3: Figuring Class With Race

Uplift, Minstrelsy, Migration, and “the Negro Problem”

The American people have fallen in with the bad idea that this is a Negro problem, a question of the character of the Negro and not a question of the nation. It is still more surprising that the colored press of the country and some of our colored orators, have made the same mistake and still insist upon calling it a “Negro problem,” or a race problem. . . . Now, there is nothing the matter with the Negro whatever; he is all right. Learned or ignorant, he is all right.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 1895

Uplift ideology protested the disfranchisement, segregation, and violence wielded against black Americans, but it was also a reaction to the cultural dimension of white supremacy—the minstrel stereotypes that saturated American journalism and popular culture throughout the period. These demeaning white images of blackness informed the popular understanding of racial issues by social commentators as “the Negro problem,” an assumption challenged by Frederick Douglass and others. Since antebellum days, minstrelsy demeaned blacks and effectively equated bourgeois morality—indeed, humanity—with whiteness. Perhaps the most insidious aspect of minstrelsy, well into the twentieth century, was its mockery of African Americans’ aspirations to equal status, its accusation that such aspiration meant a futile desire to be white.

But minstrelsy had more to do with white fears—and desires—than it had to do with African Americans. Minstrel performance rituals, both in public and at home, freed whites to entertain otherwise forbidden and dangerous ideas about sexuality, assuaged their guilt, and enabled them to maintain a sense of moral and racial superiority. Pretending that racial barriers were nonexistent in society, many whites used the popular culture of minstrelsy to assert blacks’ immorality and nonconformity to patriarchal gender norms (a crucial marker of civilized status). Douglass’s perception of the tendency to associate “the Negro problem” with the bodies of black men and women identified the terms by which racists, moderates, and even antiracists, black and white, reproduced the logic of bigotry. But for black elites, the constant threat of violence, or national controversies such as imperialism or foreign wars, might compel a reordering of priorities toward a militant perspective, yielding an identity that surpassed self-help ideology.¹

African Americans struggled against the self-loathing of a narrowly racialized identity by attacking the ubiquitous and seemingly indestructible anti-black stereotypes found in popular literature, newspapers, Progressive Era magazines, advertisements, toys, and various forms of printed ephemera. The new mass-communications technologies of recorded sound, radio, and motion pictures would soon lend minstrelsy further social veracity through the reproduction of “real” photographic and audio images.

The elaborate nature of minstrel images was hardly arbitrary, linking narratives of antebellum blackface minstrelsy and slavery with the postbellum plantation legend calling for the control of black labor and obsessed with maintaining African Americans in their subordinate place. Through mass-produced photographs or illustrations circulated nationwide at the turn of the century, blacks were represented in rural scenes conforming to these expectations centering on labor and leisure. Often, blacks were depicted as farm workers, usually content with this status, or pictured in more leisurely pastimes. Such images of tattered, but carefree, banjo-playing, watermelon-eating blacks convinced whites that although blacks’ simple joys made them virtually unexploitable, they needed to be protected from their natural inclination to indolence. Through these images, and within the coon songs that were so popular in the 1890s, minstrel narratives represented the desire to discipline black labor and discredit urban migration and the aspirations of black people to escape exploitation as field hands.² Feeling thus merged imperceptibly into thought, as the interdependence of the plantation legend and coon song themes of urban pathology inhabited much respectable commentary on race and social relations.³

It was difficult for African Americans to ignore minstrelsy, a major obstacle to the assertion of bourgeois black selfhood. Because photography was crucial in transmitting stereotypes, African Americans found the medium well suited for trying to refute negrophobic caricatures. In addition, black painters, illustrators, and sculptors, along with writers of fiction, produced antiracist narratives and iconography featuring ideal types of bourgeois black manhood and womanhood. At a broader, grass-roots level, there is an extensive photographic record of African Americans’ concern to infuse the black image with dignity, and to embody the “representative” Negro by which the race might more accurately be judged. Studio portraits of uplift and respectability—depicting black families with attributes of cleanliness, leisure, and literacy—found expression in the sitters’ posture, demeanor, dress, and setting. In most portraits, whether of individuals, of wedding portraits, or of groups, one sees an intense concern with projecting a serious, dignified image. And these still portraits of refinement sprang to life in performance rituals, often based in the church, of elocution, preaching, and in the jubilee and quartette singing of Negro spirituals. Anything less than stylized elegance would betray the ideals of race advancement and, indeed, hold the race back, as did the profusion of commodified, demeaning portraits taken of unsuspecting, often youthful, and destitute African Americans.⁴

Portrait of mother and children, ca. 1920s. This James Van Der Zee portrait, taken in Harlem, enshrines the ideals of motherhood and domesticity. (Courtesy of Donna Van Der Zee)

Many whites, however, remained unmoved by African Americans’ attempts at respectful self-representation. If images of black respectability were not omitted from the white press altogether, they were relentlessly mocked and parodied through minstrelsy. Minstrelsy’s influence on ostensibly reasonable public commentaries on race among social scientists, muckrakers, politicians, jurists, and reformers must be acknowledged. Minstrelsy mocked the elite aspirations of African Americans, expressed, for example, through a missionary interest in African nationhood, as “putting on airs.” Its objective was often to undermine transgressive images of black power and equality, as when Theodore Roosevelt, soon to be elected governor of New York, resorted to a comic portrayal suggesting black soldiers’ cowardice in the Spanish-American War for Cuban independence after it had been widely reported that black troops had contributed significantly to the defeat of Spain.

Minstrel stereotypes encompassed a range of racist perceptions that laid the intellectual and emotional foundation for the assumption by social scientists, clergy, and jurists that African Americans were biologically inferior, disorderly, appetitive at the expense of reason, and, finally, unassimilable. In 1900, Nathaniel S. Shaler, the Harvard biologist, observed in the Atlantic Monthly that “coons will get wild when there was [sic] a racket going on, but all they will need is the firm hand of the master race.” Having once criticized disfranchisement and lynching, the New York Presbyterian minister Charles H. Parkhurst voiced a change of heart. Claiming that “niggers” were unqualified for citizenship (he used the epithet “because that is what they call themselves”), he judged that “they never, never, never will contribute, in any part, toward forming the national type of the Americans of the future.” Physical and biological differences proved that blacks were unassimilable. “They grow blacker and blacker every day. Their color forms a physical barrier, which even time, the great leveler, cannot sweep away.”⁵

The Plantation Legend and Urban Pathology

Besides trivializing black power and aspirations to citizenship and equality, minstrelsy also sought to assuage white guilt. The plantation legend of popular literature reflected many whites’ nostalgic desire that blacks remain the good-natured, humble creatures that they knew and loved in slavery days. Such nostalgia reflected the belief that blacks were contented, and did not need to be coerced and controlled as workers, although in fact they were policed through legal and extralegal means. And the mammy stereotype not only stirred fond memories of plantation life, it also provided whites with a forgiving image of maternal black womanhood that released them from a guilty awareness of black women as victims of rape by white men. In other words, these variations on the plantation legend, with their fictions of harmonious interpersonal master-slave relations, enabled whites to persist in the denial of the more brutal and systemic aspects of white supremacy.

Minstrelsy functioned as a theodicy that provided the state and civil society moral arguments for the necessity of racist beliefs, institutions, policies, and practices, much as the quasi-religious ideology of the civilizing mission functioned to justify imperial conquest. In this light, its importance in American culture pointed to a complex tangle of conflicting emotions, including guilt over antiblack violence, a vague sense of the betrayal of Christian and democratic principles, and yet, all the while, a continued desire for ownership and control of black male and female bodies mediated through fantasies of black forgiveness and submission, resided at the core of the plantation legend. Transported by the memory of her “dear good old Mammy,” a southern woman writer hoped to correct the “misrepresentations” of those, carping so unfairly on “blood-curdling” accounts of lynching in the South, “who know nothing of the feeling which existed between slaves and their owners.” While claiming to oppose slavery and to welcome its abolition, she insisted that “most of the colored people were far happier and better cared for as they were than as they are now.” She averred that “the very happiest days of my life are connected with slavery, and I have always felt the joy of heaven would be incomplete were my dear old Mammy’s face absent from the group that came to welcome me.”⁶

Advertising trade card, ca. 1880s. (Courtesy of Louise Newman)

Such nostalgia for pastoral scenes of the gallant old South provided only a momentary refuge from present fears. The plantation imagery also registered anxiety over urbanizing trends among African Americans. The nostalgia of the plantation legend, sparked by its antithesis in the menacing, sex-crazed, and peripatetic black brute of negrophobic literature, represented anxiety over the preservation of institutionalized white dominance predicated on racial purity. Fears of urban black men and miscegenation were further stoked by the image of the rootless, underemployed “worthless Negro” of southern towns, a monstrous image that was central to the journalistic and social science representations of urban pathology and mulatto degeneracy. The darkest white fantasies crept into presumably evenhanded journalistic writing about blacks. With reproductive sexuality as the linchpin for a Jim Crow social order predicated on racial purity, apologists for the white South’s violent practice of lynching invoked their sense of the ultimate evil, of a fate worse than death.

Journalistic and Social Science Fears of Mulatto Degeneracy

The equation of miscegenation with the Negro rapist constituted a pornographic theodicy that provided a moral justification for lynching, which otherwise might have seemed to many reasonable people a patently evil practice. Against black and white critics, white southerners insisted that lynching, however barbaric, was necessary to protect white women from marauding black rapists and thus maintain racial purity. This visceral fear found calmer, more genteel expression in the fear of mulatto degeneracy, particularly the fear that mulatto men constituted a depraved, morally and physically diseased, threat to racial purity. Such fears had an enormous impact on public policy, as they were central to legal justifications for segregation in public accommodations.

Another daughter of the South, while denouncing “the atrocious conduct” of an “inhuman” lynch mob, promised “facts” in defense of such behavior. Southern white women, she insisted, were constantly at risk of assault by “a savage brute” who “is nearly always a mulatto.” With enough white blood to replace native humility with Caucasian audacity, this creature was above average intelligence and “sure to be a bastard.” In this hereditary theory of debased racial nature, religion was powerless to halt an epidemic of illegitimacy among blacks; indeed, “the most prominent women in their religious enthusiasms are oftenest public prostitutes.” As evidence, she cited the spectacle of a streetcorner female evangelist whose “ethics were high, while her gestures were lewd and blasphemous.” From this “cesspool of vice” emerges a hideous monster with “the savage nature of and the murderous instincts of the wild beast, plus the cunning and lust of a fiend.” Education was only increasing the likelihood of evil; little wonder that North Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana had already disfranchised blacks. The writer’s language grew more agitated as she contemplated the threat: “For years the South has been a smouldering volcano, the dark of its quivering nights lighted here and there with the incendiary’s torch or pierced through by the cry of some outraged woman. The days are feverish with suppressed excitement.” Consequently, “these Negro men never can, nor ever could, have been received at the same fireside with white women.” Although she seemed to hint at a forbidden sexual desire, repression won out as the writer warned antilynching advocates that they were excusing the crimes of brutes, and confessed that she was moved to speak on the issue “on account of a real anxiety.”⁷

Leaving aside further speculation on the sources of this writer’s anxiety, we would do well to note that men of state were no less susceptible to extreme utterance and action in projecting sexual anxieties onto black bodies. In 1909, Senator William H. Milton of Florida introduced a bill to ban intermarriage, providing evidence that fused scientific racism with minstrel caricatures. By a narrow margin, the Senate approved a motion introduced by Joseph Foraker of Ohio to table the bill.⁸

The desired effect of such respectable racism was to placate white fears and anxieties surrounding black freedom and social advancement. But this was hardly possible, requiring the power of the state to enforce the containment of African Americans. Herbert Hovenkamp, writing on the history of segregation, notes that although the legal profession is responsible for institutionalized racism, “the law is not autonomous . . . particularly in areas of explicit public policy making.” Legal arguments in segregation cases were often influenced by the racist social science of the day and the “background” of race prejudices that were simply part of the cultural atmosphere. In Berea College v. Kentucky (1908), the Supreme Court relied on social science data to uphold a Kentucky statute mandating school segregation. Berea had been an anomaly as a racially integrated coeducational school in the South established by abolitionists. Postbellum fears of amalgamation, or race mixing, culminated in the Kentucky statute establishing segregation in that state. Berea challenged the constitutionality of the law, claiming that its religious freedom and rights to freedom of association were being violated. Hovenkamp cites a brief filed on behalf of Kentucky which included a scientific text that claimed to prove natural, fixed, and God-given black mental inferiority. This work of scientific racism was central to the state’s justification for denying African Americans higher education at Berea and keeping the races apart. Belief in racial differences was so deeply entrenched in the late nineteenth century that “separate but equal” had been an accepted legal basis for segregation well before the 1896 Plessy decision. Popular and social science fears of intermarriage and mulatto degeneracy motivated what Hovenkamp called “the ultimate anti-amalgamation statute,” namely, Baltimore’s 1910 ordinance establishing residential segregation.⁹

Legal challenges to segregation by and on behalf of African Americans were sporadic, as federal and state courts were of no disposition to permit social equality, so closely tied was it in racist minds to miscegenation and the loss of white privilege. The courts would not become a major site of struggle until after the founding of the NAACP, in 1910.

In the meantime, the black intelligentsia struggled to turn public opinion in their favor. Adopting the racialized terms of bourgeois morality, elite blacks’ intellectual response to popular and scientific racism was to affirm their humanity through the evolutionary idea of progress, assuming the authoritative role of agents of civilization and uplift in relation to the black majority. Black intellectuals and elites would guide blacks’ assimilation into American society. Whether uplift endeavors meant the service of black ministers and teachers to the rural and urban black masses in the United States, the participation of black soldiers in imperialist wars in Cuba and the Philippines, or the evangelical errand of black church missionaries in Africa, black elites hoped that their support for the spread of civilization and the interests of the American nation would topple racial barriers and bolster their claims to humanity, citizenship, and respectability.

But even as elite blacks championed the respectability of uplift against embarrassing minstrel portrayals of ne’er-do-well blacks, they did not necessarily contradict the minstrel stereotypes confining them to field labor in the rural South. Indeed, black opinion makers occasionally embraced minstrel representations stressing culturally backward, or morally suspect blacks as evidence of their own class superiority. Uplift ideology thus revealed the contradictions of a black bourgeois ideology whose assimilationist claim to equality was limited, and like normative whiteness, itself indelibly tarred by race and gender inequality. While the ideology of a “better class” of blacks challenged dehumanizing stereotypes, it also exploited them, and could never fully escape them—this elite version of uplift ideology assented to the racist formulation of “the Negro problem” by projecting onto other blacks dominant images of racialized pathology.

Blacks’ use of uplift rhetoric could be empowering in certain contexts, and did not automatically entail a belief in black inferiority. Nevertheless, the middle-class character of the emphasis on positive representations of educated, assimilated blacks of sterling character was interdependent on the image of the so-called primitive, morally deficient lower classes. This was a departure from earlier, Reconstruction-era notions of uplift based on inalienable rights and the legal protections associated with citizenship. Whether or not its exponents took cognizance of the fact, uplift ideology’s vision of race progress thus remained trapped in a repressive, demeaning binary logic of race that was predicated on class and gender inequality and imposed by the defeat of working-class politics and social democracy in the South. In response, black elites tried to gain recognition of their humanity by ranking themselves at the top of an evolutionary hierarchy within the race based on bourgeois morality. That many African Americans had internalized these hierarchies testifies to their hegemonic character in a society so deeply racist that few were able to escape its impress. In short, through uplift’s bourgeois evolutionism, black elites tried to alchemize elite status out of cultural narratives whose prima material was, and remained, ideologies of race.

At another level, elite African Americans responded with a flurry of literary and intellectual activity, including social work efforts and institution-building which sprang from this ideology of service, reform, and professionalization. Throughout the 1890s, and continuing through the first decade of the new century, altruistic uplift efforts among blacks coincided with the urban progressives’ similar efforts to alleviate class and cultural divisions through the Americanization of immigrants within such moral reform crusades as temperance, the settlement-house movement, and other forms of social and charity work. In response to industrialism, many middle-class Americans embraced voluntaristic efforts, filling the void created by government inaction.

Whatever the goals of these civic-minded African Americans—to defend “the race” against its enemies, to bolster their own precarious status, or to accomplish both simultaneously—these intellectuals and spokespersons, as an extension of their duties as educators, ministers, reformers, clubwomen, or journalists produced a vast output of essays, sermons, instruction manuals, inspirational success literature, novels, historical works, and autobiographical writings on “the Negro problem” and formed organizations committed to promoting thought and culture, group self-help through education and self-improvement, and, at times, political protest on behalf of black Americans. As the Negro problem was increasingly understood as an urban problem, the self-styled black elite defined itself in public-spirited terms of a social mission of commitment and service to the masses.¹⁰

The Assimilationist Cultural Aesthetic of Uplift

Black elites’ assimilationist cultural aesthetic was one of cultural vindication, in response to pejorative minstrel-based constructions of blackness. At the turn of the century, elite cultural values were crucial in discerning that which migration, in hurling southern rural black greenhorns in close contact with old settler northern black elites, had thrown into question: the ideological class boundaries that the latter group labored to maintain as evidence of group progress.

The exaltation of domestic virtue, symbolized by home, family, chastity, and respectability, all infused with an ethic of religious piety, provided the moral criteria for uplift’s cultural aesthetic. Although outraged at whites’ lucrative expropriations of black culture, virtually all but the most unchurched and bohemian black elites were unable to distinguish the aesthetically ambitious ragtime piano compositions of, for example, Scott Joplin, from coon songs. They would have nothing of the racial content of popular culture, judged guilty by their sinful “low-life” settings and minstrel associations.

Eurocentric images and ideals of respectability were central to elite blacks’ aesthetic tastes. Grounded more or less in images of religious piety, only literature that was politically engaged, morally uplifting, and depicted heroic, idealized representatives of the race was worthy of the name. Beauty and physical perfection in literary heroes and heroines, often but not always patterned on European models, countered minstrel caricatures of blackness. Knowledgeable blacks claimed as their own such European writers of African descent as Pushkin and Dumas, against common assumptions of their whiteness. In the visual arts, the painter Henry O. Tanner (son of Philadelphia’s AME church bishop Benjamin T. Tanner), who studied and worked in France, and the sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller produced dignified images of blacks, ideal “Negro types,” as blacks proudly called them. Ira Aldridge, the African American thespian whose acclaimed performances in Shakespearian tragedies (including Othello) during the nineteenth century took place entirely in Europe, was a culture hero to many African Americans.

At the same time, elite black Americans dreamed of a universalizing fusion of black and European forms, in a manner that nonetheless privileged nonblack aesthetic criteria. In music, the model black artist was the West African-British composer and conductor Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who transcribed and orchestrated Negro spirituals and West African folk melodies for the concert stage. In a preface to the composer’s “Twenty-Four Negro Melodies,” Booker T. Washington praised Coleridge-Taylor as a “British composer” of “native bent and power.” To Washington and many others, black culture was an admissible idea only within the context of elite culture. Washington lauded Coleridge-Taylor’s settings of “plantation songs” of the past generation and complained that “the Negro song is in too many minds associated with ”rag’ music and the more reprehensible ”Coon’ song, that the most cultivated musician of his race, a man of the highest aesthetic ideals, should seek to give permanence to the folk-songs of his people by giving them a new interpretation and an added dignity.” Washington may also have sought to rehabilitate his own image through association with Coleridge-Taylor, given his own use of minstrelsy in his writings and platform oratory.¹¹

Yet the sheer popularity of black musical comedy (derived from minstrelsy), and the success of some of its stars, such as blackface comedian Bert Williams, challenged uplift’s refined aesthetic ideals. Williams’s fame and material success far overshadowed the achievements of men such as Coleridge-Taylor, who, although celebrated by African diaspora elites, died in relative obscurity in 1912 at the age of thirty-seven. By 1910, Washington seemed to have forgotten Coleridge-Taylor when he praised Williams’s resourcefulness in gathering “material for some of those quaint songs and stories in which he reproduces the natural humor and philosophy of the Negro people.” While proclaiming his distaste for “tiresome” vaudeville performances, Washington saw in Williams an exemplar of the “peculiar genius . . . of the Negro.” The comedian’s triumph did not rest wholly on artistic grounds: Washington also noted that he had “never heard him whine or cry about his color, or about any racial discrimination.” To Washington, such forbearance made Williams “a tremendous asset of the Negro race . . . because he has succeeded in actually doing something, and because he has succeeded, the fact of his success helps the Negro many times more than he could help the Negro by merely contenting himself to whine and complain about racial difficulties and racial discriminations.” Perhaps Washington had come to accept through Williams a pluralist conception of black cultural distinctiveness; as usual, however, he equated individual success and the renunciation of protest with the advancement of the race. His command over black leadership challenged by the recently formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Washington invoked Williams to counter the new protest organization. For Washington, the lowly minstrel origins of Williams’s art, which carried him to Broadway as the star of the Ziegfeld Follies from 1910 to 1919, were redeemed by his success, which Washington harped on incessantly as if to ward off his own diminishing influence.¹²

The Role of the Home

Successful blacks such as Williams used minstrel formulas to gain access to white audiences. In their desire to counter such stereotypes, black elites based their authoritative status on equally formulaic racialized conceptions of bourgeois morality. Specifically, elite blacks celebrated the home and patriarchal family as institutions that symbolized the freedom, power, and security they aspired to. Through their frequent tributes to home and family life, African Americans laid claim to the respectability and stability withheld by the state and by minstrelsy’s slanders. As a measure of evolutionary race progress, the cultivation of Christian homes had been a major tenet of freedman’s education. Not altogether dissimilar from the photographic rebuttals by African Americans of racist minstrel images were the domestic scenes pictured in photographic exhibits of moral uplift commissioned by Hampton Institute and the American Missionary Association.¹³ Thus, conformity to patriarchal gender conventions of sexual difference, and male protection and protected femininity, were proffered as a rebuke to minstrel stereotypes that denied conventional gender roles to black men and women. Although patriarchal family ideals created tensions between black men and women, they were a popular aspiration of African Americans, central as they were to uplift’s vision of respectability.

So thoroughly did disfranchisement and Jim Crow contaminate the public sphere that many black reformers focused on those private areas perceived to be within their control, namely, the domestic realm. This was fundamentally a moral vision of racial uplift, centering on self-help. W. E. B. Du Bois spoke for many educated blacks when he held that “we look most anxiously to the establishment and strengthening of the home among members of the race, because it is the surest combination of real progress.” Many regarded the patriarchal family as a sign of the race’s triumph over the ruinous impact of slavery, and they wielded home life as a shield against slanders against respectable black men and women.¹⁴

In a late-Victorian age that restricted respectable sexuality to reproduction within marriage, educated blacks idealized matrimony as a platonic sharing of racial uplift responsibilities. In this view, the very idea of sexual pleasure was illicit. Procreative passion seized on the chaste ideal of “race building.” At a more mundane level, marriage promised economic security, often to both partners, beyond its moral and instrumental advantages. Above all, marriage, as a sign of monogamous sexual purity, conferred status on black men and women, especially women, reflecting the extent to which their reputation was under siege. Marriage, so closely associated with moral superiority, could seemingly neutralize all the misogynist insults hurled by the dominant culture. Thus, a stable home and family life were often viewed as panaceas for the problems facing the race.

Negro exhibit, American Missionary Association, Boston, ca. 1905.

But uplift’s paeans to patriarchal family life complicated the position of black women. Even as they sought the protective authority of matrimony, politically active black women like Ida B. Wells and Anna Julia Cooper gave voice to these difficulties. Wells described a tense exchange with Susan B. Anthony, the woman suffrage leader, on the conflict between marriage and public activism. “I noticed the way she would bite out my married name in addressing me,” Wells recalled. “Finally I said to her, ”Miss Anthony, don’t you believe in women getting married?’ She said, ”Oh yes, but not women like you who had a special call for special work. . . . Since you have gotten married, agitation seems practically to have ceased.’” While acknowledging Anthony’s “well-merited rebuke from her point of view,” Wells “could not tell Miss Anthony that [her marriage] was because I had been unable, like herself, to get the support which was necessary to carry on alone.”¹⁵

For her part, Cooper, in arguing for black women’s right to higher education, attacked the myth that it rendered women unmarriageable. Cooper, who never remarried after her husband died in her early twenties, noted that education made women less reliant on “physical support,” which, besides, did not always accompany marriage anyway. To Cooper, education expanded women’s horizons, adding a range of platonic pursuits to an existence whose sole pleasures might otherwise be centered on “sexual love.” But while they challenged expectations of women’s subordination within marriage, both Wells and Cooper agreed with the importance of home, family, and marriage among blacks, and for American civilization. They, and other black women elites of the era, contested black bourgeois patriarchy from within its confines.¹⁶

Moral Reform Applied to Urban Problems

For progressive reformers, black and white, the home and family life epitomized middle-class morality and behavior. The home was a refuge from urban industrial society, with its poverty, disease, mortality, corruption, immorality, and crime. As blacks migrated from rural districts to towns and cities in the South, sensationalized journalistic accounts of crime, vice, and vagrancy associated black mobility with racial morbidity. For many educated blacks, as well as whites, for whom heredity explained both urban problems and influenced much of their vision of reform, social pathologies resulted from ill-considered sexual selection, as well as by prenatal and parental neglect. Among participants in conferences devoted to the study of the race’s social problems, tributes to family, motherhood, and fireside training as bulwarks against sexual degradation, disease, and crime approached mystical proportions. This outlook was reinforced by popular science, which lent the participants’ religious prescriptions an air of secular expertise.

At the end of the nineteenth century, eugenics, genetics, and heredity served as secular rearticulations of Calvinist notions of original sin and predestination. “While environment is a powerful factor in producing marked modifications of hereditary tendencies,” claimed one such expert, “yet the influence of heritage has still greater power in the formation of character.” In the laissez-faire spirit of the age, the burden for reform rested squarely on the shoulders of individuals and families. “To give uplift to the vitality of the [N]egro race,” another reformer recommended, “the best work needs to be put into the enlightenment of present and prospective parenthood. Criminals,” she warned ominously, “are often made years and years before they are sentenced to prison. Alas! too often made criminal before they are born.” Anna Julia Cooper expressed a similar, albeit exaggerated, view of congenital immorality: “In order to reform a man, you must begin with his great-grandmother.”¹⁷

To undo the damage of such biological determinism, one commentator called for reform institutions and “industrial grounds,” instead of prisons, for the rehabilitation of kleptomaniacs, whose “disease was the intuitive inbred peculiarity of the parent.” If strategies varied, the conventional wisdom on heredity and eugenics was highly influential among intellectuals and reformers, including blacks, as seen, for instance, in the scholarship of Thomas N. Baker, the first African American to receive a doctorate in philosophy from Yale University in 1903. Baker’s dissertation on “The Ethical Significance of the Connection between Mind and Body” asserted the disastrous physiological consequences of impure thoughts and debased ideals, and approvingly cited the work of Francis Galton, the British founder of eugenics. Besides Baker, others employed nineteenth-century sciences such as phrenology. Given that the courts were mining these sources of knowledge as well, it would be surprising if reform-minded African Americans did otherwise.¹⁸

The concern for eugenics and heredity presupposed the dissolution of moral restraints in the urban environment. Consequently, for many blacks, “home training” represented the blueprint for social mobility and success. Mrs. A. E. Pride of Lynchburg, Virginia, proclaimed that “The Home is the seat of power and influence, that must advance and elevate any people.” Indeed, the family symbolized freedom from societal oppression.¹⁹

As the basis for moral, self-help strategies that located the roots of poverty and social discord in the absence of patriarchal family life, popular scientific theories of heredity made intractable problems like disease, crime, and mortality seem more manageable. Social inequality was a matter of careful sexual selection and home training. But theories of heredity posited a biological determinism that clashed with the environmentalism of uplift’s calls for home training. However well-intentioned, these proponents of moral reform were deeply conflicted in trying to assert control through racial uplift ideology as a means of overcoming inbred pathology. Construing oppression as biologically transmitted moral failings offered them the agency and purposiveness they sought as reformers. But at these public gatherings, this outlook ironically required the absence of the lower orders, the objects of their concern. Had a representative of that class been in attendance to participate in the discussion, the sense of mission no doubt would have been deflated considerably.

Although much of what then passed for medical and social science would strike us today as outmoded, such statements, not far removed from the scientific racism of claims of black pathology, represented the peculiar blend of religious and technocratic impulses within uplift ideology. Strongly influenced by the racial assumptions of elite whites, African American reformers reinforced dominant racial assumptions and theories. African Americans were, after all, sexualized beings in dominant minstrel, journalistic, and social science representations. But the reformers’ biologism posed a feeble challenge to racial and sexual stereotypes, remaining imprisoned within an anti-black bourgeois morality.

Within the reform culture of uplift, urban pathology was traced to sexual misconduct. In a study of urban mortality, Eugene Harris, a white professor from Fisk University, linked infant mortality to “enfeebled constitutions and congenital diseases, inherited from parents suffering from the effects of sexual immorality and debauchery.” After a careful consideration of the facts, Harris concluded, “I do not believe that . . . poverty or [the Negro’s] relation to the white people presents any real impediment to his health and physical development.” Only “a higher social morality” would conquer disease and mortality, problems aggravated by the frequency of single mother-headed households and “debauched and immoral parentage.” In positing moral causes for the sickness and death of poor urban blacks, uplift proponents employed an apocalyptic Darwinian rhetoric of racial extermination; due “to a lack of moral stamina within,” blacks might perish “in the environment of a nineteenth century civilization” if proper measures were not taken. The remedy involved a denial of the existence of oppression and a rationalization of poverty as the outcome of “sexual vices.” The preoccupation with moral purity distinguished between deserving and undeserving poor, and social services were sometimes extended or withheld on these grounds. The New Orleans Afro-American Woman’s Club Visiting Nurses Association organized to provide skilled assistance to the sick, but also took upon itself the duty to report “contagious cases” to health authorities and refused to send nurses to “persons in immoral houses.”²⁰

Although such punitive benevolence might assert itself within academic uplift institutions like the annual Hampton and Atlanta conferences, not all blacks subscribed to, or invested fully, in this view of uplift as a moral struggle waged within the race. Yet the interpretation of poverty and its attendant social ills as an outgrowth of vice and licentiousness was typical of uplift’s emphasis on moral behavior as the basis for class distinctions. To be sure, such a “politics of respectability” might have a redemptive significance, serving the interests of some, particularly, as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has argued, working-class African American women held in contempt by U.S. society and culture, in addition to being no strangers to disfavor within the black community. For others, however, moral criteria explained the social difference between success and failure, the former accruing to membership in professional, institutional settings of racial uplift.²¹

The moralism of these conferences was enduring, expressed not only within black educational and religious institutions based on ideals of service but also through the establishment, through philanthropic largesse, of such charity institutions as the Camp Pleasant summer resort near Washington, D.C., for disadvantaged mothers and their children, founded in 1906. With its quasi-military regimentation, the camp’s daily activities promised a refuge from urban problems and provided a model of social control. From the “supervised attention to the personal toilet” of the mothers upon rising at 6:00 A.M., to “the general assembly on the pavillion for morning prayer, for flag-raising,” and for supervised games, to the sexual segregation of the children and the brief “free-time” when “the social worker gets a chance to study” the children “under normal and natural conditions,” the goal of training better mothers and more obedient children was constantly in evidence. Each day ended much as it had begun, with “the lowering of the flag, music, songs, and . . . giving thanks in prayer for the day’s benefits received.” Since the camp lacked a bugler, taps was sung by the mothers before bedtime. Here, and at local community centers under the control of the Board of Education, as well as the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA in Washington, the goal was to instill citizenship values and domestic virtues through “sewing, handwork, dramatics and music.” Christian principles, ideals of social service, and an interest in the arts were encouraged as providing a “wholesome and unique method of sublimation.” A major concern of the organization, from this description, was the threat posed by women’s sexuality: “There is an effort on the part of the personnel to appreciate, control and direct the human-nature impulses and desires of the young women.” The presumption of sexual immorality echoed the dominant culture’s low opinion of black women. In urging the camp’s mothers to renounce sexuality, reformers were not only guiding them toward Victorian ideals of chastity but also, perhaps less consciously, promoting a eugenic agenda.²²

Black Social Advancement and Racial Antagonism

Even as elites perceived impoverished urban blacks as an object of reformist concern, if not embarrassment, the striving and success of some African Americans elicited the antagonism of many whites. This was particularly the case in the white South, with its opposition to black education and federal officeholding, and where Jim Crow laws and customs demanded the deference of all blacks. Indeed, many blacks discovered that their modest gains and conformity to bourgeois mores had called forth not the anticipated acceptance of whites but, on occasion, even more animosity throughout the South. Black elites were divided in their response to white antagonism: while some identified a white backlash against black social progress, others sought to appease white supremacist views by projecting a racial stigma of social disorder onto the black masses.

W. A. Lewis noted in the Colored American Magazine that blacks had made “rapid progress” since emancipation “under the most trying circumstances,” until “it was noticed that the Negro race was gaining success along many lines.” Lewis described the violent white response: “Impediments became more numerous,” as whites committed the “blackest crimes” against the race. This view was endorsed by a number of anonymous college-educated black contributors to one of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Atlanta University social studies, a view that transcended sectional differences among blacks. These respondents, while claiming to be “hopeful” for the future of black Americans, saw blacks’ advancement itself as socially disruptive: “I sometimes think that it is the progress rather than our lack of progress that is causing the continued friction between the races,” reported a northern correspondent. Another found “the South . . . to be growing more antagonistic to [the Negro’s] progress and self respect as a citizen.” Still another, who noted the tendency of southern white politicians and journalists to inflame race hatred, believed that “the Negro’s ignorance, superstition, vice and poverty do not disturb and unnerve his enemies so much as his rapid strides upward and onward.” The African American novelist Charles Chesnutt regarded disfranchisement as an attempt to “forestall the development of the wealthy and educated [N]egro, whom the South seems to anticipate as a greater menace than the ignorant ex-slave.” Frances Harper voiced through one of her fictional characters the fear that “in some sections, as colored men increase in wealth and intelligence, there will be an increase in race rivalry and jealousy.” The vulnerability of black elites confounded those who emphasized intraracial moral and class distinctions, undermining the prevailing sentiment that disreputable elements were holding the race back.²³

The plight of southern blacks produced several responses. Some concluded, as did the AME church’s bishop Henry McNeal Turner, that continued white hostility in the face of black progress meant that the only future for black Americans lay in emigration to Africa. Turner’s vehement calls for emigration in the 1890s, a popular movement among aggrieved blacks in the South, had precedents in the mid-nineteenth-century colonizationist, nation-building agenda of elite black nationalists such as Alexander Crummell and Martin Delany. Seeing little future for blacks in America, these leaders had sought opportunities for the uplift and “redemption” of Africa, claiming to open it to commerce and Christianity.²⁴

Other respondents to Du Bois’s survey, perhaps from the South, claimed that economic self-help—blacks’ accumulation of wealth and property—would diminish, rather than exacerbate, white hostility. Still others became ventriloquists for stereotypes of Negro depravity. Indeed, their advocacy of economic self-help sometimes drew on such slanders. “The Negro,” said one such respondent, “must rid himself of obnoxious characteristics, save money, acquire property, learn trades and become moral. The leading men among us must have sense enough to denounce the rapist as well as the lynchers.” But the line would not stay drawn, as the myth of the Negro rapist besmirched and imperiled even the “representative” Negro. Another respondent believed that “for a long time it will be the task of the intelligent Negro kindly to point out deficiencies of the race and make helpful suggestions. Our country demands a better Negro,” which only better homes, schools, and churches could produce. Such arguments reflected notions of bourgeois citizenship linking political rights to property ownership. But given the risks of southern life, black claims to property ownership, insufficient in themselves, could be justified and maintained only in the context of racial accommodation.²⁵

Black Leadership Responds to Lynching

The unpopularity of black aspiration and advancement in the Jim Crow South, along with the epidemic of white violence, manifested in lynching, demanded a more militant response from black leadership. The violence posed a challenge for black leaders who had witnessed the gains of Reconstruction. In 1886, Douglass, the stalwart Republican then considered the preeminent race leader, denounced the sudden rise in mob violence against blacks, going so far as to warn whites of the consequences of continued oppression. Douglass insisted that “where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.” The anarchy of enslavement and its aftermath, not nature, had “maimed and mutilated” blacks. Still, he could only advise that blacks remain loyal to the Republican Party, “toil and trust, throw away whiskey and tobacco, improve the opportunities that we have, put away all extravagance, [and] learn to live within our means.” Although Douglass urged thrift, patience, and temperance among blacks, a stance that reflected the Republican Party’s stress on politics and equal rights over economic justice, and the usual injunctions toward the poor to remain in their place, he denounced lynching and refused to take a punitive attitude toward accusations of black criminality.²⁶

Near the end of his life in 1895, and in the wake of Ida B. Wells’s international antilynching campaign, Douglass again analyzed lynching, this time contesting the view that rape by black men justified mob terror. Douglass argued that older rationalizations for antiblack violence, namely, the threat of antebellum slave insurrections (the memory of which was often revived by white southern editors to discredit strikes or labor organizing) and, later, during Reconstruction, the fears of “Negro domination,” lacked credibility in the ascendant “solid South” that was busily disfranchising black voters. Thus the cry of rape provided the latest justification for lynching and had the additional impact of bolstering policies mandating racial segregation.

Throughout the 1890s, Douglass’s outspokenness on lynching was matched by the journalists Ida B. Wells and John Edward Bruce. The black press was a vital forum for dissent in this period. Wells had provided the earliest and most thorough analysis of lynching, gaining international fame after 1892 through her antilynching lectures throughout America and England. Wells emphasized that lynching was used to harass and drive out economic competition from black businessmen. She not only disputed the myth that lynching punished and prevented rape, but argued further that some liaisons involving black men and white women were consensual, or coerced, initiated by white women. Such a candid attack on the myth of pure white womanhood placed her life in jeopardy, and Wells abandoned Memphis for Chicago as a mob destroyed her newspaper, the Free Speech. Wells urged that African Americans combat lynching with economic boycotts, out-migration, and self-defense. Giving what she called “self-help” an entirely different meaning by equating it with armed self-defense, Wells remarked that a “Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home,” to provide the protection that southern and federal authorities denied to African Americans.²⁷

Bruce, like Wells a nationally syndicated journalist in the black press, was also a comfortably situated Republican officeholder in Albany, New York. He, too, believed that blacks should meet mob aggression with violent “organized resistance” of their own. Elsewhere he spoke out against “the systematic slaughter of innocent Negro men, women, and children by white men, who control and direct the social and political affairs of that section of the country.” In 1901, Bruce, as Wells had done several years before, pointed out the fallacy of the rape charge as a factor in lynching, observing that out of 117 mob victims accounted for in 1900, only 18 had been formally charged with rape. According to Bruce, northern complicity with this state of affairs was the product of the Republican Party’s betrayal of its tradition of social justice for interests and concerns “largely commercial.” If Bruce, who at election time was a staunch supporter of the GOP ticket, believed lynching was ultimately linked to the imperatives of industrial expansion, Wells’s extensive, earlier investigations of lynchings, which yielded the evidence used by Bruce, Douglass, and others, convinced her that whites’ hostility to economic competition from blacks, not Negro criminality, was the root cause of mob violence. The myth of the black rapist was merely “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ”Keep the nigger down.’” Wells had initiated her exposé of mob violence after the lynching of three close friends of hers, businessmen and leaders of the Memphis black community.²⁸

Though other blacks criticized lynching, including northern journalists such as Bruce, the volatile William Monroe Trotter, editor of the Boston Guardian, T. Thomas Fortune (until he became dependent on Washington’s financial support), and Wells, from exile in Chicago, such candor was rare. Western black journalists were also freer to speak out against lynching and other abuses, joining those white editors who condemned mob atrocities.²⁹ In the South, such candor was dangerous and few risked such criticism, with the notable exceptions of John Mitchell, in Richmond, and J. Max Barber, whose Atlanta periodical Voice of the Negro vehemently denounced southern atrocities until the riot compelled his own flight to safety in Chicago.

Ida B. Wells, ca. 1890.

Generally, southern journalists phrased their opposition tactfully, if at all. Mitchell, editor of the Richmond Planet, denounced the conservatism of black leadership. “The educated colored man,” he believed, “will discuss every subject under the sun in meeting assembled, except politics, lynchings and kindred outrages.” There were good reasons for such restraint, as outspokenness threatened “to bring ostracism . . . and a gentle hint from some unknown quarter that he is a dangerous Negro and a fit subject for removal either by flight or by the shot-gun route.” Mitchell frequently ran gun advertisements and observed, as did Wells, that a Winchester rifle in the house combined with a willingness to use it would earn whites’ respect. Yet while espousing armed resistance and self-defense, Mitchell also sent appeasing signals, perhaps to gain support for “polite, affable, progressive” blacks like himself. “On the other hand,” he cautioned, “there is much to be done among our own people. The lawless, insulting, disreputable classes must be restrained, and . . . forced to the background.” His militancy notwithstanding, Mitchell’s reliance on uplift’s bourgeois rhetoric of social division suggested the caution that conditions in the South exacted from black commentators. To Mitchell, and many others, it seemed that only respectable blacks could truly be victimized by racism.³⁰

Anxious Responses to Urban Migration

Many black professionals, politicians, and artisans were at the vanguard of black migration throughout the post-Reconstruction period, hounded out of the South by Jim Crow, lynching, and economic violence. Carole Marks has noted that among the first to quit the rural South were either black professionals or those able to afford the expense of relocating themselves and their families.³¹ In addition, younger blacks of all walks of life sought greater opportunity. Southern authorities denounced migration, blasting those who left the cotton fields with accusations of laziness, criminality, and immorality. The plantation legend, a staple of post-Reconstruction literature and popular minstrelsy, figured prominently in alarmist views of black migration, as older, faithful plantation slaves were contrasted in the southern press with younger, discontented, and migratory “worthless” blacks. Along with the hostility to migration, the growth of urban black sections also elicited anxiety among blacks and whites, an anxiety that only echoed dominant perceptions of those blacks trying to escape their lowly status as a labor reservoir in the South.³²

What was good for black elites became increasingly worrisome if the masses followed suit. Although numbers of elite blacks had migrated, other black elites opposed migration and resorted to pejorative minstrel representations to describe black migrants to the city. Minstrel images provided an expedient framework for their anxieties toward migration, the new urban black communities, and their mass entertainments. To such critics, particularly in the North, urban migration posed a threat to their own status and represented the antithesis of black progress and respectability. Although some touched on shortages of jobs or housing, or cited labor unrest and bitter competition with white workers over industrial jobs, many treated black migration to cities as fundamentally a moral problem. To such alarmists, the image of urban blacks and their forms of leisure portended the doom of racial uplift ideals of service and upright moral conduct. According to this outlook, blacks belonged in the rural South, not in cities, where, it was feared, they would fare badly under the storm and stress of an advanced urban industrial civilization.

Despite the discrimination that made the rural South intolerable for increasing numbers of migrants, the response of William Scarborough, the black classicist of Wilberforce University, to migration in 1903, typified minstrelsy’s serviceability for representing class distinctions. Before the American Negro Academy, located in Washington, D.C., Scarborough addressed “the growing problems of our northern cities” and the need to “separate poverty from viciousness and encourage the people to better morals and industrious, clean lives.” Too many young urban blacks lacked ambition and a sense of purpose. “We have too many dudes whose ideal does not rise above the possession of a new suit, a cane, a silk hat, patent leather shoes, a cigarette and a good time,” Scarborough declared. “Too many in every sense the ”Sport of the gods.’” Scarborough alluded to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s recent novel, a cautionary tale about the migration of southern blacks to New York City, with its gaudy temptations of cabaret life and the musical comedy stage. Scarborough noted the limited opportunities for blacks in cities, but he also drew on the old minstrel stereotype, updated in coon songs, of the slick, licentious, and criminal urban black dandy. Scarborough, hardly unique among a black leadership class unable to sympathize with destitute or ambitious blacks’ flight from misery and repression in the rural South, seemed to play into the hands of mass-media pundits, southern white planters, and northern investors in large-scale agriculture, who, fearing the mass exodus of coerced black farm labor, discouraged migration.³³

Although the black Methodist minister R. R. Downs was primarily concerned with anti-intellectualism among black ministers, minstrelsy lent him the terms for attacking the “uneducated” minister “who turns the house of God into a low class circus or minstrelsy, telling old stale jokes . . . rolling his eyes . . . and to crown it all by having his church christened a theatre by the young people.” At the heart of Downs’s vivid denunciation of a less-restrained ministerial style was panic over threats to established religious authority not only from new mass entertainments but also from the new, rival churches that welcomed recent black migrants. Downs conflated minstrel behavior with urban black folk and saw himself engaged in a struggle for leadership over the black masses, a struggle in which he felt hard pressed to compete against charismatic ministers and more participatory styles of worship, let alone the temptations of the stage.³⁴

In time, anxiety over the urban black presence would subside, as some black elites acknowledged the benefits of migration for blacks. In 1906, William Pickens recognized that urban blacks had their “baser and uglier traits more than exaggerated” by the southern press, and that inadequate schools and legal protection, along with peonage and vagrancy laws, had launched the exodus to towns and cities. Noting the frequent complaints in the South about labor shortages and the scarcity of domestic servants in the cities, Pickens lauded blacks’ increased independence in the trades and professions and commended black parents for sending their teenage daughters to school instead of subjecting them to “the perils” of domestic service, “where, if betrayed, the caste legislation leaves them without a remedy.” Pickens noted the educational advantages available to blacks in the North; southern blacks were being robbed of public educational funds. But Pickens, too, used minstrelsy as a demonstration of race progress through class differences—“there is the Negro of the ”coon song,’ and of the slum dive”—but argued that “the representative class of city Negroes” was superior to migrants from the backwoods with no chance at civilization. For Pickens, the Yale-educated son of South Carolina sharecroppers who would later become an official with the NAACP, uplift ideology was not a barrier to a sophisticated analysis of the causes of migration and its benefits for blacks, but the old, self-serving habit of associating impoverished urban black migrants with minstrelsy, vice, and criminality persisted.³⁵

Evocations of minstrelsy proved useful in Booker T. Washington’s promotion of industrial education and his rise to hegemony over black leadership. Washington’s criticisms of urban migration lent credence to his rhetorical broadsides against higher education. Higher education seemed to Washington to upset the natural order of things, the devoted black peasant’s organic ties to the soil. “The result of this progress,” he insinuated, “is that in too many cases the boy thus trained fails to return to his father’s farm, but takes up his abode in the city, and falls, in too many cases, into temptation of trying to live by his wits, without honest, productive employment.” Thus, higher education did not bring progress but contributed to the ranks of “the large idle class of our people that linger about the sidewalks, barrooms, and dens of sin and misery of our large cities.” In Washington’s eyes, educated blacks, having forgotten the virtues and usefulness of slavery and farm labor, bore responsibility for the social disorder associated with urbanization. Washington’s use of minstrelsy contributed to his popularity with whites. A youthful Claude G. Bowers, later the author of a popular historical work attacking Reconstruction, marveled in his diary at Washington’s platform oratory, which apparently included an inexhaustible store of “darky” jokes.³⁶

Statue of Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee Institute.

White politicians and journalists were influenced by such views and in turn contributed to the public apprehension toward migration, which was said to have reaped a misbegotten harvest of vagrant and criminal urban blacks. Contemporary observers could not but regard such migration as a troubling deviation from blacks’ appointed function in southern economic and social relations. Taken in by southern journalistic myths, the journalist Ray Stannard Baker attributed the phenomenon of the criminal “worthless Negro” to the higher wages paid by New South industries, which allowed the “better and more industrious Negroes” to achieve economic independence, leaving behind not only the South, the exploitation of the cotton fields, and the white man’s kitchen, but also a growing class of “naturally indolent” rural blacks. Baker, in an attempt to diagnose the causes of the Atlanta riot of 1906, linked “increased Negro idleness” to the recent migration of prosperous blacks. “Many have gone North and West, many have bought farms of their own, thousands, by education have become professional men, teachers, preachers, and even merchants and bankers—always draining away the best and most industrious men of the race and reducing by so much the available supply of common labor.” In a manner consonant with contemporary social science attempts to explain the existence of the black “underclass,” which claim that black elites had abandoned their historic “uplift” function as “role models” by leaving behind black communities, Baker equated black social mobility with “race problems.” In a racially segregated, class-stratified society bent on depressing wages and maintaining blacks as a subservient, reserve labor supply, Baker was unable to credit “industrious” blacks. In describing a “fierce contest between agriculture and industry” for a “limited and dwindling” supply of black labor, Baker felt that blacks were better off as farm laborers “under the discipline of white land owners.” However sincere his intentions, Baker’s account linked the progress of the few to those “”Worthless’ Negroes, perhaps a growing class” that “one finds everywhere.”³⁷

Perceived through the distorted lens of the plantation legend, black social mobility, in Baker’s account, was tainted by the image of the ubiquitous, vagrant Negro male, roaming the southern countryside from town to town. Journalists and philanthropists, professing objectivity, were nonetheless susceptible to this logic. The vagrancy Baker warned of, the product of southern statutes that made it a crime to leave exploitative labor contracts and seek the best price for one’s labor, as any free, rational, worker would do, also irked William Baldwin, the New York railroad magnate and trustee of Tuskegee. Baldwin also served on the Southern Educational Board, which dispensed philanthropy for black colleges that emphasized industrial education. Baldwin hoped that education would encourage blacks to “willingly fill the more menial positions, and do the heavy work at less wages.” He advised blacks to “avoid social questions; leave politics alone; continue to be patient; live moral lives; live simply; learn to work . . . know that it is a crime for any teacher, white or black, to educate the negro for positions which are not open to him.” Some black pundits echoed such skittishness toward migration, and they, too, hoped to reverse the tide of events. Kelly Miller believed that “the ”citification’ of the country Negro” as a solution to “the race problem should be accepted . . . with prudent hesitation.” The 1901 Hampton Conference committee on resolutions “deplore[d] the rush of our young people to the large Northern cities,” where they too often fell “an easy prey to the vices of the slums and alleys.”³⁸

Although many had virtually no economic stake in these matters, being remote from industrial capital and production, southern black clergy, businessmen, and opinion makers with views less extreme than Washington joined the consensus against black migration. Though they reaped little more than moral capital, and perhaps an occasional philanthropic windfall out of their position, black ministers’ and small entrepreneurs’ views mirrored those of white planter and philanthropic elites, as these black leaders feared losing the congregations and markets upon which they depended for their livelihood. For black intellectuals with even less of a stake in the location of the black population, urban migration constituted a moral and spiritual crisis among younger black migrants, as well as a crisis regarding their own cultural authority. In any case, threatened by their loss of control over the actions of southern blacks, they and other northern black commentators seized on the city as a dangerous place of leisure.

Sharing the dominant culture’s general anxieties on the subject of race and urbanization, some elites found fault with the new popular entertainments that served these migrants. Such illicit pleasures, in this view, were seducing southern black men and women away from the forced and ill-paid farm or domestic labor that many—including men of Washington’s ilk—characterized as dignified labor and the work ethic. Lest they be confused with newly arrived urban black folk, elite blacks also extolled Victorian and European cultural ideals and looked with disapproval, if not covert and guilty pleasure, upon such emergent black cultural forms as ragtime, blues, jazz, and the social dance styles that animated black vaudeville, minstrel troupes, traveling tent shows, and, later, musical comedy revues. To many genteel blacks, it was bad enough that these urban amusements—saloons, cabarets, and places of gambling and prostitution—were disreputable; still worse was that these black cultural forms were indistinguishable from minstrelsy. Seldom, if ever, did black pundits consider that black cultural expression, while in part contained within the mass cultural industry of minstrelsy, might bear an anterior or independent relationship to it.

Black Leadership on the Labor Question

Black leaders had not always opposed migration, used minstrelsy to characterize urban blacks, or espoused antilabor views. In the 1880s, amidst labor and populist struggles, such men as Fortune and D. A. Straker pursued economic analyses of labor exploitation in the New South. But these men, and other labor advocates such as Henry MacNeal Turner of Georgia and Robert B. Elliott of South Carolina, were shoved to the wall as a consensus emerged against labor organization and working-class politics, enforced by political violence and reinforced ideologically by laissez-faire appeals to self-help and more efficient agricultural methods. Claiming a harmony of interest between labor and capital, by the 1890s many black spokespersons, including Anna Julia Cooper and Washington, were siding with business elites against organized labor.

For many blacks, besieged from all sides, a bourgeois race consciousness patterned after missionary notions of uplift precluded an understanding of class conflict and the exploitation of workers, black or white. Class survival in a hostile society influenced their thinking on such questions. M. Arnold Morin, a contributor to the A.M.E. Church Review, the leading black thought journal of the day, wondered “what has given birth to the numerous trades-unions” and “why . . . the workman, the laborer, [and] mechanic” were “ever ready to follow the advice of the supposed reformer?” Instead, Morin urged “tenacity of purpose . . . these are the qualities . . . of the races that have guided the way to civilization as of those that have led in christianizing the world.” To this minister, labor unrest posed a challenge to divine and ministerial, as well as secular, business authority. Indeed, they were practically one and the same in his analysis.³⁹

Morin’s remarks on labor agitation also reflected the general antagonism toward organized labor as a source of social disorder at the turn of the century. For African American elites, this conviction was hardened by the discriminatory practices of most unions, and the violence that often accompanied the use of black strikebreakers by management. The preference of many progressives for moral reform crusades over organized labor was expressed by one black commentator, a temperance advocate, who noted that “strikers, who were, in their sober moments, quiet and inoffensive, have become frenzied . . . so that they become fiends.” In her view, which reflected the anti-labor nativism of the day, intoxicants, the working classes, strikes, and violence were virtually synonymous.⁴⁰

Antilabor sentiment among elite blacks was often an expression of their view that their main antagonist in that era of strained and violent race relations was the white working class, or, in the South, the “poor white.” Certainly this rang true enough in the experience of many blacks, North and South. Indeed, black middle-class identity was often defined in relation to the racial prejudice of working-class whites as much as it was constructed in relation to impoverished African Americans. According to Gerald Jaynes, black workers, excluded by white laborers, were “forced to appeal to the ”self interest’ of profit seeking capitalists for economic salvation.” Black spokespersons generally identified with the interests of white business elites and sought an alliance with them against discriminatory white workers. Such antilabor sentiments were often accompanied by nativism, as elite blacks, like their white counterparts, associated unions and radicalism with foreign-born workers. Black opposition to unions was led by Washington and his National Negro Business League, which sought to promote entrepreneurial activity among blacks, somewhat along the lines of Marcus Hanna’s National Civic Federation. Washington regularly praised the loyalty of black workers whom he insisted could be trusted not to strike, and who, from his standpoint, constituted “the best free labor in the world,” suggesting an altogether different meaning for “free” that reflected the overwhelming advantage of employers. Black elites seldom realized that in their alliance with white elites they were pitting themselves not only against racist white workers, but black workers as well. Indeed, such a position required a refusal to recognize blacks as an economically exploited group, and amnesia on the recent phenomenon of interracial populist politics.⁴¹

Apart from its opposition to organized labor, the Negro Business League embodied Washington’s economic self-help ideology. Within it, racism became a taboo subject. As one of his disciples put it, “We need money. . . . We can’t afford to lose time with such things as the so-called color question, especially when there is a dollar in sight. My experience has taught me that the only time my neighbors bothered me about my color was when I became broke.” Men of this perspective held much faith in market rationality as a force against antiblack prejudice. Such boosterism ignored not only white intolerance of economic competition from blacks but also the structural impediments to black business. The most viable business enterprises, such as banks or insurance companies, and later, nationally distributed black newspapers such as the Chicago Defender (failed newspaper ventures by and for blacks in the urban South were legion) and hair and cosmetics concerns such as the booming trade established by Madame C. J. Walker in 1904, were those that served the specialized needs of the segregated African American market.

Under such strained circumstances, blacks’ worship of the gospel of wealth occasionally soured, eliciting less sanguine assessments of “race” enterprises. “Many colored persons in business,” remarked one disgruntled commentator who spoke of small shopkeepers, very likely from personal experience, “are lacking in politeness, civility and disposition to please their patrons.” Carter G. Woodson located the blame on the other side of the counter, believing that the difficulties of black businesses were aggravated by a lack of race-pride and cooperation among black consumers. While many blacks of the Bookerite persuasion, and later, Garveyite black nationalists, saw the accumulation of wealth as crucial to racial uplift, their analysis of the problems facing black business often remained at the level of castigating blacks for their lack of entrepreneurial spirit, thriftlessness, or their unwillingness to make personal sacrifices, namely, to pay higher prices, to patronize black enterprises. While there was endless discussion of the need to accumulate wealth, commentators on black business seldom addressed disadvantages such as the lack of capital, credit, and business experience, and discriminatory high rents, as well as the difficulties of competing with large-scale enterprises. Such alternatives as consumer cooperatives also remained largely unexplored. The accumulation of wealth was as popular among elite blacks as the embrace of bourgeois morality, but their conflation of moral improvement with the material advancement of the race was often ill equipped to address the systemic barriers to black enterprise.⁴²

Black Radicalism and Anti-Imperialism

National controversies such as the Spanish-American War, combined with the ongoing crisis of antiblack violence in the South, represented moments of rupture in which the ideological business of racial uplift ideology was disrupted. The explosive nature of such issues made many black elites reconsider the assumptions of racial uplift. As Willard Gatewood has observed, race and color were crucial in determining national attitudes toward expansion and toward the capacity of the Cuban and Filipino peoples for self-government. Conflicts among African Americans over imperialism reflected the national divisions on the issue, as many Anglo Americans and immigrants, for various reasons, opposed expansion. What enabled a consensus on imperial control over Cuba, and later, in 1899, over the Philippines, was race—specifically, the belief in Anglo-Saxon supremacy. Imperialists argued that the United States would bring progress and civilization to childlike, primitive peoples, preparing them to exercise self-government at some unspecified future date. Black American elites were painfully ambivalent, weighing the avowedly racist justifications for expansion (and for anti-imperialists’ arguments as well), escalating antiblack violence in the South, and the mistreatment that black troops faced in a segregated army, over against the fact that the U.S. military and the American nation provided black men with virtually the only opportunity, itself painfully limited, for status, prestige, and advancement.

During the Spanish-American War, black Republican Party regulars serving the party of expansion rallied black support and the enlistment of black troops. They were mortified, perhaps enraged, when black soldiers encamped in the South encountered white hostility, triggered by the sight of armed black men in uniform and the threat of social equality they represented. The black soldier, of necessity on his guard before reaching the actual battlefront, was a controversial figure: to many whites, he threatened assumptions of Anglo-Saxon manliness and dominance; to blacks, he was a glorious example of African Americans’ manhood, fitness for equality, and citizenship rights. During the war, however, blacks were further outraged by the lynching of a black federal postmaster in South Carolina, the bloody massacre of blacks in Wilmington, North Carolina, that had accompanied a political purge of African Americans from that state’s politics, and countless other episodes of racial violence. Angered by federal authorities’ refusal to protect black lives and property, African Americans generally supported their troops, while expressing less enthusiasm for the war and for expansion. Among blacks, the pragmatic view that the war presented an opportunity to counter racial prejudices through a demonstration of the race’s loyalty, patriotism, and courage was enough to turn opposition into ambivalent, qualified support.

There were racial considerations to black support for the war, as well. Many African Americans sympathized with the Cuban cause, claiming a racial kinship with the many Cubans of African descent. Furthermore, African Americans took pride in the widely reported exploits of the black Cuban military commander, Antonio Maceo, who was killed in battle in 1896.⁴³

Nevertheless, the black press records a wide-ranging, divided, and often angry debate on the war among blacks. Indeed, the crisis of war and domestic violence helped revitalize a militant equal rights perspective among black commentators. Citing the denial of constitutional rights, the Jim Crow facilities, the mistreatment of black troops by southern white civilians, and the outbreaks of racial violence in the South, a few editors voiced an unconditional opposition to black soldiers’ participation. Some editors printed strident attacks against the hypocrisy of expansionists and wished defeat on the United States as retribution for its tolerance of crimes against blacks:

The American white man’s rule in dealing with the American Negro . . . in times of peace and prosperity [relegates] him to the rear, deprives him of his rights as an American citizen, cuts off his opportunities of existence, outrages colored women, burns down his home over his wife and children. . . . More than 500 colored men and women have been murdered by the American white people in the past 25 years and now they have the audacity to talk about the cruelty of Spain toward the Cubans. There is no half-civilized nation on earth that needs a good hard war more than the United States, and it is high time if there is any such being as an omnipotent just God, for Him to rise and show His hand in behalf of the American Negro.⁴⁴

The occasional radical voices of dissent against the forces of imperialism, white supremacy, and plutocracy, and their justification by evolutionary theory, countered the conservative tenor of black thought in this period. Frank Putnam, of Chicago, noted that the “aristocracy of money is enslaving the white masses at the North; is preparing to enslave the patriots of Cuba, Porto Rico and the Philippines, and is aiding by consent the re-enslavement of the colored men of the Southern states.” To this writer, such atrocities were a throwback to the primitive age before Christ, when “survival of the fittest—that law of the jungle, ruled.” This commentator, who identified himself as “a laboring man,” called for the unification of the forces of labor and democracy. Putnam’s analogy between black oppression in the South and U.S. imperial subjugation in the Caribbean and the Philippines was commonly invoked among anti-imperialist black editors and spokespersons; his inclusion of the northern white working class in this analysis, however, was unique. Reverdy C. Ransom, an AME minister and Christian Socialist, also from Chicago, believed that “the Negro will enthusiastically espouse the cause of socialism we cannot doubt.” Less concerned with portraying themselves as middle class, Ransom, Putnam, and others resisted the prevailing dogmas branding poor and working people as unfit. From Richmond, John Mitchell contributed to anti-imperialist opinion among black editors, calling attention to troubling developments in the United States. Mitchell, angered by the recent collapse of the Afro-American Council and Ida B. Wells’s ouster as chairman of that group’s antilynching bureau, equated the “anarchy” of lynching in the South with “slavery in the Philippines.”⁴⁵

Although Mitchell was hardly alone among blacks in condemning imperialism, others consciously or unconsciously persisted in viewing both domestic and global affairs through the racial lens of developmental paternalism. As for socialism, it did not take hold among many black intellectuals until the post-World War I economic crisis, including antilabor violence against blacks in the South, outbreaks of white mob violence against blacks in several cities across the nation, and the federal government’s Red scare.⁴⁶

Imperialism occasioned an angry debate over the abandonment of blacks by the federal government through its denial of equal protection. But the ethos of self-help tacitly discouraged such constitutional concerns. For marginalized black elites, uplift ideology and self-help promised a sense of power and authority, and informed criticism of unscrupulous black politicians. But it held limited effectiveness as an antiracist response. When members of the black intelligentsia anxiously contemplated the urban or rural black masses, their self-help ideology and opposition to urban migration were often indistinguishable from the paternalistic views of northern and southern capitalists, moderates, philanthropists, and reformers. Indeed, black elites had appealed directly to the self-interest of the business class. With exceptions, they served mainly as spokesmen, not so much representing blacks as speaking for them, testifying to the loyalty and Americanism of black labor in the South.

A perpetual state of violence, and crises such as the Atlanta riot of 1906, might disabuse black intellectuals and journalists of their dubious conflation of race and class and foster a political consciousness that reasserted an enlarged vision of civic and political equality. Uplift and its significance for black leadership was constantly contested, and there were always those for whom the mere idea of progress could never ward off the dire exigencies of everyday life or deliver on the promise of social advancement. The precarious social position of educated African Americans, subjected to humiliation by the poorest whites and constantly renegotiating their relationship to other blacks, ensured that racial uplift ideology as a basis for black bourgeois consciousness would be suffused with inherent frustrations and perpetual anxiety. After all, for racial uplift, understood in these terms, to function properly ultimately depended on the recognition of the other, namely, those often contemptuous whites and insubordinate blacks. And racial uplift ideology seemed to function best for those of its adherents who had internalized the dominant language of patriarchal power, as did William H. Ferris and other black nationalists.

The racialized argument for class stratification among blacks represented the black male intelligentsia’s attempt to give uplift to the debased status of race with the privileged category of masculinity. But the truest spirit of uplift ideology was marked by a commitment to education, both formal and informal. This meant making the most of limited resources, sharing stories of slavery and freedom, of past and present struggles handed down by elders, and practicing ideals of kinship in the daily life of the community rather than merely preaching a sterile public version of it. Images of property ownership, patriarchal authority, and militarism, striving toward the appearance of national power, marginalized the community’s strengths and human resources and the unsung efforts of community women. In the meantime, through the rhetoric of uplift, “the better class” sought to rise above minstrelsy and “the Negro problem.” But in opposing migration, elites seemed content to have destitute, harassed African American men and women remain in their place.