTs were hardly waiting on Stember. Since the interracial Stonewall rebellion in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village in 1969, which had kicked off the gay liberation movement, Black LGBTs had two-stepped away from the margins of the women’s liberation, Black Power, and White gay liberation movements, starting their own new integrative dance of queer antiracism in the 1970s. New York native and lesbian writer Audre Lorde brilliantly “gave name” to these “nameless” life dances in her poetry, essays, and speeches.
Non-Whites, women, and LGBTs were “expected to educate” Whites, men, and heterosexuals to appreciate “our humanity,” Lorde said in one of her most famous speeches. “The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.” 20 Black feminist Ntozake Shange used her creative antiracist energy to produce a play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, which debuted on Broadway on September 15, 1976. Seven Black women, named after colors of the rainbow, poetically and dramatically expressed their experiences of abuse, joy, heartbreak, strength, weakness, love, and longing for love. For Colored Girls emerged and reemerged as an artistic phenomenon over the next four decades on stages and screens as the “black feminist bible,” to quote University of Pennsylvania professor Salamishah Tillet. At every stop, Shange stood strong under the naïve crosswinds of the Black portrayals debates. Some were vocal about their fear that the play would strengthen racist conceptions of Black women; others feared it would strengthen racist conceptions of Black men.
21 The argument over For Colored Girls endured for the rest of the decade.
The same record started playing again, but much louder, in 1982 when Alice Walker penned her novel The Color Purple (and again in 1985 over Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster film adaptation, and again in 1995 over the film Waiting to Exhale, a film about four African American women). Set in rural Georgia, Walker’s The Color Purple presents a Black woman negotiating (and finding) her way through the rugged confines of abusive Black patriarchs, abusive southern poverty, and abusive racist Whites. As the best-selling novel passed through thousands of hands, some readers (and probably more nonreaders) fumed at the portrayals of Black men. But if viewers of Shange’s play or Walker’s novel (or Spielberg’s film) walked away from the theater or closed the book and generalized Black men as abusers, then they were faulty, not the play, the novel, or the film. There has always been a razor-thin line between the racist portrayer of Black negativity and the antiracist portrayer of imperfect Black humanity. When consumers have looked upon stereotypical Black portrayals as representative of Black behavior, instead of representative of those individual characters, then the generalizing consumers have been the racist problem, not the racist or antiracist portrayer. But this complex distinction, or the fact that positive Black portrayals hardly undermine racism, could never quite put an end to the senseless media portrayals arguments, which were inflamed yet again by the explosions of Hip Hop videos in the 1980s and 1990s and Black reality television in the twenty-first century.
22
“WATCHING A PERFORMANCE of ‘For Colored Girls’ one sees a collective appetite for Black male blood,” wrote sociologist Robert Staples in 1979 in “The Myth of Black Macho: A Response to Angry Black Feminists.” However, the angriest Black feminist of the era was the twenty-seven-yearold Michele Wallace. Ms. magazine presented the young Wallace on its January 1979 cover, advertising her erupting Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman as “the book that will shape the 1980s.” It certainly shaped the Black gender debate. Some hated her, some loved her for posing sexism as a greater concern than racism and for exposing the racist “myth of the black man’s castration” and the racist myth of the Black woman as a “woman of inordinate strength.” Wallace testified, “Even for me, it continues to be difficult to let the myth go” of the Black superwoman.
23 But that’s where her antiracism stopped and her racist attacks on both Black women and Black men took over. After tossing out the Black superwoman portrait, Wallace painted the opposite portrait for her readers, the portrait of a Black woman who “forced herself to be submissive and passive” during the 1960s—a pronouncement poet June Jordan blasted in the New York Times as “unsubstantiated, self-demeaning,” and “ahistorical.” Angela Davis set the record straight on the meaningful and aggressive activism in the 1960s of Black women and Black men in Freedomways. Davis included men because, according to Wallace, “the black [male] revolutionary of the sixties calls to mind nothing so much as a child who is acting for the simple pleasure of the reaction he will elicit from, the pain he will cause, his father”—“the White man.” In the foreword to the new edition eleven years later, Wallace bravely admitted some mistakes, and she took back her thesis that Black machoism was the “crucial factor in the destruction of the Black Power Movement.” To Wallace’s credit, she had still brought awareness to patriarchal Black masculinity as a crucial factor in the demise of Black Power.
24 Only one woman elicited more debate than Michele Wallace in Black communities in 1979—and it was a White woman, the White woman that many assimilationists saw as the most beautiful woman in the world. In the movie 10, Bo Derek wore her hair in cornrows with beads, setting off a mad dash of elite White women flocking to salons to get their “Bo Braids.” African Americans were angered reading the media coverage of the mad dash. Cornrows had arrived, media outlets announced, as if Whites were the sole carriers of culture. Around the same time, American Airlines fired ticket agent Renee Rogers for wearing cornrows. Racist Americans considered Afros, braids, locs, and other “natural” styles unprofessional. When Rogers sued for discrimination, the judge evoked “Bo Braids” in rejecting her claim that the style reflected her cultural heritage.
25 Quite possibly the most passionate part of the furor over the Bo Braids was the widespread feeling that Bo Derek and her look-a-likes were appropriating from the storehouse of African American culture, a feeling that possibly stemmed from the dusty racist idea that European cultures could overpower African cultures. What was most amazing about the whole uproar —and similar White appropriation uproars that surrounded Eminem (rap music) and Kim Kardashian (bodily physique) decades later—was the hypocrisy of some Black people. Some of those Black people who had permed their hair—an appropriation of European culture—were now ridiculing Bo Derek and other White women for braiding their hair and appropriating African culture.
Bo Derek and her braided look-a-likes seemed to be everywhere in the early 1980s, annoying Black people. But the fashion trend did not nearly have the lasting power of the latest reinvention of ruling White masculinity. If Planet of the Apes epitomized racists’ defeated sentiments in 1968, then the highest-grossing film of 1976, which won an Oscar for Best Picture, epitomized their fighting sentiment that year. Rocky portrayed a poor, kind, slow-talking, slow-punching, humble, hard-working, steel-jawed Italian journeyman boxer in Philadelphia facing off against the unkind, fast-talking, fast-punching, cocky African American World Heavy Champion. Rocky’s opponent, Apollo Creed, with his amazing avalanche of punches, symbolized the empowerment movements, the rising Black middle class, and the real-life heavyweight champion of the world in 1976, the pride of Black Power masculinity, Muhammad Ali. Rocky Balboa—as played by Sylvester Stallone —came to symbolize the pride of White supremacist masculinity’s refusal to be knocked out from the avalanche of civil rights and Black Power protests and policies.
26 Weeks before Americans ran out to see Rocky, though, they ran out to buy Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family. And those who did not want to slog through the 704-page tome that claimed the No. 1 spot on the New York Times Best Seller List watched the even more popular television adaptation that started airing on ABC in January 1977, becoming the most watched show in US television history. Roots: The Saga of an American Family shared the thrilling, tragic, and tumultuous story of Kunta Kinte, from his kidnapping in Gambia to his brutal crippling, which ended his incessant runaway attempts in Virginia. Claiming Kinte as his actual ancestor, Haley followed his life and the life of his descendants in US history down to himself. For African Americans in the radiance of Black Power’s broadening turn to antiracist Pan-African ideas, and starved for knowledge about their life before and during slavery, Roots was a megahit, one of the most influential works of the twentieth century. Roots unearthed legions of racist ideas of backward Africa, of civilizing American slavery, of the contented slave, of stupid and imbruted slaves, of loose enslaved women, and of African American roots in slavery. The plantation genre of happy mammies and Sambos was gone with the wind.
27 But the new plantation genre of lazy Black rioters who knocked down Whites’ livelihoods—the poor through welfare, the upwardly mobile through affirmative action—remained in the wind in the late 1970s. Thus, as much as antiracist Black Americans loved their roots, racist White Americans loved— on and off screen—their other Rocky, with his unrelenting fight for the law and order of racism. And then, in 1976, their Rocky ran for president. CHAPTER 33
Reagan’s Drugs
IRONICALLY, IT WAS a former Hollywood star who came to embody Rocky Balboa in real life; and at the same time, to embody the racist backlash to Black Power in politics. This real-life Rocky decided to challenge incumbent Gerald Ford for the presidential seat on the Republican ticket in 1976. Reagan fought down all those empowerment movements fomenting in his home state of California and across the nation. Hardly any other Republican politician could match his law-and-order credentials, and hardly any other Republican politician was more despised by antiracists. When Reagan had first campaigned for governor of California in 1966, he had pledged “to send the welfare bums back to work.” By 1976, he had advanced his fictional welfare problem enough to attract Nixon’s undercover racists to his candidacy, gaining their support in cutting the social programs that helped the poor. On the presidential campaign trail, Reagan shared the story of Chicago’s Linda Taylor, a Black woman charged with welfare fraud. “Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000,” Reagan liked to say. Actually, Taylor had been charged with defrauding the state of $8,000, an exceptional amount for something that rarely happened. But truth did not matter to the Reagan campaign as much as feeding the White backlash to Black Power.
1 Gerald Ford used every bit of his presidential incumbent power to narrowly stave off Ronald Reagan’s challenge at the 1976 Republican National Convention. But Nixon’s pardoner and the steward of a poor economy lost to the “untainted” and unknown former Democratic governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter. Black hopes were high until the austere Carter administration, to boost the economy, started unprecedented cuts in social welfare, health care, and educational programs while increasing military spending. From the lowest Black poverty rate in US history in 1973, the decade ended with record unemployment rates, inflation, falling wages, rising Black poverty rates, and increasing inequality. At the local level, struggling activists and residents partially or totally blamed corporate-friendly Black politicians for the growing poverty. There was supposedly something wrong with Black politicians. Unsurprisingly, no one ever uncovered any evidence to substantiate this political racism of Black politicians. Black politicians and the Black elites they largely served were hardly different from the politicians and elites of other races, selling out to the highest bidders or sticking to their antiracist and/or racist principles.
2 While racist Blacks blamed Black politicians—and increasingly Black capitalists—for their socioeconomic struggles, racist Whites blamed Black people and affirmative action for their struggles in the 1970s. Racist ideas put all of these Americans out of touch with reality—as out of touch as one White male aerospace engineer who wanted to be a doctor. Allan Bakke was over thirty-three when the medical school at the University of California at Davis turned him away a second time in 1973, citing his “present age” and lukewarm interview scores as the main factors in the rejection. By then, more than a dozen other medical schools had also turned him away, usually because of his age. In June 1974, Bakke filed suit against the University of California Regents—the body that had fired Angela Davis four years earlier. He did not allege age discrimination. He alleged that his medical school application had been rejected “on account of his race,” because UC Davis set aside sixteen admissions slots out of one hundred for “disadvantaged” non-Whites.
Agreeing, the California courts struck down the “quota” and ordered his admission.
The US Supreme Court decided to take Regents v. Bakke. Bakke’s lawyers argued that the quota system had reduced his chances for admission by forcing him to compete for eighty-four slots instead of the full one hundred.
The Regents’ lawyers argued the state had a “compelling . . . interest” in increasing California’s minuscule percentage of non-White doctors. Since they generally received inferior K–12 educations, non-Whites tended to have lower college grade point averages (GPAs) and test scores than Whites—thus the need to set aside sixteen seats. And despite their lower scores, these nonWhite students were indeed qualified, said the Regents’ lawyers. Ninety percent of them graduated and passed their licensing exams, only slightly less than the White percentage.
The biggest irony and tragedy of the Regents v. Bakke case—and the affirmative action cases that followed—was not Allan Bakke’s refusal to look in the mirror of his age and interviewing prowess. Instead, it was that no one was challenging the admissions factors being used: the standardized tests and GPA scores that had created and reinforced the racial disparities in admissions in the first place. The fact that UC Davis’s non-White medical students had much lower Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) scores and college GPAs than their fellow White medical students, but still nearly equaled their graduation and licensing exam passage rates, exposed the futility of the school’s admissions criteria. Since segregationists had first developed them in the early twentieth century, standardized tests—from the MCAT to the SAT and IQ exams—had failed time and again to predict success in college and professional careers or even to truly measure intelligence. But these standardized tests had succeeded in their original mission: figuring out an “objective” way to rule non-Whites (and women and poor people) intellectually inferior, and to justify discriminating against them in the admissions process. It had become so powerfully “objective” that those nonWhites, women, and poor people would accept their rejection letters and not question the admissions decisions.
Standardized exams have, if anything, predicted the socioeconomic class of the student and perhaps a student’s first-year success in college or in a professional program—which says that the tests could be helpful for students after they are admitted, to assess who needs extra assistance the first year.
And so, on October 12, 1977, a White male sat before the Supreme Court requesting slight changes in UC Davis’s admissions policies to open sixteen seats for him—and not a poor Black woman requesting standardized tests to be dropped as an admissions criterion to open eighty-four seats for her. It was yet another case of racists v. racists that antiracists had no chance of winning.
3 With four justices solidly for the Regents, and four for Bakke, the former Virginia corporate lawyer whose firm had defended Virginia segregationists in Brown decided Regents v. Bakke. On June 28, 1978, Justice Lewis F. Powell sided with four justices in viewing UC Davis’s set-asides as “discrimination against members of the white ‘majority,’” allowing Bakke to be admitted.
Powell also sided with the four other justices in allowing universities to “take race into account” in choosing students, so long as it was not “decisive” in the decision. Crucially, Powell framed affirmative action as “race-conscious” policies, while standardized test scores were not, despite common knowledge about the racial disparities in those scores.
4 The leading proponents of “race-conscious” policies to maintain the status quo of racial disparities in the late 1950s had refashioned themselves as the leading opponents of “race-conscious” policies in the late 1970s to maintain the status quo of racial disparities. “Whatever it takes” to defend discriminators had always been the marching orders of the producers of racist ideas. Allan Bakke, his legal team, the organizations behind them, the justices who backed him, and his millions of American supporters were all in the mode of proving that the earth was flat and the United States had moved beyond racism in 1978. These racists happily consumed the year’s most prominent and acclaimed race relations sociological text, The Declining Significance of Race, and spun William Julius Wilson’s arguments to proclaim that race no longer mattered. The University of Chicago sociologist attempted to solve the racial paradox of the late 1970s: the rise of the Black middle class and the fall of the Black poor. Wilson characterized the post– World War II era “as the period of progressive transition from racial inequalities to class inequalities.” The “old barriers” of racial discrimination that restricted “the entire black population” had transformed into the “new barriers” restricting the Black poor. “Class has become more important than race in determining black access to privilege and power,” Wilson wrote.
Wilson did not acknowledge the racial progress for some and the progression of racism for all. As Wilson’s antiracist critics pointed out, he neglected the evidence showing the rising discrimination faced by rising middle-income Blacks—a point Michael Harrington’s The Other America had already made in 1962. Wilson focused his scholarly lens on the economic dynamics that created an urban Black “underclass,” a class made inferior, behaviorally, by its wrenching poverty.
5 Assimilationist underclass scholarship in the late 1970s and early 1980s looked over at “ghetto ethnography,” those assimilationist anthropologists reconstructing the supposed substandard cultural world of non-elite urban Blacks. “I think this anthropology is just another way to call me a nigger,” complained a factory worker in the introduction to the classic antiracist ethnography of the era, Drylongso (1980). Syracuse anthropologist John Langston Gwaltney—who is blind—allowed his Black interviewees to construct their own cultural world. The New York Times characterized Drylongso as “the most expansive and realistic exposition of contemporary mainstream black attitudes yet published.” 6 On the thirty-third anniversary of The Declining Significance of Race, when scholars were once again pitting class over race to explain racial inequities, Wilson did what only the best scholars have found the courage to do: he admitted the book’s shortcomings and confessed that he should have advanced “both race- and class-based solutions to address life chances for people of color.” 7 It was these race- and class-based solutions that Justice Thurgood Marshall had tried to will into existence in his separate dissenting opinion for Regents v. Bakke. The dissenting opinion of Harry Blackmun, the decider in Roe v. Wade, came last. Blackmun gave America a timeless lesson: “In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently. We cannot—we dare not—let the Fourteenth Amendment perpetuate racial supremacy.” But that was exactly what racists intended to do. Supporters of affirmative action were “hard-core racists of reverse discrimination,” argued Yale law professor and former solicitor general Robert Bork. In the Wall Street Journal, Bork ridiculed the Supreme Court’s decision to keep a limited form of affirmative action. Bork and others like him used the Fourteenth Amendment to attack antiracist initiatives over the next few decades, leaving behind only the wreckage of widening racial disparities.
Four years after Regents v. Bakke, White students were two and a half times more likely than Black students to enroll in highly selective colleges and universities. By 2004, that racial disparity had doubled.
8
AS 1960S GAINS unraveled and poverty spread in the late 1970s, a growing number of Black people grew alienated from the US political system. As their alienation grew, the racist ideas about them grew. Black voters looked down on Black nonvoters as inferior. The nonvoters, they believed, had callously disregarded the blood shed for Black voting rights, had stupidly given up their political power, and as such were immoral and uncaring. Black nonvoters—or third-party Black voters like Angela Davis—clearly were not being driven to the polls by fear of Republican victories. They seemed to be only willing to vote for politicians, as Angela Davis began to realize.
9 On November 19, 1979, the Communist Party announced its presidential ticket for the 1980 election. Sixty-nine-year-old Gus Hall, the longtime head of the CPUSA, was once again running for president. His newest running mate had reached the constitutionally required age of thirty-five on January 26. She had just joined the faculty at that historic campus where Black Studies had been born thirteen years earlier, San Francisco State University.
Angela Davis agreed to partake in her first campaign for public office. But that does not mean Davis and other non-White members were totally happy with the CPUSA. The lack of diversity in the CPUSA leadership remained a source of conflict within the party in the 1980s.
10 Nor was Davis happy with the decline of antiracist activism, which was slowing in the midst of—or rather, because of—the growing production and consumption of racist ideas in the late 1970s. “In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be antiracist,” thundered Angela Davis in September 1979 at the Oakland Auditorium. She joined with Bay Area politicians and activists in urging protests against the upcoming Nazi rally nearby. All decade long, Davis’s National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression had steadily challenged the growing Klan and Nazi groups. The Klan almost tripled its national membership between 1971 and 1980, unleashing its gun-toting terrorism in more than one hundred towns to try to destroy the gains of the 1960s. Lynchings were still occurring—at least twelve were committed in Mississippi in 1980, twenty-eight Black youngsters were killed in Atlanta from 1979 to 1982, and random street-corner executions took place in Buffalo in 1980. But Klan violence and lynchings by private citizens paled in comparison to the terror being perpetrated by gangs of policemen across the nation, from strip-searches and sexual abuse of Black women to pistol-whipping of Black males. By the early 1980s, one study showed that for every White person killed by police officers, police killed twenty-two Black people.
11 “We can break this vicious cycle of racism, sexism, unemployment and inflation created by those who always put profits before people,” Davis blared on posters announcing her campaign rallies in 1980. The Communist politicos had to get the word out about their campaign stops because their party received much less media attention than President Jimmy Carter, who was campaigning for reelection, and Ronald Reagan, who had finally secured the Republican nomination. In early August 1980, Angela Davis brought her “People Before Profits” campaign back to the place where her public life had begun: UCLA. She lamented about the poor turnout of the media. “It’s part of a conspiracy to prevent us from getting our message to the people,” she said, sitting at a table with undistributed press packets. “If Ronald Reagan were holding a press conference here you wouldn’t have been able to see anything for blocks, there would have been so much press here.” 12 Days earlier, on August 3, 1980, the press did show up in full force when the former California governor more or less opened his presidential campaign at the Neshoba County Fair. The event was just a few miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights activists had been killed in 1964. It was a clever strategy that improved on the tactics Nixon had mastered before him. Reagan never mentioned race when he looked out at some of the descendants of slaveholders and segregationists, people who had championed “states’ rights” to maintain White supremacy for nearly two centuries since those hot days in the other Philadelphia, where the US Constitution had been written. Reagan promised to “restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them.” He then dodged Carter’s charges of racism. Thanks in part to southern support, Reagan easily won the presidency.
13 Reagan wasted little time in knocking down the fiscal gains that middle-and low-income people had made over the past four decades. Seemingly as quickly and deeply as Congress allowed and the poor economy justified, Reagan cut taxes for the rich and social programs for middle- and low-income families, while increasing the military budget. Reagan seemingly did offscreen what Sylvester Stallone had done on-screen, first knocking out elite Blacks the way Rocky had knocked out his opponent Apollo Creed in Rocky II (1979). And then, amazingly, Reagan befriended these Creeds—these racist or elite Blacks he had knocked down in previous fights—and used them to knock down the menacing low-income Blacks, as represented by Rocky’s opponent in Rocky III (1982), Clubber Lang, popularly known as Mr. T.
14 During Reagan’s first year in office, the median income of Black families declined by 5.2 percent, and the number of poor Americans in general increased by 2.2 million. In one year, the New York Times observed, “much of the progress that had been made against poverty in the 1960s and 1970s” had been “wiped out.” 15 As the economic and racial disparities grew and middle-class incomes became more unstable in the late 1970s and early 1980s, old segregationist fields—like evolutionary psychology, preaching genetic intellectual hierarchies, and physical anthropology, preaching biological racial distinctions—and new fields, like sociobiology, all seemed to grow in popularity. After all, new racist ideas were needed to rationalize the newly growing disparities. Harvard biologist Edward Osborne Wilson, who was trained in the dual-evolution theory, published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975. Wilson more or less called on American scholars to find “the biological basis of all forms of social behavior in all kinds of organisms, including man.” Though most sociobiologists did not apply sociobiology directly to race, the unproven theory underlying sociobiology itself allowed believers to apply the field’s principles to racial disparities and arrive at racist ideas that blamed Blacks’social behavior for their plight. It was the first great academic theory in the post-1960s era whose producers tried to avoid the label “racist.” Intellectuals and politicians were producing theories—like welfare recipients are lazy, or inner cities are dangerous, or poor people are ignorant, or one-parent households are immoral—that allowed Americans to call Black people lazy, dangerous, and immoral without ever saying “Black people,” which allowed them to deflect charges of racism.
16 Assimilationists and antiracists, realizing the implications of Sociobiology, mounted a spirited reproach, which led to a spirited academic and popular debate over its merits and political significance during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who released The Mismeasure of Man in 1981, led the reproach in the biological sciences against segregationist ideas. Edward Osborne Wilson, not to be deterred, emerged as a public intellectual. He no doubt enjoyed hearing Americans say unproven statements that showed how popular his theories had become, such as when someone quips that a particular behavior “is in my DNA.” He no doubt enjoyed, as well, taking home two Pulitzer Prizes for his books and a National Medal of Science from President Jimmy Carter.
Wilson’s sociobiology promoted but never proved the existence of genes for behaviors like meanness, aggression, conformity, homosexuality, and even xenophobia and racism.
17 Angela Davis joined other antiracist scholars in fighting back against these segregationist claims inside (and outside) of the academy. Her most influential academic treatise, Women, Race & Class, appeared in 1981. It was a revisionist history of Black women as active historical agents despite the prevailing sexism and exploitation they had faced, and despite the racism they had faced from White feminists in the suffrage struggles and the recent reproductive and anti-rape struggles. Davis showcased the irony of the most popular pieces of anti-rape literature in the 1970s—Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will, Jean MacKeller’s Rape: The Bait and the Trap, and Diana Russell’s Politics of Rape—for reinvigorating the “myth of the Black rapist.” This myth, Davis said, reinforced “racism’s open invitation to white men to avail themselves sexually of Black women’s bodies. The fictional image of the Black man as rapist has always strengthened its inseparable companion: the image of the Black woman as chronically promiscuous.” Davis’s wideranging account of Black women activists provided a powerful response to Michele Wallace’s—and patriarchal historians’—racist pictures of Black women as “passive” during racial and gender struggles. Along with bell hooks’s Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, also published in 1981, Davis’s Women, Race & Class helped forge a new method of study, an integrative race, gender, and class analysis, in American scholarship. As hooks indelibly penned, “racism has always been a divisive force separating black men and white men, and sexism has been a force that unites the two groups.” 18 But no great work of antiracist feminist scholarship—and Ain’t I a Woman and Women, Race & Class were instant classics—stood any chance of stopping those producers of the segregationist ideas that were defending Reagan’s racist and classist policies. In 1982, Reagan issued one of the most devastating executive orders of the twentieth century. “We must mobilize all our forces to stop the flow of drugs into this country” and to “brand drugs such as marijuana exactly for what they are—dangerous,” Reagan said, announcing his War on Drugs. Criminologists hardly feared that the new war would disproportionately arrest and incarcerate African Americans. Many criminologists were publishing fairytales for studies that found that racial discrimination no longer existed in the criminal justice system.
“We can fight the drug problem, and we can win,” Reagan announced. It was an astonishing move. Drug crime was declining. Only 2 percent of Americans viewed drugs as the nation’s most pressing problem. Few considered marijuana to be a particularly dangerous drug, especially in comparison with the more addictive heroine. Substance-abuse therapists were shocked by Reagan’s unfounded claim that America could “put drug abuse on the run through stronger law enforcement.” 19
REELING FROM THE ANNOUNCEMENT, Angela Davis ran again for vice president on the CPUSA ticket in 1984. “Bring to victory the defeat of Ronald Reagan,” the “most sexist[,] . . . racist, anti–working class[,] . . .
bellicose president in the history of this country,” she charged at a Black women’s conference in August. But the racial story of the 1984 elections was the stunning primary-campaign success of Martin Luther King Jr.’s former aide, the spellbinding orator and civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Neither Jackson nor Davis garnered enough votes. Too many Americans fell for the myth of the good “morning in America” Reagan was selling them about the better economy.
20 It may have been morning in America again in certain rich and White neighborhoods, which had awakened to prosperity repeatedly over the years.
But it was not morning in America again in the communities where the CIAbacked Contra rebels of Nicaragua started smuggling cocaine in 1985. Nor was it morning in America for Black youths in 1985. Their unemployment rate was four times the rate it had been in 1954, though the White youth employment rate had marginally increased. Nor was it morning in America when some of these unemployed youths started remaking the expensive cocaine into cheaper crack to sell so they could earn a living. And the Reagan administration wanted to make sure that everyone knew it was not morning in America in Black urban neighborhoods, and that drugs—specifically, crack— and the drug dealers and users were to blame.
In October 1985, the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) charged Robert Stutman, the special agent in charge of the DEA’s New York City office, with drawing media attention to the spreading of crack (and the violence from dealers trying to control and stabilize drug markets). Stutman drew so much attention that he handed Reagan’s slumbering War on Drugs an intense high. In 1986, thousands of sensationally racist stories engulfed the airwaves and newsstands describing the “predator” crack dealers who were supplying the “demon drug” to incurably addicted “crackheads” and “crack whores” (who were giving birth to biologically inferior “crack babies” in their scary concrete urban jungles). Not many stories reported on poor White crack sellers and users. In August 1986, Time magazine deemed crack “the issue of the year.” But in reality, crack had become the latest drug addicting Americans to racist ideas.
21 If Reagan’s take on drugs was the overreported racist issue of the year, then the Free South Africa Movement (FSAM) made apartheid—and Reagan’s fiscal and military support of it—the under-reported antiracist issue of the year. The FSAM movement brought out into the open the long-standing ethnic racism between African Americans and African immigrants, an ethnic racism Eddie Murphy displayed in his box-office breaker of 1988, which became one of the most beloved Black comedies of all time. Coming to America, the love story of a rich African prince coming to Queens in search of a wife, hilariously mocked African Americans’ ridiculously untrue racist ideas of animalistic, uncivilized, corrupt, and warlike people in Africa, racist ideas that Roots had not managed to fully expunge.
Weeks after passing the most antiracist bill of the decade over Reagan’s veto—the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act with its strict economic sanctions—Congress passed the most racist bill of the decade. On October 27, 1986, Reagan, “with great pleasure,” signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, supported by both Republicans and Democrats. “The American people want their government to get tough and to go on the offensive,” Reagan commented. By signing the bill, he put the presidential seal on the “Just say no” campaign and on the “tough laws” that would now supposedly deter drug abuse. While the Anti-Drug Abuse Act prescribed a minimum five-year sentence for a dealer or user caught with five grams of crack, the amount typically handled by Blacks and poor people, the mostly White and rich users and dealers of powder cocaine—who operated in neighborhoods with fewer police—had to be caught with five hundred grams to receive the same fiveyear minimum sentence. Racist ideas then defended this racist and elitist policy.
22 The bipartisan act led to the mass incarceration of Americans. The prison population quadrupled between 1980 and 2000 due entirely to stiffer sentencing policies, not more crime. Between 1985 and 2000, drug offenses accounted for two-thirds of the spike in the inmate population. By 2000, Blacks comprised 62.7 percent and Whites 36.7 percent of all drug offenders in state prisons—and not because they were selling or using more drugs. That year, the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse reported that 6.4 percent of Whites and 6.4 percent of Blacks were using illegal drugs. Racial studies on drug dealers usually found similar rates. One 2012 analysis, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, found that White youths (6.6 percent) were 32 percent more likely than Black youths (5 percent) to sell drugs. But Black youths were far more likely to get arrested for it.
23 During the crack craze in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the situation was the same. Whites and Blacks were selling and consuming illegal drugs at similar rates, but the Black users and dealers were getting arrested and convicted much more. In 1996, when two-thirds of the crack users were White or Latina/o, 84.5 percent of the defendants convicted of crack possession were Black. Even without the crucial factor of racial profiling of Blacks as drug dealers and users by the police, a general rule applied that still applies today: wherever there are more police, there are more arrests, and wherever there are more arrests, people perceive there is more crime, which then justifies more police, and more arrests, and supposedly more crime.
24 Since heavily policed inner-city Blacks were much more likely than Whites to be arrested and imprisoned in the 1990s—since more homicides occurred in their neighborhoods—racists assumed that Black people were actually using more drugs, dealing more in drugs, and committing more crimes of all types than White people. These false assumptions fixed the image in people’s minds of the dangerous Black inner-city neighborhood as well as the contrasting image of the safe White suburban neighborhood, a racist notion that affected so many decisions of so many Americans, from housing choices to drug policing to politics, that they cannot be quantified.
The “dangerous Black neighborhood” conception is based on racist ideas, not reality. There is such a thing as a dangerous “unemployed neighborhood,” however. One study, for example, based on the National Longitudinal Youth Survey data collected from 1976 to 1989, found that young Black males were far more likely than young White males to engage in serious violent crime.
But when the researchers compared only employed young males, the racial differences in violent behavior disappeared. Certain violent crime rates were higher in Black neighborhoods simply because unemployed people were concentrated in Black neighborhoods.
25 But Reagan’s tough-on-crime Republicans had no intention of committing political suicide among their donors and redirecting the blame for violent crime from the lawbreakers onto Reaganomics. Nor were they willing to lose their seats by trying to create millions of new jobs in a War on Unemployment, which would certainly have reduced violent crime. Instead, turning the campaign for law and order into a War on Drugs enriched many political lives over the next two decades. It hauled millions of impoverished non-White, nonviolent drug users and dealers into prisons where they could not vote, and later paroled them without their voting rights. A significant number of close elections would have come out differently if felons had not been disenfranchised, including at least seven senatorial races between 1980 and 2000, as well as the presidential election of 2000. What an ingeniously cruel way to quietly snatch away the voting power of your political opponents.
26 Even the statistics suggesting that more violent crime—especially on innocent victims—was occurring in urban Black neighborhoods were based on a racist statistical method rather than reality. Drunk drivers, who routinely kill more people than violent urban Blacks, were not regarded as violent criminals in such studies, and 78 percent of arrested drunk drivers were White males in 1990. In 1986, 1,092 people succumbed to “cocaine-related” deaths, and there were another 20,610 homicides. That adds up to 21,702, still lower than the 23,990 alcohol-related traffic deaths that year (not to mention the number of serious injuries caused by drunk drivers that do not result in death).
Drug dealers and gangsters primarily kill each other in inner cities, whereas the victims of drunk drivers are often innocent bystanders. Therefore, it was actually an open question in 1986 and thereafter whether an American was truly safer from lethal harm on the inner city’s streets or on the suburban highways. Still, White Americans were far more likely to fear those distant Black mugshots behind their television screens than their neighborhoods’ White drunk drivers, who were killing them at a greater rate.
27 Since Reagan never ordered a War on Drunk Driving, it took a long and determined grassroots movement in the 1980s, forged by Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), and countless horrible incidents—such as the drunk driver who killed twenty-seven schoolbus passengers in 1988—to force reluctant politicians to institute stronger penalties. But these new penalties for DUIs and DWIs still paled in comparison with the automatic five-year felony prison sentence for being caught for the first time with five grams of crack.
AS IT WAS, the media’s attention in 1986 was not on the drunk drivers but focused narrowly on sensational crack crime stories and the subsequent effects on the Black family. In a CBS special report on “The Vanishing Family: Crisis in Black America,” the network presented images of young welfare mothers and estranged fathers in a Newark apartment building, stereotypical images of Black female promiscuity, Black male laziness, and irresponsible Black parenting—the pathological Black family. It was these types of tales that prompted an aggravated Angela Davis to write an essay on the Black family in the spring of 1986. The percentage of children born to single Black women had risen from 21 percent in 1960 to 55 percent in 1985, Davis said. Black teenager birthrates could not explain this increase (those figures had remained virtually unchanged from 1920 to 1990). Davis explained that the “disproportionate number of births to unmarried teenagers” had been caused by the fact that older, married Black women had started having fewer children in the 1960s and 1970s. Therefore, it was the overall percentage of babies born to young and single Black mothers as opposed to married mothers—not the sheer number of babies born to single Black mothers—that dramatically rose.
28 But to Reagan propagandists, welfare caused the nonexistent spike in single Black mothers, and the nonexistent spike had made the Black family disappear. “Statistical evidence does not prove those suppositions [that welfare benefits are an incentive to bear children],” admitted Reagan’s chief domestic policy adviser, Gary Bauer, in The Family: Preserving America’s Future (1986). “And yet, even the most casual observer of public assistance programs understands there is indeed some relationship between the availability of welfare and the inclination of many young women to bear fatherless children.” Evidence hardly mattered when convincing Americans that there was something wrong with Black welfare mothers—and therefore, with the Black family.
29 Even the adored civil rights lawyer Eleanor Holmes Norton felt the need in 1985 to urge the restoration of the “traditional Black family.” “The remedy is not as simple as providing necessities and opportunities,” Norton explained in the New York Times. “The family’s return to its historic strength will require the overthrow of the complicated predatory ghetto subculture.” Norton provided no evidence to substantiate her class racism that “ghetto” Blacks were deficient in values of “hard work, education, respect for the Black family and . . . achieving a better life for one’s children,” in comparison to Black elites or any other racial class.
30 This racist drug of the declining Black family was as addicting to consumers of all races as crack—and as addicting as the dangerous Black neighborhood. But many of the Black consumers hardly realized they had been drugged. And they hardly realized that the new television show they thought was so good at counteracting unsavory thoughts of Black people was just another racist drug. CHAPTER 34
New Democrats
STAUNCH BELIEVERS IN uplift and media suasion looked to NBC’s The Cosby Show, which premiered on September 20, 1984, to redeem the Black family in the eyes of White America. While many viewers enjoyed Bill Cosby’s brilliant comedy and the show’s alluring storylines, and many Black viewers delighted in watching a Black cast on primetime television for eight seasons, it was Cosby’s racial vision that made The Cosby Show America’s No. 1 show from 1985 to 1989 (and one of the most popular in apartheid South Africa). Cosby envisioned the ultimate uplift suasion show about a stereotype-defying family uplifted by their own striving beyond the confines of discriminated Blackness. He believed he was showing African Americans what was possible if they worked hard enough and stopped their antiracist activism. Cosby and his millions of loyal viewers actually believed that The Cosby Show and its spinoffs were persuading away the racist ideas of its millions of White viewers. And it did, for some. For other Whites, Cosby’s fictional Huxtables were extraordinary Negroes, and the show merely substantiated their conviction—and Reagan’s conviction, and racist Blacks’ convictions—that racism could be found only in the history books. Some commentators understood this at the time. The Cosby Show “suggests that blacks are solely responsible for their social conditions, with no acknowledgement of the severely constricted life opportunities that most black people face,” critiqued literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. in the New York Times at the crest of the show’s popularity in 1989.
1 Like every attempt at uplift suasion before it, The Cosby Show did nothing to hinder the production and consumption of Reagan’s racist drug war. Quite possibly the most sensationally racist crack story of the era was written by the Pulitzer Prize–winning, Harvard medical degree–holding Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer: “The inner-city crack epidemic is now giving birth to the newest horror: a bio-underclass, a generation of physically damaged cocaine babies,” he wrote on July 30, 1989. These babies were likely a deviant “race of (sub) human drones” whose “biological inferiority is stamped at birth” and “permanent,” he added. “The dead babies may be the lucky ones.” 2 The column triggered the second major round of horrendous crack stories.
The New York Times told of how “maternity wards around the country ring with the high-pitched ‘cat cries’ of neurologically impaired crack babies.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch had one headline warning of a “Disaster in the Making: Crack Babies Start to Grow Up.” Medical researchers validated these reports—and the racist ideas that inspired them—alongside pediatricians like UCLA’s Judy Howard, who said crack babies lacked the brain function that “makes us human beings.” Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia neonatologist Hallam Hurt began following the lives of 224 “crack babies” born in Philadelphia between 1989 and 1992, and she fully anticipated “seeing a host of problems.” In 2013, she concluded her study with a simple finding: poverty was worse for kids than crack. Medical researchers had to finally admit that “crack babies” were like the science for racist ideas: they never existed.
3
BACKED BY SCIENCE or not, racist ideas persisted in American minds, and Reagan’s vice president made sure to manipulate them when he ran for president in 1988. George H. W. Bush had been losing in the polls to the Democratic nominee, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, until he released a television advertisement about a Black murderer and rapist of Whites, Willie Horton. “Despite a life sentence,” the scary voiceover stated, “Horton received 10 weekend passes from prison. Horton fled, kidnapped a young couple, stabbing the man, and repeatedly raping his girlfriend.
Weekend prison passes, Dukakis on crime.” 4 Setting himself apart from the “weak” Dukakis on crime, the “tough” Bush endorsed capital punishment and its rampant disparities. In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled in McCleskey v. Kemp that the “racially disproportionate impact” of Georgia’s death penalty—Blacks were being sentenced to death four times more frequently than Whites—did not justify overturning the death sentence for a Black man named Warren McCleskey unless a “racially discriminatory purpose” could be demonstrated. If the Court had chosen to rule in McCleskey’s favor, it would have opened the future to antiracist cases and to renovations of the criminal justice system, which was rotting in racism.
But instead the justices disconnected racial disparities from racism, deemed racial disparities a normal part of the criminal justice system, and blamed these disparities on Black criminals, yet again producing racist ideas to defend racist policies. McCleskey v. Kemp turned out to be—as New York University lawyer Anthony G. Amsterdam predicted—“the Dred Scott decision of our time.” The Supreme Court had made constitutional the rampant racial profiling that pumped up the inhumane growth of the Black executed and enslaved prison population.
5 Like their ancestors, young urban Blacks resisted the law enforcement officials who condemned them to twentieth-century slavery. And they resisted sometimes to the beat. Hip Hop and rap blossomed in 1988 after a decade of growth from the concrete of the South Bronx. BET and MTV started airing their popular Hip Hop shows. The Source hit newsstands that year, beginning its reign as the world’s longest-running rap periodical. It covered the headslamming rhymes of Public Enemy—and “Fuck tha Police,” the smashing hit of N.W.A., or Niggaz Wit Attitudes, from straight out of Compton.
6 Hip Hop and Black Studies programs blossomed together in 1988. That year, professor Molefi Kete Asante established the world’s first Black Studies doctoral program at Philadelphia’s Temple University. Asante was the world’s leading Afrocentric theorist, espousing a profound theory of cultural antiracism to counter the assimilationist ideas that continued their ascent after the demise of Black Power. Too many Black people—and too many Black Studies scholars—were “looking out” at themselves, at the world, and at their Black research subjects from the center and standards of Europeans, he argued in The Afrocentric Idea (1987). Europeans were masquerading their center as the finest, as sometimes the only, perspective. To Asante, there were multiple ways of seeing the world, being in the world, theorizing about the world, and studying the world—not just the Eurocentric worldviews, cultures, theories, and methodologies. He called for “Afrocentricity,” by which he meant a cultural and philosophical center for African people based “on African aspiration, visions, and concepts.” 7 In 1989, Public Enemy recorded one of the most popular songs in Hip Hop history, “Fight the Power.” The song headlined the soundtrack of Spike Lee’s critically acclaimed 1989 urban rebellion flick, Do the Right Thing.
“Fight the Power” tied together the commencement of the socially conscious age of Hip Hop and Black filmmaking and scholarship. Do the Right Thing was Lee’s third feature film. His second, School Daze (1988), addressed assimilationist ideas related to skin tone and eye color (the lighter the better) and hair texture (the straighter the better), a theme suggested by the fact that Black Power’s Afros were being cut or permed down. Some Blacks were even bleaching their skins White. The most known or suspected skin bleacher in the late 1980s and early 1990s was arguably the nation’s most famous African American, singer Michael Jackson. It was rumored Jackson lightened his skin and thinned his nose and lips to boost his career. Indeed, light-skins still secured higher incomes and were preferred in adoptions, while dark-skins predominated in public housing and prisons and were more likely to report racial discrimination. Racists were blaming dark-skins for these disparities.
Antiracists were blaming color discrimination. “The lighter the skin, the lighter the sentence,” was a popular antiracist saying.
8
SEVERAL DOZEN LEGAL scholars met at a convent outside of Madison, Wisconsin, on July 8, 1989, as Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” topped Billboard charts. They came together to forge an antiracist intellectual approach known as “critical race theory.” Thirty-year-old UCLA legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw organized the summer retreat the same year she penned “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” The essay called for “intersectional theory,” the critical awareness of gender racism (and thereby other intersections, such as queer racism, ethnic racism, and class racism). “Although racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices,” Crenshaw wrote three years later in another pioneering article in the Stanford Law Review.
Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, and Richard Delgado, the early formulators of critical race theory in law schools, were also in attendance at the 1989 summer coming-out party for critical race theory. One of the greatest offshoots of the theory was critical Whiteness studies, investigating the anatomy of Whiteness, racist ideas, White privileges, and the transition of European immigrants into Whiteness. Critical race theorists, as they came to be called, joined antiracist Black Studies scholars in the forefront of revealing the progression of racism in the 1990s.
9 Angela Davis, a professor at San Francisco State University, working from the same antiracist intellectual traditions, was also calling attention to the progression of racism. “African Americans are suffering the most oppression since slavery,” Davis thundered at California State University at Northridge in 1990. Her speech angered believers in racial progress. After all, African Americans possessed 1 percent of the national wealth in 1990, after holding 0.5 percent in 1865, even as the Black population remained at around 10 to 14 percent during that period. “Our country is now replete with many blacks in positions of prestige and power,” which was “certainly a far cry from the ‘worst oppression since slavery,’” someone wrote in a miffed letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times. It was not outside societal forces that were responsible for “impregnating unmarried girls” and forcing “young blacks to drop out of school and into drug-dealing, into gangs and into killing.” No one had compelled Ugandans to “kill and oppress each other,” or caused Ethiopia to make “such a mess of its economy” that its citizens were “dependent on handouts from capitalists to survive.” Apparently, in the United States and Africa, racists were imagining that it was Black-on-Black ethnic warfare and corruption, along with welfare handouts, that were causing global Black poverty and political instability and the lingering socioeconomic disparities between White and Black Americans and between Europe and Africa. In a much friendlier manner, Ronald Reagan echoed the letter writer’s projection of global African incompetence when he spoke in England following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. The end of the Cold War had “robbed much of the West of its common, uplifting purpose,” Reagan declared. Americans and their allies should unite “to impose civilized standards of human decency” on the rest of the world.
10 In the United States, it was poor, young Black women whom racists of all races supposed needed the greatest imposition of civilized standards of human decency. Producers and reproducers of racist ideas were saying that it was their loose sexual behavior—and not the actual declining number of Black children to married Black couples—that was causing the increase in the percentage of children born to Black single mothers. Assimilationists argued that these young Black women could one day learn to discipline themselves sexually (like White women). Segregationists argued that they could not, advocating sterilization policies or long-term contraceptives. In December 1990, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the long-term contraceptive implant Norplant, despite its gruesome side effects. The Philadelphia Inquirer ran an editorial in support of it entitled “Poverty and Norplant: Can Contraception Reduce the Underclass?” The paper advocated Norplant—not an urban jobs bill—as a solution to the poverty of Black children.
While antiracists spit outrage at the editorial, Angela Davis emerged as one of the few voices condemning the ongoing denial of the sexual agency of young Black women. But Black and White racists rushed to the Inquirer’s defense. Louisiana legislator David Duke, the former KKK Grand Wizard, made a campaign out of it. He ran for Louisiana governor in 1991 on a pledge to reduce the number of Black welfare recipients by funding their implantations of Norplant. Duke’s plan was shrewd. Even though most Blacks eligible for welfare did not utilize it, one study found that 78 percent of White Americans thought Blacks preferred to live on welfare. Duke lost the election even though the majority of Louisiana Whites voted for him. The next day, the New York Times printed a photo of a poor White welfare recipient who had voted for Duke because Blacks, she said, “just have those babies and go on welfare.” The picture symbolized the power of racist ideas. Low-income Whites could be manipulated into voting for politicians who intended to slice their welfare, just as middle-income Whites were being manipulated into voting for politicians whose policies were increasing the socioeconomic inequities between the middle and upper classes.
11
INSPIRED BY SOCIOLOGIST Patricia Hill Collins’s 1990 volume Black Feminist Thought, Black feminists led the campaign to ban Norplant. The negative portrayals of young Black women in the Norplant debate never failed to leave them outraged. Some Black feminists were less outraged about the sexist portrayals of women in Hip Hop, viewing “sexism in rap as a necessary evil” or a reflection of sexism in American society, according to Michele Wallace’s report in the New York Times on July 29, 1990. Wallace revealed the recent rise of women rappers, such as Salt-n-Pepa, M. C. Lyte, and the “politically sophisticated” Queen Latifah.
12 Women rappers fared better than their sisters in Hollywood, because at least their art was in mass circulation. Aside from Julie Dash’s pioneering Daughters of the Dust, Black men were the only ones producing major Black films in 1991. These included illustrious films like Mario Van Peebles’s New Jack City; John Singleton’s debut antiracist tragedy Boyz N the Hood; and Spike Lee’s acclaimed Jungle Fever. Jungle Fever got people arguing about Black men cheating on Black women with White women; about interracial relations being “jungle fever,” not love; about the discrimination that interracial couples faced; about whether anything was wrong with Black women (causing Black men to date White women); and about how “there ain’t no good Black men out there,” because all the Black men were “drug addicts, homos,” or “dogs,” to quote one character. Some moviegoers defended the anti-racist truth: that there was nothing wrong with Black women or Black men as a group. Some consumed Spike Lee’s satire at face value, probably not realizing that no good Black women plus no good Black men equaled no good Black people—equaled racist ideas.
13 Black men produced more films in 1991 than during the entire 1980s. But a White man, George Holliday, shot the most influential racial film of the year on March 3 from the balcony of his Los Angeles apartment. He filmed ninety grueling seconds of four Los Angeles Police Department officers savagely striking Rodney King, a Black taxi driver. Holliday sent the footage to TV stations, and TV stations started broadcasting it across the country, from urban communities that had been suffering under the baton of aggressive policing for years to suburban and rural communities that had been cheering the aggressive policing of inner-city communities for years. Charges of assault with a deadly weapon and the use of excessive force were quickly filed against the four LAPD officers. In the emotional swing, N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police” reemerged with a social vengeance in thumping cars and on screaming televisions. President Bush condemned the beating, but he did not back down from the tough-on-crime mantra that he had ridden to the White House. It was a political mandate that the LAPD had executed on trampled and imprisoned Black bodies as efficiently as any department in the nation.
Politicians created law-and-order America, but the police officers were the pawns carrying out the policies.
14 Bush’s political dancing on the King beating angered antiracists as spring turned into summer. He fanned the fury on July 1, 1991, when he nominated a Black jurist, Clarence Thomas, to replace civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. Thomas saw himself as a paragon of self-reliance, even though he had needed antiracist activism and policies to get him into Holy Cross College and Yale Law School, and even though he had needed his racist Blackness to get him into the Reagan administration in 1981, first as assistant secretary of education for the Office of Civil Rights. He had been the backseat driver of antiracist and racist forces throughout his career. And now, Bush had called Thomas to the Supreme Court, claiming he was the “best qualified at this time,” a judgment that sounded as ridiculous as those officers trying to justify the beating of Rodney King. The “best qualified” forty-threeyear-old Thomas had served as a judge for all of fifteen months.
15 During Thomas’s formal confirmation hearings in the Senate that fall, Anita Hill, who had been his assistant at the Education Department and at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), testified. She accused Thomas of sexual harassment and gender discrimination during their tenure in government employment. Thomas denied the allegations, framing it a “hightech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves.” The frenzied Senate confirmation arguments that followed spilled out into the rest of America, making the summertime arguments over Jungle Fever seem mild. Again and again, Hill’s defenders spoke out, arguing that the defamation of Black womanhood and the lack of awareness of sexual harassment was preventing Americans from believing her testimony. Thomas’s defenders, meanwhile, argued that it was another case of the Black man being cut down. Gender racists generalized Thomas and Hill to weigh in on what was wrong with Black men or Black women. In the end, Thomas was narrowly confirmed on October 15, 1991. But the defenders of Hill and of Black women did not walk quietly into the night. “We cannot tolerate this type of dismissal of any one Black woman’s experience,” several hundred Black women wrote in a protest advertisement in the New York Times a month later.
16 Clarence Thomas joined a US Supreme Court that had gutted the Civil Rights Act of 1964, compelling Congress to pass the Civil Rights Restoration Act over Reagan and Bush vetoes. The teeth of the bill bit down on provable “intentional discrimination,” hardly touching the octopus arms of discrimination that had privately grown in the past three decades, causing very public racial disparities up and down the job market, from Black professionals receiving less pay than their White counterparts to Black workers being forced into the dead-end service industry. White workers and professionals had come to widely believe that they must secretly help their racial fellows in the job market, on the false assumption that government policies were helping Blacks more than Whites. Discriminating Whites had replaced the “old black-inferiority rationale for exclusion” by a more sophisticated affirmative action rationale for exclusion. It was a new racist theory to justify an old job discrimination. As for the racial disparities in unemployment rates, the newest racist theory was that African Americans’ “refusal to lower their demands helps keep them jobless,” as NYU political scientist Lawrence Mead stated. Racists cleverly avoided the question of whether jobless Whites were more willing to lower their demands. Instead, they dispatched their ethnic racism, regarding African Americans as less industrious, more welfare dependent, and less willing to lower their job demands than non-White immigrants.
17 African Americans were making millions in the entertainment industry.
But not all was well there, either. On November 7, 1991, HIV-positive Ervin “Magic” Johnson suddenly retired from the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team. Vowing to “battle this deadly disease,” he became the overnight heterosexual face of the presumed White gay disease. After a long and torturous and murderously oppressive decade in the 1980s, HIV-positive men and women were finally starting to be seen as innocent victims of a disease by the early 1990s. But Johnson’s public announcement, his face, and his admission of multiple sexual partners instigated a shift in perceptions of HIV and AIDS. The “gay White disease” affecting innocent victims—and necessitating protective politics—transformed into a “Black disease” affecting ignorant, hypersexual, callous marauders, and necessitating punitive policies to control them.
18 FOR ANGELA DAVIS, 1991 began with outrage over the physical lashing of Rodney King and ended with outrage over the verbal lashing of Anita Hill.
The year also ended for Davis in an unfamiliar place. She had taken a new professorship at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and she stepped away from the Communist Party after spending twenty-three years as the most recognizable Communist in the heartland of global capitalism. On the eve of the twenty-fifth CPUSA National Convention in Cleveland in December 1991, Davis joined with about eight-hundred other members to draft and sign an initiative critical of the party’s racism, elitism, and sexism.
In a punishing response, none of the signatories were reelected to office. They bolted the CPUSA.
19 Although she was in the market for a new party, Davis did not join the Democratic Party, or rather, the newest force in US politics, the New Democrats. This group was espousing liberal fiscal policies but accepting Republican-style toughness on welfare and crime. A dazzling, well-spoken, and well-calculating Arkansas governor was now billing himself as the ultimate New Democrat. On January 24, 1992, weeks before the start of the Democratic primaries, Bill Clinton traveled back to Arkansas. The country had gone through Nixon’s law and order, Reagan’s welfare queens, and Bush’s Willie Horton—and now Clinton made the execution of a mentally impaired Black man, Ricky Ray Rector, into a campaign spectacle to secure racist votes. “I can be nicked a lot,” Clinton told reporters afterward, “but no one can say I’m soft on crime.” 20 By the time an all-White jury acquitted the four LAPD officers on April 29, 1992, for the Rodney King beating, Clinton had practically run away with the Democratic nomination. The millions of viewers of the beating were told that those officers had done nothing wrong. With justice denied them in the courts, Black and Brown residents rushed to claim justice in the Los Angeles streets. They had reached their own verdict: the criminal justice system, local business owners, and Reagan-Bush economic policies were guilty as charged of robbing the poor of livelihoods and assaulting them with the deadly weapon of racism. On April 30, 1992, Bill Cosby pleaded with the rebels to stop the violence and watch the final episode of The Cosby Show. Rodney King himself tearfully pleaded the next day, “Can we all get along?” It would take 20,000 troops to quell the six-day uprising and restore the order of racism and poverty in Los Angeles.
21 Open-minded Americans seeking to understand the racist sources of rebellion and the progression of racism read Andrew Hacker’s New York Times 1992 best seller, Two Nations: Black & White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal, and Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism—or, two years later, Cornel West’s Race Matters. Or they entered theaters to watch Spike Lee’s best-ever joint, a film Roger Ebert rated as the top film of 1992. In the opening scene of Malcolm X, Lee showed the beating of Rodney King and the burning of the American flag.
22 “If you call it a riot it sounds like it was just a bunch of crazy people who went out and did bad things for no reason,” argued South Central LA’s new antiracist congresswoman, the walking powerhouse Maxine Waters. The rebellion, she said, “was [a] somewhat understandable, if not acceptable[,] . . .
spontaneous reaction to a lot of injustice.” To Vice President Dan Quayle, however, the rebels were not rebelling from economic poverty, but a “poverty of values.” The New Democrat Bill Clinton blamed both political parties for failing urban America before blasting the “savage behavior” of “lawless vandals” who “do not share our values,” whose “children are growing up in a culture alien from ours, without families, without neighborhood, without church, without support.” On Clinton’s racist note, Columbia University researchers began a five-year research study of only Black and Latino boys in New York to search for a connection between genetics and bad parenting and violence. (They did not find any connection.) 23 About a month after the LA uprising, Bill Clinton took his campaign to the national conference of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. Though Jackson was widely unpopular among those racist Whites whom Clinton was trying to attract to the New Democrats, when Jackson invited Hip Hop artist Sister Souljah to address the conference, the Clinton team saw its political opportunity. The twenty-eight-year-old Bronx poverty native had just released 360 Degrees of Power, an antiracist album so provocative that it made Lee’s films and Ice Cube’s albums seem cautious. White Americans were still raging over her defense of the LA rebellion in the Washington Post: “I mean, if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” It was clipped and circulated, but few racist Americans heard or understood—or wanted to understand—her point: she was critiquing the racist idea of occasional Black-on-White deaths mattering more to the government than Black people killing Black people every day.
24 On June 13, 1992, Clinton took the podium at the Rainbow Coalition conference. “If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black’ and reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech,” Clinton volleyed at Sister Souljah’s post-rebellion comments. This dismissive assimilationist maneuver of equating antiracists with segregationists, this planned political stunt, thrilled racist voters nearly as much as Clinton’s campaign pledge to “end welfare as we know it.” Clinton gained a lead in the polls that he never lost.
25 By the 1993 Christmas season, rappers were hearing criticism from all sides of the racist rainbow, not just from Bill Clinton. Sixty-six-year-old civil rights veteran C. Delores Tucker and her National Political Congress of Black Women took the media portrayals debate to a new racist level in their strong campaign to ban “Gangsta rap.” Gangsta rap was not only making Black people look bad before Whites and reinforcing their racist ideas, she said.
Gangsta rap lyrics and music videos were literally harming Black people, making them more violent, more sexual, more sexist, more criminal, and more materialistic (here she was sounding a sensational chord that would be replayed years later in response to Black reality shows). In short, Gangsta rap was making its urban Black listeners inferior (to say nothing of its greater number of suburban White listeners). It was a curious time for this wellmeaning campaign, and not just because Queen Latifah had released her Grammy Award–winning feminist anthem “U.N.I.T.Y.,” which headlocked and shouted at men, “Who you callin’ a bitch?!” Political scientist Charles Murray was in the midst of reproducing racist ideas for the upcoming 1994 midterm elections, falsely connecting the “welfare system” to the rise in “illegitimacy” that, as he put it in the Wall Street Journal on October 29, “has now reached 68% of births to [single] black women.” He repeated the claim on television shows in the final weeks of 1993.
26 C. Delores Tucker could have campaigned against the anti-welfare ravings of Charles Murray, which were much more materially and socially devastating to poor Black people—especially women—than the lyrics of Gangsta rap. Instead, she became the dartboard for Hip Hop artists, especially the twenty-two-year-old new king of Gangsta rap, the son of Black Panthers, Tupac Shakur. In 1993, Tupac encouraged his fans to “Keep Ya Head Up,” and connected to them with rhymes such as, “I’m tryin to make a dollar out of fifteen cents / It’s hard to be legit and still pay tha rent.” 27 While Tucker remained focused on the scourge of Gangsta rap, Massachusetts Institute of Technology historian Evelyn Hammonds mobilized to defend against the defamation of Black womanhood. More than 2,000 Black female scholars from all across the country made their way to MIT’s campus on January 13, 1994, for “Black Women in the Academy: Defending Our Name.” It was the first-ever national conference of Black women scholars, whose academic lives and scholarship had been routinely cast aside by gender racism. In the cold of the Boston-area winter, these women came blazing about the public dishonor of Black welfare mothers, of Anita Hill, of Sister Souljah, of three of Clinton’s failed appointments (Johnetta Cole, Lani Guinier, and Joyce-lyn Elders): of the Black woman. Some of the attendees had signed the Times advertisement defending Anita Hill in November 1991.
Angela Davis was honored as the conference’s closing keynote speaker.
She was certainly the nation’s most famous African American woman academic. But more importantly, she had consistently, prominently, and unapologetically defended Black women over the course of her career, including those Black women that even some Black women did not want to defend. She had been arguably America’s staunchest antiracist voice over the past two decades, unwavering in her search for antiracist explanations when others took the easier and racist way out of Black blame. Davis had looked into the eyes and minds and experiences of those young incarcerated Black and Brown women during her imprisonment in New York in 1970, and she had never stopped looking into their lives and defending them. Her career embodied the conference’s title, like the careers of so many of those accomplished intellectuals who listened that day to her speech.
Davis opened her address by taking her audience back to the origins of the conference title, “Defending Our Name.” She took them back to the moral policing of Black clubwomen in the 1890s, which, like the campaigns today “against teenage pregnancy,” denied “sexual autonomy in young black women.” Davis admonished the “contemporary law and order discourse” that was “legitimized” by both political parties and all the races. Black politicians were sponsoring “a deleterious anti-crime bill,” and Black people were “increasingly calling for more police and more prisons,” unaware that while African Americans constituted 12 percent of the drug users, they constituted more than 36 percent of the drug arrests. Davis called for her sisters to envision “a new abolitionism” and “institutions other than prisons to address the social problems that lead to imprisonment.” 28 Ten days later, in his first State of the Union Address, President Clinton called for the very opposite of “a new abolitionism.” Congress, he said, should “set aside partisan differences and pass a strong, smart, tough crime bill.” The president endorsed a federal “three strikes and you’re out” law, bringing on wild applause from both Democrats and Republicans. Heeding Clinton’s urging, Republicans and New Democrats sent him a $30 billion crime bill for his signature in August 1994. New Democrats hailed the bill as a victory for being “able to wrest the crime issue from the Republicans and make it their own.” The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, the largest crime bill in US history, created dozens of new federal capital crimes, instituted life sentences for certain three-times offenders, and provided billions for the expansion of police forces and prisons—and the net effect would be the largest increase of the prison population in US history, mostly on nonviolent drug offenses. Clinton fulfilled his campaign vow that no Republican would be tougher on crime than him—and crime in America was colored Black. As Tupac Shakur rhymed in “Changes,” “Instead of war on poverty, they got a war on drugs so the police can bother me.” (About two decades later, Hillary Clinton—in the thicket of a run for the White House— renounced the effects of her husband’s signature anticrime bill, calling for the “end of the era of mass incarceration”).
29 Just as the discourse on the overblown welfare problem primarily defamed Black women, the discourse on the overblown crime problem in 1994 primarily defamed Black men. Media critic Earl Ofari Hutchinson passionately rebuked the defamers in The Assassination of the Black Male Image, his 1994 scorcher. The Queens-born rapper Nas released “One Love,” a composition of letters to incarcerated friends, on his debut album, Illmatic, an instant classic, as revered that year—and in history—as “Juicy,” the debut single of the Brooklyn-born Biggie Smalls. In Biggie’s music video, one lyric is sung over the sight of a Black male behind bars: “Considered a fool ’cause I dropped out of high school / Stereotypes of a black male misunderstood / And it’s still all good.” 30 Biggie Smalls had no idea he had released his debut single on the eve of the most spirited academic debate in recent history on whether Black people were natural or nurtured fools. It was an academic debate that had serious political repercussions for Clinton’s tough-on-Blacks New Democrats and the newest force in American politics, which pledged to be even tougher. CHAPTER 35 New Republicans
BY THE TIME Biggie Small’s “Juicy” was released in 1994, a growing number of academics was accepting the truth that “intelligence” was so transient, so multifaceted, so relative, that no one could accurately measure it without being biased in some form or fashion. And these revelations were threatening the very foundation of racist ideas in education (as well as sexist and elitist ideas in education). These revelations were endangering the racist perceptions of the historically White schools and colleges as the most intelligent atmospheres; the contrived achievement gap (and actual funding gap); the privileged pipelines for Whites into the best-funded schools, colleges, jobs, and economic lives; and the standardized testing that kept those pipelines mostly White. Harvard experimental psychologist Richard Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray watched the growth of these endangering ideas in the 1980s and early 1990s. In response, they published The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, a landmark book that gave standardized tests—and the racist ideas underpinning them—a new lease on life.
In the first sentence, Herrnstein and Murray took aim at the spreading realization that general intelligence did not exist, and as such, could not vary from human to human in a form that could be measured on a single weighted scale, such as a standardized test. “That the word intelligence describes something real and that it varies from person to person is as universal and ancient as any understanding about the state of being human,” Herrnstein and Murray wrote at the beginning of their Introduction. They went on to dismiss as “radical” and “naïve” those antiracists who rejected standardized test scores as indicators of intelligence and thus the existence of the racial achievement gap. For Hernnstein and Murray, that left two reasonable “alternatives”: “(1) the cognitive difference between blacks and whites is genetic” (as segregationists argued); “or (2) the cognitive difference between blacks and whites is environment” (as assimilationists argued). Actually, Hernnstein and Murray reasoned, “It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences.” They claimed that “cognitive ability is substantially heritable, apparently no less than 40 percent and no more than 80 percent.” The increasing genetically inferior “underclass” was having the most children, and as they had the most children, the great White and wealthy “cognitive elite” was slowly passing into oblivion. “Inequality of endowments, including intelligence, is a reality,” Hernnstein and Murray concluded. “Trying to eradicate inequality with artificially manufactured outcomes has led to disaster.” 1 In fact, it was the resistance to egalitarian measures by those all-powerful beneficiaries of inequality and their producers of racist ideas, like Hernnstein and Murray, that had led to disaster. The book was well marketed, and initial reviews were fairly positive. It arrived during the final straightaway to the 1994 midterm elections, around the time the New Republicans issued their extremely tough “Contract with America” to take the welfare and crime issue back from Clinton’s New Democrats. Charles Murray started the midterm election cycle whipping up voters about the “rise of illegitimacy,” and ended by rationalizing the “Contract with America,” especially the New Republicans’ tough-on-crime “Taking Back Our Streets Act” and tough-onwelfare “Personal Responsibility Act.” 2 The term “personal responsibility” had been playing minor roles for some time. In 1994, Georgia representative Newt Gingrich and Texas representative Richard Armey, the main authors of the “Contract with America,” brought the term to prime time—to the lexicon of millions of American racists—targeting not just Black welfare recipients. The mandate was simple enough: Black people, especially poor Black people, needed to take “personal responsibility” for their socioeconomic plight and for racial disparities, and stop blaming racial discrimination for their problems, and depending on government to fix them. The racist mandate of “personal responsibility” convinced a new generation of Americans that irresponsible Black people caused the racial inequities, not discrimination—thereby convincing a new generation of racist Americans to fight against irresponsible Black people.
It made sense to encourage a Black individual (or non-Black individual) to take more responsibility for his or her own life. It made racist sense to tell Black people as a group to take more personal responsibility for their lives and for the nation’s racial disparities, since the irresponsible actions of Black individuals were always generalized in the minds of racists. According to this racist logic, Black people and their irresponsibility were to blame for their higher poverty and unemployment and underemployment rates, as if there were more dependent and lazy Black individuals than dependent and lazy White individuals. Slaveholders’ racist theory of African Americans as more dependent had been dusted off and renovated for the 1990s, allowing racists to reside in the hollow mentality of thinking that African Americans were not taking enough personal responsibility, and that’s why so many were dependent on government welfare, just as they used to be dependent on their masters’ welfare.
It was a popular racist idea—even among Black people who were generalizing the individual actions of someone around them. In the 1994 midterm elections, voters handed Republicans and their dictum on personal responsibility control of Congress. After the New Democrats got tougher than the New Republicans by passing the toughest crime bill in history, New Republicans pledged to get even tougher than the New Democrats. Both angled to win over one of the oldest interest groups—the racist vote—which probably had never before been as multiracial as it was in 1994.
As 1995 began, the critical and affirming responses of The Bell Curve began to cross fire. It is hard to imagine another book that sparked such an intense academic war, possibly because the segregationists, in their think tanks, and the assimilationists, in universities and academic associations, and the antiracists, in their popular Black Studies and critical race theory collectives, were all so powerful. In his revised and expanded 1996 edition of The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould maintained that no one should be surprised that The Bell Curve’s publication “coincided exactly . . . with a new age of social meanness.” The Bell Curve, said Gould, “must . . . be recording a swing of the political pendulum to a sad position that requires a rationale for affirming social inequalities as dictates of biology.” He criticized the proponents of this new meanness for their calls to “slash every program of social services for people in genuine need . . . but don’t cut a dime, heaven forbid, from the military . . . and provide tax relief for the wealthy.” British psychologist Richard Lynn defended the social meanness and The Bell Curve, asking, in an article title, “Is Man Breeding Himself Back to the Age of the Apes?” The “underclass” was only “good” at “producing children,” and “these children tend to inherit their parents’ poor intelligence and adopt their socio-pathic lifestyle, reproducing the cycle of deprivation.” The American Psychological Association (APA)—representing the originators and popularizers of standardized intelligence testing—convened a Task Force on Intelligence in response to The Bell Curve. “The differential between the mean intelligence test scores of Blacks and Whites does not result from any obvious biases in test construction and administration, nor does it simply reflect differences in socio-economic status,” the assimilationist and defensive APA report stated in 1996. “Explanations based on factors of caste and culture may be appropriate, but so far there is little direct empirical support for them. There is certainly no such support for a genetic interpretation. At this time, no one knows what is responsible for the differential.” No one will ever know what doesn’t exist.
3 While congratulating and lifting up Hernnstein and Murray for The Bell Curve, Republican politicians tried to unseat Angela Davis after UC Santa Cruz’s faculty awarded her the prestigious President’s Chair professorship in January 1995. “I’m outraged,” California state senator Bill Leonard told reporters. “The integrity of the entire system is on the line when it appoints someone with Ms. Davis’ reputation for racism, violence, and communism.” Davis, he said, was “trying to create a civil war between whites and blacks.” Southern segregationists had said that northern integrationists were trying to create a civil war between the races in the 1950s. Enslavers had said that abolitionists were trying to create a civil war between the races back in the 1800s. Both northern and southern segregationists had regarded Jim Crow and slavery as positively good and claimed that discrimination had ended or never existed. As much as segregationist theory had changed over the years, it had remained the same. Since the 1960s, segregationist theorists, like their predecessors, were all about convincing Americans that racism did not exist, knowing that antiracists would stop resisting racism, and racism would then be assured, only when Americans were convinced that the age of racism was over.
4 After Hernnstein and Murray decreed that racial inequality was due not to discrimination, but to genetics, Murray’s co-fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, almost on cue in 1995, decreed “the end of racism” in his challenging book, which used that phrase as its title. “Why should groups with different skin color, head shape, and other visible characteristics prove identical in reasoning ability or the ability to construct an advanced civilization?” asked the former Reagan aide Dinesh D’Souza. “If blacks have certain inherited abilities, such as improvisational decision making, that could explain why they predominate in certain fields such as jazz, rap, and basketball, and not in other fields, such as classical music, chess, and astronomy.” These racist ideas were not racist ideas to D’Souza, who wrapped himself in his Indian ancestry on the book’s first page in order to declare that his “inclinations” were “strongly antiracist and sympathetic to minorities.” D’Souza, the self-identified antiracist, rejected the antiracist notion that racism was “the main obstacle facing African Americans today, and the primary explanation for black problems.” Instead, he regarded “liberal antiracism” as African Americans’ main obstacle, because it blamed “African American pathologies on white racism and opposes all measures that impose civilization standards.” 5 With D’Souza’s incredible writing and speaking and marketing talents— and powerful backers—he had managed to get many Americans to ponder the issues discussed in The End of Racism. But discrimination was everywhere in 1995 for people who cared enough to open their eyes and look at the policies, disparities, and rhetoric all around them. How could anyone claim the end of racism during one of the most racially charged years in US history, with racist ideas swinging back and forth like Ping-Pong balls in the media coverage of the criminal trial of the century? From the opening statements on January 24 to the live verdict on October 3, 1995, the O. J. Simpson murder trial and exoneration became the epitome of softness on crime for upset racist Americans.
6 The O.J. case was not the only evidence for the progression of racism that D’Souza wisely omitted. Florida’s Don Black established one of the earliest White supremacist websites, Stormfront.org, in 1995. Informing the views of this new crop of “cyber racists,” as journalist Jessie Daniels termed them, were segregationists like Canadian psychologist J. Phillippe Ruston, who argued that evolution had given Blacks different brain and genital sizes than Whites. “It’s a trade-off; more brain or more penis. You can’t have everything,” Ruston told Rolling Stone readers in January 1995. In March, Halle Berry starred in Losing Isaiah as the spiraling debate over interracial adoptions hit theaters. The film was about a Black mother on crack whose baby is adopted by a White woman. And while the idea of Black parents adopting a White child was beyond the racist imagination, assimilationists were not only encouraging White savior parents to adopt Black children, but claiming that Black children would be better off in White homes than they were in Black homes.
7 When asked in 1995 to “close your eyes for a second, envision a drug user, and describe that person to me,” 95 percent of the respondents described a Black face, despite Black faces constituting a mere 15 percent of drug users that year. But racist Americans were closing their eyes to these studies, and opening them to pieces like “The Coming of the Super Predators” in the Weekly Standard on November 27, 1995. Princeton University’s John J.
Dilulio—a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where Charles Murray had resided in the 1980s—revealed the 300 percent increase in murder rates for Black fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds between 1985 and 1992, a rate six times greater than the White increase. He did not explain this surge in violence by revealing the simultaneous surge in unemployment rates among young Black males. Nor did Dilulio explain the violent surge by revealing that drug enforcement units were disproportionately mass incarcerating young Black drug dealers, in some cases knowing full well that the consequence of breaking up a drug ring was a violent struggle for control of the previously stabilized market. Dilulio explained this violent surge by sensationalizing the “moral poverty” of growing up “in abusive, violence-ridden, fatherless, Godless, and jobless settings.” When we look “on the horizon,” he said, there “are tens of thousands of severely morally impoverished juvenile superpredators” who “will do what comes ‘naturally’: murder, rape, rob, assault, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, and get high.” What was Dilulio’s solution to “super-predators”? “It’s called religion.” 8 In the eyes of Dilulio, in the eyes of millions of people of all races, the baggy-clothes wearing, Ebonics-swearing, Hip Hop–sharing, “Fuck tha Police”–declaring young Black male did not have to wear a costume on Halloween in 1995. He was already a scary character—a “menace to society”—as a 1993 film had depicted (Menace II Society). And his young mother was a menace for giving birth to him. The main female and male prey of predatory racism were effectively stamped “super-predators.” As an antiracist teacher in Menace II Society told young Black males, “The hunt is on and you’re the prey!” 9 In the midst of all of these proclamations about the end of racism in 1995, African Americans engaged in the largest political mobilization in their history, the bold Million Man March on Washington, DC. It had been proposed by Louis Farrakhan after the smoke cleared from the 1994 midterm elections. March fever quickly enraptured Black Americans. Antiracist feminists, Angela Davis included, ridiculed the gender racism of the march’s unofficial organizing principle: Black men must rise up from their weakened state of emasculation to become heads of households and communities and uplift the race. “Justice cannot be served, by countering a distorted racist view of black manhood with a narrowly sexist vision of men standing ‘a degree above women,’” Davis said at a Midtown Manhattan press conference on the eve of the march. But some critics went too far. As some Black feminists were erroneously calling march organizers sexist for mobilizing just Black men, some White assimilationists were erroneously calling march organizers racist for mobilizing just Black men.
10 Some activists who split over the Million Man March did come together in the summer of 1995 to defend the life of the world’s most famous Black male political prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, who had been convicted of killing a White police officer in Philadelphia in 1982. “These are America’s death row residents: men and woman who walk the razor’s edge between half-life and certain death,” Mumia said in Live from Death Row, a collection of his commentaries. “You will find a blacker world on death row than anywhere else. African-Americans, a mere 11 percent of the national population, compose about 40 percent of the death row population. There, too, you will find this writer.” 11 Weeks after Live from Death Row appeared to a shower of reviews in May 1995, and days before Mumia’s lawyers filed an appeal for a new trial, lawand-order Pennsylvania governor Thomas Ridge, a Republican, signed Mumia Abu-Jamal’s death warrant. His execution would be August 17, 1995.
Protests erupted around the world that summer for Mumia’s life and for the death of capital punishment. Among the protesters were graying activists, some of whom had screamed “Free Angela” decades ago, and younger ones, some of whom had helped to mobilize the Million Man March. But before the National Day of Protest was to take place, scheduled for August 12, Mumia was granted an indefinite stay of execution.
12 At the end of that volcanic summer, the vast majority of African Americans were supportive of the doubly conscious Million Man March, doubly conscious of racist and antiracist ideas. Arguably, its most pervasively popular organizing principle was personal responsibility, the call for Black men to take more personal responsibility for their lives, their families, their neighborhoods, and their Black nation. Many of the roughly 1 million Black men who showed up on the National Mall on October 16, 1995, showed up believing the racist idea that something was wrong with Black men and Black teens and Black boys and Black fathers and Black husbands. But many of those marchers who stood there and listened to the fifty speakers also believed the antiracist idea that there was something wrong with rampant discrimination. As Louis Farrakhan thundered at the climax of his two-and-ahalf-hour oration, “The real evil in America is not white flesh or black flesh.
The real evil in America is the idea that undergirds the setup of the Western world, and that idea is called white supremacy.” 13 Bill Clinton did not greet the million Black men or hear their exclamations of racism’s persistence on October 16. Instead he gave a racial progress speech at the University of Texas, pleading in the heart of evangelical America for racial healing, egging on the mass evangelical crusade for racial reconciliation in 1996 and 1997. Crusading evangelicals would go on to preach that the so-dubbed problem of mutual racial hate could be solved by God bringing about mutual love. Clinton, at least, did recognize in his Texas speech that “we must clean the house of white America of racism.” But he surrounded one of the most antiracist statements of his presidency with two of the most racist statements of his presidency. Instead of relaying statistics that Whites usually suffered violence at the hands of Whites, Clinton legitimized the “roots of white fear in America” by saying that “violence for . . . white people too often has a black face.” And then he went on the defensive: “It’s not racist for whites to assert that the culture of welfare dependency, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and absent fatherhood cannot be broken by social programs unless there is first more personal responsibility.” 14 Clinton officially declared himself a supporter of the racist idea of personal responsibility when he signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) into law on August 22, 1996, with the next presidential election on the horizon. The bill was a compromise between Newt Gingrich’s New Republicans and Clinton’s New Democrats. It limited federal control of welfare programs, required work for benefits, and inserted welfare time limits. Even though programs for the poor represented only 23 percent of the non-defense budget, and had suffered 50 percent of the spending cuts over the past two years, welfare reform remained the leading domestic issue for the majority of White Americans. From Barry Goldwater’s “animal creature” to Reagan’s “welfare queen,” producers of racist ideas had done their job on non-Black Americans. Republican congressman John L.
Mica of Florida held up a sign that said it all during the congressional debate on the bill: “Don’t Feed the Alligators / We post these warnings because unnatural feedings and artificial care creates dependency.” 15 The same producers of racist ideas had also done their job on Black Americans, averting a march against welfare reform, and causing some African Americans to hate irresponsible, dependent, violent “niggers” as much as racist non-Blacks did. “I love black people, but I hate niggers,” jabbed a relatively unknown Black comedian, Chris Rock, on HBO’s “Bring the Pain” on June 1, 1996. The unforgettable performance began with a litany of antiracist jabs at Blacks and Whites over their reactions to the O.J. verdict and catapulted Chris Rock into the pantheon of American comedy. It marked the beginning of a revolution in Black comedy and introduced the three main comedic topics for a new generation: relationships, the racism of White people, and what was wrong with Black people. Out of “Bring the Pain,” doubly conscious Black comedy emerged as one of the most dynamic arenas of antiracist and racist ideas, with listeners laughing at, or with, the comedians.
16 ANTIRACISTS SUFFERED A crushing loss in California on election night in 1996. California voters banned affirmative action, or “preferential treatment,” in public employment, contracts, and education. Neither funding allocation policies for public colleges and K–12 schools nor standardized tests —both of which preferentially treated White, rich, and male students—were banned. The percentage of African Americans at University of California campuses began to decline.
The campaign for California’s Proposition 209 ballot initiative displayed the progression of racist ideas in their full effect: its proponents branded antiracist affirmative action as discriminatory, named the campaign and ballot measure the “civil rights initiative,” evoked the “dream” of Martin Luther King Jr. in an advertisement, and put a Black face on the campaign, University of California regent Ward Connerly. It was a blueprint Connerly would take on the road to eliminate affirmative action in other states, but not before receiving a public rebuke from the sixty-nine-year-old Coretta Scott King. “Martin Luther King, in fact, supported the concept of affirmative action,” she said. “Those who suggest he did not support affirmative action are misrepresenting his beliefs and his life’s work.” 17 On November 6, 1996, a day after passage of the proposition and the reelection of Clinton and a Republican Congress, quite possibly the most sophisticated, holistically antiracist thriller of the decade appeared in theaters.
Directed by twenty-seven-year-old F. Gary Gray, who was already well known for Friday (1995), written by Kate Lanier and Takashi Bufford, and starring Jada Pinkett, Queen Latifah, Vivica A. Fox, and Kimberly Elise—Set It Off showcased just how and why four unique Black women could be motivated by Los Angeles’s job, marital, and gender discrimination; class and sexual exploitation; and racist police violence to commit a violent crime—in their case, well-planned armed bank robberies—in an attempt to better their lives and get back at those who were trying to destroy them. Set It Off did what law-and-order and tough-on-crime racism refused to do: it humanized inner-city Black perpetrators of illegal acts, and in the process forced its viewers to reimagine who the real American criminals were. While Pinkett played an erudite, independent, sexually empowered heterosexual woman in all her normality among male lovers and abusers, Latifah portrayed a mighty butch lesbian in all her normality among poor Blacks. In the end, three women die, but the shrewd Pinkett escapes with the stolen money into the sunset away from American racism.
Critics and viewers fell in love with the tragedy and triumph of Set It Off.
Even film critic Roger Ebert “was amazed how much I started to care about the characters.” If only law-and-order America, seeing the structural racism, had started to care about the real characters. But the producers of racist ideas seemed determined to make sure that never, ever happened.
18
BILL CLINTON WAS sadly mistaken about the root of the “problem of race” when he made a stunning announcement on the subject on June 14, 1997. In his commencement address at Angela Davis’s alma mater, UC San Diego, Clinton pledged to lead “the American people in a great and unprecedented conversation on race.” Racial reformers applauded Clinton for his willingness to condemn prejudice and discrimination and for his antiracist ambitions of building “the world’s first truly multiracial democracy.” 19 Upward of 1 million Black women made sure to inject their ideas into the conversation, gathering in Philadelphia on October 25, 1997. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Sister Souljah, Winnie Mandela, Attallah and Ilyasah Shabazz (daughters of Malcolm X), and Dorothy Height spoke to the Million Woman March. At one point, a helicopter flew down low to drown out their words. Thousands shot up their arms, trying to almost shoo the helicopter away like a fly. It worked. “See what we can do when we work together,” intoned the passionate director of ceremonies, Brenda Burgess of Michigan.
The calls for Black unity resounded in Philadelphia as they had two years earlier among those million men in Washington, DC—as if Black people had a unity problem, as if this disunity was contributing to the plight of the race, and as if other races did not have sellouts and backstabbers. The nation’s most unified race behind a single political party was never the most politically divided race. But, as always, racist ideas never needed to account for reality.
20 “Racism will not disappear by focusing on race,” House speaker Newt Gingrich argued in the wake of Clinton’s national race conversation. This reaction to Clinton’s conversation synthesized into a newly popular term: color-blind. “Color-blindness” rhetoric—the idea of solving the race problem by ignoring it—started to catch on as logical in illogical minds. “Color-blind” segregationists condemned public discussions of racism, following in the footsteps of Jim Crow and slaveholders. But these supposedly color-blind segregationists were much more advanced than their racist predecessors, announcing that anyone who engaged Clinton’s national discussion in any antiracist way was in fact racist. In his 1997 book Liberal Racism, journalist Jim Sleeper argued that anyone who was not color blind—or “transracial”— was racist. In their runaway success of the same year, America in Black & White, Manhattan Institute Fellow Abigail Thernstrom and Harvard historian Stephan Thernstrom said that “race-consciousness policies make for more race-consciousness; they carry American society backward.” “Few whites are now racists,” and what dominates race relations now is “black anger” and “white surrender,” the Thernstroms wrote, echoing the essays in The Race Card, an influential 1997 anthology edited by Peter Collier and David Horowitz. Criers of racial discrimination were playing the fake “race card,” and it was winning because of liberal “white guilt.” 21 All this color-blind rhetoric seemed to have its intended effect. The court of public opinion seemed to start favoring the color-blind product nearly a century after the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of the product “separate but equal.” The millennium was coming, and people were still being blinded to human equality by colors. CHAPTER 36
99.9 Percent the Same
THE COLOR-BLIND IDEAL was reinforced by the propaganda of the arrival of American multiculturalism. “More than ever, we understand the benefits of our racial, linguistic, and cultural diversity,” Clinton said in his speech at UC San Diego. The old assimilationist ideal of all Americans, no matter their cultural heritage, adopting Euro-American culture, had indeed suffered a devastating assault in schools, and especially colleges, from the new Ethnic Studies departments, the profusion of non-White immigrants, and Americans learning their native and foreign ancestral roots. Nathan Glazer, the coauthor of a book detailing the assimilationist standard of the 1960s, Beyond the Melting Pot, despondently confessed that things had changed. The title of his 1997 book was We Are All Multiculturalists Now. The book became a punching bag for assimilationists, who had spent the decade swinging at those increasingly popular Black Studies programs and departments.
1 But Glazer again got it wrong on culture. A truly multicultural nation ruled by multiculturalists would not have Christianity as its unofficial standard religion. It would not have suits as its standard professional attire.
English would not be its standard language or be assessed by standardized tests. Ethnic Studies would not be looked upon as superfluous to educational curricula. Afrocentric scholars and other multicultural theorists, lecturing on multiple cultural perspectives, would not be looked upon as controversial. No cultural group would be directly and indirectly asked to learn and conform to any other group’s cultural norms in public in order to get ahead. A nation of different-looking people is not automatically multicultural or diverse if most of them practice or are learning to practice the same culture. The United States was maybe a multicultural nation in homes, behind closed doors, but certainly not in public in 1997. Racists in the United States were only embracing diversity and multiculturalism in name. In practice, they were enforcing cultural standards.
And this maintenance of the status quo became apparent in the critical reviews of Angela Davis’s game-changing new book, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, published in 1998. It had taken years for her to transcribe the entire body of Ma Rainey’s and Bessie Smith’s available blues recordings, the material basis of her analysis. Known for her integrative analysis of gender, race, and class, Davis quietly extended the analytical factors to include sexuality and culture. She looked at lyrics in light of lesbianism and bisexuality, and she examined African cultural retentions in the blues genre.
Not many Americans had expressed antiracist ideas in the five major analytic categories: gender, race, class, sexuality, and culture. So the critiques came from all five sides, especially the side of culture. The New York Times reviewer rebuked Davis’s cultural antiracism as “ingrained cultural nationalism,” while the Washington Post ridiculed her “turgid academic jargon and rigid ideology.” Apparently, scholars like Angela Davis who uncovered, studied, and articulated cultural differences in more than just name were ideologues and cultural nationalists.
2 Davis continued her innovative integrative scholarship on Black women and remained focused on reviving the abolitionist movement as the new millennium arrived. “The two millionth prisoner entered the system in America on February 15, 2000 and half of those prisoners are Black,” she said in early 2000 at the University of Colorado. Davis knew that most of these prisoners had been convicted of drug crimes. She also knew that Whites were found to be more likely to sell drugs than Blacks, as Human Rights Watch was reporting. Therefore, Davis was crossing the country and directing the attention of Americans to the unjust criminal justice system, which she viewed as the new slavery. Davis offered the natural abolitionist solution a few years later, asking the antiracist question of the age in 2003 in her new book title: Are Prisons Obsolete? She imagined “a world without prisons” in the 115-page manifesto for prison abolition. “Because of the persistent power of racism, ‘criminals’ and ‘evildoers’ are, in the collective imagination, fantasized as people of color,” Davis wrote. And “the prison” relieved America “of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers.” 3 A prominent Black linguist at UC Berkeley did not agree with Davis’s assessment. The Black proportion of the prison population “neatly reflects the rate at which they commit crimes,” maintained John McWhorter—without evidence—in Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America. This 2000 best seller catapulted him into the spotlight as America’s best-known Black conservative intellectual. As a linguist, McWhorter of course had to spend a chapter commenting on the Ebonics debate, which had been tipped off four years earlier when word got out that the Oakland Unified School District had recognized Ebonics as a language derived from West Africa. Aside from a line saying that African Americans had a genetic predisposition to Ebonics (which was extracted in a future resolution), the 1996 Oakland resolution was amazingly antiracist and compassionate, equating Ebonics with more accepted English languages. Acknowledging those students as fluent in Ebonics, the school board wanted to maintain “the legitimacy and richness of such language” and “facilitate their acquisition and mastery of English language skills.” They wanted to make sure these students were bilingual.
4 Social psychologist Robert Williams had coined the term “Ebonics” back in 1973 to replace all the racist identifiers, like “Nonstandard Negro English.” “We know that ebony means black and that phonics refers to speech sounds or the science of sounds,” he explained then. “Thus, we are really talking about the science of black speech sounds or language.” Ebonics remained a littleknown linguistic term until the Oakland school board resolution set off a typhoon of assimilationist ire and antiracist defenses in the late 1990s.
McWhorter made a name for himself as one of the few Black linguists opposing the Oakland resolution.
5 Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press days after the resolution, Jesse Jackson bristled, “I understand the attempt to reach out to these children, but this is an unacceptable surrender, borderlining on disgrace. It’s teaching down to our children.” The Linguistic Society of America, on the other hand, issued a supportive statement in 1997. “Characterizations of Ebonics as ‘slang,’ ‘mutant,’ ‘lazy,’ ‘defective,’ ‘ungrammatical,’ or ‘broken English’ are incorrect and demeaning,” the statement said. Evidence showed that people could “be aided in their learning of the standard variety by pedagogical approaches which recognize the legitimacy of the other varieties of a language. From this perspective, the Oakland School Board’s decision to recognize the vernacular of African American students in teaching them Standard English is linguistically and pedagogically sound.” When Jesse Jackson learned that Oakland planned to use Ebonics to teach, as he called it, “standard English,” he backed off from his initial opposition. But Jackson’s initial opposition—let alone the opposition of people of all races who continued to oppose the embrace of Ebonics—demonstrated that despite the lip service they gave it, many Americans despised multiculturalism.
6 Assimilationists who came around to supporting the teaching of “Standard English” using Ebonics did not come around to discarding the racist hierarchy that places “standard” or “proper” English above Ebonics. And this linguistic hierarchy existed across the Western world. All the new languages that enslaved Africans had developed in the Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and British colonies were similarly denigrated in racist fashion as broken “dialects,” or inferior varieties of the standard European language, which in the United States was “Standard English.” Ebonics had formed from the trees of African languages and modern English, just as modern English had formed from the trees of the Latin and Germanic languages. Ebonics was no more “broken” or “nonstandard” English than English was “broken” or “nonstandard” German or Latin.
7 To John McWhorter, those defending Oakland’s decision to provide a bilingual education for their Ebonics speakers constituted yet another example of Black America’s self-sabotaging. He argued in Losing the Race: SelfSabotage in Black America that White people were better, and better off, than Blacks because they did not self-sabotage as much. With “white racism . . . all but obsolete,” McWhorter argued, Black people’s main obstacle was Black people: their “victimology” (or race cards), their separatism (or antiassimilationist ideas), and their “Black anti-intellectualism,” as revealed in the “Ebonics movement” and in the “acting White” putdown in schools that Black elites were raging about. McWhorter supplied his anecdotes as many other people were giving theirs. But he gave no proof that the Black children condemning other Black children for “acting White” were always relating intellectualism to “acting White.” Some of these high-scoring students being scolded for “acting White” may have indeed been looking down on their lower-scoring classmates, which, from a political standpoint, would be “acting White” (if “acting White” is looking down on Black people). Some of these students may have indeed been “acting White” because they could not help but act out what their parents kept telling them: that they were not like those other Black kids. Some of these students may have indeed been “acting White” because they lacked a fluency in Black cultural forms (if “acting Black,” from a cultural standpoint, is being fluent in Black cultural forms).
8 Three years after the release of Losing the Race, John McWhorter submitted his Essays for the Black Silent Majority. According to this 2003 book, the silent Black majority believed that African Americans’ own “culture-internal ideologies” had hobbled the group from “taking advantage of pathways to success.” McWhorter wrote Essays for the Black Silent Majority from the half-truth of racial progress, ignoring the half-truth of the progression of racism. “Today, black success stories,” he wrote, are “based on good old-fashioned hard work, ingenuity, and inner strength,” with “residual racism . . . as a minor nuisance they overcame by keeping their eyes on the prize.” 9 McWhorter’s “silent Black majority” was neither silent nor in the majority. But he was mobilizing a loud Black minority, and its expressions of cultural racism, of class racism, of struggling Black folk needing to take personal responsibility and work harder, may have been deeply personal.
Some Black folks did not want to admit that they took advantage of extraordinary opportunities from their elite or even humble backgrounds— and that there are extremely hard-working poor people who never had the same opportunities. Like racist Whites, racist Blacks believed their “success” was due to their extraordinary God-given qualities and/or their extraordinary work ethic; that if they “made it,” then any Black person could, if he or she worked hard enough. For many of these Black racists, their expressions may have been deeply political: they may have been cunningly reciting racist talking points in order to receive financial and occupational favor, whether they actually believed these racist ideas or not. Opportunities proliferated in political offices and think tanks and news mediums for Black racists willing to look down on African Americans in the twenty-first century. In 2003, McWhorter left academia for a posh position as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. But if science mattered more than self-interest, then the Manhattan Institute’s preeminent production of racist ideas would have ceased three years before McWhorter arrived.
REPORTERS CLAPPED AS Clinton walked into the East Room of the White House on June 26, 2000. He held the answer to one of the oldest questions of the modern world: whether there was some inherent biological distinction between the identifiable races. Flanking the presidential podium were two large screens that read: “Decoding the Book of Life / A Milestone for Humanity.” “We are here to celebrate the completion of the first survey of the entire human genome,” Bill Clinton rejoiced to an audience of reporters and cameras. “Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind.” It was a map that should “revolutionize” medicine by giving scientists information about the “genetic roots” of disease.
It should also revolutionize racial science, Clinton announced. The map shows us “that in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same.” One of the scientists responsible for sequencing the human genome, Craig Venter, was even more frank with reporters. “The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis,” Venter said. His research team at Celera Genomics had determined “the genetic code” of five individuals, who were identified as either “Hispanic, Asian, Caucasian or African American,” and the scientists could not tell one race from another.
10 When the press conference ceased and the reporters broadcast their stories, the old racist saying that a human book can be judged by its cover should have ceased. The refrain of “White blood” and “Black diseases” should have ceased, and the segregationist chorus saying that human beings were created unequal, that played for five centuries, should have also ceased.
Science did not start the singing, though, and science would not stop it.
Segregationists had too many racist policies to hide, racial disparities to justify, scientific and political careers to maintain, and money to make. The racial progress of Clinton’s 99.9 percent announcement brought on the next segregationist theory: the 0.1 percent genetic difference between humans must be racial. First curse theory and then natural slave theory and then polygenesis and then Social Darwinism and now genes—segregationists had produced new ideas to justify the inequities of every era. “Scientists planning the next phase of the human genome project are being forced to confront a treacherous issue: the genetic differences between the human races,” science reporter Nicholas Wade shared in the New York Times, just weeks after Clinton’s press conference.
11 Segregationist geneticists powered forward on their wild goose chase, trying to figure out something that did not exist: how the races differed genetically. In 2005, University of Chicago geneticist Bruce Lahn made the conjecture that there were two super-intelligence genes, and said they were least likely to exist in sub-Sahara Africans. When scientists demanded proof, Lahn had trouble providing it. Still no one had proven any association between genes and intelligence, let alone genes and race. “There is no such thing as a set of genes that belong exclusively to one [racial] group and not another,” University of Pennsylvania bioethics scholar Dorothy Roberts explained in her 2011 book Fatal Invention, in which she exposes the unscientific basis of biological races, race-specific genes, and race-specific drugs for race-specific diseases. “Race is not a biological category that is politically charged,” she added. “It is a political category that has been disguised as a biological one.” But the biological ideas lived on comfortably.
By 2014, Nicholas Wade had retired from the New York Times and released his own defense of biological racism, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History. “The thesis presented here assumes . . . that there is a genetic component to human social behavior,” Wade wrote. “Contrary to the central belief of multiculturalists, Western culture has achieved far more than other cultures in many significant spheres,” he wrote, because of Europeans’ genetic superiority. Craig Venter, the geneticist involved in mapping the genome, writing again in 2014, reassured his readers that “the results of genome sequences over the last thirteen years only prove my point more clearly”: that there “are greater genetic differences between individuals of the same ‘racial’ group than between individuals of different groups.” 12
MONTHS AFTER CLINTON evoked that timeless phrase—“99.9 percent the same”—the United States Report to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination pointed out what was now the broken US race record: there had been “substantial successes,” but there were “significant obstacles” remaining. It was September 2000, and Texas governor George W. Bush was pledging to restore “honor and dignity” to the White House, while Vice President Al Gore was trying to distance himself from Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal. The report’s findings of discrimination and disparities across the American board did not become campaign talking points, as they reflected poorly on both the Clinton administration and the Republicans’ color-blind America.
“U.S. law guarantees the right to participate equally in elections,” the State Department had assured the United Nations. But on November 7, 2000, tens of thousands of Black voters in Governor Jeb Bush’s Florida were barred from voting or had their votes destroyed, allowing George W. Bush to win his brother’s state by fewer than five hundred votes and narrowly take the electoral college. It seemed ironically normal. After triumphantly proclaiming to the United Nations their commitment to eliminating racism, local officials, state officials, the Supreme Court, and the US Senate executed or validated the racism that won a presidential election. “The tactics have changed, but the goal remains depressingly the same,” concluded New York Times columnist Bob Herbert. “Do not let them vote! If you can find a way to stop them, stop them.” 13 Funding evangelical race healers and personal responsibility advocates, once in office President Bush tried and failed to slow the antiracist momentum of the late 1990s. Trans-Africa executive director Randall Robinson accelerated that momentum in 2000 with his best-selling reparations manifesto, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks. Robinson’s reparations demands came on the heels of African nations demanding debt forgiveness and reparations from Europe. Meanwhile, the antiracist world was gearing up for one of the largest, most serious, most collaborative meetings in history. Nearly 12,000 women and men ventured to beautiful Durban, South Africa, for the United Nations World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, held from August 31 to September 7, 2001. Delegates passed around a report on the prison-industrial complex and women of color that had been coauthored by Angela Davis.
They also identified the Internet as the latest mechanism for spreading racist ideas, citing the roughly 60,000 White supremacist sites and the racist statements so often made in comments sections following online stories about Black people. The United States had the largest delegation, and antiracist Americans established fruitful connections with activists from around the world, many of whom wanted to ensure that the conference kicked off a global antiracist movement. As participants started venturing back to Senegal and the United States and Japan, Brazil, and France around September 7, 2001, they carried their antiracist momentum around the world.
14 Then all this antiracist momentum smashed into a brick wall in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. After more than 3,000 Americans heartbreakingly lost their lives in attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush condemned the “evil-doers,” the insane “terrorists,” all the while promoting anti-Islamic and anti-Arab sentiments. Color-blind racists exploited the raw feelings in the post-911 moment, playing up a united, patriotic America where national defense had overtaken racial divides, and where antiracists and antiwar activists were threats to national security. But they could not exploit those feelings for long. Only 44 percent of African Americans endorsed the invasion of Iraq in 2003, far less than the 73 percent of Whites or 66 percent of Latina/os.
15 By then, antiracists had regained their footing, inspired by California Newsreel’s definitive three-part educational documentary, Race: The Power of an Illusion, released in April 2003. Months earlier, a comedian known for starring in Half Baked (1998) debuted his show on Comedy Central. Dave Chappelle performed a hysterical skit of a blind White supremacist, who thinks he is White, and who spits out anti-Black ideas like tobacco. In the end he tragically—or, for the viewer, comically—learns he is a Black man. Of all the notable antiracist sketches he did, that first sketch of the racist Black man may have been Chappelle’s most clever and memorable. Millions replayed it on YouTube long after its original airing on January 22, 2003. The everpopular Chappelle’s Show aired for three seasons until 2006, routinely demonstrating the absurdity of the New Republicans’ color-blind America.
16 Many Republicans assumed, given the alleged “end of racism,” that affirmative action would soon be on its way out. But shockingly, on June 23, 2003, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor issued a majority opinion upholding the University of Michigan’s affirmative action policy, citing a “compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.” Somewhat pleased, supporters of affirmative action reasoned that the Supreme Court had upheld affirmative action because having some Black students around benefited the interests of White students in the increasingly multiethnic nation and globalizing world. O’Connor’s ruling added a time limit to the judgment, saying, “The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” O’Connor’s judgment was way off, according to United for a Fair Economy researchers. The racial “parity date” at the existing pace of gradual equality was not twenty-five years, but fivehundred years, and for some racial disparities, thousands of years from 2003.
The defenders of affirmative action were still relieved that O’Connor had saved it, for now.
17 That pace toward racial parity could be quickened if the racial preferences of standardized testing were eradicated. But the use of standardized testing grew exponentially in K–12 schooling when the Bush administration’s bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act took effect in 2003. Under the act, the federal government compels states, schools, and teachers to set high standards and goals and to conduct regular testing to assess how well the students are reaching them. It then ties federal funding to the testing scores and progress to ensure that students, teachers, and schools are meeting those standards and goals. The bill professed that its purpose was to keep children from being left behind, but it simultaneously encouraged funding mechanisms that decrease funding to schools when students are not making improvements, thus leaving the neediest students behind. The No Child Left Behind Act was not supposed to make sense. It was the latest and greatest mechanism for placing the blame for funding inequities on Black children, teachers, parents, and public schools. And this victim blaming watered the growth of the quickening “No Excuses” charter school movement, which ordered children to rise above their difficult circumstances, and blamed (and expelled) these children if they could not.
18 Scientists know that, developmentally, when children are sick or hurt, or confused or angry, one of the ways they express those feelings is through acting out, because children have difficulty identifying and communicating complex feelings (over things like hunger or parental incarceration or police harassment). While misbehaving White children have received compassion and tolerance—as they should—misbehaving Black children have been more likely to hear “No Excuses” and to be on the receiving end of zero tolerance and handcuffs. More than 70 percent of students arrested at school during the 2009–2010 school year were Black or Latina/o, according to Department of Education statistics.
19 Assimilationists hailed the No Child Left Behind Act’s explicit goal of narrowing the racial achievement gap, drowning out segregationists, who were saying that Black children were incapable of closing the achievement gap, and antiracists, who did not believe in the existence of an achievement gap, since it was predicated on standardized test scores, which they viewed as invalid. In the early 1970s, many Americans were imagining a world without prisons. In the early 1980s, many Americans were imagining a world without standardized tests. But racism had progressed since then. On the fiftieth anniversary of the Brown decision in 2004, a world without standardized testing seemed to many as unimaginable as a world without prisons, despite both keeping millions of Black young people behind bars.
And the anniversary of the Brown decision and discourse on Black education invariably brought out the racist ideas about what was wrong with Black parents. No one was better suited to that task than Bill Cosby, who had once been considered the model Black parent during the run of The Cosby Show. “The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal.
These people are not parenting,” Cosby said in Washington, DC, after being honored at an NAACP gala in May 2004. “They are buying things for kids.
$500 sneakers for what? And they won’t spend $200 for Hooked on Phonics.
I am talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit.” Bill Cosby took his racist ideas on the road, causing a rash of debates between racists and antiracists. Sociologist Michael Eric Dyson shot back, knocking Cosby down from his high horse in his acclaimed 2005 book, Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? “All the selfhelp in the world will not eliminate poverty or create the number of good jobs needed to employ the African American community,” historian Robin D.G.
Kelley added.
20 During Cosby’s “blame-the-poor tour,” as Dyson termed it, the rising star of the Democratic Party subverted Cosby’s message during his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Boston on July 27, 2004.
His star had appeared across the political landscape back in March, at the time of his stunning victory in the Illinois Democratic primary for a US Senate seat. But it was his convention address before 9 million viewers that solidified his stardom. Working people of all kinds, from “small towns and big cities,” were already taking responsibility, Barack Obama declared. “Go into any inner-city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can’t teach kids to learn. They know that parents have to teach, that children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white. They know those things.” A booming applause interrupted Obama as his rebuke of the lecturing Cosby settled in. Also settling in were his affirmations of No Child Left Behind’s high expectations, instead of high funding, and his pronouncement of the never-proven “acting white” achievement theory.
Barack Obama presented himself as the embodiment of racial reconciliation and American exceptionalism. He had had humble beginnings and a lofty ascent, and in him both native and immigrant ancestry and African and European ancestry came together. “I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story . . . and that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible,” he declared. “America, tonight, if you feel the same energy that I do, if you feel the same urgency that I do, if you feel the same passion that I do, if you feel the same hopefulness that I do, if we do what we must do, then I have no doubt that all across the country . . . the people will rise up in November, and John Kerry will be sworn in as president.” 21 Bush’s Republicans, intent on stopping that rise, took their Black voter suppression techniques from Florida to Ohio in 2004. Kerry lost the election, of course, and Bush and his tactics seemed poised to embody the future of the Republican Party. But Barack Obama seemed poised to embody the future of the Democratic Party. CHAPTER 37 The Extraordinary Negro
TWO WEEKS AFTER his exhilarating keynote address, Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, was republished. It rushed up the charts and snatched rave reviews in the final months of 2004. Toni Morrison, the queen of American letters, and the editor of Angela Davis’s iconic memoir three decades earlier, deemed Dreams from My Father “quite extraordinary.” Obama had written the memoir in the racially packed year of 1995 as he prepared to begin his political career in the Illinois Senate. In his most antiracist passage, Obama reflected on assimilated biracial Blacks like “poor Joyce,” his friend at Occidental College. In Joyce and other Black students, he “kept recognizing pieces of myself,” he wrote.
People “like Joyce” spoke about “the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people. It wasn’t a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street. The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be ‘neutral’ and ‘objective.’ Only white culture could be ‘nonracial.’ . . . Only white culture had ‘individuals.’” Obama’s antiracist litany continued in his critical revelation of the “extraordinary Negro” complex. “We, the half-breeds and the collegedegreed, . . . [are] never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we’re bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives—although that’s what we tell ourselves—but because [we] . . . have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger. Don’t you know who I am? I’m an individual!” 1 Ironically, racist Americans of all colors would in 2004 begin hailing Barack Obama, with all his public intelligence, morality, speaking ability, and political success, as the extraordinary Negro. The extraordinary-Negro hallmark had come a mighty long way from Phillis Wheatley to Barack Obama, who became the nation’s only African American in the US Senate in 2005. Since Wheatley, segregationists had despised these extraordinary-Negro exhibits of Black capability and had done everything to take them down. But Obama—or rather Obama’s era—was different. Segregationists turned their backs on their predecessors and adored the Obama exhibit as a proclamation of the end of racism. They wanted to end the discourse on discrimination.
But, to their dismay, the discourse would not quiet down. Segregationists hardly minded the animalistic Black Savior flicks, featuring physically supernatural Blacks saving Whites (The Green Mile, 1999); or the paternalistic White Savior flicks, featuring morally supernatural Whites saving Blacks (The Blind Side, 2009); or the flicks depicting amazing real-life stories of personal responsibility overcoming extreme adversity (The Pursuit of Happyness, 2006). But segregationists did mind Paul Haggis’s 2005 Academy Award–winning Best Picture, Crash, a film that intertwined the racial experiences over a two-day period of characters from every racial group except Native Americans. Each character is shown as both prejudiced and the victim of prejudice, and the characters’ prejudiced ideas and actions are depicted as stemming from both ignorance and hate. While segregationists over the years rebuked Crash’s explicit racial discourse, and assimilationists hailed the film’s masterful portrayal of the pervasive, illogical, and oppressive effects of individual bigotry, antiracists argued that the film left much to be desired. They critiqued especially the lack of complexity on race relations in the film and the absence of any exploration of institutional racism. In The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates did not temper his antiracist review, calling it the “worst film of the decade.” And for the color-blind segregationists, John McWhorter described Crash as “a melodrama, not a reflection of The Real America.” 2 But it was a devastating natural and racial disaster that summer that forced a tense debate about institutional and individual racism. During the final days of August 2005, Hurricane Katrina took more than 1,800 lives, forced millions to migrate, flooded the beautiful Gulf Coast, and caused billions in property damage. Hurricane Katrina blew the color-blind roof off America and allowed all to see—if they dared to look—the dreadful progression of racism.
For years, scientists and journalists had warned that if southern Louisiana took “a direct hit from a major hurricane,” the levees could fail and the region would be flooded and destroyed, as the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported in 2002. Ignoring the warnings, it was almost as if politicians were hoping for a destructive hurricane to occur so that what Naomi Klein termed “disaster capitalism” could follow it. Politicians could award multimillion-dollar reconstruction contracts to corporations filling their campaign coffers, and New Orleans’s Black residents locked on prime real estate could be cleared away to make room for gentrification. Whether they actually hoped for something like Hurricane Katrina hardly mattered, because politicos and disaster capitalists (Vice President Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, for example) capitalized on the destruction. Even Klansmen got rich off their fake donation websites.
3 It was rumored that the Bush administration directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to delay its response in order to amplify the destructive reward for those who would benefit. Whether he actually did that is unknown, but it hardly mattered because FEMA did delay, and millions suffered because of it. While national reporters quickly reached the city and captured for their cameras thousands of residents of the predominantly Black Ninth Ward trapped on roofs and in the Superdome, federal officials made excuses for their delays. It took three days to deploy rescue troops to the Gulf Coast region, more time than it took to get troops on the ground to quell the 1992 Rodney King rebellion, and the result was deadly. “I believe it was racism,” said a paramedic who witnessed the death spiral in New Orleans.
4 But even this was not the full story of Hurricane Katrina. The extreme disaster story of racism became an extremely racist disaster story. The Associated Press dispatched a photograph of White people carrying “bread and soda from a local grocery store,” and another photograph of a Black man who “loot[ed] a grocery store.” As babies died of infections and hurt people waited for ambulances, reporters broadcasted sensational stories of “babies in the Convention Center who got their throats cut” in a crime-saturated city of “armed hordes” hijacking ambulances and “refugees” seeking shelter.
Libertarian journalist Matt Welch did not mince words or the truth when he declared that the “deadly bigotry” of the media probably helped “kill Katrina victims.” Federal officials and nearby emergency personnel used these media reports to justify their delays—citing the dangers of sending aid and personnel with so many people looting “gun stores” and shooting “at police, rescue officials and helicopters.” Racist Americans actually reported, circulated, and believed the outrageous lies of those who were saying that Black people in a disaster zone would shoot at the very people coming to help them.
No one summed up the class racism of the government and media response to Hurricane Katrina victims better than Lani Guinier of Harvard Law School. “Poor Black people are the throw-away people. And we pathologize them in order to justify our disregard,” she said. And no one summoned up the raw feelings of antiracist Blacks better than the superstar rapper who had just released his second studio album, Late Registration. “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” Kanye West boldly stated, deviating from his script during a live hurricane relief concert on NBC on September 2, 2005. By mid-September 2005, the pollsters were rushing out to check the pulse of American racism. In one national poll, only 12 percent of White Americans—but 60 percent of African Americans—agreed that “the federal government’s delay in helping the victims in New Orleans was because the victims were black.” Presumably, the minds of 88 percent of White Americans and 40 percent of Black Americans—if the poll was representative—had been flooded by racist ideas.
In the era of color-blind racism, no matter how gruesome the racial crime, no matter how much evidence was stacked against them, racists were standing up before the judge and claiming “not guilty.” But how many criminals actually confess when they don’t have to? From “civilizers” to standardized testers, assimilationists have rarely confessed to racism. Enslavers and Jim Crow segregationists went to their graves claiming innocence. George W.
Bush will likely do the same. “I faced a lot of criticism as president,” Bush mused in his post-presidency memoir. “I didn’t like hearing people claim that I lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction or cut taxes to benefit the rich.
But the suggestion that I was racist because of the response to Katrina represented an all-time low.” 5 Into the fall and winter of 2005, antiracist charges of racism in New Orleans were met with racist charges of “the irresponsible use of the race card,” to quote Black media personality Larry Elder. Into 2006, the producers of racist ideas were arguing that the charges of widespread discrimination in New Orleans, and in the United States, were fabricated or overblown. The United States was color blind, and the Black people charging discrimination were lying—they were playing their race cards.
6 It was in this polarized post-Katrina racial climate that Crystal Mangum stripped at a party for Duke University’s White lacrosse team. After the party, in March 2006, the Black single mother and college student went to the Durham police. Team members had shouted racial epithets before forcing her into a room and gang-raping her, Mangum told police. Investigators then intercepted and released a post-party email. I wanted “to have some strippers over,” Ryan McFadyen told his teammates. “I plan on killing the bitches” and cutting “their skin off while cumming in my duke issue spandex.” As the Durham district attorney filed charges, the case became a national story. The national antiracist, anti-rape, and antisexist community rose up to support Crystal Mangum. “Regardless of the result of the police investigation,” eighty-eight Duke professors said in a full-page advertisement in the Duke Chronicle on April 6, 2006, “what is apparent every day now is the anger and fear of many students who know themselves to be objects of racism and sexism.” By 2007, the case against the lacrosse players had fallen apart. Physical and DNA evidence had exonerated them of misconduct, and revelations of drug use, promiscuous sex, and mental health problems had smeared Crystal Mangum. When it was revealed that she had lied about being raped, everything seemed to turn upside down. The Durham district attorney was fired and disbarred. The players sued the city. Racists and sexists used her case to try to silence the post-Katrina discussion of racism as well as the discussion of rape culture that flowed from her allegation. It was said that Duke’s antiracist, antisexist, antipoverty professors had exploited the case for propaganda.
Crystal Mangum’s lies were generalized to all Black people, all women, and especially all Black women. Racists started waving their race cards, explaining that Black people had been fabricating and exaggerating the amount of racial discrimination all along. Sexists started waving “rape” cards, charging that women had been fabricating and exaggerating the amount of sexual violence all along. Gender racists combined the race and rape cards to dismiss the integrity of Black women claiming to be victims of racialized sexual violence. It was as if all Black women had done something wrong in Durham, North Carolina. And then the race and rape reformers felt betrayed —especially the men—and they started to belittle Crystal Mangum for setting the anti-rape and antiracist movements back, by giving rapists and racists more of the rape and race cards they loved to play. Her lies would make it more difficult for them to persuade away rapist and racist ideas, to convince Whites to acknowledge their racism, and to convince men to acknowledge their rape culture. Ironically, as these reformers condemned Mangum for her folly, foolish tactics of trying to persuade (instead of force) offenders to stop their crimes against humanity were setting rape culture and racism back.
7
OUTSIDE THE MARX HOTEL in Syracuse, New York, antiwar activists were demonstrating against the US occupation of Iraq. Freezing rain dropped on their heads as they carried on. “You are not fair-weather activists!” Angela Davis proclaimed on October 20, 2006. Davis invited the demonstrators to hear her plenary speech at Syracuse University’s “Feminism and War” conference. Many obliged. Davis lectured on how certain concepts had been “colonized” by the Bush administration, which had used “democracy,” for example, in speeches about the need to “liberate” the women of Iraq and Afghanistan. “Diversity” had been used by the government, the military, and the prisons to present themselves as the most “diverse” institutions in history.
But the oppressors were hiding behind their “diversity” and keeping their institutional racism intact, Davis proclaimed. It was a “difference that doesn’t make a difference.” Democracy and diversity were becoming as caustic to the antiracist cause as “race card” and “personal responsibility.” 8 Civil rights activists, however, remained fixated on the “N-word,” especially after an N-word-laced rant went viral of Seinfeld actor Michael Richards confronting Black audience members during a standup at Hollywood’s Laugh Factory on November 17, 2006. The outrage over Richards’s “He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger!” blended in the spring with the outrage over talk-show host Don Imus describing the darkskinned members of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos.” The outrage did not just reflect on Richards and Imus.
“It is us,” Fox Sports journalist Jason Whitlock wrote in the Pittsburgh PostGazette on April 16, 2007. “At this time, we are our own worst enemies. We have allowed our youth to buy into a culture”—by which he meant Hip Hop —that “is anti-black, anti-education, pro-drug dealing and violent.” 9 At its annual convention in early July 2007, the NAACP held a public funeral and burial of the N-word. But “race card,” “personal responsibility,” “color blind,” “no excuses,” “achievement gap,” and “it is us” were all allowed to live on in the dictionary of racism. “This was the greatest child that racism ever birthed,” the Reverend Otis Moss III said in his eulogy for the Nword. All of the hurricane deaths in New Orleans from the womb of racism— and the N-word was the greatest child? Months earlier, on November 25, 2006, New York police officers had slaughtered the twenty-three-year-old Sean Bell on his wedding night. Shortly thereafter, the excessive criminal charges against six Black high school students in Jena, Louisiana, were announced for their alleged crime of beating up a noose-hanging, racialepithet-throwing White classmate. Days before the N-word funeral, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts had struck down the efforts of three communities to desegregate their schools, saying that the “way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” And the N-word was the greatest child of racism? “Die N-word,” Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick ordered at the funeral. But nothing was said about racism’s other, even more monstrous children.
10
“HE’S THE FIRST mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Presidential hopeful and Delaware senator Joe Biden might as well have labeled Barack Obama the extraordinary Negro. Biden’s evaluations of his presidential rivals appeared in the New York Observer days before Obama stood in front of the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois, and formally announced his presidential candidacy on February 10, 2007. Obama stood on the spot where Abraham Lincoln had delivered his historic “House Divided” speech in 1858. Obama brimmed with words of American unity, hope, and change.
But Joe Biden’s comments—which he later “deeply” regretted—became a sign of things to come. What was to come over the course of the campaign was a reflection of the audacity of racist minds—from President Bush to radio mega-personality Rush Limbaugh to Democratic stalwarts—all to view Obama as an extraordinary Negro. In February 2007, Time magazine speculated that African Americans were expressing greater support for New York senator Hillary Clinton because of questions over whether Obama was “black enough.” It couldn’t be because they saw Obama as a long shot. It had to be that they did not see Obama as ordinarily Black like them, meaning inarticulate and ugly and unclean and unintelligent.
11 Pundits were dubbing Hilary Clinton the “inevitable” nominee until Barack Obama upset her on January 3, 2008, in the Iowa primary. By Super Tuesday on February 5, 2008, Americans had been swept up in the Obama “Yes We Can” crusade of hope and change, themes he embodied and spoke about so eloquently in his stump speeches that people started to hunger. In mid-February, his perceptive and brilliant wife, Michelle Obama, told a Milwaukee rally, “For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country, and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.” Suddenly, racist ridicule came down on her, smearing her “unpatriotic” statements, slave ancestry, and brown skin, and tagging her the ultimate “angry Black woman.” Later in the campaign, The New Yorker put an image of Michelle Obama on its cover. She was depicted in military gear and combat boots with an AK-47 across her back and a large Afro topping her head—it was the iconic, stereotypical image of the strong Black woman—and she was standing next to her husband in his Islamic apparel. Racist commentators became obsessed with Michelle Obama’s body, her near-six-foot, chiseled, and curvy frame simultaneously semi-masculine and hyper-feminine. They searched for problems in her Black marriage and family, calling them extraordinary when they did not find any.
12 When the dirt on the Obamas could not be found, investigative reporters started checking their associates. In early March 2008, ABC News released snippets of sermons from one of Black America’s most revered liberation theologians, the recently retired pastor of Chicago’s large Trinity United Church of Christ. Jeremiah Wright had married the Obamas and had baptized their two daughters. In an ABC News release, Wright was quoted proclaiming, in a sermon, “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no . . . God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human.” Wright had discarded the very old racist lesson that had first been taught to slaves: that African Americans were supposed to love the United States and consider it the world’s greatest country no matter how they were treated. On top of his rejection of American exceptionalism, Wright had the audacity to preach that American “terrorism” abroad had helped bring on the tragic events of 9/11. To put it lightly, Americans everywhere were livid.
13 When Obama’s flippant characterizations of Wright as a fraught “old uncle” did not calm Americans down, Obama decided to address the controversy on March 18, 2008. He stepped into the spotlight and gave a “race speech,” entitled “A More Perfect Union,” from Philadelphia’s National Constitutional Center. Having taught constitutional law, worked in civil rights law, and overseen successful political campaigns (including his current campaign, which analysts were already regarding as masterful), Obama could easily be regarded as an expert on many things: constitutional law, civil rights law, Chicago politics, Illinois politics, campaigning, and race and politics.
And just as racists presumed that all Black individuals represented the race, racists presumed that all articulate Black individuals were experts on Black people. They presumed, therefore, that Obama’s Blackness made him an expert on Black people. And media outlets routinely brought on eloquent Black voices to pontificate on all sorts of “Black” issues they had not been trained in, making the actual interracial cast of experts squirm as they listened.
And so, in Philadelphia, many Americans did not see Obama as merely a politician saying what he needed to say to save his campaign. They listened to him—as his campaign aides had hoped they would—as an esteemed, knowledgeable, and sincere expert lecturer on race—as someone more credible on race relations than the supposedly angry and old Jeremiah Wright.
Obama skillfully took advantage of this platform given to him by racist Americans—and who knows whether he expressed his actual beliefs or calculated that his most comfortable political space was to stand with assimilationists, the group that Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki named the “ambivalent majority.” These Americans believed that Blacks had some strikes against them, but sometimes used that as a crutch. And they were totally unaware that this viewpoint was not only racist, but hardly made much sense. It was like saying that the game was rigged, but Blacks should not let that stop them from winning, and that when they lost and complained about the game being rigged, they were “using that as a crutch.” 14 Obama dismissed Jeremiah Wright’s “profoundly distorted view,” but courageously refused to totally “disown” Wright. And then he opened his general lecture on race, explaining that socioeconomic racial inequities stemmed from the history of discrimination. From this firm antiracist opening, he rotated to the consensus racist theory of the “pervasive achievement gap,” to the disproven racist theory of “the erosion of black families” that “welfare policies . . . may have worsened,” and to the unproven racist theory that racial discrimination had bequeathed Blacks a “legacy of defeat.” According to Obama, this “legacy of defeat” explained why “young men and, increasingly, young women” were “standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons.” He ignored the fact that this population was facing some of the nation’s highest unemployment and policing rates. Obama added his “legacy of defeat” theory to the many racist folk theories circulating in classrooms and around dinner tables and in barbershops about slavery and discrimination—especially its trauma—making Black people biologically, psychologically, culturally, or morally inferior. Over the years, people had been using these folk theories—giving them names such as “post-traumatic slave syndrome,” or the “slavery-hypertension thesis,” or the “Hood Disease”—to walk away from the complete truth that discrimination had resulted in inferior opportunities and bank accounts for Black people, and not an inferior racial group.
15 Those antiracist Jeremiah Wrights, their “anger is not always productive,” Obama continued. “Indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity within the African-American community in our condition.” It was a classic assimilationist retort: calling antiracists “angry” for truly believing in racial equality, for not seeing anything wrong with Black people, and for seeing everything wrong with discrimination when squarely facing the African American condition. Like W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr. before him, Obama lumped these “angry” antiracists with angry anti-White cynics to discredit them and distinguish himself from them. But when Du Bois and King ultimately arrived at antiracism, they had had to ward off the same “angry” and anti-White labels they had helped to produce. And now, Obama was doing the same thing, unaware that he was reproducing a label that his opponents would stamp onto him whenever and wherever he uttered another antiracist word—after this speech.
Obama uttered quite a few antiracist words in the speech—most profoundly, his analysis of how for “at least a generation” politicians had used “resentments,” fears, and anger over welfare, affirmative action, and crime to distract White voters “from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze,” the nation’s “economic policies that favor the few over the many.” But then, ever the politician, he refused to classify White “resentments” as “misguided or even racist”; amazingly, he “grounded” them “in legitimate concerns.” Obama ended up following in the racist footsteps of every president since Richard Nixon: legitimizing racist resentments, saying those resentments were not racist, and redirecting those resentments toward political opponents.
The doubly conscious Obama encouraged African Americans to fight discrimination, take personal responsibility, be better parents, and end the “legacy of defeat.” Obama did not offer any childrearing or psychological lessons for the presumably parentally and psychologically superior White Americans. He merely asked them to join him on the “long march” against racial discrimination—“not just with words but with deeds”—in a chillingly antiracist conclusion. He left the Philadelphia platform on March 18, 2008, as he began, expressing the half-truthful analogy of continuous racial progression. “This union may never be perfect,” he said, “but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.” 16 Segregationist and antiracist critiques were drowned out by the fawning eruption across the ideological isle. MSNBC political analyst Michelle Bernard framed it as “the best speech and most important speech on race that we have heard as a nation since Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.” And it was not just Democrats who were fawning. Prominent Republicans—everyone from presidential candidates Mike Huckabee and John McCain to the Bush administration’s Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell and to the Clintons’ old foe, Newt Gingrich—were also praising the speech. The Bell Curve’s author, Charles Murray, called it “flat out brilliant— rhetorically, but also in capturing a lot of nuance about race in America.” 17 If Barack Obama hoped to transform ABC News’s roadblock into a springboard, then he succeeded, soaring into April and May away from Jeremiah Wright and Hillary Clinton and on to the Democratic nomination in early June. Meanwhile, Republican producers of racist ideas had gotten down to business, demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate, questioning whether Barack Hussein Obama was really an American, and suggesting that only real Americans, who were White like McCain, could live in the White House of the United States. No other major-party candidate for the US presidency had ever been put under such a searing nativity microscope. Then again, no other major-party candidate for US president had ever been anyone other than a White male. The Obama campaign released a scanned copy of his US birth certificate, but the rumors of Obama being born in Kenya or some Islamic anti-American nation did not suddenly go away. They were not started out of ignorance, so why would they go away out of knowledge?
But the son of a single mother turned to other matters, like a Father’s Day address on June 15, 2008. “If we are honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that too many fathers are missing—missing from too many lives and too many homes,” Obama said to a thunderous applause from Black hands at a Southside Chicago church. “They’re acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.” The next day in Time, sociologist Michael Eric Dyson should have buried once and for all the racist exaggeration that Obama—and many other Americans—kept repeating on this issue of missing Black fathers. Dyson cited a study by Boston College’s Rebekah Levine Coley finding that Black fathers not living in the home were more likely than fathers of every other racial group to keep in contact with their children. “Obama’s words may have been spoken to black folk, but they were aimed at those whites still on the fence about whom to send to the White House,” Dyson criticized.
18 The legend of the “missing Black father” had become as popular as the legend that there are “no good Black men.” Back in May 2008, Tyra Banks had devoted an episode of her popular television talk show to the topic, calling it “Where Have All the Good Black Men Gone?” The nearly 1 million Black men in prison and the life expectancy of Black men being six years below White men did not make the discussion. Tyra Banks speculated, sounding the tune of racist Black women, that Black women were having trouble finding good Black men because so many were dogs or dating nonBlack women or men. In no time, racist Black men were saying the same thing about Black women. The longest-running No. 1 R&B single of 2010, Alicia Keys’s “I’m Ready,” featured Hip Hop sensation Drake, who rapped: “Good women are rare too, none of them have come close.” Few good Black men plus few good Black women equals few good Black people, equals racist ideas.
19
ON NOVEMBER 4, 2008, a sixty-four-year-old recently retired professor cast a vote for a major political party for the first time in her voting life. She had retired from academia, but not from her very public activism of four decades. She was still traveling the country trying to rouse an abolitionist movement against prisons. In casting her vote for Democrat Barack Obama, Angela Davis joined roughly 69.5 million Americans. But more than voting for the man, Davis voted for the grassroots efforts of the campaign organizers, those millions of people demanding change. When the networks started announcing that Obama had been elected the forty-fourth president of the United States, happiness exploded from coast to coast, and from the United States around the antiracist world. Davis was in the delirium of Oakland.
People whom she did not know came up and hugged her as she walked the streets. She saw people singing to the heavens, and she saw people dancing in the streets. People, in fact, were dancing on streets around the world. And the people Angela Davis saw and all the others around the world who were celebrating were not enraptured from the election of an individual; they were enraptured by the pride of the victory for Black people, by the success of millions of grassroots organizers, and because they had shown all those disbelievers, who had said that electing a Black president was impossible, to be wrong. Most of all, they were enraptured by the antiracist potential of a Black president.
20 Behind the scenes of the exploding happiness that November night and over the next few weeks was the exploding fury of hate attacks on Black people. The producers of racist ideas were working overtime to take down some of their color-blind rhetoric that had blinded consumers from seeing discrimination for a decade. They were working to put up something better: a portrait of America conveying that there was no longer any need for protective or affirmative civil rights laws and policies—and no longer any need to ever talk about race. “Are we now in a post-racial America? . . . Is America past racism against black people?” John McWhorter asked in Forbes weeks after the election. “I say the answer is yes.”