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 Canadian-Australian 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 motion-picture 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.