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 Anglo-Saxon 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 post-Plessy, 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 Spanish-American 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 re-enslavers 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 “self-development 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 double-consciousness, 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.