Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (42 page)

SOUTHERN WHITE MEN
were “shielding” themselves “behind the plausible screen of defending the honor [of their women]” through lynchings in order to “palliate” their record of hate and violence, Ida B. Wells maintained in
Southern Horrors
, and again during her 1893 anti-lynching tour of England. Her speaking tour was an embarrassment to White Americans. In her work, Wells more or less condemned the strategy of uplift suasion and championed armed Black self-defense to stop lynchings. “The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs,” she declared, “the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged, lynched.”
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The pro-lynching president of the Missouri Press Association, James Jacks, published an open letter to attack Wells—and all Black women, who, in his view, were nothing but thieves and prostitutes. If Jacks hoped to silence Wells and her sisters, then his plan backfired. By the summer of 1896, inflamed Black club women had united under the banner of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) to defend Black womanhood, challenge discrimination, and lend power to self-help efforts. But some, if not most, of the self-help efforts of these mostly elite reformers encouraged the assimilation of White women’s
mores. They were based on the same old historical racism that said that low-income Black women had been morally and culturally ruined by slavery. “Lifting As We Climb” became the NACW motto.
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AFTER TWO YEARS
of study abroad in Germany, W. E. B. Du Bois returned to the United States in 1894. Slater Fund officials declined to extend funding for his study abroad, which would have enabled him to defend his economics doctoral thesis. Though he intended to prove Black educational capacity, to Slater Fund officials, he looked like a special education teacher pursuing a physics doctorate. No matter what Du Bois did, he could not persuade away racist ideas. If Blacks pursued the European world’s most prestigious degree, they were looked upon as stupid for doing so. If they did not pursue it, then they did not have the natural talent, as Rutherford B. Hayes said in 1890, provoking Du Bois. Even Du Bois’s settling for being the first African American to earn a Harvard history doctorate in 1895 brought on racist ridicule. In elite White circles, Du Bois became known as one of those “half dozen Negroes” who had allowed Harvard “to make a man out of semi-beast,” as New Yorker Franklin Delano Roosevelt exulted as a Harvard freshman in 1903.
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Though Du Bois’s educational success in Germany did not prove much of anything to American producers and consumers of racist ideas, Du Bois did prove something to himself. He had grown more accustomed to meeting “not white folks, but folks.” He mentally climbed in Germany and stood on an equal plane with White people. But his new antiracist mind-set of not looking up at White people did not stop him from looking down at supposedly low-class Black people. It would take Du Bois much longer to see not low-class Black folks, but folks on an equal human plane with him and the rest of the (White) folks.
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Du Bois accepted a position in 1894 teaching Greek and Latin at the A.M.E. Church’s flagship college in Ohio, Wilberforce. He was determined “to begin a life-work, leading to the emancipation of the American Negro.” Somehow, some way, he maintained his faith that
American racism could be persuaded and educated away. “The ultimate evil was stupidity” about race by “the majority of white Americans,” he theorized. “The cure for it was knowledge based on scientific investigation.”
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Whereas Du Bois wanted to educate Americans about the capacity of Black people for the higher pursuits, Booker T. Washington, the calculating thirty-eight-year-old principal of Tuskegee, wanted Black people to publicly focus on the lower pursuits, which was much more acceptable to White Americans. Booker T. Washington claimed the vacancy of race leadership that had been vacated upon Frederick Douglass’s death in 1895. Ida B. Wells would have been a better replacement, but she was a woman, and too antiracist for most Americans. In private, Washington supported civil rights and empowerment causes across the South throughout his career. In public, his talking points reflected the New South racism that elites enjoyed hearing.
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At the opening of the Cotton States International Exposition on September 18, 1895, Washington delivered the “Atlanta Compromise.” He asked southern Whites to stop trying to push Blacks out of the house of America, and to allow them to reside comfortably in the basement—to help them to rise up, knowing that when they rose, the whole house would rise. Many of the landowners in the Atlanta audience had spent their lifetimes trying to convince their Black sharecroppers “to dignify and glorify common labour.” So when Washington beckoned to them with the words, “It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top,” they were overjoyed. Rest assured, Washington said, “the wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly.”
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Amid the excited applause from thousands, the waving handkerchiefs, the flowers pulled from White women’s bosoms that showered Washington when he finished, New South editor Clark Howell of the
Atlanta Constitution
sprinted up to the speakers’ platform. He shouted, “That man’s speech is the beginning of a moral revolution in America!” Washington’s words were telegraphed to every major newspaper in the nation. Editors published raving reviews. Democratic president Grover Cleveland arrived in Atlanta and called Washington the “new
hope” for Black people. “Let me heartily congratulate you upon your phenomenal success at Atlanta,” W. E. B. Du Bois glowed in a telegram on September 24, 1895. “It was a word fitly spoken.”
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Not every Black commentator was like Du Bois, applauding Washington, however. Calvin Chase of the
Washington Bee
did not see compromise, but “death to the Afro-American and elevating to white people.” Death or not, Booker T. Washington grasped the national acclaim, attracted philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie, and built the “Tuskegee Machine,” an institution that over the next decade ruled Black colleges, businesses, newspapers, and political patronage. And a year after Washington had loudly issued the Atlanta Compromise with southern segregationists, the US Supreme Court quietly followed suit.
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For years, the US Supreme Court had been stuffed with northern-born corporate lawyers happily wielding the Fourteenth Amendment to cut down laws violating the “liberty” and “civil rights” of capital to dictate the wages and working conditions of labor. The Court provided no such protections for the liberty and civil rights of workers, women, immigrants, and Black people. On May 18, 1896, the Court ruled 7–1 in
Plessy v. Ferguson
that Louisiana’s Separate Car Act—and other new Jim Crow laws—violated neither the Thirteenth nor the Fourteenth Amendments. The biracial Homer Plessy had challenged the law requiring Louisiana railroads to provide “equal but separate accommodations” for White and Black passengers. New Orleans judge John H. Ferguson had claimed that the “foul odors of blacks in close quarters” made the law reasonable. The Louisiana Supreme Court and the US Supreme Court upheld Ferguson’s ruling.

In his majority opinion, Supreme Court Justice Henry Billings Brown relied on racist ideas to support a policy that was clearly discriminatory in intent. It was his job to obscure those intentions. Justice Brown evaded the politics of the Louisiana Separate Car Act, evaded the discriminatory intent, and evaded the obvious shoddiness of the railcars for Blacks, and instead semantically classed it a “social law” that merely recognized the social “distinction” between the races. “If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the
United States cannot put them upon the same plane,” wrote the former Detroit corporate lawyer. The lone dissenting voice to the
Plessy
ruling was hardly an antiracist voice. Though he did not doubt that Whites would forever be “the dominant race in this country,” Justice John Harlan of Kentucky wrote, “in the view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.”

On May 18, 1896, the
New York Times
buried the
Plessy
decision in a third-page column focusing on railroad news, reflecting the case’s marginal news coverage and the nation’s marginal awareness of its significance. The
Plessy
decision legalized what was already assumed by the New South and America: separate but unequal, and branded it equal for courts and consciences to stop antiracist resistance. The social conscience of America was a significant political factor during this period. It was the beginning of the Progressive era.
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Though it is popularly remembered as a time of heartfelt social concern and awareness, in reality the Progressive era was rigged by elite White men and women. It was dominated, at least from the standpoint of its elite funders and organizers, by a desire to end the social strife caused by industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and inequality in the 1880s and 1890s. Cotton Mather’s blessings of order through benevolence still held the philanthropist’s ear from Boston to Atlanta after all these years. The projected benevolence of the
Plessy
ruling and the Atlanta Compromise seemed to bring a finality to the disorder of the “Negro problem.” Indeed, the finality of the “Negro problem” as the nineteenth century closed meant a United States dead set on playing down the southern horrors of discrimination and playing up what was wrong with Black people.
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CHAPTER 23

Black Judases

AFTER
PLESSY V. FERGUSON
reportedly solved the “Negro problem,” British physician Havelock Ellis proclaimed that a new question had presented itself. “The question of sex,” he said, “with the racial questions that rest on it—stands before the coming generations as the chief problem for solution.” It was an overly ambitious prediction in the first medical treatise on homosexuality,
Studies in the Psychology of Sex
(1897). Western nations were still not ready to sufficiently deal with the reality of multiple sexualities, at least not in public. Ellis nevertheless tried to put sexuality on the Progressive era’s agenda. This self-described friend of the yet unnamed LGBT community popularized the term “homosexual,” classifying it as a congenital physiological abnormality (or “sexual inversion”). Ellis aimed to defend homosexuality against the “law and public opinion” that regarded homosexuals as criminals in the late nineteenth-century English-speaking world.
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Similarly, racist scholars had long conceived of Blacks as criminals, and of Blackness as a physiological abnormality, debating all along about whether it was congenital. “Sexologists,” inspired by scholars of race, were already using the comparative anatomy of women’s bodies to concoct biological differences between sexualities at the turn of the century. While racist scholars were distinguishing between the “free” and prominent clitorises of “negresses” and the “imprisonment” of the clitoris of the “Aryan American woman,” homophobic scholars started claiming that lesbians “will in practically every instance disclose an abnormally prominent clitoris. This is particularly so in colored women.”
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To sexist thinkers in the late nineteenth century, the more prominent the clitoris, the less chaste the woman, and the less chaste the woman, the lower the woman on the hierarchical scale of womanhood. Hence the convergence of racist, sexist, and homophobic ideas that deemed both White lesbians and Black heterosexual women to be more chaste, and higher on the scale of womanhood, than Black lesbians, who reportedly had the largest clitorises. When men, Black heterosexual women, or White lesbians viewed
Black
lesbians, bisexuals, or transgender women as biologically or socially inferior, as less chaste, they were speaking at the intersection of racist, sexist, and homophobic ideas. They were articulating queer racism.

But it was difficult to find a scholar willing to engage sexuality, let alone sexuality and race—and increasingly, even race. W. E. B. Du Bois had begun his career trying to present solutions to the “Negro problem” to White intellectuals. But many of these intellectuals now felt it had been solved by
Plessy
—or it would be solved, by the natural selection of evolution or extinction. A statistician for the Prudential Insurance Company predicted the imminent extinction of Black people in his epic book that relied on the 1890 census figures. Unlike the
Plessy
ruling, Frederick Hoffman’s
Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro
received plenty of attention in 1896. Packed with statistical tables and published by the American Economic Association, the book was a pioneering work in American medical research, and it catapulted Hoffman into scientific celebrity in the Western world as the heralded father of American public health. At “the time of emancipation,” he wrote, southern Blacks were “healthy in body and cheerful in mind.” “What are the conditions thirty years after?” Well, “in the plain language of the facts,” free Blacks were headed toward “gradual extinction,” pulled down by their natural immoralities, law-breaking, and diseases. Hoffman supplied his employer with an excuse for its discriminatory policies concerning African Americans—that is, for denying them life insurance. White life insurance companies refused to insure a supposedly dying race. Yet another racist idea was produced to defend a racist policy.
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