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 Afro-American 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 semi-beast,” 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 low-class 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