5: The Woman and Labor Questions in Racial Uplift Ideology

Anna Julia Cooper’s Voices from the South

I purposely forbear to mention instances of personal violence to colored women travelling in less civilized sections of our country, where women have been forcibly ejected from cars, thrown out of seats, their garments rudely torn, their person wantonly and cruelly injured. America is large and must for some time yet endure its out-of-the-way jungles of barbarism as Africa its uncultivated tracts of marsh and malaria.

ANNA JULIA COOPER, A VOICE FROM THE SOUTH

In her account of the first annual meeting of the American Negro Academy in Washington, D.C., in 1897, Anna Julia Cooper praised the gathering, initiated by the black nationalist cleric and intellectual Alexander Crummell. Noting that the academy was founded to promote intellectual work and higher education among African Americans, to advise “colored people on lines affecting their development and improvement,” and to defend the race against vicious assaults, Cooper quoted from the remarks of Crummell and Presbyterian minister Rev. Francis Grimké, another close friend and colleague. Grimké believed that black intellect and reason would sway the American conscience in favor of African Americans “by endeavoring to educate public sentiment to a Christian conception of the Negro as a man.” Cooper quoted from Crummell’s attack on the vogue of industrial education among white philanthropists, a trend that placed black intellectuals in an even more precarious situation. Instead of manual training, “what the Negro needs is civilization.” After all, the object of education for the Negro was “not to make the white man a Croesus, but to make himself a man.” Calling attention to the limits of this oppositional rhetoric of racial uplift and manhood rights, Cooper remarked of the academy only that “its membership is confined to men.”¹

Cooper’s account of the institutional activities of the black intelligentsia of which she had been an active member, yet here found herself relegated to the sidelines, raises questions about the status of the black woman intellectual that cannot be so easily deferred. Although she lived for more than a century, into the civil rights era, Cooper (1858?—1964) made her most significant intellectual contribution to African American intellectual life before 1900. Until her rediscovery in the late 1980s with the reissue of her 1892 volume of essays A Voice from the South, Cooper was largely neglected by historians.² As Cooper’s own words suggest, this neglect had its precedent in the male-dominated character of black leadership and intellectual life at the turn of the century, marked by a middle-class ideology of racial uplift that measured race progress in terms of civilization, manhood, and patriarchal authority.

The initial wave of scholarship on Cooper has understandably addressed the obstacles facing black women intellectuals and has emphasized Cooper’s feminist contribution to African American thought.³ In the following, although I will continue this line of interpretation by surveying Cooper’s critique of the male prerogatives encoded within racial uplift ideology, I will also address Cooper’s role as a social commentator on a wide array of national questions, which besides gender, included controversies over race, labor, and African American and American cultural identity. The impulse to reclaim Cooper as a black feminist intellectual, although undoubtedly of value within an African American intelligentsia and U.S. political culture still resistant to gender equality, may ultimately impose artificial limits on the critical consideration Cooper warrants. Much of what contemporary readers recognize as “feminist” in Cooper’s writing cannot easily be disentangled from her Western ethnocentrism, her staunch religious piety, and a late-Victorian bourgeois sensibility distrustful of social democracy. Of course, these were views she shared with the predominantly male black intelligentsia, complicated, however, by her gender consciousness in such a way as to produce multiple and at times conflicting identities. Out of the multiplicity of her voices emerged that of a southern, nativist apologist for antilabor views.

My intention is not to single her out in this respect, for the middle-class aspirations and agenda of marginal black intellectuals made such accommodationist views commonplace. Rather, it is to suggest that Cooper’s thought, particularly her gender consciousness, both contested and reflected the assumptions of the black intelligentsia and black middle-class ideology. Indeed, it is important that we consider racial uplift ideology as a discrete set of values that was understood by educated blacks and yet was at the same time unfinished, provisional, contradictory, and always subject to revision. Cooper thus embodied the contradictions inherent in the avowed status of “representative” Negro leadership: on the one hand, seeking the affirmation and recognition of white elites within the logic of a racist social order while, on the other hand, claiming to represent the political and social aspirations of African Americans.

Cooper, along with fellow members of the black intelligentsia, took for granted that black elites, as “representative Negroes,” necessarily spoke for the black majority. Untroubled by the sorts of anxieties of relevance that have preoccupied many black intellectuals since the black power era, Cooper and her cohort of black intellectuals were confident that their writings and reform activities defended the race and, indeed, “uplifted” it. Perhaps the ameliorative, messianic ideals of racial uplift ideology, imposed by an antiblack society, bore a compensatory relation to the devastating indifference, isolation, and hardship black scholars of the day often endured. But for Cooper and other black women intellectuals, including Pauline Hopkins, Ida B. Wells, and others, assumptions of an organic link to the group were eroded by the patriarchal trappings of black intellectual endeavor, racial uplift ideology, and black leadership. Before embarking on a close reading of Cooper’s handling of gender and class politics in A Voice from the South, and elaborating on their relationship to the ideology of New South economic development, a brief summary of Cooper’s life and career is in order.

Cooper was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, to her slave mother and the white man who owned them both. After the Civil War, she attended St. Augustine Normal School in North Carolina, and married Rev. George Cooper in 1877. Widowed two years later, she entered Oberlin College, graduating in 1884. She taught math and science at St. Augustine, then headed the modern languages department at Wilberforce University in Ohio before returning to St. Augustine. In 1887 Cooper received an M.A. degree from Oberlin in mathematics on the strength of her college teaching experience in that subject. This qualified her for an appointment in the Washington, D.C., schools, and she taught mathematics and science at M Street, later known as Paul Laurence Dunbar High School. Cooper never remarried. In 1915, at about age fifty-seven, she adopted five young orphans, the grandchildren of her half-brother.

Cooper was active during a brief period when black leadership enjoyed an ideological diversity that would disappear with the passing of Frederick Douglass and the rise of Booker T. Washington. Cooper embodied that ideological diversity herself, her quest for an authoritative subject position requiring, it would seem—not unlike other black intellectuals—a pragmatic variety of political stances fostered partly by the institutional centers of racial uplift. She was closely associated during the 1890s with Hampton Institute, and her views on education and the organization of labor in the New South were quite similar to those of Washington. It should not be forgotten, however, that the black women’s club movement provided a crucial institutional base and audience for the work of black women intellectuals and activists within the culture of racial uplift and political activism and protest before the rise of Washington and Du Bois.⁴

Anna Julia Cooper, ca. 1890.

Although she supported industrial education during the 1890s, as a teacher of Latin, and later, from 1901 to 1904, principal of the Colored Preparatory School in Washington, D.C., she insisted on the highest standards of academic excellence. Several of her students from the city’s only black high school went on to elite universities. Cooper’s success may have called forth the resentment and hostility of white officials in the District of Columbia board of education, who dismissed her in 1904, after, it is said, she refused to use racially derogatory textbooks.⁵

Cooper surpassed what could often seem to be the hollow, abstract rhetoric of racial uplift with practical service. Taking in the children was a concrete act of generosity; her commitment to teaching stands out in this regard, too. In addition, Cooper attended a number of conferences devoted to uplift in the 1890s, including the Hampton Negro Conference. She helped organize the Washington, D.C., Colored Woman’s League in 1894, which offered domestic training programs for black women. As testimony to both her contemporary prominence, and to the neglect of her peers and subsequent historians, she addressed the first pan-African conference held in London in 1900. Her remarks seem not to have survived. Cooper remained an active teacher and scholar, and an active participant in black Washington’s intellectual life. Undoubtedly she was acquainted with such distinguished visitors to the city as the pan-Africanist scholar Edward W. Blyden. Juggling summer research trips to Europe with her teaching duties in the States, Cooper went on to earn a doctorate in French literature from the Sorbonne in 1925, well into her seventh decade. She published articles and essays on an infrequent basis, and after 1930, served for nine years as president of Frelinghuysen University for adult education in Washington. Her efforts revived the institution after a period of decline. In 1929, Cooper had urged W. E. B. Du Bois to answer Claude Bowers’s prosouthern, popular history of Reconstruction, The Tragic Era; six years later, Du Bois brought out Black Reconstruction, a Marxist treatment of the period as a short-lived experiment in interracial social democracy.⁶

A Voice From the South contained Cooper’s most sustained treatment of racial uplift ideology. Though she lived for another seven decades, the work marked her only book-length survey of the full landscape of black politics and culture, the women’s movement, and American society. The A.M.E. Church Review praised the work: “It is the voice of a woman pleading for justice to women and to humanity, and she pleads well.” Katherine Davis Tillman observed in the same journal that Cooper “[was] said to have produced the best book written by a Negro on the Negro.” The book is divided into two parts, asserting not so much the primacy of gender over race as their inseparability: the first is concerned with the status of black women within racial uplift, and as reformers. In the second part, Cooper addresses a range of national issues, including race relations, the women’s movement, labor, the nation’s cultural identity, and the decline of religious belief and authority.

Antilabor repression and populist insurgency provided the background for Cooper’s writings as much as did segregation, lynching, and the rape of black women. Cooper’s views were shaped by the violent class warfare of the late nineteenth century, including the Haymarket Square riot in Chicago in 1886, and the bloody 1892 strike by iron and steel workers against the Carnegie steelworks in Homestead, Pennsylvania. Cooper, like many middle-class commentators on labor issues, blamed workers for the violence, and believed in an essential harmony of interests between capital and labor.⁷

Although Cooper occasionally attacked the greed and materialism of industrializing America, she opposed organized labor as a threat to social peace, national unity, and religious authority. Her position was different from that of a laissez-faire apologist for business, however; Cooper argued elsewhere that the businessman whose “power and greed” prevented his recognition of the rights of labor “was manifestly a robber whether the jailors can catch him or not.”⁸ But the rights of labor evidently did not include the right to strike. Like many black writers who sought a covenant with white elites, Cooper’s antiracism was selective, singling out poor whites and immigrant workers and exonerating southern planters, merchants, and bankers, who personified the “wealth and intelligence” of the region. Yet her bourgeois inclinations met their match in her confrontation with other reformers, such potential allies as black ministers and white women’s rights leaders, whose own claims to cultural authority were articulated through sexism and racism, respectively. In other words, Cooper felt betrayed by patriarchy among blacks and by racial prejudice among white women’s rights advocates. Yet even as she challenged those aspects of uplift ideology and social reform that invoked and perpetuated race and gender inequalities, she espoused the middle-class, nativist biases of the period, reflecting black elites’ indignation at the racism of poor whites and immigrants. Cooper, like most other black writers, was engaged in the contradictory task of using uplift ideology to expose the moral bankruptcy of white supremacy while seeking the recognition and cooperation of white reformers and philanthropic and business elites.

Cooper defended black women from the charges of sexual immorality leveled at them with unnerving frequency. The authoritative style of her learned essays, in which she cited, among others, Emerson, Macaulay, Madame de Stael, and Matthew Arnold, was undoubtedly meant to demolish racial and gender stereotypes. While her appeals to ancient history and assumptions of teleological Christian progress were standard among black intellectuals, Cooper balked at the usual preoccupation with black manliness. Instead, Cooper broke the silence among many black writers and public leaders on the particular grievances of black women, and the subordinate role that had been reserved for them within conventional views of black progress. Cooper’s first essay in the volume called attention to the rape of black women in the South.⁹ This sort of candor about oppression was rare amidst the self-congratulatory optimism of the spate of commemorative volumes testifying to black progress. Cooper criticized the tendency to treat the condition of black Americans as “the sole province of the colored man’s inheritance and apportionment.” She denounced what she regarded a coldly legalistic approach to racial and social conflicts, as well as the penchant among many black writers (male and female) to cite increases in property ownership and professional status as evidence of black progress. She noted the injustice and folly of white “attorneys for the plaintiff . . . and defendant,” who “with bungling gaucherie have analyzed and dissected, theorized and synthesized with sublime ignorance or pathetic misapprehension of counsel” from black men, and no testimony at all from black women.¹⁰

In that initial essay, an address delivered before an assembly of Washington, D.C., black ministers, Cooper argued that the rape of black women and girls in the South mocked paeans to black progress. Many black and white reformers exhorted blacks, and black women in particular, to improve their sexual morés. Cooper made it clear that black women were not to be judged for their victimization. Following Alexander Crummell—Cooper alluded to his pamphlet “The Black Woman of the South,”—she urged the ministers to take more of a protective interest in “the Colored Girls of the South . . . so full of promise and possibilities, yet so sure of destruction; often without a father to whom they dare apply the loving term, often without a stronger brother to . . . defend their honor with his life’s blood; in the midst of pitfalls and snares, waylaid by the lower classes of white men, with no shelter, no protection nearer than the great blue vault above.” In Cooper’s view, black women were not immoral, but unprotected. As the daughter of a slave owner, she knew that family ties with such men carried no assurance of protection.¹¹

Cooper’s impassioned plea for the protection of black women was part of her larger argument that group uplift was impossible without an improvement of their status. It was “absurd to quote statistics showing the Negro’s bank account and rent rolls, to point to the hundreds of newspapers edited by colored men and lists of lawyers, doctors, professors . . . etc., while the source from which the life-blood of the race is to flow is subject to taint and corruption in the enemy’s camp.” Her comparison of the sexual domination of black women with military occupation was a stark indictment of the usual claims for black progress. Furthermore, Cooper objected to the denial of higher education to black women: “Every attempt to elevate the Negro, whether undertaken by himself or through the philanthropy of others, cannot but prove abortive unless so directed as to utilize the indispensable agency of an elevated and trained womanhood.” She questioned the habit of black writers to honor “representative” men as beacons of progress, noting that “our present record of eminent men, when placed against the actual status of the race in America to-day, proves that no man can represent the race.” According to Cooper, “Only the Black Woman can say ”when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.’” A broader social recognition of black womanhood represented to Cooper the fundamental criterion for racial progress.¹²

As we have seen, a central rhetorical strategy of racial uplift ideology, as part of its insistence on class differences, was its opposition of racism by invoking conventional gender hierarchies of sexual difference, as this was widely regarded as the behavioral measure of bourgeois civilization. Cooper took this line of argument with her claim that civilizations are measured by the status of women, upon which she based her demand that society recognize the “undisputed dignity” of black womanhood. This, and her appeals to protection, were understandable, given the urgent need to halt the brutality of rape and to challenge the accusations of promiscuity that justified such acts. Cooper went on to dispute the white South’s stereotype that black men had a monopoly on rape. Still, Cooper’s appeal for protection was indicative of the political disadvantage faced by southern blacks. Calls for male protection seemed to remove the issue from the realm of politics and the courts; the ruffianly element among whites was not the sole source of the sexual abuse of black women; fundamentally, it was a matter of political power in the courts, on juries, and at the polls. Without this political context, calls for protection reduced the issue to self-help and moral conduct. In other words, by this logic, black men were at fault for “failing” to protect, or black women were culpable for “failing” to defend their “virtue.” Given that the state denied legal protection to black women, the only meaningful arguments for protection would have been those made by militants, like Ida B. Wells and others, who called for armed resistance and self-defense.

Cooper’s call for protection was rooted in gender conventions of respectable manhood and true womanhood. Within racial uplift ideology, however, appropriations of the moral category of “true womanhood” were not always appropriate to the interests of black women. If Cooper and other black women called for black men to fulfill the role of protector, many black men felt most protective in their expectation that black women remain within the sphere of home and family.

Although contemporaries stressed complementary relations between the sexes, the linkage of race progress with male supremacy contradicted uplift’s unifying ideals and led to some interesting arguments that spoke to the conflicts at hand. One commentator sought to refute the prejudice against educating black men on grounds that it led to sex across the color line by asserting that because most “women, with a few exceptions, by nature, are inferior in intellectual capacity to men,” educated black men would hardly desire association with such inferiors. Voicing anxiety over women’s increased public activity as a violation of God and nature, James H. A. Johnson proclaimed in the pages of the A.M.E. Church Review that woman’s “position was prescribed” as “the ”mother of all living’—made to fill a place peculiar to herself, so that any attempt to change it would be an attempt to change the divine arrangement of society.” It was understood that such general pronouncements on the nature and position of “woman” referred to black women. Johnson was especially alarmed at the prospect of black women assuming ministerial authority, one of the few professional careers available to black men, and one already fraught with intense competition. “A true woman, like . . . Amanda Smith,” he observed, referring to the extraordinarily popular unordained black woman evangelist, “thinks she is as great in the pew as man is in the pulpit,” striving “to satisfy the Lord and not the bubbling ambition of her soul.” Though sufficiently deferential, according to Johnson, Smith was, in fact, a threatening presence within the black Methodist church, which refused to ordain her, and which had refused to ordain black women preachers since antebellum times.¹³

Cooper challenged such expectations of women’s deference. She pointed out that while “numerous young men have been . . . trained for the ministry by the charities of the Church, the number of indigent females who have been supported, sheltered and trained, is phenomenally small.” Gender conflict exposed the contradictions of uplift’s vision of progress, a middle-class vision structured in sexual dominance.¹⁴

Cooper’s argument for the education of black women joined an ongoing debate among black writers over the role of black women in racial uplift. In several published testimonials to the black woman’s idealized, yet narrowly prescribed role within uplift, bourgeois black women were generally represented, by themselves and others, as being employed in a restricted range of occupations. In addition to the obligatory celebrations of domesticity and motherhood as both a privilege and a duty, black women were praised as race builders through their material labor, which subsidized their children’s education and such black institutions as churches and schools. In addition, they were lauded as teachers, writers, journalists, missionaries, elocutionists, musicians, and artists. Membership in such moral reform crusades as the temperance and clubwomen’s movements, which projected domestic values into the public realm, were also acceptable badges of status. The Women’s Era, a Boston journal for African American women, sounded a dissenting note in 1894: “Not all women are intended as mothers. Some of us have not the temperament for family life. Clubs will make women think seriously of their future lives, and not make girls think their only alternative is to marry.” But this statement, and Cooper’s views, were exceptional. Although black women valued public activism, in keeping with the multivocal, ambiguous character of black middle-class ideology, they usually situated their appeals for women’s independence within the rhetoric of female domesticity.¹⁵

Thus, even the public activities of black women as reformers and journalists reinforced the assumption that their true “power and influence,” resided at home and hearthside. Against this, Cooper pointed out that black women were unjustly discouraged by black men from pursuing higher education and social reform: “The colored woman too often finds herself hampered and shamed by a less liberal sentiment and a more conservative attitude on the part of those for whose opinion she cares most.” Accordingly, uplift instructed black women on their duties to the race. Seldom were they regarded as intellectual peers on an equal public footing. If allowances were made for the “true type of ”progressive woman’ of today,” implying the inauthenticity of all others, then by definition, that woman was “modest and womanly, with a reverence for the high and holy duties of wife and mother.” Years later, Cooper informed her old friend Francis Grimké that her niece, Annie, had married and left Howard University. That came as “a great and sore disappointment” to Cooper, who had “great hopes on her becoming a teacher to succeed me in the work I am now doing.” The deference expected of black women reflected the limited aspirations racial uplift ideology held out for all blacks.¹⁶

The importance of religious leadership and institutions among blacks contributed to the view that held racial uplift and black leadership synonymous with patriarchal authority. The prospect of extending higher education to black women raised the disturbing possibility of competition with black men for these precious opportunities. It was difficult enough as it was to attract and keep men as church members. Black women’s work and economic independence clashed with patriarchal imperatives of male leadership, protection, and support of families. Logic and argument were hardly necessary to discredit such competition between black men and women in the public realm of jobs and status; this was simply at odds with nature.

Such views were not simply a product of restricted occupational and professional opportunities for black men, they also reflected the rising opposition through the 1890s, by women as well as men, to woman suffrage organizations. Antisuffragist views were shared by both misogynists and many of those who claimed to be women’s advocates. Cultural anxieties over social change—industrialism, urbanization, immigration, and economic uncertainty—generally settled on fears for the survival of the family, whose health symbolized social harmony and stability. Citizens were men and men only. Reasserting women’s sphere as home and family was an effective means of discrediting demands for public activity and citizenship. Thus, antisuffragists feared that enfranchised women would destroy traditional sexual differences, leaving the family, and society, in ruins. Antisuffragist rhetoric and iconography from the turn of the century warned ominously that women voters would wear the pants and henpecked men would be saddled with laundering them. The suffrage, employment, women’s education, and other forms of public activity, according to opponents of women’s rights, produced unwomanly shrews, and worse, conflicted with women’s natural domestic duties. Such logic echoed that employed by white supremacists—the end result of votes for women would not be equality, but domination.¹⁷

Although opponents to women’s suffrage among blacks were few, black elites harbored other assumptions of women’s subordination. According to uplift ideals that reflected the status aspirations of black men, black women were to be supported, not independently employed. Cooper broke with convention on such matters, citing an Atlanta University study in 1899 that found that “of 1,137 colored families in that city, 650, or 57.17 per cent, are supported wholly or in part by female heads.” She held that “if men cannot or will not help the conditions which force women into the struggle for bread, we have a right to claim at least that she shall have fair play and all the rights of wage-earners in general.” Cooper went on to claim similar rights as wage earners for black women’s domestic labor in the home, and to criticize Kelly Miller’s attribution of “unnatural conditions in our large cities” to the large number of “surplus” unmarried black women. She reminded her readers and critics that “surely the greatest sufferer from the strain and stress attendant upon the economic conditions noted among our people is the colored woman, and she is the one who must meet and conquer the conditions.” Cooper insisted that these views were compatible with marriage and family, as black men and women teamed up for race-building: “So, by her . . . calm insight and tact, thrift and frugality . . . the colored woman can prove that a prudent marriage is the very best investment that a working man can make.” Concluding her analysis with the sugar-coated homilies of uplift, Cooper argued, as did many of her contemporaries, for the necessity of a black woman’s household work as the thrift that stretches the family’s wages while extolling her role within marriage and the home as that of an active partner.¹⁸

The rhetoric of domesticity may have enabled such challenges to assumptions of women’s deference, but the expectation that black women maintain home and hearth for the welfare of the race could spark confrontations. Among those black women who, like Cooper, aspired to race leadership, Ida B. Wells clashed on numerous occasions with injunctions of female passivity. She stormed out of a meeting before AME ministers in Philadelphia when they proceeded to debate whether to endorse her antilynching efforts. Outraged that she could not obtain the support of “ministers of my own race,” she recalled telling them that she had done the work “that you could not do, if you would, and you would not do if you could.” Other black women, who, like Wells, ventured into male-dominated occupations like journalism, and their numbers were more significant than one might suspect, often negotiated their seemingly anomalous public presence by endorsing the gender conventions of the dominant culture, as appropriate for racial uplift. Motherhood and domesticity reigned supreme for the journalist Mrs. Julia Ring-wood Cotson, as she insisted that men would marry only “essentially feminine” women who “know naught of women’s rights and universal suffrage, . . . are not troubled with the affairs of State, nor are they agents of reform.” These “adorable” women entertained “no vicious longing for publicity, no hunger to usurp the sphere of men.” Wells was somewhat exceptional, in that her syndicated columns in the black press under the pen name “Iola” covered a wide range of issues, foremost among them, black politics and leadership. In 1892 Wells praised an economic boycott of a streetcar company in Atlanta led by the pastor of one of the largest churches in the city. Wells regarded such boycotts as blacks’ most effective protest against segregated public conveyances.¹⁹

Cooper wrote as the debates over the quality of education to be made available to blacks—higher education, or industrial education based on the Hampton-Tuskegee model that stressed farm and domestic labor—were being duplicated for black women. Among those who debated what sort of education was best for blacks, there were those who feared higher education would unfit its beneficiaries for their perceived station in society as menial workers. Similarly, some held that black women’s education was best limited to rudimentary instruction, and that it should emphasize motherhood and domestic and household work. Miller, a faculty member of Howard University and an advocate of higher education for black men, found the “upward ambition and aspiration of colored women . . . encouraging” and urged that “school[s] of domestic service” be established for “every girl of moderate intelligence and ambition. This would indeed be an industrial education that counts.” Though Miller’s remarks reflected the fact that for most black women, domestic work, dressmaking, marriage, and motherhood were foremost among available respectable occupations, opponents of higher education for black women also reiterated the general arguments against women’s education: it would “unsex” women, thus violating norms of sexual difference, and worst of all, make women unfit for marriage.²⁰

Among black writers, education was a much discussed matter, as the status of black women within uplift was a constant concern. Thomas Baker, who held a doctorate in philosophy from Yale, warned in 1906 that black women “must not be educated away from being a mother. . . . The race is dependent on her giving her best to her children.” Interestingly enough, however, he added that the black woman “be better educated than the man,” noting that superior mothers would rear superior men. Baker’s fear that educated black women might forsake motherhood was typical of uplift ideology’s emphasis on black women’s reproductive function, which, it seemed, functioned best with the birth of male infants. Such concerns were rearticulations by blacks of the “race suicide” fears of Anglo-American eugenicists, and also echoed the biological determinism of opponents of women’s education.²¹

For Baker, Miller, Cotson, and even Wells, there could be no education for blacks without Christianity, which, among other things, sanctioned patriarchal commands urging marriage and motherhood. Fears of the growing migration of blacks to towns and cities at century’s end also spurred concerns that black women were defying nature, as several commentators found the preponderance of single women in towns and cities cause for alarm. Echoing Booker T. Washington’s public derision for higher training for blacks, many regarded higher education for black women as impractical, superfluous knowledge that besides making them unmarriageable, raised their aspirations to an unattainable standard of living. Against the humiliating effects of poverty, sexual exploitation, and the public stigma of vice, domestic and family life were so exalted within uplift ideology that some black women endorsed these grounds for limiting their educational opportunities. “Have they been so trained out of sympathy with the plain life,” wondered Mrs. S. B. Stevens at the Hampton Negro Conference in 1898, “that they are unwilling to marry and help cheerfully to bear the burdens of life instead of fretting because their homes . . . are not handsomely furnished out of a meagre salary?” Stevens voiced a far more prosaic version of the usual paeans to the so-called powerful influence of black women in homes. However unglamorous and burdensome, black women’s unpaid housework, praised as thrift—cooking, laundering, sewing, and child rearing—was part of uplift’s master plan, as a vital labor supplement to family incomes considerably below those of middle-class whites. By urging black women to accept domestic labor as their lot, Stevens had also embraced the Hampton-Tuskegee philosophy that similarly assigned subordinate status to black people within the political system, and the industrial order of the New South. The black poet from Richmond, Daniel Webster Davis, voiced similar sentiments in Negro dialect:

Larnin’ is a blessed thing
An’ good cloze berry fin’,
But I likes to see de cullud gal
Dat’s been larnt how to ”ine’ [iron].²²

Although Cooper’s advocacy of protection and higher education for black women challenged assumptions of male privilege, it is impossible to separate such incipient black feminism from the dominant Hampton-Tuskegee philosophy that prescribed the subordinate and instrumental function of black men and women within the New South labor market. Such feminism (if the term is even appropriate in this context) was tethered to the social and cultural conservatism of uplift. For advocates of industrial education, Native American assimilation, and missionary deculturation of subject peoples, the women of primitive societies might hold strategic influence as agents of civilization, and for the institution of Christian home life, or, in the case of Native Americans, the preference for private property ownership over collective systems of tribal ownership. Hampton materialized its belief in woman as an uplifting and civilizing entity with its curriculum in domestic science, which became the prevailing mode of education available to red and black women in southern institutions. Equating the bravery and devotion of black women in the South to missionary domesticity with that displayed by black soldiers in Cuba, the Southern Workman praised its female graduates as “centers of light and civilization in dark communities,” and opined that “if every public school in the South could introduce sewing, instead of having all the time devoted to the study of books, much could be accomplished.” How often these discursive attempts to police the boundaries of acceptable behavior for black women were contested and subverted in the daily lives of black women, as I will argue in my discussion of the public and private life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson in chapter 8, remains a matter of conjecture. Nevertheless, the rhetoric of female domestic service was perhaps necessary to ensure support in a region where black education in even its most conservative form might provoke violent opposition from white supremacists. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has shown that domestic training for black women was vulnerable to such intimidation, as a school in Baton Rouge was accused of “educating the nigger up to think they are the equal of white folks.”²³

Cooper’s association with Hampton and its philosophy might be explained by her ideological affinity with its civilizationist philosophy, which conferred status and moral authority on marginalized African American women just as it had for white women, educated Native Americans, and African American men. In any event, Cooper, a graduate of Oberlin College’s gentleman’s course, saw no conflict between industrial and higher education for blacks, as did many of those who supported Hampton and Tuskegee. Cooper used a rhetorical strategy common to black writers for the purpose of arguing on behalf of black women’s education. She appealed to history, marshaling ancient precedents for women’s education and independence, including “Sappho, the bright, sweet singer of Lesbos,” who wrote “six centuries before Christ”—she also summoned trends that had yet to be endorsed by middle-class blacks whose preoccupation with race (understood as masculine) left little room for women’s concerns.²⁴ Cooper, like other black clubwomen, situated herself within women’s increased social and political presence as reformers. She linked women’s moral influence, which she termed “the sweetening, purifying antidotes for the poisons of man’s acquisitiveness,” with the essential progress that could not exist without the black woman. Cooper praised the work of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and praised women reformers as trenchant critics of a materialistic society that seemed to have deified economic man over Jesus Christ. Indeed, her claims for the socially redemptive influence of women resembled the romantic racialism of the anti-slavery era, which attributed to African Americans the gentle, religious, and feminine qualities that would somehow temper Anglo-Saxon aggression and materialism. “In this period,” Cooper wrote, “when material prosperity and well-earned ease are an assured fact from a national standpoint, woman’s work and woman’s influence are needed as never before; needed to bring a heart power into this money getting, dollar worshipping civilization; needed to bring a moral force into the utilitarian motives and interests of the time; needed to stand for God and Home and Native Land versus gain and greed and grasping selfishness.” Appropriating the rhetoric of white women reformers, Cooper invoked the Victorian myth of women’s moral superiority.²⁵

Black women’s drill team, Wilmington, Delaware, 1905. Military supplies shown are castoffs from the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. (Courtesy of Wahneema Lubiano)

As is apparent from the last quotation, Cooper cannot be fully explained in terms of her gender consciousness. Displaying the anxious moral indignation of the late-Victorian bourgeoisie, Cooper praised the progressive spirit of women reformers as she sought to be counted on the side of right against the forces of disorder, standing for “God and Home and Native Land.” Her nativism was evidently a retaliatory response to the racial exclusion practiced by white craft unions. In addition, her marginality within the black community, as well as within the women’s reform organizations whose work she otherwise valued so highly, may have made such rhetoric attractive in her bid for authority.²⁶

Cooper’s Criticism of the (White) Women’s Movement

Given her idealized view of women as a force for social betterment, Cooper was deeply disappointed by those women reformers whose social vision was tainted by racist attitudes. In an essay entitled “Woman versus the Indian,” Cooper argued that white women reformers had abdicated their moral responsibility in trying to exploit racial prejudice to serve their own interests. She criticized these reform groups, and such leaders as Susan B. Anthony, for their acquiescent silence in allowing white southern women to dictate the increasingly racist character of the national women’s suffrage movement. Cooper’s title was taken from an address by Rev. Anna Shaw before the National Women’s Council in 1891. Shaw’s premise was that contemporary debates on the rights of Native Americans came at the expense of what she held to be the more urgent question of women’s rights. Cooper opposed Shaw’s claim, which paralleled some of the women suffragists’ opposition to Negro suffrage, as well as the bigotry that excluded black women from the authoritative public role of women reformers.²⁷

Shaw’s speech enabled Cooper to analyze the extent to which women reformers, ostensibly concerned with “the broadening, humanizing and civilizing” of American society, actually replicated the oppression they claimed to oppose. To Cooper, these so-called reformers, as women, should have sympathized with the powerless. In a similar vein, Cooper chastised Mary A. Livermore, a white suffragist, temperance advocate and reformer from Massachusetts. Livermore, in an essay describing “the Anglo-Saxon genius for power and his contempt for weakness,” waxed prescriptive in a manner that effectively proved Cooper’s point. Livermore told of a pack of white children who attacked a Chinese man in San Francisco, throwing his bundle of laundry into a ditch. Because the man did not “teach [the children] a lesson with his two fists,” Livermore scoffed, “I didn’t much care.” An outraged Cooper remarked: “This is said like a man! It grates harshly. It smacks of the worship of the beast.” Livermore’s statement betrayed Cooper’s ideals of women’s moral superiority. Racism was the relevant issue here, undermining Cooper’s appropriation of white women’s universalistic rhetoric of “woman’s” moral influence.²⁸

To Cooper, such contempt for weakness as shown by Livermore, Shaw, and others was “untrue to the instincts I have ascribed to the thinking woman and to the contribution she is to add to the civilized world.” For Cooper, contempt for weakness was a corruption of reform ideals, rooted in Christianity. Their debasement was consummated in a fetish for strength, the “worship of the beast” of power and brutality. Thus, while Cooper generally applauded the efforts of women reformers, she parted with them on the issue of race. For suffragists themselves to engage in acts of discrimination, setting their own rights above those of other powerless groups, demonstrated the narrow, jurisprudential mindset that jealously sought recognition of its privileged status of whiteness before the law. Remember that for Cooper, justice was hardly embodied in the southern legal system, its moral double-standard codified in anti-intermarriage laws and in its denial of equal protection and justice to blacks. In a manner illustrative of prevailing discriminatory conceptions of rights, Cooper vehemently rejected the arguments of white women suffragists that they, as educated, refined white women, were more entitled to the vote than what she sarcastically called “the great burly black man, ignorant and gross and depraved.” “Why should woman,” she wondered, “become plaintiff in a suit versus the Indian, or the Negro, or any other race or class who have been crushed under the heel of Anglo-Saxon power and selfishness?” In powerful language, Cooper claimed the higher law of Christianity as the final arbiter in such matters. “When the image of God in human form” was fully recognized by society and its laws, and “when race, color, sex, [and] condition are realized to be the accidents, not the substance of life . . . then woman’s lesson is taught and woman’s cause is won—not the white woman nor the black woman nor the red woman, but the cause of every woman who has writhed silently under a mighty wrong.” By representing oppression as rape, in both actual and metaphorical senses, Cooper’s analysis of the competition for rights and legal standing between white women and racial minorities put forth a claim for group rights in inclusive terms of justice. White women suffragists who, in their collusion with patriarchal racism, may have considered themselves immune to the problem, would do well to remember that “Woman’s cause” was epitomized by the rape of black women. By the same token, rape as a metaphor for the disfranchisement of racial groups struck at the heart of white women’s claims to moral, educational, and racial superiority. Through the harrowing image of rape, Cooper alluded to the dominance masked by the category of civilization as a racialized slogan. It followed that polite references to “equality” really entailed domination and brutality, and that the advancement of white women inevitably claimed a victim. This was a zero-sum, exclusionary conception of rights and equality, as the historical inertia of a republic for property-owning white males dictated that one person’s rights required another’s disfranchisement, whether it involved missionaries seeking to reclaim heathen peoples, a lynch mob inflicting its murderous will on its victim, or those who inflicted rape without fear of prosecution.²⁹

Cooper’s Racial Solution to the Labor Question

Perhaps because racists within the women’s movement refused to acknowledge black women’s oppression, and had thus betrayed her high expectations of women as agents of progress, Cooper seemed to vacillate in her designation of which group, women or blacks, was more likely to redeem society. Still, her faith in the ultimate resolution of social conflict by the messianic intervention of an oppressed group was unshakable. “We would not deprecate the fact,” Cooper wrote, “that America has a Race Problem.” The resolution of racial conflict ensured “the perpetuity and progress” of American institutions, “and the symmetry of her development.” Though not much in her experience encouraged her, Cooper believed that “the Negro is appointed to contribute to that problem,” for “his tropical warmth and spontaneous emotionalism may form no unseemly counterpart to the cold and calculating Anglo-Saxon.” Cooper experimented with the period’s romantic racialism, that negritude of the nineteenth century, which sought to turn perceived racial differences and liabilities into strengths.³⁰

Although Cooper waxed sentimental over the moral authority she believed blacks and women had earned in their respective struggles for inclusion in American society, significantly, gender did not play a major role in Cooper’s scenario for the resolution of racial and social conflict. Cooper wanted to affirm a moral advantage held by oppressed blacks, while also seeking the approval of ruling elites. Thus, like most other black exponents of uplift, whose middle-class aspirations often found expression in attacks on the working class and organized labor, Cooper was considerably less willing to see any advantages to the bitter and violent class conflicts of her day. Cooper viewed the confrontations between capital and labor as evidence of foreign subversion; reflecting black anxieties over immigration, she invoked nativist hostility and a self-righteous chauvinism to demonstrate the cultural loyalty of African American farm workers in the South. Her message anticipating that of Booker T. Washington, Cooper believed that only blacks as a group could mediate and resolve class antagonism, “prov[ing] indispensable and invaluable elements in a nation menaced as America is by anarchy, socialism, communism and skepticism poured in with all the jail birds from the continents of Europe and Asia.” Cooper appeared untroubled by the extent to which capitalists exploited and exacerbated racial prejudice by pitting black strikebreakers against white workers. She carried her blend of religious piety and antitrade unionism well into the twentieth century.³¹

Cooper and other southern black spokespersons feared that southern elites would make good on their repeated threats to replace black workers with immigrant labor. During the 1890s, there had been widespread efforts throughout the New South to attract European immigrants to work in expanding cotton mill and railroad industries. According to Charles Flynn, black farm workers in Georgia protested exploitative conditions after Redemption, and into the 1880s, resisted the planters’ attempts to dictate the terms of labor. Hysterical press reports characterized union organizing among blacks as impending violent insurrection plots, but it was white violence that invariably claimed black organizers as victims. Racial hostility and frequent complaints about insubordinate black labor led to campaigns in the press for immigration, which, it was believed, promised a superior labor force. Immigration was also proposed to relieve the labor shortage caused by out-migrations of native-born blacks and whites. The most ardent proponents of immigration hoped that European immigrants would replace blacks as a labor force. Thus, black leaders feared that black workers would become superfluous, and they argued that African Americans held the solution to the threat of class warfare posed by lawless, violent strikers from southern Europe.³²

Commenting on the labor question as a black woman for whom the norms of law and respectability did not then apply, it seems understandable that Cooper would be drawn to dominant antilabor, nativist arguments. While she attacked the injustices of racism and patriarchy, Cooper was hardly alone among southern uplift advocates in taking a conservative, gradualist, deal-making approach with planters and industrialists. Many black leaders participated in the public ritual of attacking a stigmatized outsider, aligning themselves with industrialists and against white workers branded “foreign,” criminal, and, as Cooper described them elsewhere, “ignorant . . . incapable of sympathy with [the country’s] institutions, brewers of anarchy, experts with dynamite, murderers and terrorizers of honest workers, wholesale disturbers of public comfort and travel, and irresponsible destroyers of the country’s peace and prosperity and safety and freedom.”³³

By comparison, Cooper asserted the loyalty of black workers in servile terms evocative of the plantation legend—African Americans were “a people long-suffering and gentle . . . teachable, loyal, loving,” and the country was “demented” not to take advantage of their labor. Cooper’s appeal seemed more concerned with southern blacks as potential laborers than as citizens. Unhampered by her Christian convictions, Cooper raged against organized labor, to her personified by atheism, and by racist immigrants who were unworthy of sympathy, forgiveness, and love. Indeed, moral outrage infused her sense of class conflict. Cooper equated insurgent workers with “crackers” and “poor whites”—just as she had singled out “the lower classes of white men” as the main culprits for the sexual abuse of southern black women. In this respect, Cooper’s antidemocratic views were analogous to Alexander Crummell’s association of democracy with white mob assaults against blacks. Trusting in the benevolence of a Christlike, disinterested bourgeoisie over the immoral lust her slaveholder father and poor whites represented, Cooper singled out “atheistic” white workers and radical foreigners. Her world was rigidly ordered by the struggle between good and evil, and Cooper struck what she doubtless believed to be the proper tone of southern, patrician indignation toward the demands of organized labor: “Will you call it narrowness and selfishness, then, that I find it impossible to catch the fire of sympathy and enthusiasm for most of these labor movements at the North?” Her preference for southern paternalism over northern labor unrest led her to denounce unions as an un-American “body of men who still need an interpreter to communicate with their employer,” and who “threaten to cut the nerve and paralyze the progress of an industry that gives work to an American-born citizen, or one which takes measures to instruct any apprentice not supported by the labor monopoly.” Perhaps to placate white southern fears of “Negro domination” and threats to racial purity, Cooper portrayed organized labor as a contagion far more threatening to the health of the social organism. Siding with capital against unions, Cooper emphasized class conflict among whites with the hope of blunting the force of racism. According to Cooper and others, black labor served a crucial instrumental function within the New South economic order.³⁴

Just as race served—among other things—at the turn of the century as a distraction from the age’s bitter class conflicts, Cooper sought to reverse this situation, reinscribing the centrality of class polarization, but with blacks holding the key for restoring order. Though she romanticized blacks and women as messianic social groups, Cooper finally located virtue and moral authority in power, as she preached a gospel of accommodation. “Not only the Christian conscience of the South, but also its enlightened self-interest is unquestionably on the side of justice and manly dealing with the black man,” Cooper declared. Directing her argument toward captains of industry, she adopted the stiff upper lip of the Victorian man of letters, demanding firm control of recalcitrant workers and espousing feudal New South paternalism. Cooper offered a clear choice between what she regarded as loyal black Americans and unassimilated immigrant workers. Compared to the “self-constituted tribunal of ”recent arrivals,’” as she called unions, “the Negro” was far more trustworthy by virtue of “his instinct for law and order, his inborn respect for authority, his inaptitude for rioting and anarchy, his gentleness and cheerfulness as a laborer, and his deep-rooted faith in God.” Thus spoke Cooper, in a portent of Washington’s watershed 1895 Atlanta address, on behalf of the voiceless black masses.³⁵

Reflections on Race and the National Culture

Like most blacks educated into a system of Western values, Cooper was of mixed minds on the matter of race, reflecting her shifting, conflicting identities and her ambivalent pragmatism. Indeed, Cooper’s place at the vortex of several sites of social conflict—namely, class, gender, race, color, region, religion, and culture, to name those articulated in her essays—made it impossible for her to maintain a consistent ideological position, particularly on the tortured question of race. Perhaps as well as anyone else, Cooper demonstrates the impossibility of uplift ideology’s project of constructing a unified black subject that might guide the race along the path to progress. Although she could take comfort from romantic racialist stereotypes, Cooper rejected the idea of black cultural differences. She resented the white moderate’s belief that blacks preferred segregation, as well as “the intimation that there is a ”black voice,’ a black character, easy, irresponsible . . . a black ideal of art and a black barbaric taste in color.” To debunk this fallacy, along with the more lurid products of white imaginations, she cited the popular literary stereotype of the mulatto, whose drop of black blood irresistibly summoned forth the atavistic passions of a savage nature. But if whites employed such stereotypes toward racist ends, it seemed, blacks could appropriate them for their own purposes. Thus Cooper was willing elsewhere to exploit the “Uncle Tom” stereotype of black Christian forebearance and what she defined among blacks as a constitutional absence not only of lustful sexual desire, but also, of anger. Noting that most white writers, lacking Harriet Beecher Stowe’s refined “humility and love,” have been unable “to put themselves into the darker man’s place,” Cooper believed that African Americans served as Stowe’s muse for Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Indeed, she dated the emergence of American literary autonomy from the time the nation’s authors took notice of the innocence of blacks, “their . . . tropical luxuriance and naive abandon” and the “paroxysms of religious fervor into which this simple-minded, child-like race were thrown by the contemplation of Heaven and rest and freedom.” Anticipating the racial uplift project of refining Negro folklore into high art, Cooper held that America could have no true art that ignored black Americans. She wondered at the prospect of someone gathering folklore, “to digest and assimilate these original lispings of an unsophisticated people while they were yet close—so close—to nature and to nature’s God.”³⁶

If she dwelled excessively, and to contradictory effect, on images of humble, Christian blacks more worthy of pity than fear, Cooper also trenchantly analyzed the motives behind “A Voodoo Prophecy,” a poem by Maurice Thompson that appeared in the New York Independent in 1892. Cooper denounced the poem as a hypocritical white man’s fantasy of black male revenge through rape:

As you have done by me, so will I do . . .
Your snowy limbs, your blood’s patrician blue
Shall be
Tainted by me
And I will set my seal upon your face.

Cooper dismissed such inflammatory fears, assessing Thompson’s poem as a perverse fantasy, arising from the northern white’s lurid fascination with the white South’s practice of rape, and Thompson’s apparent desire, camouflaged by his use of a black male persona in the poem, to entertain vicarious fantasies of sexual domination and possession. To Cooper, the sexual terrorism practiced against black women in the South made this slander against black men all the more pernicious and hypocritical.³⁷

Given the existence of such dubious texts as Thompson’s poem in mainstream discourse, issues of sexuality, as we have seen, were a volatile topic among black writers. Insofar as patriarchal authority and home life signified to many middle-class blacks freedom from the unbearable realities of sexual domination of black women by whites, these were ardently sought goals of racial uplift. There were aspects of the enslaved past and the not fully emancipated present too painful to be remembered, and openly discussed. Such emphasis on family life as a racial panacea often treated the problem as a failure of blacks to conform to Victorian sexual morés, instead of as an outgrowth of ongoing, systematic repression. Thus, as lynching, a barbarous practice, was defended by whites as necessary to maintain racial purity by curbing so-called criminal black lust, and as black women were stigmatized as sexualized beings rather than the victims of criminal whites’ lust, so it seemed that uplift ideology required relegating black women to the protective custody of the home. The proverbial sanctity of white womanhood was intertwined with the moral devaluation of black women, all of which abetted the terroristic component of white supremacy, and the dispossession of blacks, practiced in the name of “civilization.” Statutes forbidding intermarriage in the South enabled white obsession with the so-called criminal lust and immorality of blacks when it was whites who remained free to be the aggressors. Until Ida B. Wells’s antilynching campaign began in 1892, and outside of the occasional militant black editor, advocates of uplift rarely alluded to, let alone analyzed, the hypocrisy behind the white South’s preoccupation with rape. Cooper’s demystification of Thompson’s poem departed from the Victorian reticence of many black commentators intent on maintaining an appearance of respectability by condemning black sexual improprieties, and by implication, exonerating white men—and some white women, according to Wells—of sexual aggression.³⁸

Yet Cooper’s identity as a southern writer also led her to contrast the hypocrisy of northern whites such as Thompson with what she at times wishfully perceived as the generosity and goodwill of southern authorities. Though admitting that “the South presents a solid phalanx of iron resistance to the Negro’s advancement, still as individuals to individuals they are warm-hearted and often tender.” Such interracial cooperation sought friends wherever they might be found, reducing race conflicts to the realm of harmonious interpersonal relations and the hope that black and white elites might find some common ground. In this instance, Cooper’s overture was a variation on paternalistic whites’ theme that considered blacks “like one of the family.” Citing the folly of southern whites’ fears of “Negro political domination” and the “horror of being lost as a race in this virile and vigorous black race,” Cooper dismissed the prospect of black supremacy given that “the usual safeguards of democracy are in the hands of intelligence and wealth in the South as elsewhere.” Cooper believed southern benevolence would ensure that “she [the South] will find herself in possession of the most tractable laborer, the most faithful and reliable henchman, the most invaluable co-operator and friendly vassal of which this or any country can boast.”³⁹

Cooper’s final chapter, entitled “The Gain from a Belief,” was an impassioned defense of religious faith against “lofty, unimpassioned agnosticism.” Against agnosticism, Cooper argued for an evangelical crusade of social reform and uplift. She refused to accept the “eternal silence” of a Godless universe. Through the agnosticism of such men as the charismatic reformer Robert Ingersoll, “God and Love are shut out,” eliminating all moral basis for social reform and activism. Against skepticism Cooper asserted “just this one truth:—The great, the fundamental need of any nation, any race, is for heroism, devotion, sacrifice” founded on religious faith, “particularly urgent in a race at almost the embryonic stage of character-building.” Noting that at such times, “most of all, do men need to be anchored to what they feel to be eternal verities,” Cooper asserted the pragmatism of religious faith for racial uplift. “Do you not believe that the God of history often chooses the weak things of earth to confound the mighty, and that the Negro race in America has a veritable destiny in his eternal purposes,” Cooper asked as she exhorted both elite blacks and whites to “let go your purse-strings and begin to live your creed.” Cooper’s declaration of boundless, messianic faith undoubtedly had its roots in bodily oppression and worldly despair. Her vision resembled, for all her criticism of imperialism, the rhetoric of the civilizing mission: “There are nations still in darkness to which we owe a light. The world is to be moved one generation forward—whether by us, by blind force, by fate, or by God! If thou believest, all things are possible; and as thou believest, so be it unto thee.”⁴⁰

The possibility of the “eternal silence” of a godless universe meant to Cooper that the nameless, numberless crimes against black women and men, consigned to silence and invisibility before the bar of an unjust and complicit legal system, would forever remain silent, and unredressed. Those often unmentionable horrors—sins, really, to Cooper—that black women and men had endured in the South that had to be forgotten in the name of uplift, swallowed along with the unrighteous rage they provoked, cruelties that only God could know and reconcile—these horrors would have for Cooper no hope for redress and redemption if religious faith were meaningless. Cooper’s piety lent meaning and moral strength, despite the decline in religious and ministerial authority she was witnessing. It was perhaps only through such a vehement declaration of spirituality that Cooper could hope to resolve all the contradictions of her experience, and reclaim the virtue and moral authority that American institutions withheld from black men and women. To Cooper, racial purity, uplift, and religious faith joined in a desperate prayer to divine will for deliverance, somewhat analogous to her appeal for the goodwill and material assistance of paternalistic New South industrialists.

During a period of violent labor confrontations, economic depression, and escalating racial segregation and harassment, Cooper’s vision of social reform was personified by Christ’s chaste love that must have represented to her the triumph over the patriarchal aggression to which she owed her very existence. The difficulties she faced as a southern black woman and intellectual to secure for herself the status of middle-class womanhood led her at times to adopt the unsympathetic stance of class privilege she had criticized elsewhere in A Voice from the South. Animated by service ideals, Cooper based her appeal for authority on the derogation of others. Uplift’s strategy of class differentiation may have provided blacks like Cooper with some defense against racism, but in pursuing its strategy to its utmost, speaking for the black masses as compliant labor, Cooper risked muting the critical voice she herself raised to break the silence.⁴¹