Passing opens with its mixed-race first-person narrator, Irene Redfield, receiving a letter from a former acquaintance (although others considered them friends), Clare Kendry, which prompts her to recall an incident that occurred sometime during a visit to Chicago. On a hot summer day Irene had sought refuge from the heat in the rooftop tearoom of the exclusive Drayton Hotel, where she unexpectedly encountered Clare, a mixed-race woman who, unlike Irene, “passes” as white. It had been years since Irene had last seen Clare, who disappeared when her father died and she went to live with her two paternal white aunts. Now she stood before her again—and had caught her “passing” too. Several days later, and with an equal measure of fascination and misgiving, Irene joined Clare and her mixed-race friend, Gertrude Martin, who also passes as white, once again for tea. As their afternoon was coming to its end, Clare’s white husband, John (Jack) Bellew, arrived, and the conversation took a decidedly uncomfortable turn when, unaware of the women’s mixed-race heritage, he voiced some offensive racist opinions with all the assurance of superiority that his whiteness gave him and silenced the women. From this uncomfortable remembrance Nella Larsen fashions her equally disturbing narrative of race and identity.
When the novel’s contemporary plot resumes, Larsen grounds Irene in her social world. Married to an African American physician, Brian Redfield, and the mother of two young sons, she lives in Harlem, New York, and is an active member of its African American community, including the Negro Welfare League (NWL). One day, Clare appears at Irene’s door, concerned that she had not received a reply to her letter. During their conversation, Clare confesses to Irene that she wishes to participate in the black community, and Irene reminds her of what she risks should her husband discover the truth of her identity. Clare, however, will not be deterred from her intention and, after attending the NWL dance, begins spending much of her time at the Redfield apartment. Her frequent presence there eventually arouses Irene’s suspicion that Clare and Brian, who is dissatisfied with his comfortable life and dreams of meaningful work in South America, are engaged in an affair.
One day, during a shopping trip with her friend Felise Freeland, who is visibly black, Irene encounters Jack Bellew. Clearly aware now of Irene’s race, he also, by implication, realizes that the woman he calls in jest “Nig” is, like Irene, mixed race and that he has been deceived in his marriage. Irene considers whether to warn Clare about the encounter but decides against it. Later, at a party hosted by Felise on the top floor of her apartment building, Bellew crashes the gathering to accuse Clare of being a “damned dirty nigger!” Irene rushes to Clare, who sits at an open window, and the beautiful woman, who has alternately frustrated and fascinated Irene, falls to her death. Was that death an accident? Did Clare commit suicide? Or did Irene murder her? Larsen’s ambiguous ending leaves her readers with nothing more than their speculations, rather like the enigma of her racial identity.
Harlem was in vogue during the 1920s. The raucous jazz tunes that escaped from the doors of New York’s northern suburb’s clubs and cabarets had given birth to an era, the Jazz Age, and helped make fashionable all things African American for a rising black middle class and a white elite in pursuit of the new. A “New Negro Movement,” as it was known at the time, taking its name from the title of an influential anthology of African American literature and thought published in 1925 by the philosopher and writer Alain Locke, was challenging pervading stereotypes of African Americans and fostering the aspirations and achievements of a new generation of writers and thinkers, artists and musicians of color. For nearly two decades, but especially in the 1920s, the Harlem Renaissance, as the cultural movement eventually became known, infused new life into an African American community in process of change. Among its artifacts is Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing, the tale of two childhood friends, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, reunited in adulthood that captures the era’s spirit even as it exposes the gender, class, and racial issues that change could never quite erase, for like the decade of which it was part, the Harlem Renaissance was itself filled with contradictions.
The Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the major cities of the industrial North during the early twentieth century was in part a catalyst for the Harlem Renaissance. Fleeing the Jim Crow South of segregation, persecution, and limited opportunity, more than five million African Americans settled in Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland, and New York City and throughout the West and Midwest, hoping to escape discrimination, violence, and hatred; to secure rights that had been denied them in the South, including the right to vote; and to gain access to jobs and educational opportunities that would improve their and their families’ lives. Creating communities and establishing churches, schools, newspapers, and small businesses, many African Americans thrived and increasingly enjoyed middle-class prosperity. They also formed organizations, most notably the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and the National Urban League in 1910, to advocate for full political and social integration into the nation’s life. By the 1920s, African Americans in New York City, where for more than a decade black entrepreneurs had established their businesses and black churches had been founded on a large block along the 135th Street (where Nella Larsen would work at a branch of the New York Public Library), were primed for the full flowering of their cultural and intellectual life that was the Harlem Renaissance.
For African American writers, the Harlem Renaissance provided an opportunity to develop authentic voices and to enlarge the scope of their subject matter and concerns. Freed from the need to write slave narratives that could be used by abolitionists in support of their cause as well as tales of racial uplift that had provided aspirational models following Reconstruction, a new generation of writers who had never experienced slavery but had known racial discrimination, including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, and Nella Larsen, began to write about black middle-class experience and the hopes and dreams, doubts and fears, joys and triumphs shared by blacks and whites that spoke to a common humanity. Zora Neale Hurston’s 1933 short story “The Gilded-Six Bits,” for example, is a tale of marriage tested by infidelity, a color-blind subject, and Jessie Redmon Fauset’s 1928’s Plum-Bun, like Larsen’s Passing, a novel about racial identity, adopts the traditional form of the bildungsroman, or novel of development, to structure the story of its protagonist Angela Murray. Larsen’s characters, moreover, like Fauset’s, are educated members of the black middle class. Irene’s husband, for instance, is a physician, and they mingle comfortably with Harlem’s social and intellectual elite. Whatever their subject, whatever their approach, the writers of the Harlem Renaissance focused on race—racial identity, racial consciousness, racial discrimination—in all its many forms and complexity to convey the reality of African American life.
Despite their talent, or perhaps because they were talented (the difference in perspective is telling), many writers of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as many artists and musicians, owed much of their success to white patronage, one of the ironies of the movement. Harlem’s jazz musicians, for instance, performed for white audiences in the city’s clubs and cabarets. Similarly, African American writers depended at least in part on a white elite for their success. Indeed, in March 1924, the National Urban League sponsored a dinner attended by a group of African American writers and the white publishers, editors, and critics who could give their work the serious consideration that it deserved in an effort to pursue what the historian David Levering Lewis has called “civil rights by copyright” (xvi). Moreover, writers such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nella Larsen accepted the patronage of wealthy white women such as Charlotte Osgood Mason, who were known colloquially as “Miss Annes,” and men such as the writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten.
As the term “Miss Anne,” with its mixture of respect and submission, implies, the relationship between black artists and white patrons was complicated. Black artists needed and were grateful for the support, both moral but especially financial, that their white patrons provided, but it left them at the same time indebted to a person who evoked the historical slave master. Their white patrons, moreover, no matter how sympathetic to issues of race or appreciative of African American culture, were at some level condescending to people who were perceived as inferior to them. Among the goals of the New Negro Movement were to dismantle stereotypes about African Americans and advocate for equality by demonstrating that they were intelligent and capable people who were not inferior to whites. Attaining those goals, the patronage system suggested, would not be easily achieved. Indeed, the system perpetuated to some extent the stereotypes to which it was a response.
The Harlem Renaissance did not end racial inequality. In fact, racially motivated violence continued throughout the era. Nevertheless, this flourishing of African American arts introduced new voices and new forms and established a pathway to integration into the nation’s cultural heritage. It also raised important issues about race and racial identity for both blacks and whites. Many African American writers would explore them in their poetry, fiction, and drama, among them Nella Larsen in her provocative novel Passing.
When Nella Larsen died on March 30, 1964, at the age of seventy-two, few would have suspected that one of the most significant female voices of the Harlem Renaissance had just been silenced. Many assumed that she had died years before. After publishing two well-received novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), and a few short stories during the Jazz Age, however, the novelist had slipped silently into literary obscurity, working primarily as a nurse in New York City until her death. In the 1970s, however, as a new generation of scholars sought to rescue the literary works of women and writers of color, Larsen’s novels were rediscovered and reissued for a new audience interested now in the issues of gender, racial, and class identity that are central to her fiction. They were central to her life as well and perhaps account for her obscurity in death.
Born in Chicago, Illinois, on April 13, 1891, Nellie Walker was the child of mixed-race parents. Her father, Peter Walker, was an Afro-Caribbean immigrant from the Danish West Indies who quickly disappeared from her life; her mother, Marie Hansen, a Danish immigrant, was a seamstress and domestic worker who married a fellow Danish immigrant, Peter Larsen, several years later. Nellie, a mixed-race child, soon had a white half-sister and assumed her stepfather’s surname. From her beginnings, in other words, race complicated Larsen’s identity. Indeed, she experimented with different versions of her name—Nellye Larson, Nellie Larsen—before settling finally on Nella Larsen.
Educated with her half-sister at a private school in Chicago, Larsen was a sensitive and lonely child who seems to have been aware of her liminal status as neither white nor black and to have experienced racial prejudice in her white immigrant Chicago neighborhood. Her stepfather, according to one biographer, “viewed her as an embarrassment” (Brown-Guillory 696), and she limited her contact with her family, according to another biographer, because, she said, “It might make it awkward for them, particularly my half-sister” (Davis, “Nella Larsen” 183). As a child, she lived for several years with maternal relatives in Denmark, and then in 1907, Larsen’s parents enrolled her at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, an historically black institution, where she studied science for a year. She never returned home. Instead, she lived again in Denmark, where she attended classes at the University of Copenhagen. In 1912, Larsen began training as a nurse at Lincoln Hospital Nursing School in New York City. Completing her course, she accepted a position in 1915 as head nurse at the John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital and Nurse Training School of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where she experienced Booker T. Washington’s model of education as well as the Jim Crow South. Within a year, the disillusioned young woman had returned to New York, where she worked as a nurse first at Lincoln Hospital and then for the city’s Bureau of Public Health, serving during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. Yet it seemed as if she would never find her place in the world.
Nella Larsen (1891–1964) receives a Harmon Foundation Award for her 1928 novel Quicksand. The Harmon Awards were created in 1926 to recognize “Distinguished Achievement among Negroes” and testify to the patronage of a white elite in the Harlem Renaissance. (Bettmann/Corbis)
Larsen’s status and identity changed once again in 1919 when she married a prominent physicist, Elmer Imes, the second African American to earn a doctorate in physics. Moving from Jersey City, New Jersey, to Harlem in the 1920s, the couple quickly established themselves among Harlem’s black professional class, counting among their acquaintance W. E. B. Du Bois, the writer James Weldon Johnson, and other leaders of the NAACP. Larsen, nevertheless, never felt entirely comfortable in this world. The circumstances of her birth, her mixed-race heritage, her lack of a college degree, all of which were important to a rising middle-class black culture that valued family and school ties, made Larsen aware of her peripheral status. Here was another world in which she did not quite belong.
Larsen’s interest in the arts, however, helped secure her place in the Negro Awakening or the New Negro Movement, which eventually came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. Volunteering as a librarian in 1921, Larsen helped prepare the first Negro art exhibit at the New York Public Library and then, in 1923, became the first African American woman to earn certification from the New York Public Library School, sponsored by Columbia University. Eager to continue participating in the lively Negro arts culture that was flourishing in the city’s northern suburb, Larsen sought and received a transfer to the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library, where she worked as a children’s librarian until late 1925, when she took a sabbatical and began to write her first novel.
Shortly after her marriage, Larsen had in fact begun to pursue an interest in writing, publishing her first short stories in 1920 and two articles about Danish games in the Brownies’ Book, a children’s magazine edited by Jessie Redmon Fauset, one of the most influential African American women writers of the era. Encouraged by the support of important figures in Harlem’s interracial literary and arts community, including Fauset and the photographer Carl Van Vechten, Larsen found an appreciative audience for her first novel, the largely autobiographical Quicksand (1928), which chronicles the unsuccessful efforts of its mixed-race protagonist Helga Crane to find love and fulfillment and a place where she can belong. Her second novel, Passing (1929), the tale of two mixed-race friends who follow different paths to identity, received equally strong reviews.
Larsen’s literary career ended, however, in 1930, when on the publication of her short story “Sanctuary” the writer was accused of plagiarizing Sheila Kaye-Smith’s short story “Mrs. Adis,” which had been first published in the United Kingdom in 1919. While the charges were never proved and did not prevent Larsen from becoming the first African American woman writer to be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, she never published again. She used her fellowship to travel to Europe for several years, spending time in Mallorca and Paris, where she worked on a third novel, the manuscript of which has never surfaced. Divorced from her husband in 1933, Larsen returned to New York, where, struggling with depression, she lived on alimony until Imes’s death in 1942. She then returned to nursing, living quietly in her Brooklyn apartment in the obscurity that would be penetrated only on her death in 1964.
Quicksand and Passing are, of course, Larsen’s legacy. The issues of race, class, and gender that they examine certainly defined the writer’s life and continue to resonate with contemporary readers, thereby guaranteeing that she will not be forgotten. Life on the color line may have been fraught, but Nella Larsen made something worthy and lasting of it.
Questions of race and racial identity are without doubt central to Nella Larsen’s novel Passing. Early in the novel, in fact, Brian and Irene Redfield speculate about the reasons that African Americans who choose to pass as white inevitably and no matter the cost seek to reestablish links with the culture that shaped their identity. Neither can provide an answer, and Brian actually confesses, “If I knew [why], I’d know what race is” (185). Brian’s confession echoes the sentiment in the Countée Cullen poem “Heritage” that provides the epigraph to Larsen’s novel: “One three centuries removed/ From the scenes his father loved,/ Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,/ What is Africa to me?” In a novel in which the central characters can pass as white, what is it that makes them black? Larsen does not provide an answer to the question. She offers instead a drama of ambiguity that, like its unresolved and unsettling ending, disrupts the certainties on which constructions of race have been based but that also confirms that race matters. It mattered during the Jazz Age, and it matters still in a multicultural, multiracial nation where racial lines are increasingly blurred but the color line persists.
Against the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance, when all things African American were suddenly fashionable, the world of Larsen’s novel is rife with race consciousness, and Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield embody its complexities. Clare, for instance, who is married to a white man unaware of her mixed-race heritage, has passed seamlessly into white society. “What difference would it make if, after all these years,” she teases her racist husband, “you were to find out that I was one or two percent coloured?” (171). (Her husband, by the way, asserts absolutely, and ironically, that there “never have been and never will be” [171] a person of color in his family.) Obviously aware of the “one drop” rule on which the biological basis of race had been formulated, Clare chooses to ignore a definition of self imposed by others because it prevents her from achieving her desires. Based on a stock character in African American literature, the tragic mulatta, the mixed-raced daughter of a white slaveholder and his black slave, Clare should struggle with her identity, unable to find her place in either black or white society, and suffer the consequences of self-loathing and rejection, such as alcoholism, depression, and promiscuity, but she does not. Indeed, she seems relatively untroubled by her status, for what she seeks is to pass between both societies, asserting her right to self-definition and effectively subverting racial classifications. Her death clearly calls into question such possibilities.
For her part, Irene Redfield, capable of passing but fully invested in her racial heritage, is firmly entrenched in the black middle class, signified by her membership in the Negro Welfare League and the round of teas and dances that fill her social calendar. Eager to uplift the race, she and her fellow club members work tirelessly to promote the achievements of African Americans and thereby affirm a sense of racial identity and belonging that had been virtually erased by slavery, a laudable goal. Larsen’s treatment of the means of achieving it, however, those teas and dances attended by the black bourgeoisie and liberal white intellectuals and philanthropists, satirizes the effort and suggests that Irene’s race pride is a self-deception. Deeply anxious about her security, Irene strives to be the perfect lady, aware of the rigid standards to which she must conform if she wishes to maintain her status within her community. Her philanthropy is thus a carefully choreographed performance for the black middle class and, perhaps more to the point, for the white patrons of these events, who are more than a little patronizing in their presumption of superiority. Despite her awareness of Hugh Wentworth’s rather “contemptuous” attitude toward “everything and everybody,” for instance, Irene is incapable of concealing from Clare her pride in her friendship with the celebrated writer or of leaping quickly to his defense at Clare’s criticism of him (198), responses that undermine Irene’s philanthropic motives and race pride. By exposing Irene’s conventionality, selfishness, and hypocrisy, Larsen acknowledges yet another aspect of race, that blacks have effectively internalized their inferiority in a society where whiteness sets the standard.
Race, as the examples of Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry reveal, is contested ground and nearly impossible to define. Is it biological? Is it based on geographic origin? Is it socially determined, a matter of shared habits and customs and beliefs? The answer remains elusive and fraught with disagreement. Even in the United States, where laws pertaining to race have long implied a definition of the term, the vocabulary by which dark-skinned people have been and continue to be identified by others as well as themselves, from offensive racial slurs to relatively neutral (but often political) words such as “Negro,” “colored,” “black,” and “African American,” demonstrates that notions about race and the characteristics on which it is based are subject to historical, cultural, and political change.
Yet however resistant to definition, race has the power to define and confine the self. While Clare and Irene might have been able to pass from one side of the color line to the other, for example, the line still existed, and discovery had consequences. Moreover, they would always have been considered “colored” in a society dominated by whites and would thus have negotiated a diminished world, for their color would have made them inferior. It would have determined their opportunities and set limits on their dreams. In a nation that privileges self-definition and invites self-reinvention, such boundaries and limitations are clearly ironic, as Larsen’s use of passing as a metaphor intends. They are also tragic, a source of so much wasted potential and self-hatred (or at least self-deception). To Countée Cullen’s query, “What is Africa to me?” Nella Larsen, it seems, would have answered, “Everything.” In a multiracial, multicultural nation, where citizens must no longer tick one of three or four boxes on a census form, one of which is “Other,” to signify their race and an African American president governs from the White House, such an answer resonates still and may account for Passing’s continued relevance in the United States. During the Harlem Renaissance, that first full flowering of African American culture, race mattered. Nearly a hundred years later, in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, of federally mandated interaction between races and equal opportunity for all, race still matters.
In Chapter Two of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing, Irene Redfield transgresses the color line. On a hot, humid summer day in Chicago, the attractive woman, one of the novel’s two central characters, seeks relief from the stifling heat in the rooftop tearoom of the city’s elite Drayton Hotel. Nobody, of course, stops the fashionably dressed woman from taking a seat and ordering refreshments, but somebody certainly would have done had he known that Irene was African American. Nothing about her appearance or demeanor, however, betrays her racial heritage, the fact that she is a mixed-race woman, and Irene, on this occasion, is grateful that she is able to pass as white and thus enjoy privileges that would be denied her if her skin were darker.
Harlem may have been in vogue during the Jazz Age, but as this scene from as well as the title of Larsen’s novel implies, the color line, that invisible barrier that separated (and continues to separate) blacks from whites for centuries, existed still during the 1920s. In the half-century since the Civil War had secured the emancipation of slaves in the nation’s Southern states, African Americans remained second-class citizens throughout the country, their status determined by their race. One drop of African blood defined their racial identity, no matter the color of their skin, and that one drop of blood placed each person on one side or the other of the color line, effectively determining the rights and privileges that everyone was expected to accept as his or her own. Individuals who sought to cross the color line by “passing” as a member of another racial group disrupted the systems on which American society had been ordered and contributed to the considerable anxiety about shifting racial boundaries that developed in the 1920s as a consequence of increased immigration from areas outside northern Europe and the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North. Nella Larsen’s Passing not only captured that anxiety but also evoked the race and class issues that fueled it and thus reveals the contradictions of the era.
“The problem of the Twentieth Century,” asserted the African American scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), “is the problem of the color line.” The historical and cultural contexts of Nella Larsen’s Passing affirm this assertion. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for instance, gave rise to a popular and an influential eugenics movement in the United States. A social philosophy supported by now largely discredited scientific studies and research into genetic disorders, especially mental conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression, eugenics is the application of selective breeding for the improvement of human hereditary qualities. Through selective breeding, in other words, humans, eugenicists believed, could direct their own evolution. Because the practice of eugenics promised to eliminate inferior genes, the philosophy was embraced by many leaders of the Progressive Era, including the birth control activist Margaret Sanger. In addition, various corporate foundations, including the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Harriman railroad fortune, and the Kellogg fortune, funded the eugenics movement’s activities and initiatives. In 1906, the American Breeder’s Association, the first eugenics body in the United States, was established under the direction of the biologist Charles B. Davenport to “investigate and report on heredity in the human race, and emphasize the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood” (Chase 114). Among its members were the inventor Alexander Graham Bell and the botanist Luther Burbank. In 1911, Davenport founded the Eugenics Record Office, which collected family pedigrees and supported genetic research. By the late 1920s, eugenics was included in the curriculum of many high schools and leading universities, including Harvard, Colombia, Cornell, and Brown, effectively legitimizing the movement and the science on which it was based.
One of a staff of forty physicians and nurses begins the task of examining some of the 983 children between the ages of two months and five years who have been entered in a “Better Babies” Contest. Like the “Fitter Families” contests, the “Better Babies” contests, based on the “science” of eugenics popular in the Jazz Age, were intended to identify the finest specimens of children based on an “objective” set of standards. (Underwood & Underwood/Corbis)
Unifying the eugenics philosophy was the view that some people were more “fit” than others and that the fittest should be encouraged to procreate while the “unfit” should be discouraged and even prevented from bearing children. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this view also gained acceptance among the general public at least in part because it came to be linked to progressive belief in the improvement of society, especially through science. In 1908, for instance, the Louisiana State Fair launched the first “Scientific Baby Contest,” a competition to find the ideal child based on health and intelligence standards. By 1913, when the Women’s Home Companion magazine began to cosponsor these “Better Babies Contests,” they rivaled in popularity the produce and livestock competitions at as many as forty state fairs. Proud mothers submitted their children for inspection by doctors and nurses in hopes that their child would be determined to possess “a sound mind in a sound body,” as the winners’ certificate proclaimed. In 1920, at the Kansas State Free Fair, “Better Babies Contests” expanded to include “Fitter Families Contests.” Competitors submitted an “Abridged Record of Family Traits” and then underwent physical and psychological testing by medical doctors. Each family received a letter grade of eugenic health. The “Grade A Individuals” received a silver trophy. All contestants with a grade of B+ or higher took home a coveted bronze medal bearing the inscription “Yea, I have a goodly heritage” (eugenicsarchive.org). By linking health to scientific measurement, these competitions thus helped popularize eugenics philosophy and paved the way for legislative reforms aimed at the problem of the “unfit.”
Racial passing, the subject of Nella Larsen’s novel, contributed to this anxiety because the practice of crossing the color line to live as a member of another race disrupted the stereotypes of “fit” and “unfit” and undermined the social structures built on them. While nobody could know for certain the prevalence of the practice, headlines like that published in 1928 by the New York World, “Crossing the Color Line: Social and Economic Ambitions Lead Negroes to ‘Pass’ at Rate of 5,000 a Year to White Fold,” would have alarmed a white majority whose superiority was based on a biological construction of race. That majority would also have been both appalled and fascinated by a sensational trial, known as the Rhinelander Case, that highlighted and confirmed some of their worst fears about the practice. The case, to which Larsen refers late in her novel, when Irene speculates about Clare’s fate should her racist white husband discover her mixed-race status, “What if Bellew should divorce Clare? Could he?” There was the Rhinelander case” (228), clearly provides a context for her Jazz Age tale.
On October 14, 1924, after a difficult three-year courtship, Alice Beatrice Jones and Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander married despite his family’s disapproval. He, after all, was the son of a prominent New York family whose name appeared on the Social Register alongside the Vanderbilts and the Astors and heir to a $100 million fortune. She, in contrast, was the daughter of working-class English immigrants and employed as a domestic. Scandal about the marriage arose a month later when the New Rochelle Standard Star published a story under the headline “Rhinelanders’ Son Marries Daughter of a Colored Man.” What had formerly been a marriage of disparate class had suddenly become a case of miscegenation, and all the nation was interested. While New York law did not ban interracial marriage, as twenty-eight states did in the 1920s, it was socially prohibited throughout the nation. Alice’s name, for instance, had been included in the Social Register after her elopement with Leonard, but it was quickly deleted after the allegations of her mixed-race heritage surfaced. Moreover, Leonard’s father understood what his son, who clearly loved Alice, apparently did, or perhaps cared, not to acknowledge, that no respectable white woman of the Rhinelanders’ class would marry Leonard unless he secured an annulment, which would have rendered the marriage null and void, as if it had never happened. Two weeks after the revelations that Alice’s father descended from a West Indian, Leonard, capitulating to family pressure, filed for an annulment of the marriage, alleging, among other charges, that Alice had deceived him about her race. One year later, in November 1925, the case of Rhinelander vs. Rhinelander produced headlines that testified to the nation’s racial anxieties.
In prosecuting Leonard’s case, his lawyer argued that Alice, who was four years older than her husband, had deliberately deceived a shy, awkward young man who at the time of their meeting was being treated at the Orchard School, an inpatient clinic, for various nervous conditions, including stammering. Alice, moreover, had used sex, he argued, reading from their love letters, which provided irrefutable evidence of sexual intimacy, to coerce Leonard, “slave” to his affection for her, into marriage. Alice, at the urging of her husband, had initially denied her mixed-race heritage, the only hope that she and Leonard might socially preserve their marriage, but at trial, she surprised both her husband and his lawyers by abandoning her claim of whiteness to maintain that Leonard had known and accepted the truth of her racial identity. The letters that were intended to portray her as a predatory and licentious black woman suddenly provided evidence to support Alice’s honesty. Given their premarital intimacy, Leonard, after all, who had seen her naked body, would have had to know that at least one drop of non-white blood flowed through her veins, and that drop, so far as society was concerned, determined her racial identity.
As the trial progressed, both sides introduced a variety of sensational evidence to support their claims. In addition to the love letters, which women were excluded from hearing to protect their sensibilities, the entertainer Al Jolson, famous as a blackface performer of jazz and blues songs, was called to corroborate Alice’s claim that she had once met him, which he denied. Most sensational of all, however, Alice’s lawyer asked his client to disrobe to allow an all-white, all-male, all-married jury as well as her husband to inspect her skin color. The truth written on her body, Alice’s attorney, who had also called into question Leonard’s honesty and criticized his exploitation as a privileged white gentleman of a working-class black woman, rested his case, and the jury began its deliberations. On December 5, 1925, it returned a verdict in favor of Alice. In 1929, Leonard and Alice Rhinelander divorced. Neither married again, and their sensational case slipped into obscurity. In the mid-1920s, however, the scandal as well as the jury’s verdict had challenged the nation to consider race and racial identity and to formulate an answer to a question that Leonard’s attorney had put to the jury in his summation: “Can the Ethiopian change his skin?”
Larsen’s novel issues that same challenge to both its black and white readers in its treatment of what is known as “the talented tenth.” A term that originated among Northern white liberals in 1896, the “talented tenth” refers to the African American leadership class in the early twentieth century and is today associated chiefly with an influential essay of the same phrase by W. E. B. Du Bois in which he challenged the views of another African American leader, Booker T. Washington, in his Atlanta Exposition Speech of 1895. In that speech, Washington advocated mutual cooperation between the races and a technical education for blacks that would prepare them for useful contributions to the nation’s, and their own, prosperity. In “The Talented Tenth,” in contrast, Du Bois, who favored a classical education of the sort that he had received at Fisk and Harvard universities, argued, “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is a problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races” (33). Unabashedly elitist, the notion of the Talented Tenth might have been endorsed by proponents of the eugenics movement, implying, as it does, that some people are more fit than others, yet its assertions of African American “fitness” likely would have affronted those same proponents. Larsen’s novel, with its black middle-class characters, would also have done so.
W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), African American writer and intellectual, was considered one of the midwives of the Harlem Renaissance and the father of pan-Africanism. (Library of Congress)
Passing’s social world is distinctly upscale. Irene Redfield, the novel’s protagonist, is married to a physician who practices in Manhattan and the mother of two school-age sons who, in the novel’s opening scene, are away at summer camp. A fashionable woman who knows the difference between a dress designed by Worth or Lanvin (219) and has traveled in Europe, she fills her days flitting from social engagement to social engagement, from teas to bridge parties to dances, where she mingles not only with an African American elite but also with white philanthropists and liberals, such as Hugh Wentworth (as well as race tourists drawn to her Harlem home by the thrill of the exotic). A member of the Negro Welfare League, she also works tirelessly to improve the lives of the less fortunate, prompting her dissatisfied husband to taunt about her earnestness, “Uplifting the brother’s no easy job” (186). The Redfields’ lifestyle places them firmly within the era’s thriving black middle class and thus provides evidence of the African American’s ability to surmount class barriers that effectively disrupts racial stereotypes. Yet because their lifestyle is also anchored in a distinctly white bourgeois ethos, it reinforces the complexities of racial identity signified in the act of passing. In effect, the novel simultaneously undermines and reinforces the eugenicists’ belief that whites are superior to people of color.
While the reasons for which every individual chooses to pass as a member of another race are always personal, Larsen suggests that they are chiefly social and economic, rooted in the desire to enjoy the privileges of superiority and to avoid the persecution and discrimination experienced by those of the lower classes. Irene, for example, is proud of her racial heritage. At one point, in fact, observing her husband dancing with her friend Clare Kendry, she is pleased “that Clare was having the opportunity to discover that some coloured men were superior to some white men” (204). Nevertheless, Irene, who could pass as white but chooses not to do so, cannot on occasion resist the temptation to pass, especially when passing secures an advantage. Had she not been passing, after all, she could not have sheltered from Chicago’s summer heat in the Drayton Hotel’s tearoom.
Clare’s decision to pass as a white woman is also based on social and economic advantage. Aware early of her mixed-race identity, a teenage Clare had been raised to know her place as a “daughter of the indiscreet Ham” (159) by her white father’s “good Christian” aunts following his death in a bar fight. Expected to earn her keep doing housework and the laundry, the sixteen-year-old was soon chafing against this “hard life.” “Determined to get away, to be a person and not a charity or a problem” (159), she was also aware of advantages available to whites. Soon it was rumored about school that she had been seen dining with whites at a fashionable hotel and driving with a white man in a chauffeur-driven Packard in Lincoln Park. When John “Jack” Bellew returns to the city from South America with “untold gold” (159), Clare seizes the opportunity to abandon her “coloured” heritage and marries him on her eighteenth birthday. As she tells Irene, “Money’s awfully nice to have. In fact, all things considered, … it’s even worth the price” (160). As Irene soon discovers, that price includes marriage to an unredeemed racist who calls his wife “Nig” (171) because her skin is a tawny white. To live the life she wants, Clare is clearly willing to make any sacrifice.
Despite their differing views on passing, both women share the desire to enjoy the social and economic benefits of white society. Clare has attained them by passing. Irene, however, enjoys them as a member of a black elite modeled on a distinctly white ethos. Her world of teas and dances and charity functions is no different from the white elites’ whose names and photos appeared on the society pages of newspapers and whose lives were chronicled in the gossip magazines that gained popularity in the Jazz Age. Nor is her deep concern for respectability. She assures herself, for example, that she is not “a snob” who “cared greatly for the petty restrictions and distinctions with which what called itself Negro society chose to hedge itself about” (157), but Irene is in fact deceiving herself. Indeed, she has “a natural and deeply rooted aversion to the kind of front-page notoriety that Clare Kendry’s presence in [the Michigan summer resort of] Idlewild, as her guest, would expose her to.” She is a conventional woman who fears the collapse of her secure life among the black elite and thus distrusts anything that she perceives as “menaces” (190) to it, including her husband’s restless longing to practice medicine in Brazil and Clare’s dangerous insistence on reconnecting to her race.
Everything about Irene’s world, from the “fat-bellied German coffee- pot” (184) from which she pours the morning coffee prepared by her housemaid Zulena to her plan to send her son for a European education (19), from her tasteful wardrobe to her carefully chosen circle of friends, replicates upper middle-class white society and its bourgeois ethos, which may account at least in part for her insecurities. Just as passing reinforced notions of white superiority, so, too, did the creation of a black elite that reproduced the white paradigm, so any deviation from that paradigm, any social faux pas, would constitute a fall from grace, not only in the black community but also in the white. For a woman like Irene, who has defined herself as a superior black woman within a community of the “talented tenth,” such a fall would be intolerable.
A candid conversation between Irene and Hugh Wentworth at the Negro Welfare League dance makes clear that Larsen was acutely aware of the complex and contradictory status of the black elite during the Jazz Age. Surveying the guests circulating about the venue, Irene and Hugh remark first on its diversity, but then, having observed Clare dancing with a handsome black man, Hugh seizes on the topic of the popularity of “gentlemen of colour,” complaining a bit tongue-in-cheek but not without an edge of pique that they have displaced “a mere Nordic” like him from his accustomed position. Even his wife Bianca, he notes, has spent the night “being twirled about by some Ethiopian” (205). In response, Irene quickly corrects Hugh’s assumptions about the reason for black popularity, locating it not in superiority, not in “patronizing kindness” (205), not in “predatory sexuality” (206), but in the exotic. It springs, she tells him, from an “emotional excitement; … the sort of thing you feel in the presence of something strange and even, perhaps, a bit repugnant to you” (205). Otherness, the strange and exotic, prompts curiosity, Irene explains, but as her use of the word “repugnant” implies, it does not confer equality. She reinforces her point when the topic of conversation moves on to passing. Noting that the practice primarily involves blacks who pass as white, Irene responds to Hugh’s statement that he had never considered the point with a remark that exposes the unspoken assumptions about race in the United States: “No, you wouldn’t. Why should you?” (206). As a wealthy white man, the most privileged of all classes, Hugh would never have contemplated passing as a black man, for in doing so, he would have devalued himself. Although nothing about his talents and skills, his intelligence and achievements, or even his appearance would have been different, to identify himself and pass as a black man would have changed entirely the basis on which society judged him, and he would have been found inferior. The implications of Hugh’s obliviousness to this truth unify the various historical and cultural contexts of Nella Larsen’s Jazz Age novel. In a country based on a white paradigm and where color mattered, only a man of Hugh’s race and class could so easily have assumed his superiority, but then science, after all, as well as the legal system, affirmed his status. Moreover, the African American middle class, modeled as it was on a white bourgeois ethos, conceded it.
In the midst of the Harlem Renaissance, that first full flowering of African American culture, “when hundreds of white people of Hugh Wentworth’s type” (198) trekked north for an experience of otherness, Larsen exposed the reality of the color line, even for its “Talented Tenth.” Indeed, when Irene’s husband Brian observes, “Pretty soon the coloured people won’t be allowed in [to Harlem events] at all, or will have to sit in Jim Crowed sections” (198), she captured its ironies as well.
The Harlem Renaissance, the first full flowering of African American culture, expanded American cultural life to make popular all things African American for the first time in the nation’s history. No longer were African American writers constrained by the forms of the slave narrative or the tale of racial uplift that had historically been their primary literary genres. They could instead create tales of African American life within the nation’s urban centers, novels and short stories that certainly explored issues of race but were not limited to them. African American musicians were also revolutionizing the modern sound and rhythms, inventing all that jazz that would give rise to an era. The following selections, the first two by participants in this Renaissance, the poet Langston Hughes and novelist Wallace Thurman, bear witness to a time when Harlem was in vogue not only for the African American community but also for fashionable white liberals. All three selections make clear that despite the new inclusiveness of the era the Harlem Renaissance did not effect a sea change in race relations.
The 1920’s were the years of Manhattan’s black Renaissance. It began with Shuffle Along, Running Wild, and the Charleston. Perhaps some people would say even with The Emperor Jones, Charles Gilpin, and the tom-toms at the Provincetown. But certainly it was the musical revue, Shuffle Along, that gave a scintillating send-off to that Negro vogue in Manhattan, which reached its peak just before the crash of 1929, the crash that sent Negroes, white folks, and all rolling down the hill toward the Works Progress Administration.
Shuffle Along was a honey of a show. Swift, bright, funny, rollicking, and gay, with a dozen danceable, signable tunes. Besides, look who were in it: The now famous choir director, Hall Johnson, and the composer, William Grant Still, were a part of the orchestra. Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle wrote the music and played and acted in the show. Miller and Lyles were the comics, Florence Mills skyrocketed to fame in the second act. Trixie Smith sang “He May Be Your Man But He Comes to See Me Sometimes.” And Caterina Jarboro, now a European prima donna, and the internationally celebrated Josephine Baker were merely in the chorus. Everybody was in the audience—including me. People came back to see it innumerable times. It was always packed. When I saw it, I was thrilled and delighted… . It gave just the proper push—a pre-Charleston kick—to that Negro vogue of the 20’s, that spread to books, African sculpture, music, and dancing… .
Langston Hughes (1902–1967), one of the best known leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, famously wrote about the period when “the negro was in vogue” and championed pride in African American identity and its diverse culture. (Library of Congress)
White people began to come to Harlem in droves. For several years they packed the expensive Cotton Club on Lenox Avenue. But I was never there, because the Cotton Club was a Jim Crow club for gangsters and monied whites. They were not cordial to Negro patronage, unless you were a celebrity like Bojangles. So Harlem Negroes did not like the Cotton Club and never appreciated its Jim Crow policy in the very heart of their dark community. Nor did ordinary Negroes like the growing influx of whites toward Harlem after sundown, flooding the little cabarets and bars where formerly only colored people laughed and sang, and where now the strangers were given the best ringside tables to sit and stare at the Negro customers—like amusing animals in a zoo… .
It was a period when, at almost every Harlem upper-crust dance or party, one would be introduced to various distinguished white celebrities there as guests. It was a period when almost any Harlem Negro of any social importance at all would be likely to say casually: “As I was remarking the other day to Heywood—,” meaning Heywood Broun. Or: “As I said to George—,” referring to George Gershwin. It was a period when local and visiting royalty were not at all uncommon in Harlem. And when the parties of A’Lelia Walker, the Negro heiress, were filled with guests whose names would turn any Nordic social climber green with envy. It was a period when Harold Jackman, a handsome young Harlem school teacher of modest means, calmly announced one day that he was sailing for the Riviera for a fortnight, to attend Princess Murat’s yachting party. It was a period when Charleston preachers opened up shouting churches as sideshows for white tourists. It was a period when at least one charming colored chorus girl, amber enough to pass for a Latin American, was living in a pent house, with all her bills paid by a gentleman whose name was banker’s magic on Wall Street. It was a period when every season there was at least one hit play on Broadway acted by a Negro cast. And when books by Negro authors were being published with much greater frequency and much more publicity than ever before or since in history. It was a period when white writers wrote about Negroes more successfully (commercially speaking) than Negroes did about themselves. It was the period (God help us!) when Ethel Barrymore appeared in blackface in Scarlet Sister Mary! It was the period when the Negro was in vogue.
Source: Excerpt from “Parties” from THE BIG SEA by Langston Hughes. Copyright © 1940 by Langston Hughes. Copyright renewed 1968 by Arna Bontemps and George Houston Bass. Reprinted by permission of Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
… Harlem’s famed night clubs have become merely side shows staged for sensation-seeking whites… . [T]hey cannot approximate the infectious rhythm and joy always found in a Negro cabaret.
Take the Sugar Cane Club on Fifth Avenue near 135th Street, located on the border of the most “low-down” section of Harlem. This place is visited by few whites or few “dicty” Negroes. Its customers are the rough-and-ready, happy-go-lucky more primitive type—street walkers, petty gamblers and pimps, with an occasional adventurer from other strata of society.
The Sugar Cane Club is a narrow subterranean passageway about twenty-five feet wide and 125 feet long. Rough wooden tables, surrounded by rough wooden chairs, and the orchestra stands, jammed into the right wall center, use up about three-quarters of the space. The remaining rectangular area is bared for dancing. With a capacity for seating about one hundred people, it usually finds room on gala nights for twice that many. The orchestra weeps and moans and groans as only an unsophisticated Negro Jazz orchestra can. A blues singer croons vulgar ditties over the tables to individual parties or else wah-wahs husky syncopated blues songs from the center of the floor. Her act over, the white lights are extinguished, red and blue spot lights are centered on the diminutive dancing space, couples push back their chairs, squeeze out from behind the tables and from against the wall, then finding one another’s bodies, sweat gloriously together, with shoulders hunched, limbs obscenely intertwined and hips wiggling; animal beings urged on by liquor and music and physical contact… .
One particular place known as the Glory Hole is hidden in a musty damp basement behind an express and trucking office. It is a single room about ten feet square and remains an unembellished basement except for a planed down plank floor, a piano, three chairs and library table. The Glory Hole is typical of its class. It is a social club, commonly called dive, convenient for the high times of a certain group. The men are unskilled laborers during the day, and in the evenings they round up their girls or else meet them at the rendezvous in order to have what they consider and enjoy as a good time. The women, like the men, swear, drink and dance as much and as vulgarly as they please. Yet they do not strike the observer as being vulgar. They are merely being and doing what their environment and their desire for pleasure suggest… .
The other extreme of amusement places in Harlem is exemplified by the Bamboo Inn, a Chinese-American restaurant that features Oriental cuisine, a jazz band and dancing. It is the place for select Negro Harlem’s night life, the place where debutantes have the coming out parties, where college lads take their co-eds and society sweethearts and dignified matrons entertain. It is a beautifully decorated establishment, glorified by a balcony with booths, and a large gyroflector, suspending from the center of the ceiling, on which colored spotlights play, flecting the room with triangular bits of varicolored light. The Bamboo Inn is the place to see “high Harlem” just like the Glory Hole is the place to see “low Harlem.” Well-dressed men escorting expensively garbed women and girls; models from Vanity Fair with brown, yellow and black skins. Doctors and lawyers, Babbitts and their ladies with fine manners (not necessarily learned through Emily Post), fine clothes and fine homes to return to when the night’s fun has ended… .
When Harlem people wish to dance, without attending a cabaret, they go to the Renaissance Casino or to the Savoy, Harlem’s two most famous public dance halls. The Savoy is the pioneer in the field of giving dance-loving Harlemites some place to gather nightly. It is an elaborate ensemble with a Chinese garden (Negroes seem to have a penchant for Chinese food—there are innumerable Chinese restaurants all over Harlem), two orchestras that work in relays, and hostesses provided at twenty-five cents per dance for partnerless young men. The Savoy opens at three in the afternoon and closes at three in the morning. One can spend twelve hours in this jazz palace for sixty-five cents, and the price of a dinner or an occasional sustaining sandwich and drink. The music is good, the dancers are gay, and setting is conducive to joy.
Source: Wallace Thurman, Negro Life in New York’s Harlem, Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius Publications, 1928.
From the battery to the Bronx, from the darkest dives of Harlem to the flittering splendor of Fifth av., everybody in New York is dancing the “Charleston.”
With utmost reluctance, the most exclusive dancing masters of the country accepted the wiggle-wiggle that drifted into the light, from the black and tan resorts of New York into the homes of the indigo-blooded with the insidious impartiality of the cholera. They were forced to adopt the form of these aboriginal gyrations as a regular ballroom dance to teach the youngsters and their grandmothers because public sentiment of high and low forced it. The American Society of Teachers of Dancing, the dancing masters of the four hundred in all the great cities of the nation—with modifications, and their convention at the Waldorf this week.
Behold then Louis Chalif, who teaches his art to his fashionable disciples in a pink marble temple on the creme de la creme of thorough-fares, Fifty-seventh st., near Fifth Av.; he who had been teacher of royalty and is preceptor of the aristocracy of Manhattan, is preparing with utmost distaste to teach the Charleston.
Chalif numbers among his pupils whom he instructs for the trifling sum of $6 a half hour—Gloria Gould and her family (he has taught Gloria since she was nine years old), all the Vanderbilt children and some of the Vanderbilts, no longer children, Mrs. August Belmont, Mrs. Sarah Payne Whitney, her son and two daughters and, in a word, the offspring of the social register.
Chalif, who is a preacher of beauty and grace of movement, admits that the high as well as the low want the “Charleston,” and that Newport and Tuxedo are swaying and wriggling and kicking in the same measures as Avenue A.
And this fall even the little children of the social powers that want to gyrate in imitation of their elders. Chalif and his conferees will have to teach them.
“I hate to make clowns of the children,” he mourned, “but what would you do?”
The best dancing masters, however, led by the fashionable Russian, will teach a modified version, in which smooth gliding motions will be substituted for the free motions of the African savage and which the foot will be tilted but 45 degrees off the floor.
That no one really expects folks to dance a characterization revised to have the thrill of a Virginia reel is apparent. “We teach them the polite steps. We cannot be responsible for the way they perform them outside our halls,” apologized Chalif.
This master has real hopes, however, that the innate culture of the “upper classes” will take the Charleston and make it a decent, if popular, exercise.
“Just because the Charleston has come up to us from the lowest social level, does not mean that it might not become a polished and beautiful dance,” he says optimistically, pointing out the lowly origin of dances popular for generations… .
France, according to Chalif, has given the world most of its formal dances. Now it is America’s turn. All the world is Charleston-mad and assuredly the Charleston is of American vintage.
The close dancing and the habit of dancing all evening on floor space no larger than that of a telephone booth is not altogether the product of the war or current immorality, he states. It is because of the modern practice of many people dancing in public on tiny café floors. “Picture people dancing the quadrille or a stately minuet at the Del Fey club,” he smiles… .
Source: Maxine Davis, “ ‘Charleston’ Dance Sweeps New York City by Storm; Louis Chalif Is Forced to Instruct in Dance That Is Distasteful,” The Miami Daily News, August 29, 1925.
The world of Nella Larsen’s Passing is decidedly upscale. Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield enjoy European travel and a social life that revolves around teas and dances and charity events. Their children attend private schools and summer camp. Irene possesses a sense of noblesse oblige to those less fortunate than she is. Their lives make clear, in other words, that the African American community replicated the class system of the larger white culture, a hierarchal structure into which people earned their place based on marks of status such as income, profession, education, and, perhaps surprisingly, color. The ability of Irene and Clare to “pass” as white, for example, makes available to them privileges that would not have been shared by dark-toned African Americans. The following selections document the reality of this African American elite and in so doing challenge the assumptions of the eugenics movement, documents about which follow this section, that achieved both popular and scientific acceptance during the 1920s.
The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races. Now the training of men is a difficult and intricate task. Its technique is a matter for educational experts, but its object is for the vision of seers. If we make money the object of man-training, we shall develop money-makers but not necessarily men; if we make technical skill the object of education, we may possess artisans but not, in nature, men. Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools—intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it—this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life. On this foundation we may build bread winning, skill of hand and quickness of brain, with never a fear lest the child and man mistake the means of living for the object of life.
If this be true—and who can deny it—three tasks lay before me; first to show from the past that the Talented Tenth as they have risen among American Negroes have been worthy of leadership; secondly, to show how these men may be educated and developed; and thirdly, to show their relation to the Negro problem.
You misjudge us because you do not know us. From the very first it has been the educated and intelligent of the Negro people that have led and elevated the mass, and the sole obstacles that nullified and retarded their efforts were slavery and race prejudice; for what is slavery but the legalized survival of the unfit and the nullification of the work of natural internal leadership? Negro leadership, therefore, sought from the first to rid the race of this awful incubus that it might make way for natural selection and the survival of the fittest… .
And so we come to the present—a day of cowardice and vacillation, of strident wide-voiced wrong and faint hearted compromise; of double-faced dallying with Truth and Right. Who are to-day guiding the work of the Negro people? The “exceptions” of course. And yet so sure as this Talented Tenth is pointed out, the blind worshippers of the Average cry out in alarm: “These are exceptions, look here at death, disease and crime—these are the happy rule.” Of course they are the rule, because a silly nation made them the rule: Because for three long centuries this people lynched Negroes who dared to be brave, raped black women who dared to be virtuous, crushed dark-hued youth who dared to be ambitious, and encouraged and made to flourish servility and lewdness and apathy. But not even this was able to crush all manhood and chastity and aspiration from black folk. A saving remnant continually survives and persists, continually aspires, continually shows itself in thrift and ability and character. Exceptional it is to be sure, but this is its chiefest promise; it shows the capability of Negro blood, the promise of black men. Do Americans ever stop to reflect that there are in this land a million men of Negro blood, well-educated, owners of homes, against the honor of whose womanhood no breath was ever raised, whose men occupy positions of trust and usefulness, and who, judged by any standard, have reached the full measure of the best type of modern European culture: Is it fair, is it decent, is it Christian to ignore these facts of the Negro problem, to belittle such aspiration, to nullify such leadership and seek to crush these people back into the mass out of which by toil and travail, they and their fathers have raised themselves?
Can the masses of the Negro people be in any possible way more quickly raised than by the effort and example of this aristocracy of talent and character? Was there ever a nation of God’s fair earth civilized from the bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters. The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth the saving up to their vantage ground. This is the history of human progress; and the two historic mistakes which have hindered that progress were the thinking first that no more could ever rise save the few already risen; or second, that it would better the unrisen to pull the risen down.
Source: W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” from The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative Negroes of To-day, New York, 1903.
Throughout the years of history, woman has been the weather-vane, the indicator, showing in which direction the wind of destiny blows. Her status and development have augured now calm and stability, now swift currents of progress. What then is to be said of the Negro woman of to-day, whose problems are of such import to her race?
A study of her contributions to any one community, throughout America, would illuminate the pathway being trod by her people. There is, however, an advantage in focusing upon the women of Harlem—modern city in the world’s metropolis. Here, more than anywhere else, the Negro woman is free from the cruder handicaps of primitive household hardships and the grosser forms of sex and race subjugation. Here, she has considerable opportunity to measure her powers in the intellectual and industrial fields of the great city. The questions naturally arise: “What are her difficulties” and, “How is she solving them?”
To answer these questions, one must have in mind not any one Negro woman, but rather a colorful pageant of individuals, each differently endowed. Like the red and yellow of the tiger-lily, the skin of one is brilliant against the star-lit darkness of a racial sister. From grace to strength, they vary in infinite degree, with traces of the race’s history left in physical and mental outline on each. With a discerning mind, one catches the multiform charm, beauty and character of Negro women, and grasps the fact that their problems cannot be thought of in mass.
Because only a few have caught this vision, even in New York, the general attitude of mind causes the Negro woman serious difficulty. She is conscious that what is left of chivalry is not directed toward her. She realizes that the ideals of beauty, built up in the fine arts, have excluded her almost entirely. Instead, the grotesque Aunt Jemimas of the streetcar advertisements, proclaim only an ability to serve, without grace or loveliness. Nor does the drama catch her finest spirit. She is most often used to provoke the mirthless laugh of ridicule; or to portray feminine viciousness or vulgarity not peculiar to Negroes. This is the shadow over her. To a race naturally sunny comes the twilight of self-doubt and a sense of personal inferiority. It cannot be denied that these are potent and detrimental influences, though not generally recognized because they are in the realm of the mental and spiritual. More apparent are the economic handicaps which follow her recent entrance into industry. It is conceded that she has special difficulties because of the poor working conditions and low wages of her men. It is not surprising that only the most determined women forge ahead to results other than mere survival. To the gifted, the zest of meeting a challenge is a compensating factor which often brings success. The few who do prove their mettle, stimulate one to a closer study of how this achievement is won under contemporary conditions.
Better to visualize the Negro woman at her job, our vision of a host of individuals must once more resolve itself into groups on the basis of activity. First, comes a very small leisure group—the wives and daughters of men who are in business, in the professions and a few well-paid personal service occupations. Second, a most active and progressive group, the women in business and the professions. Third, the many women in the trades and industry. Fourth, a group weighty in numbers struggling on in domestic service, with an even less fortunate fringe of casual workers, fluctuating with the economic temper of the times.
The first is a pleasing group to see. It is picked for outward beauty by Negro men with much the same feeling as other Americans of the same economic class. Keeping their women free to preside over the family, these women are affected by the problems of every wife and mother, but touched only faintly by their race’s hardships. They do share acutely in the prevailing difficulty of finding competent household help. Negro wives find Negro maids unwilling generally to work in their own neighborhoods, for various reasons. They do not wish to work where there is a possibility of acquaintances coming into contact with them while they serve and they still harbor the misconception that Negroes of any station are unable to pay as much as persons of the other race. It is in these homes of comparative ease that we find the polite activities of social exclusiveness. The luxuries of well-appointed homes, modest motors, tennis, golf and country clubs, trips to Europe and California, make for social standing. The problem confronting the refined Negro family is to know others of the same achievement. The search for kindred spirits gradually grows less difficult; in the past it led to the custom of visiting all the large cities in order to know similar groups of cultured Negro people. In recent years, the more serious minded Negro woman’s visit to Europe has been extended from months to years for the purpose of study and travel. The European success which meets this type of ambition is instanced in the conferring of the doctorate in philosophy upon a Negro woman, Dr. Anna J. Cooper, at the last commencement of the Sorbonne, Paris. Similarly, a score of Negro women are sojourning abroad in various countries for the spiritual relief and cultural stimulation afforded there.
Source: Elise Johnson McDougald, “The Task of Negro Womanhood,” in Alain Locke, The New Negro, An Interpretation, New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925.
By the 1920s, scientists and social scientists had begun to apply the theories of Charles Darwin to efforts to improve the human race. Eugenics, then considered a progressive idea, sought to engineer “better babies” and “fitter families” through mapping of the gene pool and selective breeding. While the eugenics movement that reached the height of its popularity during the Jazz Age may not have been intentionally racist, the following documents make clear that whiteness was privileged by those who supported and encouraged the adoption of its principles and methods. The first two documents thus provide appropriate context for a novel that explores issues of race and racial identity. The third document, a newspaper account of the sensational Rhinelander trial to which Larsen refers in Passing, provides evidence of the conflicts associated with race in the United States.
This office is devoted to the study of the biological forces which determine the natural capacities and limitations of mankind. It looks forward to having ultimately a good working pedigree-index of the natural traits of a large portion of the families of America. Science can not [sic] experiment with human beings. It desires merely to learn and publish the actual results of man’s experiments on himself. Every marriage is an experiment in heredity. Every person should be interested in the actual biological results of matings among his own kin, and should look forward to securing a scientific analysis of the hereditary potentialities of himself and all his descendants which may result from matings with persons with specific hereditary qualities. When this desire becomes general, the science of eugenics will become firmly established and will be able to contribute to the practical conservation of the better family traits of the American people… .
The principle business of eugenics is:
In a few words, then, if a race is to make progress along the lines of natural abilities, those in control must see to it that there shall be fit matings and many children among those most richly endowed by nature, and that hereditary defectives and degenerates shall not be permitted to reproduce at all. The accomplishment of these ends will require much effort and interest on the part of individual citizens. The State can be expected to take means to bring about these ends only when due pressure is brought to bear by aroused citizens. Thus law, science, social effort, individual enlightenment, and personal resolve—each has its part to play in working out the eugenical ideal, that is, in improving the inborn character and talents of succeeding generations. Eugenics, like other practical pedigree studies, is primarily a biological science. When a child is conceived, “the gates of heredity are closed;” after that, so far as control is concerned, the child’s development, education, and betterment are a matter of environment. Thus it is easily seen that if the race is to be improved in its natural qualities, family records, giving a thorough account of the natural physical, mental and temperamental traits of members of many families, must be provided for the use of science in discovering the laws of heredity, and for the particular family itself in predicting profitable lines of education for its young, in guarding against inborn weakness, and in determining whether a contemplated marriage may be biologically fortunate.
Record of Family Traits. Every person interested in conserving the best racial qualities of his family should apply to this office for two copies of the schedule, “Record of Family Traits.” The record is sent in duplicate to all persons who ask for it, provided they are further seriously interested in studying the origin, segregation, transmission, and recombination of the inborn traits within their family pedigrees, and will agree, in each case, after filling out these schedules and retaining one copy for his own family archives, to return the second to be added to the permanent files of the Eugenics Record Office.
Family Tree Folder. Besides the Record of Family Traits, there are numerous other genealogical and pedigree forms supplied to interested persons by this office. The Family Tree Folder is one of the most useful of these forms. It provides space and instructions for plotting the family tree and for indicating the distribution, in the family, of one or more striking hereditary traits. This folder provides also for a short biographical outline of each person charted. This is the shortest and most condensed pedigree-plotting system outlined by this office.
Short Schedules for Special Traits. In addition to the two schedules above described, the Eugenics Record Office issues a few briefer forms for recording special traits. These are: (1) Musical Talent, (2) Tuberculosis, (3) Harelip and Cleft Palate, (4) Hair Form, Hair and Eye Color, and Complexion, (5) Stature, (6) Weight, (7) Physical Measurement Record, (8) Twins, (9) Mathematical Ability, and finally a small (10) Special Trait Sheet for recording the family distribution and brief description of any striking trait that seems to “run in families.” …
Source: “Eugenics Seeks to Improve the Natural, Physical, Mental and Temperamental Qualities of the Human Family,” Eugenics Record Office, 1927.
The Fitter Families’ Project is a legitimate outgrowth of scientific agriculture. It is the application of the principles of scientific plant and animal husbandry to the next higher order of creation, the human family, and contemplates the development of a science of practical human husbandry.
The basic principle underlying modern agricultural procedure is the fact that the character and vitality of every living thing is determined by two factors, heredity and environment. After the germ cell of plant or animal is fertilized, nothing can alter the traits that plant or animal will have, but it then depends entirely upon the nurture and care as to whether that plant or animal will become the best possible individual of its kind.
It is now believed that the time has come when these two factors must be taken into consideration in human mating and in family habits, if the best elements of our civilization are to dominate or even survive. This must be done by stimulating the interest of intelligent families and arousing a family consciousness by which each family will conceive of itself as a genetic unit with a definite obligation to study its heredity and build up its health status.
The movement for the competitive health examination of pre-school children originated at the Iowa State Fair in 1911, and the winners provided the climax in the million dollar parade of prize stock and other agricultural products, as they rode in an automobile with a runner on the side proclaiming them to be “Iowa’s Best Crop”. The examiners of these babies followed the only criterion extant at that time and observed and used, in considerable part, the methods of the stock judges. They soon observed that the stock judges always took inheritance into consideration in judging. Charles B. Davenport said to the Iowa group in the very beginning, “You should score 50% for heredity before you begin to examine a baby”, and again, a year later, “A prize winner at two may be an epileptic at ten”. It remained for the Kansas Free Fair to give the Better Baby a pedigree. It is now demanded that the Better Baby be supported by a Family, fit both in their inheritance and in the development of their mental, moral, and physical traits.
It is highly appropriate that this movement should rise out of the vigorous, progressive, rural life of the present day, which is giving to the world not only material sustenance but a very important and substantial reserve vigor of brain and body.
In the Free Fair Book, announcing the newly-created Eugenics Department, appeared the following appropriate challenge:
TO THE MEN OF AMERICA
You talk of your breed of cattle,
And plan for the higher strain;
You double the food of the pasture,
And heap up the measure of grain;
You draw on the wits of the nation,
To better the barn and the pen;
But what are you doing my brothers,
To better the breed of men?
You boast of your Morgans and Herefords,
Of the worth of a calf or a colt,
And scoff at the scrub and the mongrel,
As worthy a fool or a dolt;
You mention the points of your roadster,
With man a “wherefore” and “when”,
But ah, are you conning, my brothers,
The worth of the children of men?
And what of your boy—Have you measured
His needs for a growing year?
Does your mark, as his sire, in his features,
Mean less than your brand on a steer?
Thoroughbred—that is your watchword
For stable and pasture and pen—
But what is your word for the homestead?
Answer, you breeders of men!
Rose Trumall, Scottsdale, Arizona
Source: “Fitter Families for Future Firesides: A Report of the Eugenics Department of the Kansas Free Fair, 1920–1924,” 1924.
Mrs. Rhinelander Viewed to Settle Question of Color.
White Plains, NY, Nov 23
In the jury room of the West Chester county supreme court today, Alice Jones Rhinelander undressed with her body from the waist up and her lower limbs exposed, was viewed by the jury trying her husband’s suit for annulment.
Leonard Kip Rhinelander, who charges that his wife deceived him as to her color, Justice Mortschauser, stenographers and opposing counsel accompanied the girl, the daughter of a negro cab man, into the jury room.
Preceding this astounding development, two letters written by Leonard to Alice were read in court. They described minutely pre-marital intimacies and Lee Parsons Davis, the defendant’s counsel, hoped to prove by the color of her body that young Rhinelander could not but suspect that she had negro blood in her veins.
Mrs. Rhinelander and her mother went behind a screen in the jury room while the former disrobed. She was seen by the jury for only a few minutes and no questions were asked her.
Former Judge Isaac N. Mills, Rhinelander’s counsel, was shocked at the proceedings. Again and again the venerable attorney proclaimed his protest at the “indecent procedure.”
Ten minutes after the scene had again been transferred to the court room, Mrs. Rhinelander left the court house. She was weeping hysterically. Her two sisters, Mrs. Grace Miller and Mrs. Emily Brooks, were at her arm.
Davis resumed cross-examination of Rhinelander. He asked the witness whether his wife’s body was the same color as it was in 1922. Rhinelander replied that it was.
Court then recessed for luncheon.
As soon as court reconvened after the recess, Davis announced that he had completed the cross-examination of Rhinelander, which began a week ago today.
Mrs. Rhinelander, composed, but her eyes bearing traces of her weeping spell, was back in court as were many other women who had been ordered out when Davis read the “mystery” letters.
Source: “Body of Woman Shown to Jury.” The Florence [AL] Times, November 23, 1925.
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