Anthropology and Racial Politics of Culture
During the decades that enveloped the Great Depression and the New Deal, the NAACP could not rely on Democrats in Congress or the White House to pass Civil Rights legislation. Franklin D. Roosevelt could not support bills empowering African Americans; if he had, southern Democrats would make sure that his New Deal legislation did not become law. The judicial branch was the only recourse, so the NAACP turned to Charles Hamilton Houston, dean of the Howard University Law School, to pull together an elite corps of legal scholars, strategists, and litigators to fight school segregation in the federal judiciary. The NAACP led a dogged campaign to change the Supreme Court justices’ interpretation of the Constitution.
The senior members of the legal staff of the NAACP were professors at the Howard School of Law and had been trained in sociological jurisprudence by Roscoe Pound and Felix Frankfurter at Harvard. In other words, they were trained in the value of using social science as a complement to precedent and logic to make their case. The NAACP developed a strategy that used current sociological and anthropological research as evidence to prove that African Americans were not given “equal protection” under the law. The LDEF employed the most authoritative science available: it presented Gunnar Myrddl’s An American Dilemma as “Exhibit A.”1 The role anthropology played in directly changing the legal significance of racial categories, therefore, corresponds to Myrdal’s use of it in 1938, when he began to compile his Herculean 1,300-page study. The work emerged as the dominant discourse on Negro and White race relations. This emergence, as well as the reasons for the NAACP’s use of it, are buried in the twists and turns of the politics surrounding the New Deal, World War II, and the rise of Howard University as the center for the study of race relations.
In 1920 Warren G. Harding, the little-known Republican senator from Ohio, was elected president. The members of Harding’s cabinet were scandalous: they lined their pockets with government contracts, accepted bribes, and refused to prosecute organized criminals who violated the prohibition of alcohol. In 1923 Harding died, and Calvin Coolidge, the vice president, presided over the executive branch for the balance of the term. In 1924 Coolidge won the presidency in his own right, because the Democratic Party was not united. It was split over whether to include an anti-Klan plank in its platform and who to nominate for president. The fissure emerged between the political machines in northern cities and the Klan defenders in southern districts. Southern Democrats held sway over considerable electoral votes in their respective states, which allowed them to reject, by one vote, the anti-Klan plank. The party also deadlocked on its nominee. On the 103rd ballot the two factions finally compromised on John W. Davis, thus ending the longest standoff in the history of national party conventions.
Coolidge did not run for a second term in 1928, which left his efficient and highly respected secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover, as the logical nominee for the Republican Party. The political machines succeeded in nominating Alfred C. Smith from New York during the Democratic convention, but Smith lost to Hoover in a landslide. Smith failed because he was Catholic, he favored repeal of the Eighteenth (Prohibition) Amendment, he was connected to Tammany Hall (New York City’s political machine), and he was a friend of the Negro and the worker.
Virtually every Black newspaper and most Black organizations endorsed Alfred C. Smith. African Americans again turned away from the “Party of Lincoln,” hoping not to repeat the Wilson debacle. With the help of the Black vote, Smith carried the twelve largest U.S. cities. While African Americans cultivated an alliance with White northern Democrats, northern Republicans cultivated one with White southern Democrats. This meant that northern Republicans had to abandon southern Black Republican officials and party members. The leadership of the Republican Party executed this shift to what Du Bois called “lily-white-ism” with aplomb.2 In 1928 southern Whites betrayed their loyalty to the Democratic Party. They abandoned the party in droves and overwhelmingly supported Herbert Hoover. The Republican Party spoils for courting White southern Democrats included carrying Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. The Republicans delivered the half-century- “solid South” from the grips of the Democratic Party.
African Americans did not, however, totally abandon the Republican Party, especially in local and congressional races. In 1928 African Americans widely supported Smith, to no avail; yet residents of the south side of Chicago sent their Republican alderman, Oscar DePriest, to the U.S. Congress. DePriest was the first African American legislator from the North. He thus represented not only his district but also the New Negro, serving as a beacon of hope and a symbol of pride.3
Hoover and his secretary of the treasury, Andrew Mellon, won instant acclaim from business interests. Hoover increased tariffs and reduced corporate and individual taxes. He also steered legislation through Congress that extended credit to farmers who had been hit hard by falling agricultural prices. During the 1920s the economy grew, and most Americans experienced a rapid rise in their standard of living. Relying often on credit, Americans consumed goods and invested in securities at unprecedented levels, but this pattern of conspicuous consumption and unchecked economic growth was short-lived. Agricultural profits soon lagged far behind industrial profits, and wages did not keep up with inflation. The manufacturing and industrial sectors began to produce more goods than Americans could buy, even on credit. In addition, overseas markets were quickly diminished by the high tariffs imposed by the United States. In October 1929 the stock market crashed, and the ensuing mayhem throughout the financial world ushered in a decade-long depression.4
In 1932 the nation was in the grip of the Great Depression. The Democratic presidential nominee, Franklin D. Roosevelt, won an impressive victory by espousing a new deal for the forgotten man. Relief, recovery, and reform were catchwords that framed Roosevelt’s attempts to manage the economy in such a way that Americans could spend their way back to prosperity. The Democrats held a majority in both the House and the Senate; plus, with a clear public mandate, they passed many recovery and reform acts in Congress. To provide relief for unemployment, Congress implemented the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Civil Works Administration. To assist in the recovery of businesses and agriculture, Congress enacted the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Public Works Administration, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and the Federal Housing Administration. To guide reform of unfair business practices and to ensure consumer protection, Congress implemented policies to reform banking procedures, price gouging, and racketeering. Most of the first programs were directed at industry, businesses, and merchants. Only after winning overwhelming public support for the New Deal did Roosevelt create agencies and policies that became effective in helping African Americans and organized labor recover from despair. These included the Works Progress Administration, the National Youth Administration, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt facilitated some political agency for African Americans by appointing many Black people to high-level positions in the administrative bodies of the New Deal. It was Harold L. Ickes, Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior and the former president of the Chicago branch of the NAACP, however, who did the most to integrate the New Deal. Many African American political appointees or “advisors” were used merely as salespeople for the New Deal.5
Roosevelt’s administration immediately embarked on the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), one of the largest regional programs of the New Deal era. The TVA planned to harness the power of the Tennessee River to generate inexpensive hydroelectric power, which would jumpstart the economy and make the entire region prosperous. On May 18, 1933, Congress enacted legislation creating the project. By generating cheap electricity, the planners outlined, large-scale industry would expand along the transmission lines that would in turn increase small businesses, employment, and the purchasing power of the residents in the Tennessee River Basin. TVA administrators attempted to hire African Americans in proportion to their population, but they were kept from participating in the many remedial programs implemented by the authority. For example, they were denied access to the model dairies, tree nurseries, and produce farms, as well as the model woodworking, automotive, and electrical shops. Another model program was the planned community erected at Norris, Tennessee. No expense was spared to make it represent an ideal American community.6 In an article entitled “TVA: Lily-White Reconstruction” (1934), Charles H. Houston and John P. Davis reported in the Crisis that “The authorities told us bluntly no Negroes would be permitted to occupy houses in Norris, ‘Because Negroes do not fit into the program.’ Thus their position is that Negroes do not belong in the ‘ideal American community’ built and maintained by public funds.”7 Houston and Davis concluded “that the only function that the Negro has in the T.V.A., the only recognition which the T.V.A. gives him, is as a labor commodity. And even this function is subject to certain exceptions.”8 Even though the New Deal offered recovery and relief for some unemployed workers, it was not such a great deal for Black people.
Walter White was appointed executive director of the NAACP in 1931. He immediately committed much of the organization’s time and resources to pressure, agitate, organize, and lobby Congress for the Costigan-Wagner Anti-Lynching Bill. White outlined the devastating impact that lynching had on all Americans and the urgent need for federal antilynching legislation in his 1929 book Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch.9 His book drew on ethnographic methods, statistics, psychology, and history to level a terse indictment at the continued use of lynch law. It covered an array of topics, including “the mind of the lyncher,” “sex and lynching,” “the economic foundations of lynch-law,” “science, nordicism, and lynching,” and “the price of lynching.”
The NAACP aroused overwhelming public support for this legislation, and in 1934 it was finally able to spring the perennially locked bill from the Senate Judiciary Committee—but the ensuing filibusters prevented a vote. In 1935 White was again able to have the bill considered on the Senate floor, but southern senators “with cynical skill” allowed it to flounder in the quagmire of rules, procedures, and debates.10 While the bill was on the floor, White called Eleanor Roosevelt and pleaded with her to set up a meeting between him and her husband: the bill would die without the president’s public support. Mrs. Roosevelt set up the meeting. Although the president favored the bill, he could not publicly endorse it. Roosevelt explained his position to White:
“I did not choose the tools with which I must work,” he told me [White]. “Had I been permitted to choose them I would have selected quite different ones. But I’ve got to get legislation passed by the Congress to save America. The Southerners by reason of the seniority rule in Congress are chairmen or occupy strategic places on most of the Senate and House committees. If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take the risk.”11
The New Deal seemed more and more like a raw deal for African Americans. If African Americans could not even secure an antilynching bill, which had overwhelming national support, how could African American interest groups petition Congress to pass civil rights legislation? The executive and legislative branches blocked the NAACP’s efforts. The NAACP devised a strategy based on the 1923 Margold Report to slowly equalize segregated public education in state and federal circuit court systems.12 If a case was appealed to the Supreme Court, however, the 1935 Hughes Court would probably have reversed any favorable decision. The judicial branch was also blocked.
The New Deal was literally gutted by the Supreme Court. Led by newly appointed Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, the Court continued its century-and-a-half-long allegiance to protect property rights by welding capitalist interests to the Constitution. Hughes had sat on the Court as an associate justice from 1910 to 1916, but he resigned to run for president. In 1930 President Hoover appointed him chief justice to replace William Howard Taft. Hughes pursued a more conservative approach than he had the first time. Just weeks after he was confirmed, Hoover needed to replace Associate Justice Edward T. Sanford. He nominated Judge John J. Parker of the U.S. Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit. Parker’s confirmation was blocked by the NAACP and the American Federation of Labor.
The NAACP knew that every appointment to the Supreme Court was critical. Parker was from North Carolina and was the overseer of the South’s Fourth Circuit. NAACP leaders believed that he would affirm the state court’s decisions to continue Jim Crow. White, who led the fight against confirmation, discovered evidence that Parker had advocated poll taxes, literacy tests, and the grandfather clause during his 1920 bid for governor of North Carolina. White obtained a decade-old article from the Greensboro Daily News; dated April 19, 1920, it reported Parker’s statement that “The participation of the Negro in politics is a source of evil and danger to both races and is not desired by the wise men in either race or by the Republican Party of North Carolina.”
The NAACP quickly mobilized. The organization sent telegrams to all of its branches, wrote editorials, distributed press releases, spoke at rallies, and presented copies of the article to every senator and to the president. In addition, the NAACP was successful in convincing other organizations to join the effort to derail the confirmation.13 The American Federation of Labor also weighed in to oppose Parker’s confirmation because he had affirmed an opinion to uphold Yellow Dog contracts (stating that employment would terminate upon union affiliation) when the United Mine Workers appealed an injunction to revoke them.
The campaign was successful, and Parker was denied confirmation by a two-vote margin.14 Hoover moved quickly to appoint Owen J. Roberts, who was swiftly confirmed. Roberts gravitated toward the conservative bloc that opposed any and all efforts to federally regulate business. James C. McReynolds, Willis Van Devanter, George Sutherland, and Pierce Butler constituted this bloc and were referred to as the four horsemen. To replace Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1932, Hoover appointed Benjamin N. Cardozo, who sided with the more liberal dissenters. This only left Cardozo, Harlan Fiske Stone, and Louis D. Brandeis to defend Roosevelt’s New Deal.15
So, thanks in part to the NAACP, Roosevelt inherited the Hughes Court, which razed the hastily written New Deal legislation. Beginning with the 1933 October term and continuing through 1936, the Supreme Court held twelve of the New Deal acts unconstitutional. Two of the acts—the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act—were pillars of the New Deal.
The National Industrial Recovery Act of June 1933 established the National Recovery Administration (NRA). This legislation allowed merchants and manufacturers in specified industries to write their own codes for fair business practices. In return, the agency would impose minimum wages, maximum working hours, and collective bargaining. Businesses enthusiastically advertised their compliance with the NRA Blue Eagle, which patriotically declared “We Do Our Part.” However, the infamous “Sick Chicken Case,” Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, put an end to federal regulation of trade practices. Chief Justice Hughes delivered the unanimous decision, stating emphatically that “Extraordinary conditions do not create or enlarge constitutional power. . . . Congress cannot delegate legislative power to the President to exercise an unfettered discretion to make whatever laws he thinks may be needed or advisable for the rehabilitation of expansion of trade or industry.”16 In United States v. Butler the Court struck down another pillar of the New Deal, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which provided incentives for farmers to reduce production, thus decreasing surplus and raising the price of their goods.
In February 1937, President Roosevelt responded to these Court decisions by proposing legislation, dubbed the “Court-Packing Plan,” to add up to six justices to the Supreme Court and thereby change its makeup. In an opinion read on March 29, 1937—just weeks after Roosevelt announced his plan—Roberts unexpectedly joined the less conservative side of the Court to uphold a Washington State minimum wage law.17 After this conversion, the Court upheld every New Deal law that came before it. Bernard Schwartz has asserted that this constituted a “veritable revolution in the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court.”18 Melvin I. Urofsky has also noted that this judicial turnaround, in the midst of the Court-Packing Plan, served as a marker to delineate a shift in the Court’s agenda. For 150 years the bulk of the Court’s cases had concerned economic matters, and it generally favored property rights over public welfare. With the transformation of the Court, economic matters played an increasingly smaller and less important role on the agenda. The Court began to resonate with a more libertarian tenor and changed course to explore how far the Constitution would protect individual rights and liberties.19
The accounts explaining why the Court switched so suddenly vary, but the poignant pun that whirled through Washington that spring simply concluded that “a switch in time saves nine.”20 In the following months Roosevelt solidified his Court by appointing two more associate justices, thus hobbling the “horsemen.” In August 1937 Hugo Black replaced Van Devanter, and in January 1938 Stanley Reed replaced Sutherland. Although the rapid reconstitution of the Court concerned the NAACP, it was encouraged by the gestures to secure individual rights and uphold federal regulation. Would a Roosevelt Court favor the Negro? Roosevelt had proved that he could not. What strategy would the NAACP employ now, with a less conservative Supreme Court? And who would take the leadership of the NAACP National Legal Committee from the aged Moorefield Storey?
Charles Hamilton Houston, dean of the Howard School of Law, emerged as the leader in the first round of the desegregation battles and was soon followed by his student, Thurgood Marshall. The specific strategy was slow to develop, but to win, they decided to look to the social scientists at Howard University to provide evidence that segregation was deleterious to African Americans. They packed their briefs with anthropological, sociological, and psychological data and research to demonstrate that separate could never be equal and that segregation violated both the due-process clause of the Fifth Amendment and the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.21
During the 1920s literary and art circles transformed American prose and art in Harlem; during the 1930s a circle of scholars transformed the study of American race relations. The hub of this activity was Howard University. Although the nucleus was the faculty at Howard, the circle extended to an array of scholars who published in Howard’s Journal of Negro Education and participated in many university-sponsored conferences.22
The movement to reshape the study of race relations can be linked to Mordecai Johnson, who, in 1926, became the first African American president of Howard University. Johnson inherited a jumble of old buildings, a secondary school, a collection of undergraduate departments, and a handful of graduate and professional schools. In addition to raising faculty salaries and academic standards, toughening admission requirements, and insisting on full accreditation, he hired an impressive group of young professors in law, physical science, medicine, education, social science, and the humanities. These scholars worked closely together to redefine the study of race relations in the United States.23 As a consequence, Howard emerged as an important center for the study of the Negro during the New Deal era.
The core of Howard’s faculty in arts and sciences included E. Franklin Frazier in sociology, Abram L. Harris in economics, Rayford Logan in history, Alain Locke in philosophy, Ralph Bunche in political science, and Charles Thompson in the School of Education. This core also included Charles Hamilton Houston and William Hastie in the School of Law and Charles Drew and W. Montague Cobb in the College of Medicine.24 In 1925 Melville Herskovits, one of Boas’s most celebrated students, was an instructor at Howard; however, he became marginalized by the Howard circle because of his emphasis on African cultural continuities in the Americas.25 Howard’s faculty advanced a multidisciplinary approach to race relations that demonstrated how economic and environmental processes prevented most Negroes from fully assimilating a “legitimate culture.” The Howard circle developed ideas about culture that differed markedly from those held by folklorists, anthropologists, and certain members of the New Negro Movement.
Boas, his students, and his close associates developed a tightly knit discourse that aligned theories of racial equality with notions of a historically specific cultural relativity.26 African American intellectuals, such as Arthur H. Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, Arthur Schomburg, Carter G. Woodson, and W. E. B. Du Bois, accepted and built on Boas’s work to explain the so-called culture of the Negro. Others scholars, such as E. Franklin Frazier, Charles Johnson, Ralph Bunche, and Guy B. Johnson, all members of the Howard circle, accepted the Boasian notion of racial equality but discarded the emphasis on cultural history. This group embraced the sociological view of Negro culture that Robert Park advanced at the University of Chicago.
Robert Park maintained “that the Negro, when he landed in the United States, left behind him almost everything but his dark complexion and his tropical temperament. It is very difficult to find in the South today anything that can be traced directly back to Africa.”27 Boas, on the other hand, viewed African American culture in terms of that “peculiar amalgamation of African and European tradition which is so important for understanding historically the character of American Negro life, with its strong African background in the West Indies, the importance of which diminishes with increasing distance from the south.”28 For analytical purposes, I suggest that the scholars aligned with Park’s views were maintaining a cultural legitimacy thesis and that those aligned with Boas’s views were maintaining a cultural specificity thesis. This analytical framework will enable me to illustrate how these two lines of thought converged and diverged, and why attorneys for the LDEF used the Boasian discourse on racial equality and the Park discourse on Negro culture to bolster their desegregation cases.
Proponents of the Boas-influenced cultural specificity argument stressed the idea that unique historical and cultural continuities shaped African American culture. These members of the New Negro Movement were groping for a symbolic anchor other than race to ground an identity. They found it, in part, in Africa.29 They attempted to forge an ethnic identity centered on the construction of a cultural homeland. They produced studies of folklore, cultural history, and art history in an effort to reclaim, authenticate, and validate the past as well as the present. Schomburg captured the crux of this line of thought: “The Negro has been a man without a history because he has been considered a man without a worthy culture. But a new notion of cultural attainment and potentialities of the African stocks has recently come about, partly through the corrective influence of the more scientific study of African institutions and early cultural history.”30
In a variety of ways the idea of African culture in America provided an important symbol that tied the indigenous West African to the plantation slave to the sharecropping tenant to the urbane and cosmopolitan “New Negro.” In 1925 Alain Locke articulated this line of thought from a somewhat different angle: “But even with the rude transplanting of slavery, that uprooted the technical elements of his former culture, the American Negro brought over an emotional inheritance [and] a deep-seated aesthetic endowment. And with a versatility of a very high order, this offshoot of the African spirit blended itself in with entirely different culture elements and blossomed in strange new forms.”31
Proponents of the Park-influenced cultural legitimacy approach maintained that Negro culture had progressed far enough, especially among assimilated middle-class Negroes, to take its place among the higher civilizations of “mankind.” However, proponents of this approach were forced to explain what happened to Negroes who never attained the cosmopolitan ways of the New Negro. These scholars, most of whom were sociologists, assumed that a large percentage of African Americans deviated from American cultural and behavioral standards. Such deviations, the sociologists explained, were inevitable responses to deleterious environmental conditions, racial discrimination, and the heritage of slavery.32 Perhaps the most notable proponent of this approach was the esteemed sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, who earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago. Advancing ideas similar to Park’s, Frazier explained the “simple Negro folk culture” as an “incomplete assimilation of western culture by the Negro masses.” Frazier argued that “generally when two different cultures come into contact each modifies the other. But in the case of the Negro in America it meant the total destruction of the African social heritage. Therefore in the case of the family group the Negro has not introduced new patterns of behavior, but has failed to conform to patterns about him. The degree of conformity is determined by educational and economic factors as well as by social isolation.”33 Several Black sociologists even suggested that African Americans left their culture behind in the South and adopted an entirely new one in the North. Charles Johnson concluded that “A new type of Negro is evolving—a city Negro. . . . In ten years, Negroes have been actually transplanted from one culture to another.”34
African American sociologists cited statistics that compared African Americans with a White American standard. Deviations from “the norm” included the high incidence of female-headed households, divorces, and fictive kin relations. These were correlated with high incidences of poverty, crime, delinquency, and disease. Together they became indices for deviant or pathological culture and behavior. These supposed deviations or pathologies were purportedly caused by turbulent and radical changes in the Negroes’ social structure, beginning with the break from Africa, then enslavement, then plantation tenancy, then urban life in the northern and southern cities. These rapid changes, coupled with virulent racism, inhibited the development of normative patterns that would allow Negroes to assimilate Western culture.35
Although many scholars challenged discipline-specific boundaries, supporters of cultural specificity arguments were generally aligned with cultural anthropology—specifically the Columbia school. These arguments were primarily articulated in New York City during the New Negro Movement of the 1920s. Supporters of cultural legitimacy arguments were closely aligned with sociology—specifically the Chicago school. These arguments eventually eclipsed those from New York and were articulated from Howard University during the Great Depression. There were influential scholars, however, who contradicted this pattern, especially St. Clair Drake, coauthor of Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945), who combined sociological and anthropological methods and theory.
An integral component of the Howard circle’s approach was Park’s assimilation model outlining four phases of social evolution: competition, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation. Park’s 1930s version of evolution saturated the Howard circle and affirmed its obstinate position on assimilation. The model also underpinned An American Dilemma and the legal arguments later used for Brown.36
The Howard social scientists found the cultural specificity thesis incompatible with assimilation because it implied that the cultural patterns of African Americans were long-standing, slow to change, and ostensibly irreversible. In a speech to the Harlem Council of Social Agencies, Frazier publicly chided Herskovits, asserting that “if whites came to believe that the Negro’s social behavior was rooted in African culture, they would lose whatever sense of guilt they had for keeping the Negro down. Negro crime, for example, could be explained away as an ‘Africanism’ rather than as due to inadequate police and court protection.”37 E. Franklin Frazier, the most influential and prolific of the Howard scholars, continued to argue that Negroes could and should assimilate “Western culture.” Gunnar Myrdal employed these same ideas in An American Dilemma.
Although the Supreme Court did not officially document the sources of social science that influenced Plessy, it specifically cited An American Dilemma in Brown.38 Some scholars have suggested that Chief Justice Earl Warren’s reference to Myrdal’s work was effectively a reference to Boas’s legacy in the social sciences.39 My argument in this section directly challenges one of Dinesh D’Souza’s major theses in The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society (1995) that “the logic of cultural relativism leads directly to proportional representation, which is the underpinning of American civil rights law.”40 He argues that this “direct” link was made by “Thurgood Marshall [who] spearheaded a direct attack on segregation, and chose to premise it on the findings of Boasian relativism.”41
I want to demonstrate that when Earl Warren cited An American Dilemma he accepted the argument presented by the LDEF and that the LDEF, for its argument, used the Howard circle’s approach that adopted Boas’s notion of race and jettisoned his concept of culture. In its place, the NAACP used a concept of culture associated with Robert Park but developed by scholars at Howard University during the 1930s. It was Myrdal who first validated this approach a decade before Brown. Following the Howard circle, Myrdal used Boas’s and Herskovits’s evidence that there was no basis for claims of racial inferiority and their analysis that the environment caused any racial differences, but Myrdal virtually ignored the associated line of thought that cultures were historically specific and relative to one another.42
Myrdal’s watershed study was the culmination of a massive research study of U.S. race relations sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation.43 As director of the project Myrdal hired researchers to write book-length memoranda or reports on an array of topics, which he then synthesized for the final product. He hired Frazier and Bunche to submit reports, and together they shaped the tenor of the study. Bunche was hired as a permanent staff member for the project and was Myrdal’s closest American advisor. Frazier was also an important advisor to Myrdal and was responsible for giving the manuscript of An American Dilemma final approval.44
Myrdal employed Frazier’s basic arguments that all Negroes could obtain a culture as “legitimate” as that of Whites, but he articulated the notion that “the simple folk culture of the Negro” was pathological with more force than Frazier did. In this important passage Myrdal vividly painted African American culture as pathological and demonstrated his logical disdain for Boasian notions of cultural relativity:
In practically all its divergences, American Negro culture is not something independent of general American culture. It is a distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American Culture. The instability of the Negro family, the inadequacy of educational facilities for Negroes, the emotionalism in the Negro church, the insufficiency and unwholesomeness of Negro recreational activity, the plethora of Negro sociable organizations, the narrowness of interests of the average Negro, the provincialism of his political speculation, the high Negro crime rate, the cultivation of the arts to the neglect of other fields, superstition, personality difficulties, and other characteristic traits are mainly forms of social pathology which for the most part, are created by the caste pressure.
This can be said positively: we assume that it is to the advantage of American Negroes as individuals and as a group to become assimilated into American culture, to acquire the traits held in esteem by the dominant white Americans . . . .45
So, what was the specific role anthropology played in An American Dilemma and subsequently the Brown decision? Boasian anthropology established the only common denominator in studies of African American race, culture, and society during the 1920s and 1930s. It was the anchor for the consensus that there was no proof of any hereditary difference in intelligence or temperament and that historical and environmental factors—cultural factors—caused the differences between racial groups.46 Myrdal generally followed the members of the Howard circle, who took the tightly knit Boasian discourse and separated theories of racial equality from notions of a historically specific cultural relativity. They appropriated Boas’s assumption that there was no proof of racial inferiority but discarded the rest. Therefore, although all of the studies shared Boas’s theory of racial equality, his idea of culture was just one of many. Various research groups with distinct methodologies explored African American culture and social structure. Most social scientists viewed African cultures in the Americas as a variant of some sort of “national” culture; some argued that blacks, especially in the rural South, had a distinct folk culture with African influences. As I have already mentioned, there was the Chicago school of sociology and its more radical variant, the Howard circle. There was also Donald Young’s comparative analysis of minority groups, Howard Odum’s southern sociology, John Dollard’s “caste and class” approach, W. E. B. Du Bois’s interdisciplinary studies of Black society and culture, Carter G. Woodson’s Negro history movement, and Charles S. Johnson’s more liberal variant of Chicago sociology. Finally, there was Otto Klineberg’s social-cultural psychology approach to studying racial differences and Hortense Powdermaker’s functional-structural studies of southern culture.47
Although Myrdal incorporated the discussions of class and caste articulated by Allison Davis and John Dollard, he dropped the Boasian notion of culture altogether; he did not and could not agree with Herskovits. In addition to Herskovits and Boas, Myrdal rejected the perspective of Du Bois and Woodson.48 He nevertheless praised Herskovits’s work on Negro anthropometry,49 explaining that “it is the merit of Professor Melville J. Herskovits that he has finally approached this problem [of racial character] directly.”50 Myrdal needed to establish a premise that Negroes were not mentally or physically inferior to Whites. As evidence he provided Herskovits’s anthropometric studies, Montagu’s studies of characteristics of the Negro population, Klineberg’s work on IQ scores, and Cobb’s applied anthropology. All of these scientists were closely associated with Boas.51
Mordecai Johnson oversaw the hiring of professors in education and the social sciences that forever changed the study of Black people. He was also responsible for hiring the professors of law who would use this new research to forever change civil rights law. In 1929 Johnson received a clear mandate from Louis Brandeis to revamp Howard’s law school. The Supreme Court Justice explained, “I can tell most of the time when I’m reading a brief by a Negro attorney.” He persuaded the new president “to get yourself a real faculty out there or you’re always going to have a fifth-rate law school. And it’s got to be full-time and a day school.”52 To execute this mandate Johnson appointed Charles Hamilton Houston as dean.
Charles Houston (1895–1950) was nineteen when he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Amherst College. In 1917 he entered the officer training camp that the NAACP had worked so vigorously to establish at Fort Des Moines. He went on to serve as an officer in World War I, and when he returned he enrolled at Harvard Law School, where he served on the Harvard Law Review.
Houston enjoyed working with Felix Frankfurter, the most liberal and the only Jewish member of the law school faculty. Frankfurter was a Washington insider, a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, on the legal advisory committee of the NAACP, and a fierce defender of labor. Frankfurter, in turn, enjoyed working with Houston and encouraged him to pursue graduate study under his tutelage. Houston agreed and earned a doctorate in juridical law from Harvard. Frankfurter then recommended Houston for the Sheldon Traveling Fellowship. Houston won the fellowship and used it to attend the Universidad de Madrid, where he earned a doctorate in civil law.53
Houston arrived at Harvard Law School when Frankfurter and his colleague Roscoe Pound were extolling the virtues of sociological jurisprudence.54 Pound outlined “The Scope and Purpose of Sociological Jurisprudence” in a series of articles for the Harvard Law Review.55 In the series, he railed against “Mechanical Jurisprudence” that produced laws from logical deductions based on axiomatic premises, and he argued that the law was not an autonomous collection of self-contained and self-referential rules and insisted that judges be sensitive to the social purposes of the law. He urged judges and lawyers to cease being legal monks and look to economics, sociology, and philosophy for guidance. Above all, Pound called for “ ‘team-work’ between jurisprudence and the other social sciences.”56 Pound lionized Frankfurter’s mentor, Louis Brandeis, and considered the Brandeis brief to be the best method by which to employ sociological jurisprudence.
Laura Kalman suggested that the sociological jurisprudence taught at Harvard was ineffective because the law school itself was in a state of cultural lag. She has explained that proponents of sociological jurisprudence were ineffective because the social science used was twenty years old. The attorneys and scholars who used sociological jurisprudence were simply impervious to changes in social sciences that were occurring at Columbia, Chicago, Yale, and Howard.57
Charles Houston was trained in sociological jurisprudence at Harvard but came to Howard University when it was fast emerging as the institution for cutting-edge studies of race relations. The Brandeis brief and teamwork with the other social sciences were important lessons he learned from the ineffectual proponents of sociological jurisprudence. Once Houston received the appointment, he wasted no time in executing the mandate delivered by Mordecai Johnson and Louis Brandeis. The law school earned full accreditation in a single year. Houston made two appointments that enhanced the program: William H. Hastie (also a Harvard Law School graduate) and Leon Ransom of Ohio State University. The curriculum that Houston developed included invited lectures by Clarence Darrow and other nationally recognized law professors and litigators. Houston kept close ties to Harvard, and when Roscoe Pound was in Washington he would visit the Howard School of Law to profess his views of jurisprudence.
Houston’s curriculum was not limited to case studies and lectures by distinguished jurists. He also incorporated practicing attorneys’ views and cases. People like James Nabrit Jr., the young civil rights attorney from Texas, were integral to the Law School and NAACP National Legal Committee.58
Thurgood Marshall entered Howard School of Law in 1930 and graduated first in the class of 1933. In the same year Houston started representing the NAACP as legal counsel. Walter White enlisted Houston’s support after a miscalculated effort to free the Scottsboro Boys. Houston welded the law-school students, alumni, and faculty to the LDEF. Houston did not limit his efforts strictly to law. He was a social and political critic and deeply committed to African American education. In 1934 he was elected to the School Board of the District of Columbia and joined his colleagues at Howard as an ardent critic of the New Deal. He championed school desegregation and wrote prolifically in the Journal of Negro Education and the Crisis. In 1935 he was appointed chief counsel for the LDEF and won his first case before the Supreme Court.59
The people Mordecai Johnson appointed as deans were important to his efforts to reorganize the university. Houston was not the only notable dean Johnson appointed; he also named Numa P. G. Adams dean of the College of Medicine. She in turn hired R. L. McKinney, a specialist in microscopic anatomy, M. W. Young, a neuro-anatomist, and the renowned medical scientist Charles Drew. Adams also provided funds for W. Montague Cobb to attend Case Western Reserve University, where he earned a doctorate in anatomy and anthropology.
W. Montague Cobb (1904–1990) initially earned a medical degree from Howard, but after he graduated, Adams underwrote additional graduate education so that he could return to teach and assemble the Laboratory of Anatomy and Physical Anthropology. Beginning in the early 1930s, he was an integral member of the intellectuals who contributed to the anthropological discourse on race and worked with the NAACP National Health Committee to shape national health-care policy. His interest in anthropology was grounded in anatomy and medicine before a separate bioanthropological field had even matured. The American Association of Physical Anthropologists was founded in November 1929 by efforts spearheaded by Aleš Hrdlička, and that same year Cobb entered Case Western Reserve to study anatomy and physical anthropology under T. Wingate Todd. As physical anthropology became a full-fledged discipline, Cobb was thrown into the middle of debates on race within the profession. He immediately took the offensive. In 1939 he published “The Negro as a Biological Element of the American Population” in the Journal of Negro Education. He presented evidence to contradict physical anthropologists’ assertions regarding African American infertility and contended that the intellectual achievements of African Americans were quite extraordinary in light of their social and economic barriers. Cobb was part of the generation that linked the founding figures of American physical anthropology to all succeeding generations.60 He did not claim any intellectual roots from Boas; however, he and Boas arrived independently at many of the same conclusions. They both emphasized the value of human diversity, equality, flexibility, and creativity. Furthermore, they both deplored ideas of racial determinism.
Cobb was perhaps the first physical anthropologist to conduct an applied demography study without a commitment to eugenics. In study after study and paper after paper he exposed and documented the physical toll that racism inflicted on African Americans and the high cost the nation paid for it. His research determined that ending Jim Crow hospitals and implementing health-care reform would remedy many of the nation’s public health problems. Effective public health policies, Cobb demonstrated, were ultimately linked to eradicating the embedded segregation and institutionalized racism in professional schools and healthcare facilities.61 Michael Blakey and Leslie Rankin-Hill explained that Cobb’s approach to health-care policy and his 1,100 publications constituted an unparalleled program of applied physical anthropology.62 Cobb led the NAACP National Health Committee efforts on Capital Hill to bring about health-care reform and greater access to medical facilities and public health information, and he confronted the access to health-care information in the public sphere by writing prolifically in magazines such as the Negro Digest, Journal of Negro Education, the Crisis, and Ebony.63
According to Cobb, it was clear that the social processes which make racial categories have physical and biomedical implications. To confront these issues he had the NAACP National Health Committee employ the same strategy that the LDEF was developing. Following in the LDEF’s footsteps, the National Health Committee marshaled the prevailing scientific and social scientific evidence to prove that segregated hospitals and restricted access to health care must be eradicated. The National Health Committee took a legislative approach, however.
Cobb was the architect of the annual Imhotep National Conferences on Hospital Integration, which he began in 1957. The conferences were jointly sponsored by the NAACP and the National Medical Association, and they attracted many of the top biomedical scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, public health officials, and legislators. President Lyndon B. Johnson even attended. The group convened for seven years until its goal, passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was met. Cobb prophetically outlined a plan for national health insurance and assisted in drafting the 1965 Medicare Bill.64
The activist scholars who came to Howard during the 1930s changed the discourse on Negro race and culture. In the most general sense the Howard circle’s view of culture was shaped by a belief that the assimilation of “mainstream” culture facilitated the struggle for racial equality. Yet whatever political factors shaped the way they conceptualized the culture concept, nothing in anthropology paralleled the sagacious critique of the political economy of race they leveled in the 1930s. Although they generally disparaged Black cultural patterns, together they developed important approaches to understanding society, political economy, and endemic power inequalities. Typifying these efforts, Ralph Bunche insightfully penned:
Through the use of the ballot and the courts strenuous efforts are put forth to gain social justice for the group [African Americans]. Extreme faith is placed in the ability of these instruments of democratic government to free the minority from social proscription and civic inequality. The inherent fallacy of this belief rests in the failure to appreciate the fact that these instruments of the state are merely the reflections of the political and economic ideology of the dominant groups, that the political arm of the state cannot be divorced from its prevailing economic structure, whose servant it must inevitably be.65
I do not wish to give the impression that the scholars associated with the Howard circle were monolithic thinkers. There was a tremendous diversity of thought. Often they did not even agree on what strategy to employ in their effort to secure racial equality. For example, Bunche and Harris were critical of the NAACP’s efforts to fight desegregation in the courts. They wanted the NAACP to commit its resources to forging an alliance with trade and industrial unions and the White working class. Even though they were not united in their ideas, they were resolute in their commitment to have the ideals of freedom, equality, and participatory democracy finally realized. Whether in medicine, education, or law, these scholars integrated and used each other’s work to effect change and affect lives.
Howard University was a keystone for change. The multidisciplinary approach to race relations challenged, documented, and defined the very structural, institutional, and political aspects of racism prohibiting African Americans from participating in everything considered American in the United States. The subsequent appropriation of that discourse in An American Dilemma changed how the federal and state governments structured and imposed a racial category on African Americans.
Whereas the NAACP strategy of fighting public school segregation in the courts was conceived during the 1930s, the more sweeping decisions regarding segregation were handed down by the Supreme Court after World War II and during the cold war. The Court began to dismantle the legal fabric of state-sponsored racism only after segregation posed glaring contradictions between the ideals of democracy and the United States’ triumph over the state-sponsored racism of Nazi Germany and mounting cold war tensions.