The Atlanta Riot and Unmasking “Social Equality”
I know many souls . . . but none . . . intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk. . . . I know their thoughts and they know that I know. This knowledge makes them now embarrassed, now furious! . . . The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing,—a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction. The Middle Age regarded skin color with mild curiosity. . . . Today, we have changed all that, and the world, in a sudden, emotional conversion has discovered that it is white and by that token, wonderful!
A theme common to much African American autobiographical writing is the telling of the moment, usually during childhood, at which the author learns the drama of “social equality,” or, as James Weldon Johnson put it, “the brutal impact of race and . . . how race prejudice permeate[s] the whole American social organism.” In these accounts the autobiographical memory of the youthful trauma of racial rejection is inevitably shaped by mature reflections on what Johnson implied was a pathological “American social organism.” These narratives of racial (and gendered) initiation describe the painful socialization of young African American males and females into a negrophobic, Victorian social order. At another level, while these autobiographical narratives subtly protest the sexual dimension of racism, they also convey the ambivalence of racial uplift ideology’s desire for the recognition of whites. Clearly, the desire for recognition of one’s humanity is a natural impulse in a childhood world innocent of race. But the remembered pain of rejection by white peers or schoolmates produces a retelling that not only renounces that desire for recognition, but more importantly, begins to question the pathological whiteness that, in its own fearful renunciation of desire, deludes itself about its own humanity.
W. E. B. Du Bois waxed poetic in recalling a lost innocence: “I remember well when the shadow swept across me,” he wrote of his Massachusetts boyhood, and the day his schoolmates exchanged visiting cards. “The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card. . . . Then it dawned on me that I was different from the others . . . shut out from their world by a vast veil.” Du Bois claimed that the experience left him with no desire “to tear down that veil,” but instead, had bred in him contempt for those beyond it. He sought revenge by outperforming his classmates, and occasionally, “beat[ing] their stringy heads.” Mary Church Terrell winced at the memory of the day when she joined several of her white schoolmates, a group of young girls posing before a mirror, “joking about their charms.” When Terrell, joining their game, asked, “Haven’t I got a pretty face, too?” she heard, “You’ve got a pretty black face” and was hurt by the girls’ derisive shrieks. Gathering her wits, Terrell insisted she “wanted her face nice and dark just like it is.” Marcus Garvey recalled that his playmates in Jamaica included white children: “To me, . . . there was no difference between White and Black.” Of his friendship with “the little White girl whom I liked most,” Garvey noted, “We were two innocent fools who never dreamed of a race feeling and a problem.” When Garvey was fourteen, the girl’s parents ended the friendship by banishing her to Scotland. “I did not care about the separation,” Garvey claimed, because he never thought that his white playmates were better than him; to the contrary, “they used to look up to me. So I simply had no regrets.”1
These autobiographical narratives are concerned with more than unanticipated racial rejection and the disturbing first awareness of one’s despised, racialized self. But when Du Bois, Garvey, or Terrell highlight their contempt for the rejecting other, they also raise the question what it has meant to be white.
Such an inquiry emerges in Walter White’s account of his youthful coming to terms with his racial identity during the Atlanta riot of 1906, a terrifying moment of racial violence in which mobs of whites attacked the city’s black neighborhoods. To call White’s story unique is an understatement—“white” in appearance, White’s case, however uncommon, reveals the sociological dimension of race. “I am a Negro,” his autobiography begins. “My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond,” observed the executive secretary of the NAACP. Not surprisingly, White’s claim of black identity invited skepticism from all quarters. In the first chapter of his autobiography, entitled “I Learn What I Am,” White explains the moment “in which I discovered what it meant to be a Negro,” and concomitantly, the true meaning of white identity predicated on the attitude of white supremacy. As he told it, this occurred in Atlanta, in September of 1906, when he was thirteen years old. At the time, he was aiming a pistol to defend his home and family from an advancing white mob.2
White’s account is more revealing of the adult autobiographer’s awareness of race than it is of the youthful Walter. “I had read the inflammatory headlines in the Atlanta News . . . which reported alleged rapes and other crimes committed by Negroes,” White recalled, but these were so commonplace that they made little impression on him. Perhaps this was because White’s family, all of whose members he described as phenotypically Caucasian, lived on the border between black and white sections. Walter usually accompanied his father, a mail collector, on his route, and on this day, his father told him that “ominous rumors of a race riot were sweeping the town.” The occasion for these rumors, and the sensationalist headlines, was the gubernatorial election between Hoke Smith, the negrophobic reform candidate, and Clark Howell, editor of the Atlanta Constitution and the candidate backed by the state Democratic Party. Smith, with his ally Tom Watson, in White’s words, “stumped the state screaming, ”Nigger, nigger, nigger!’” White quoted an editorial in the Atlanta Journal echoing the campaign oratory of Smith and Watson calling for Negro disfranchisement: “Political equality being preached to the negro in the ring papers and on the stump, what wonder that he makes no distinction between political and social equality? He grows more bumptious on the street, more impudent in his dealings with white men, and then, when he cannot achieve social equality as he wishes, with the instinct of the barbarian to destroy what he cannot attain to, he lies in wait, as that dastardly brute did yesterday near this city, and assaults the fair young girlhood of the south.”3
Demonstrating the power of racism as a commodity within the press, the Atlanta News entered the fray with its “eight-column streamers of the raping of white women by Negroes.” Its circulation rose, and only later would it become known that these stories were fabricated. “Atlanta became a tinderbox,” as White put it, and “fuel was added to the fire” by a local theater performance of Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman, deplored as “incendiary and cruel” by Ray Stannard Baker. On Saturday, September 22, as White accompanied his father on his route, they witnessed “a lame Negro bootblack from Herndon’s barber shop pathetically trying to outrun a mob of whites.” Less than a hundred yards away, “the chase ended. We saw clubs and fists descending to the accompaniment of savage shouting and cursing.” On spotting another unlucky black man, the mob left its victim. “The body with the withered foot lay dead in a pool of blood on the street.” After five days of violence, at least ten blacks and one white were killed, with scores injured, and much devastation of property in black residential areas.4
Although protected by their white appearance, Walter and his father were glad to complete the route, and they left the post office at eleven that evening. On the way home, their wagon nearly collided with another fleeing a white mob, three blacks desperately holding on to its sides. The wagon’s driver, a white man, found his whip useful in alternately lashing the horses and cracking it in the faces of men in the mob giving chase. Taking an alternate route they believed would be safer, the Whites encountered another mob closing in on a black woman who cooked for one of the downtown white hotels. Handing Walter the reins, his father, “though he was of slight stature,” reached down and lifted the woman up into their cart to safety.
Sunday afternoon White’s father was warned by friends of a plan among whites to gather that night on Peachtree Street and invade “Darktown,” the black residential section three blocks below, “to clean out the niggers.” With the lights turned out, and White’s mother and sisters crouched in the rear of the house, Walter and his father waited at the front windows of the parlor with guns. As the mob approached, some bearing torches, White recalled that they heard a familiar voice yell, “That’s where that nigger mail carrier lives! Let’s burn it down! It’s too nice for a nigger to live in.” Softly, the elder White said, “Son, don’t shoot until the first man puts his foot on the lawn and then—don’t you miss!”
As White recalled it, “I knew then who I was. I was a Negro, a human being with an invisible pigmentation which marked me as a person to be hunted, hanged, abused, discriminated against, kept in poverty and ignorance,” all so that those with white skin would have proof of their superiority, a proof “accessible to the moron and the idiot as well as to the wise man and the genius.” The lowest whites could claim superiority to the two-thirds of the world’s population that was not white. The threat posed by the rioters to White’s family was an example of the “one-drop rule,” namely, the legal and social classification in the South of persons with known black ancestry—the proverbial single drop of “black blood”—as Negroes, despite their nonblack appearance. This was a legal attempt to maintain absolute racial boundaries despite the long and continued history of miscegenation in the South. White’s recollection of the riot echoed one of the central grievances of uplift ideology, the dominant group’s refusal to acknowledge class differences among blacks: “It made no difference how intelligent or talented my millions of brothers and I were, or how virtuously we lived. . . . There were white men who said Negroes had no souls, and who proved it by the Bible. Some of these were now approaching us, intent on burning our house.” Despite what must have been a tense situation, “the inexplicable thing” was evidently not lost on Walter—“that my skin was as white as the skin of those who were coming at me.”
Suddenly, as the mob edged closer, and as Walter wondered how it would feel to kill a man, there was a volley of shots. The mob halted. Some friends of White’s father had barricaded themselves nearby and had fired on the mob. They fired again, and the mob retreated. The tension lingered long after the danger had passed, but White recalled feeling that he knew who he was and was glad of it. He was “sick with loathing” for the hatred of the mob, “glad I was not one of those whose story is in the history of the world, a record of bloodshed, rapine and pillage.” Perhaps the riot had led White to such an understanding of race. We can be more certain, however, that an accretion of subsequent experiences, including work as an undercover investigator of lynchings for the NAACP, as well as his frequent confrontation with the indeterminacy of his racial affiliation, and even ideological disputes among the NAACP’s leadership, animated White’s search for the origin of his racial identity, and the intensity of his desire to dissociate himself from whiteness.5
Whatever impact it had on the formation of White’s racial and middle-class subjectivity, and his commitment to racial justice, the Atlanta riot marked the collapse of what had appeared to be a harmonious period of interracial cooperation, with moderate white elites joining with civic-minded black leadership in the birthplace of Booker T. Washington’s 1895 Atlanta Compromise address. The Outlook called the riot “An American Kishniev,” after the site of a pogrom against Jews in Russia in 1903.6 From the perspective of J. Max Barber, editor of the Atlanta periodical Voice of the Negro, and other contributors to the journal after its relocation in Chicago, the Atlanta riot was the culmination of a series of antiblack incidents, including the racist gubernatorial campaign, the staging of Dixon’s Clansman, and the so-called Brownsville Affray, in which President Theodore Roosevelt discharged 170 black soldiers after a violent dispute with local whites in that Texas town. These incidents resulted from the white South’s obsession with “social equality,” the miscegenation taboo, and ongoing efforts to suppress free speech among black editors in that region.7 Although it would provide the catalyst for black and interracial political opposition that would eventually result in the founding of the NAACP, the riot was the most extreme manifestation of a system of daily humiliations that blacks endured under Jim Crow.
Jim Crow in Atlanta, and throughout the South, beset African Americans with substandard public facilities, forbade blacks and whites to interact in public and private life as equals, as human beings, and menaced blacks’ attempts at social advancement. Under Jim Crow’s reign of terror, whites coveted the property and possessions of successful blacks and raised the constant threat of psychic and physical violence and humiliation. African Americans struggled in a variety of ways to define themselves, maintain self-respect, and insulate themselves and their families against this systematic brutality.
In their daily lives and public utterances, African Americans insisted on their respectable status, a concern often articulated in terms of gender conventions. As part of the “high destiny” of black people in America, Du Bois noted the “development of strong manhood and pure womanhood,” as a crucial part of a “race ideal” that would serve “the uplifting of the Negro people.” The frequent references to “manhood” as a signifier for citizenship, militancy, humanity (as opposed to the stereotype of animalism), and the protection of black women, were all rooted in the nineteenth-century political culture that held bourgeois rights and the realm of politics as a masculine domain.
The preoccupation with manhood as a response to the racial and gendered restrictions on citizenship also illustrated the powerlessness of southern blacks, facing bigotry ranging from daily encounters with whites to matters of life and death. The refusal of many white hospitals to admit blacks for treatment, and the substandard resources and care of segregated black facilities plagued all African Americans. In 1931, Walter White’s elderly father was hit by a car and taken to Atlanta’s white hospital, only to be shifted across the street to the Negro ward when his Negro identity became known. As he lingered on for days afterward, Walter and his brother kept a vigil, trying not to notice the “dinginess, misery and poverty” of the crowded ward. There were numerous private hospitals managed by churches, but none admitted blacks, leaving Atlanta’s ninety thousand African Americans to those limited, squalid facilities set aside for them. White wrote, “When death had come, he had been ushered out of life in the meanest circumstances an implacable color line had decreed for all Negroes, whatever their character or circumstances might be.” Among all southern blacks, such conditions were painfully familiar. Although historians debate whether segregated medical facilities and delayed treatment caused the deaths of such prominent blacks as the singer Bessie Smith and Dr. Charles R. Drew, African Americans and the black press usually suspected the worst. When Juliette Dericotte, a dean at Fisk, died after an automobile accident in Georgia, after being denied treatment at a whites-only hospital, E. Franklin Frazier, then on the faculty at that institution, organized campus and community protests. Such discriminatory conditions, in addition to poverty, contributed to a fear and distrust of hospitalization among many blacks of southern origin.8
Stories of life under Jim Crow abound in the lore of countless African American families. African Americans might encounter the whims of white supremacy just by going out in public. Richard Wright wrote a chilling autobiographical essay on growing up under Jim Crow, in which he recounted how the threat of constant violence forced blacks to adapt, feigning and performing the role of submissive Negroes in order to survive. Needless to say, the system of segregation was equally effective in producing hostile whites. To paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, white supremacists under Jim Crow were not born—they were made. This is illustrated by a story told within my own family. In Birmingham, Alabama, during the 1930s, while window shopping, a black woman felt a blow to her leg. More shocked than injured, she saw that a child, a small white boy of five or six years, had kicked her, without so much as a word. As the child’s mother appeared and made a show of reprimanding the boy, the woman calmly told her that she, as the child’s parent, not the child, was to blame.
A more lethal form of violence was practically lying in wait for black men whose dignified public appearance and demeanor defied white expectations of deference. Arna Bontemps recalled the confrontation that sparked his father’s decision to move his family out of Louisiana, to California. Bontemps’s father, a prosperous builder, was generally well-dressed, a breach of Jim Crow expectations of black subordination. One night, “two white men wavered out of a saloon,” blocking his path; “one of them muttered, ”Let’s walk over the big nigger.’” Although “capable of fury,” Bontemps’s father “calmly stepped aside,” as local custom dictated. To do otherwise would have given his tormentors license to shoot him out of hand. The trouble began, ironically enough, when a black man tried to make himself respectable in appearance and conduct, upsetting even the poorest whites’ expectations of privilege. To publicly present one’s self, as the elder Bontemps did, not as a field hand, but as successful, dignified, and neatly attired, constituted a transgressive refusal to occupy the subordinate status prescribed for African American men and women.9
Perhaps middle-class sanctuaries like black college campuses shielded blacks from such crude encounters with white supremacy. But even there, it was no guarantee that rotten personalities could be kept out. More than one hundred students at Talladega College in Alabama went on strike in January of 1906 following the appointment of a new superintendent of the school’s agricultural department. Accounts of the dispute noted that this superintendent “began to move among the students with an air of superiority, to address them by their first names,” and that he refused to share a residence with students because he was opposed to “social equality.” The Atlanta journalist J. Max Barber commented that “conditions are such in the South, generally, and the average white man of this section is so arrogant and presumptious, that the young Negro of intelligence and self-respect does not care to have contact with him.” Barber held that the students were justified in their action.10
The lack of career options was a common complaint for college-trained blacks in both sections, but the South’s assault on relations between black men and women kindled the resentment of those who struggled to meet prevailing standards of bourgeois selfhood. Sutton E. Griggs, a Memphis minister, testified to the material difficulties of blacks in the South. Griggs pointed out the extent to which free speech and political assertiveness were incompatible with the pursuit of a livelihood, harming black men and their ability to support families. In Imperium In Imperio, a popular novel published in 1899, Griggs, who supported both Tuskegee and the Niagara movement, imagined a conspiracy among blacks to establish a separate black nation. Griggs described the undoing of his hero, Belton Piedmont, which pushed him toward his fateful course. Belton, a brilliant teacher and journalist, lost his teaching appointment when he editorialized against election fraud in Richmond. Dismissed from a lowly clerical patronage job in the post office for refusing to support a Republican Party candidate he knew to be a racist, Belton found that although “he possessed a first class college education” and “there were positions around by the thousands which he could fill . . . his color debarred him.” In contemplating this situation, which “precluded his earning a livelihood” for his new bride, Belton found “scores of young men in just his predicament.” Teaching positions were all taken, and the situation was worsened as “colleges were rushing class after class forth with his kind of education, and there was no employment for them.” In Griggs’s narrative, the dark-complexioned Belton’s marriage ends after his new bride gives birth to a pale “white” baby, a shocking development meant to illustrate the worst fate that could befall black men who were unable to support, and thus protect, their wives. While the implication Griggs drew cast black women in a negative light as race betrayers, the episode conveyed the powerlessness of black men to establish, let alone protect, their families in accordance with patriarchal norms.11
Corroborating Griggs’s scenario, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Atlanta University study of The College-Bred Negro recorded a threefold increase from 1880 to 1899 of black college graduates, and seemed chagrined to note that “they are not rushing into matrimony and its responsibilities without forethought.” As career prospects did not always fulfill the expectations raised by education, the problem of “getting a living,” as Du Bois termed it, remained a deep concern of educated blacks, North and South. “How many times,” recalled the southern-born scholar and minister Benjamin Brawley, “have I seen responsible Negro men detached from something stable and uncertain as to the way to turn! The higher they are, the more difficult is the problem. Some never seem to find the way again.” Though Brawley’s lament came during the Depression, it illustrates not only the precarious status of educated blacks but also, for black men, the violence this situation did to their sense of identity as men. Clearly, the material difficulties faced by black men and women, whose unprotected lives, bodies, and property could be instantly taken and seized without redress, had an enormous impact on gender relations and on the quality and concerns of uplift ideology.12
Insofar as Jim Crow mores had spread above the Mason-Dixon line, blacks in the North were no less vulnerable on matters of gender identity. In her biography of her mother, Margaret Lawrence, a pioneer African American psychoanalyst, Sara Lawrence Lightfoot discusses the impact of racism on her mother, who recalled meeting her supervisor for a summer job with the department of public health in Jackson, Mississippi, while in medical school at Cornell. The year was 1938. “As she entered his office, his greeting made her feel like she had been hit in the stomach.” In Dr. Lawrence’s words, “He immediately called me ”Margaret.’ . . . He made it clear that as a Negro, despite the fact that I was [in] medical school, I had no title. . . . He knew who I was, ”Miss Margaret Morgan.’ . . . But he needed to demean me. I was greatly offended.” Margaret Morgan and her future husband Charles Lawrence were from the South, but when she told him of what happened, as she remembered it, “Charles was infuriated. . . . He was so angry, he was destroyed.” Through tears, Dr. Lawrence explained to her daughter—her biographer—Charles Lawrence’s devastation (reading her present marital status back into the period of their engagement): “To have reached his manhood, to have married . . . to have his wife not respected. . . . In this place he was rendered helpless as a man. . . . He could not protect his wife from indignity.” The memory of that incident brought back another, in which Margaret Lawrence had arranged for her mother to have kidney surgery in a New York hospital. Reviewing correspondence to her New York colleagues from her mother’s doctor in Vicksburg, Dr. Lawrence was shocked to discover that he referred to his patient throughout as “Mary.” “He spoke so disrespectfully, calling her ”Marry’” Dr. Lawrence angrily recalled, “as if this was someone who was working on his plantation!”13
Sara Lightfoot, a sociologist, concluded that her mother’s response “reflects the long shadow of black folks’ tireless attempts to gain status as full-fledged human beings. . . . In the first-name address, Negroes heard the old contempt, the brutal infantilization” of slavery. Besides infantilization, the first-name address of black women by white men signaled a stolen intimacy, a falsely claimed familiarity, hardly mutual. In the context of institutionalized sexual exploitation of black women, this verbal violation of privacy was tantamount to the physical act of rape. In this light, we can better understand Charles Lawrence’s rage and sense of helplessness at being unable to protect his fiancée. African Americans steeled themselves against such displays of power by whites, which perversely masqueraded as social niceties.
According to Lightfoot, generations after slavery, in the Deep South, blacks found ingenious methods of avoiding the humiliating first-name address. It was not uncommon for black parents to name their sons President, Mister, Deacon, or even Royal, or to name their daughters Queen or Princess, so that whites would be compelled to address them using a respectful title. An alternative open to both men and women was to maintain circumspect silence on one’s first name and to go by one’s initials, as Charles Lawrence’s mother did. White paternalism could also be subverted by naming children, usually male, after popular political or military leaders, such as Roosevelt (as in Franklin), or somewhat earlier, Maceo, the latter after Antonio Maceo, the black general of the Cuban rebellion widely admired among southern blacks in the 1890s and afterward. Of course, southern whites could escalate this psychological warfare, insisting on the black man’s subordinate place by addressing him as “boy,” or by otherwise calling black men and women, and indeed, the race, “out of their names,” as blacks referred to it. The everyday prevalence of such racist practices informed an internal moral code among blacks governing interpersonal relations and demanding mutual respect, especially for those elders who had survived the worst aspects of the past.14
In the South, white landlords exercised their absolute power over their black tenants through the system of concubinage, reserving an unrestricted right to sexual relations with women on the plantation. Concubinage was not just assumed by whites to be an integral part of peonage, for it was widely practiced in urban settings by white employers of domestic workers, and by others, as well. Black men and women who refused to comply, or who challenged the system—and there were many—invariably faced violent retribution, especially men. It should be mentioned that many African Americans raised families under these conditions of terror. Some black women, however, exploited the system by becoming prostitutes, but it is difficult, and indeed misleading, to regard the actions of black women as freely chosen and consensual under a system of legalized rape, maintained by anti-intermarriage laws. African Americans of all classes struggled against concubinage to protect their female relatives. Among privileged blacks, it was commonly believed that daughters would be safer away at schools, where the pietistic missionary culture would afford a measure of protection. In a fictionalized magazine sketch, one commentator described concubinage as the essence of Jim Crow, recounting a tragic case of the separation of a young girl from her long-suffering mother, an urban washerwoman.15 Black men bitterly resented the system but were largely powerless to oppose it. If their repressed rage could be vented, it might come at the expense of black women themselves, or target rival black male suitors. Such rage could be directed against those white males who preyed on black women only indirectly. The white anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker told of a prank several black youths played on white male visitors inquiring after black women. The boys directed the men to the best white residential section. “The youth of the boys and the satisfaction in the prank were equally telling,” observed Powdermaker.16
Black commentators, particularly those intent on projecting an image of respectability, were understandably reticent about concubinage. Silence about sexual domination might be partly overcome by dissemblance, or by displacement through historical analogy. One writer situated his denunciation of concubinage in an account of French aristocrats’ “droit de Seigneur,” by which “every bride was his for the asking.” He warned that such crimes would drive southern blacks to revolt against their oppressors as surely as French peasants had done in the eighteenth century. For elite blacks, concubinage was generally a class issue, and despite their concern for the chastity of their daughters, many were prone to equate concubinage with prostitution or the supposed sexual indiscretions of lower-class women. For many, respectability meant condemning the morals of black women caught within the system as much as they condemned the system itself. But in those times all black women were vulnerable to such accusations. Black women were no doubt devastated to hear that such murmurings had originated among blacks. As a young woman, Ida B. Wells confronted a minister who had spread the rumor that her dismissal from a teaching position in Memphis on political grounds was actually punishment for a breach in moral conduct. Having secured his public retraction of the accusations, Wells saw a larger significance in her action: “I felt I had vindicated the honor of the many southern girls who had been traduced by lying tongues.”17
Public-spirited black women were equally zealous about defending their names and image against the verbal slanders and physical outrages of racist whites. Invariably their bylines appeared in the black press with the title “Mrs.,” displaying to the world their respectable status. Moreover, there was the need for the protection that was not forthcoming in the courts. This preoccupation with morals, status, and conformity to bourgeois gender norms among educated blacks may have been repressive and indicative of a misogynistic distrust of single black women in certain contexts, but it also reflects African Americans’ outrage at abuses such as concubinage. The widespread concern for family stability among blacks has to be attributed to the sheer magnitude of racist domination that threatened to humiliate, segregate, and dispossess, if not murder and rape, black men and women regardless of social status.18
Amidst widespread portrayals of disorderly black sexuality, there was little mention that black women and men were largely the prey of state-sanctioned white aggression, as victims of rape and violently homoerotic lynchings culminating in castration and mutilation. Two words—“social equality”—were sufficient to unleash such explosions of mob fury and terror. As the cornerstone of white supremacist ideology, the slogan, signifying black rape and the miscegenation taboo, was routinely invoked in southern newspapers, many of which often took pains to report the so-called orderliness and self-control exercised by lynch mobs.
In addition, genteel magazines and journals of wider circulation did their part, transmitting fearful images of sexual racism to white middle-class readers nationwide. When black men were not being depicted as butts of racist humor, they were portrayed as sexual predators needing to be controlled at all costs. In 1904, McClure’s magazine brought out Thomas Nelson Page’s series of articles defending the southern method of handling the black population. He deemed lynching a useful defense against rape by black men and concurred with the view that Reconstruction was a “national blunder” and that blacks lacked the maturity and intelligence necessary for responsible citizenship, an idea given national prominence, oddly enough, by Washington’s Up From Slavery. Popular racism was made respectable by men like Booker T. Washington, Page, and countless others, and endlessly exploited by race-baiting politicians. At the turn of the century, the racist perception that black people embodied what was then widely termed the “Negro problem” was so pervasive in American society—a sentiment shared by both southern extremists and “moderates”—that black spokespersons were obliged to enter this debate on these disadvantageous terms.19
Miscegenation was regarded by the white South as the rape of white women by black men. Consensual sexual relations between white women and black men remained inadmissible and unspeakable within the reigning terms of black criminality and pure, passionless white womanhood, as the bolder black journalists who contested this myth periodically discovered. White males’ criminal acts—rapes of black women—also remained unspoken, or were explained away by images of black women as wanton seductresses. The law reinforced this sexual domination, as anti-intermarriage statutes denied black women legal redress against white attackers. Lynching, often on the pretext of rape, upheld and enforced this regime, punishing black men who attempted to protect black women from whites’ assaults.20
For the black South, miscegenation was synonymous with the rape of black women by white men. Among educated circles, theories influenced by scientific racism and eugenics positing the immorality and degeneracy of mulattoes also provided an additional basis for arguments against intermarriage. Drawing on such theories, but also in an assertion of race pride, black elites with nationalist leanings challenged the views supporting miscegenation espoused by men like Frederick Douglass, T. Thomas Fortune, and the Washington, D.C., bibliophile Daniel Murray (all of whom had nonblack ancestry). Against the dominant view of mulatto degeneracy, these men had argued that progress through biological “race assimilation” was inevitable, accompanied by an eventual fading of racial differences. But this tendency to look favorably on “amalgamation,” shared by the most radical of the abolitionists, was hardly universal among blacks. The tightening coils of white supremacy, along with the perception of the snobbery and opportunism of mulatto elites and the persistent white conviction that black progress and achievement were the result of white parentage, led a growing number of blacks, drawn mainly from the rising ranks of journalists, educators, professionals, and self-made men to reject such arguments. In the first place, arguments positing race mixing as a precondition for black progress presupposed black inferiority. And the race mixing that had occurred during and after slavery was a sign of moral degradation, not progress. Finally, such “assimilation” as had already occurred had failed to reduce white antipathy.21
No matter how much blacks spoke of race integrity, white opinion would not be dissuaded from its hypocritical, sexualized obsession with racial purity and social equality. Central to the justification of lynching as a deterrent to rape, the maintenance of the Jim Crow social order founded on involuntary servitude through debt peonage, convict labor, and elaborate customs, protocols, and rituals of racial deference—was white intolerance of interracial contact. Blacks and whites, particularly black men and white women, were forbidden to meet publicly as equals. For the white South, civilization also seemed to rest on preventing black men from interfering with clandestine or criminal sexual contact between white men and black women. In short, “social equality” was a sexualized diversion from and justification for political and social inequality, a slogan mobilized frequently, but most effectively at election time, herding white workers into the Democratic Party with appeals for the disfranchisement of blacks. Explaining local custom to a national audience, and in the process seeming to lend southern extremism a veneer of reasonableness, Thomas Nelson Page observed that the white South held “universal and furious hostility to even the least suggestion of social equality.” Most blacks opposed lynching on grounds of its violation of due-process rights. But white extremists disingenuously equated antilynching protests with support for social equality, or worse, the condoning of rape, and many blacks defensively tried to divest their claims for social equality of their sexual implications (by opposing intermarriage) or insisted on the necessity of literacy and property qualifications for suffrage to eliminate poor blacks (and whites) from the inequitable social equation.22
The tragic irony of such accommodationist rhetoric was a stunning revelation to William Crogman in the aftermath of the Atlanta riot. Crogman, who would soon assume the presidency of Clark College in Georgia through Booker T. Washington’s influence, noted as he recovered from injuries sustained in the violence, that “here we have worked and prayed and tried to make good men and women of our colored population, and at our very doorstep the whites kill these good men. But the lawless element in our population, the element we have condemned fights back, and it is [to] these people that we owe our lives.” Crogman was referring to the residents of Darktown who had fought off an invading white mob. The Atlanta crisis forced men like Crogman to see the transparency of the moral distinctions claimed by some advocates of uplift ideology. Crogman was not the only victim; Rev. J. W. E. Bowen, president of Atlanta’s Gammon Theological Seminary, was beaten with a rifle butt by a policeman. That elite blacks were not immune to the riot’s violence suggested the ultimate futility of moralistic repudiations of the behavior of the urban black population in the name of progress and civilization.23
During the brief period before the riot that he edited the Voice of the Negro, Jesse Max Barber’s editorials vigorously protested race prejudice in Atlanta’s civic affairs and in national politics, and encouraged interracial cooperation. Barber’s journal was the voice of Atlanta’s black leadership. Its editorial board had included J. W. E. Bowen of Gammon Theological Seminary and Henry Hugh Proctor, the influential pastor of the biracial First Congregational Church. Proctor was deeply involved in local moral reform efforts, including a protracted, unsuccessful struggle to eliminate Atlanta’s vice and entertainment district, though in 1902 he succeeded in closing several dance halls. The year before Proctor had helped defeat a measure that would have disfranchised blacks in Georgia. Black and white reformers had managed to block a persistent movement for disfranchisement in Georgia since the late 1890s. Bowen and Proctor were joined on the Voice staff by Emmett J. Scott, Booker T. Washington’s personal secretary and confidant. W. E. B. Du Bois contributed articles from Atlanta University. Pauline Hopkins joined as a regular contributor after losing her position as contributing editor to the Colored American Magazine in Boston.24
The circulation of the Voice ranged from three thousand at its first appearance to fifteen thousand in 1906. The magazine was available through subscription and distributed nationwide by agents. It ran advertisements for local black businesses and promoted its own publishing ventures, generally books of didactic and success literature aimed at African Americans and promoting uplift ideals. Frequently, the “vivid interpretation to the current history of the day” found in its pages was reprinted and excerpted by “the press of both races,” sometimes, to Barber’s displeasure, without attribution.25
Initially, the magazine’s editorial and political content reflected prevailing black bourgeois sentiment on politics and cultural affairs, much of it promoting images of success and achievement. There were the usual features boosting black business enterprise and the constructive role in race progress played by Washington’s Negro Business League.26 The editors opposed segregation in public facilities and praised successful economic boycotts of streetcar companies that practiced Jim Crow, but they took issue with the older, integrationist claim that opposed separate black institutions such as hospitals, schools, and YMCAs on principle as “drawing the color line” or practicing self-segregation. The journal’s position on labor relations echoed the usual New South argument by black elites that blacks comprised the most loyal and effective labor force in the region and were thus preferable to other immigrant groups. Contributors called for an end to the exclusion of blacks from northern industries and labor unions. Editors and contributors opposed black disfranchisement, insisting that literacy, not color, be the criterion for exercising the suffrage, so that elite blacks might be able to hold onto the vote against the tide of disfranchisement.27 The magazine promoted ideals of black beauty and moral perfection through idealized, wholesome images of the race’s manhood and womanhood in the visual arts and literature.28 It published the occasional short story, and a great deal of poetry, some of it appearing in the dialect verse of such lesser-known southern black bards as Daniel Webster Davis and Silas X. Floyd. The journal decried the racial exclusion practiced by the officials of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904, and supported the Roosevelt administration’s expansionist policy, though by 1906, the lofty praise Roosevelt received from such black Republicans as William Scarborough during the previous national campaign would give way to angry disillusionment over his handling of domestic racial politics.29 The magazine opened its pages to black women contributors, such as Fannie Barrier Williams, Mary Church Terrell, and Josephine Silone Yates, and brought out a “Negro Women’s Number” in 1904 that publicized the activities of the National Association of Colored Women. There were numerous publicity features on black cultural, self-help, and reform institutions.30 Throughout the life of the journal, there were frequent occasions for condemnations of lynchings and the complicity of southern courts and newspaper editors with mob tyranny.31
What distinguished the journal was the maverick presence of Barber, whose editorials were often sharply worded protests against the abuses of southern society. Born to poor former slaves in Blackstock, South Carolina, Barber received his bachelor’s degree from Virginia Union University in Richmond. Barber waged constant war on southern shibboleths, whether uttered by blacks or whites. Of the conservative race leader who asserts “I do not believe in social equality,” Barber maintained that “men make their social spheres and men do believe in social equality.” The magazine’s support of black business was by no means incompatible with protest, a position many Bookerites were in the habit of asserting. John Mitchell, the Richmond journalist turned banker, drew Barber’s wrath for telling a national banking conference in New York that “Negro loafers are the only block to our advance. . . . There is no fight between the intelligent white man and the intelligent Negro.” Barber reminded Mitchell that many southern whites “do not like to see the Negro advance materially,” quoting an item from a northern newspaper on a prosperous black minister and his family from Clay County, Mississippi, run out of town by “an envious mob.” Barber called for “more discriminating language” on the part of black spokespersons: “What these men say is caught upon the wings of the wind and heralded to all parts of the country,” sowing disinformation and self-delusion among whites on race questions.32
Barber used his editorials to provide a timely rebuttal to the numbingly commonplace negrophobic pronouncements in the southern press and pulpit. He delighted in debunking the self-righteous assumptions of white supremacists. To a white newspaper’s demagogic broadside against black vagrancy, Barber countered that “particularly obnoxious and dangerous is the white tramp,” who, according to Barber, “in many instances . . . paint their faces black, and, thereby, throw the police off their tracks.” Casting doubt on the media furor over the Negro vagrant, Barber insisted that “this is one question where surely there can be no race discrimination.” In the same number, he printed an account of the lynching of whites, including “the burning of a little white child . . . by his playmates” in West Virginia. According to Barber, “Saturn is devouring his own children,” and “in the parlance of the man in the street, ”chickens are coming home to roost.’” Barber supported Fannie Barrier Williams’s defense of the Frederick Douglass Center, an interracial reform organization founded in Chicago in 1904, from the assertion that it promoted “social equality.” Indeed, this epithet was commonly hurled at antiracist efforts at interracial cooperation. Barber accepted the southern designation of the militant, “insolent Negro” as a badge of honor, calling for justice in the courts, on the railroads and electric cars, and at the polls: “[The insolent Negro] retorts that ”Grandfather clauses’ and ”understanding clauses’ belong to the days of feudalism and are the irrational and inhuman prerogatives of Monarchies and Oligarchies; that Democracy means ”the people’ and that there are no grandsons in a Democratic government.” In 1906, Barber used the pages of his journal to publicize the militant Niagara movement, in which he was actively involved. Members of the movement, a forerunner of the NAACP founded at Niagara Falls the previous year, challenged statements by such influential northerners as Lyman Abbott favoring disfranchisement, opposed the stage adaptation of Thomas Dixon’s Clansman, and celebrated the memory of John Brown in hopes of strengthening ties between white liberals and black militants. Barber ran Du Bois’s charge that an anonymous black leader (Booker T. Washington) subsidized five black newspapers with “$3,000 of hush money.” Washington’s supporters, including Oswald Garrison Villard, demanded conclusive proof from Du Bois. Although Villard remained unpersuaded, according to Louis Harlan, Washington employed “espionage and repression” in an attempt to derail the Niagara movement.33
Not surprisingly, such outspoken editorial content did not endear Barber to those civic leaders in Atlanta who regarded such statements outside the bounds of permissible speech. Barber was apparently made aware of this not long after his journal appeared, noting that “neither freedom of speech nor freedom of the press has ever been tolerated in the South.” As evidence, Barber cited the dismissal of two white college professors for speaking out against the mistreatment of blacks in that section, adding that “it is far worse for the Negro.” One of Barber’s agents was harassed in Louisiana, forbidden to sell the periodical because “it was a political number and colored people were not allowed to discuss politics in those parts.” Barber reprinted an editorial responding to his criticism of a white newspaper, which stated that “Negroes of this temper ought not to be allowed in these troubled times to hold positions in which they can threaten or disturb the peace of society.” The editorial went on to say that if the law could not “suppress a pestilent nuisance like this,” then “the usual result” was likely to befall “this insolent coon.” Barber concluded with an appeal to “the better classes of white people” for the protection of freedom of speech and for blacks “to seek by right living to secure the confidence of the better element of the white people.” Barber’s reflections on free speech were a portent of what was to come when, as the gubernatorial campaign wore on in 1906, he attacked the candidates’ descent into racist demagoguery. Though Barber’s militancy, and the threats it elicited, suggested otherwise, white moderates committed to interracial cooperation could be found in Atlanta, and nationwide, and Barber sought their assistance as energetically as anyone else, including Washington. Washington had visited Atlanta a month before the riot to give the keynote address at a gathering of the National Negro Business League. Hoping to calm what had become an increasingly incendiary atmosphere, Washington found his speech reported in the press as primarily a denunciation of black crime.34
That August, another crisis, this one involving the black soldiers of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry stationed in Brownsville, Texas, would discredit Washington’s leadership among blacks. Local white citizens protested the soldiers’ presence to their congressman and repeatedly complained to officers about “uppity” black troops. The troops were accused of not giving way on the sidewalk to whites (a breach of Jim Crow custom), and when a white woman told of being thrown on the ground by a black soldier, all army passes for black troops were canceled. There was a search of the barracks for a black soldier who was alleged to have assaulted a white woman in her home. The allegation further angered the black soldiers, who considered the charge a fabrication designed to harass them, and insisted on their innocence. On the evening of August 13, nine to fifteen black soldiers reportedly entered the town and fired their weapons, killing a bartender and wounding the chief of police. They returned to the base and rejoined the regiment. When an investigation failed to reveal the persons involved, the soldiers again claimed innocence. Abandoning, in the eyes of black critics, the square deal, President Roosevelt dismissed the entire regiment of approximately 170 men without a trial, disqualifying them from further military support or employment. W. E. B. Du Bois called Roosevelt’s action impulsive and stubborn, and found himself at a loss in wondering what Roosevelt had ever done on behalf of black Americans. Roosevelt brushed aside Washington’s private entreaties on behalf of the soldiers, and the black educator was compelled to abide by the decision, losing whatever credibility he still had with the Talented Tenth. Noting white officers’ defense of the discharge, Mary Church Terrell regretted that “this everlasting social equality question must be injected into everything.” As if to prove her point, Roosevelt declared before Congress at the end of 1906, “The greatest existing cause of lynching is the perpetration, especially by black men, of the hideous crime of rape.” He urged respectable blacks not to harbor criminals, and regarded industrial education as the best remedy for lynching. Barber strongly condemned Roosevelt’s message, and protests against the president’s handling of the Brownsville Affray wore on for months, including a mass meeting in New York organized by white sympathizers under the aegis of John Milholland’s Constitution League, which sought to breathe life into the civil rights amendments. Eventually, partly through the efforts of Senator Joseph Foraker of Ohio, those of the soldiers found to be innocent were reinstated.35
Barber published his account of the riot from Chicago, explaining the causes of the lawlessness, and the circumstances of his abrupt departure from Atlanta in the riot’s aftermath. He denounced “the wholesale arrest and disarming of colored people” as whites armed themselves. In the days after the bloody weekend, martial law was instituted, and militia, police, and armed citizens “became agents for Negro intimidation.” Barber estimated that five thousand black citizens had quit the city, and he called the riot the inevitable result of an antiblack campaign orchestrated by unscrupulous politicians and newspaper editors. Barber cited the performance of Thomas Dixon’s Clansman the previous winter, with its attack on Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan’s heroic role in the redemption of the South, and the rescue of white women threatened by lustful black politicians as the first incitement to the mob spirit. Next was the eighteen long months of Hoke Smith’s “vituperation” during the gubernatorial campaign. Barber attributed Smith’s victory to his abusive rhetoric and calls for black disfranchisement. Barber charged that the editor of the Atlanta News, “the open champion of mob law,” had “deliberately fomented and precipitated the riot.” Once again, Barber confronted the hypocritical charge of social equality, noting that it was black women who were in real danger of rape. He reported the mysterious circumstances surrounding an assault on two white women that August, just before the white primary. A member of the investigating posse disclosed to Barber that the bloodhounds led them to the door of a white man, at which point the search was given up. Barber’s source surmised that a white man in blackface had committed the crime. Barber found this a likely scenario, as “white men with blacked faces have been killed in South Carolina, Kentucky and Texas and one is now in jail in the District of Columbia for playing Negro while committing crime.” Barber concluded that blacks had no monopoly on rape, and that many accusations were pure fabrications. Some cases involved whites disguised as blacks, others were cases of “mutual consent.” In addition, Barber rejected the idea that the mob was comprised of “hoodlums”: “Tho[ugh] launched by the rabble, the creative force of this mob was the upper class.” Finally, the mob’s orchestrated wrath was not directed at black criminals, indeed, it claimed among its victims a black woman, and had driven many enfranchised blacks out of town. “”Humiliate the progressive Negro’ was the command to the mob.”36
Barber had telegraphed his account of the riot, with the assertion that white men in blackface were behind the “Negro rapes,” to the New York World, in answer to John Temple Graves’s charge that the riot was retribution for “a carnival of rapes” in Atlanta. He went further, accusing those men in blackface of being emissaries of Hoke Smith.37 Barber signed his dispatch “A Colored Citizen.” With that, Barber had transgressed the permissible limits of free expression. Barber’s claims were circumstantial, but plausible, compared with the routine disinformation practiced by white editors. His cause was not helped by the anonymity of his sources, who faced similar punishment if they became known. Summoned by a tribunal of civic leaders headed by James English, president of the Fourth National Bank of Atlanta, Barber was accused of penning the offending letter, and told to get out of town or face a criminal trial. Not caring “to be made a slave on a Georgia chain gang,” Barber departed for the North.38
Barber’s account of the causes and aftermath of the riot went to the heart of antiblack southern (and national) ideology and, at the same time, challenged those aspects of racial uplift ideology that operated as rhetorical accommodations to the status quo. Even before the riot, Barber’s editorial and political actions foreshadowed the emerging militancy of black leadership, a state of affairs that put Washington on the defensive. He typified those African Americans of all social strata, race women and men, who were not as uncommon in the South as those northerners who fancied themselves culturally superior would have thought, and who went down fighting, or loudly protesting, that they knew their rights. Barber praised the “mighty hegira of Negroes from the country to the cities,” attributing the migration to “the new slavery, peonage,” and lynching.39 He continued publishing the journal from Chicago for just one more year, until its final number appeared in October 1907.
Barber remained politically active, taking part in a number of fledgling black and interracial protest organizations in the first decade of the century. He attended the National Negro Conference in 1909, which led to the founding of the NAACP. The interracial conference was called after a race riot in Springfield, Illinois, the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln. The disturbance was touched off by an accusation of rape, and when a lynch mob was frustrated in its attempt to storm the jail, it vented its fury on two innocent black men and burned black homes and property. At the conference, Barber urged that full citizenship, the suffrage, and jury service were imperative necessities for African Americans. Barber moved to Philadelphia not long afterward and enrolled in dental school (at Temple University), beginning his practice there in 1912. He served in the Philadelphia branch of the NAACP (with the former North Carolina congressman George White) and joined the National Board of Directors of that organization after 1920. He was married and widowed twice, and died in 1949. Although he remained involved in civic affairs, he had left his mark as editor of the Voice of the Negro while still in his twenties.40
W. E. B. Du Bois was absent from Atlanta during the riot. While returning on the train he composed an angry poem, “Litany of Atlanta,” which attempted to come to terms with the catastrophe: “Surely, Thou too art not White, O Lord, a pale, bloodless, heartless thing?”41 The riot was a massive evil that mocked belief in a benevolent deity. Du Bois bitterly imagined Atlanta’s black community as the sport of a racist white God. “Social equality” and the lynching for rape scenario functioned similarly as a popular justification for the evils of white supremacy in an avowed Christian republic. The combined abuses of disfranchisement, which was finally adopted in Georgia in 1908, the Brownsville dismissals, the Atlanta riot, and lynching merely required what many might regard a morally sufficient reason to justify them. Social equality and the myth of the black rapist provided persuasive justifications and incitements to legal and extralegal domination. In this period, and for a considerable time afterward in the South, social equality, the polarizing slogan of sexual racism, served the purposes of such state and national politicians as Hoke Smith and Roosevelt as effectively as a blackface disguise.