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 best-selling 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.