Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (43 page)

In a critical book review, W. E. B. Du Bois argued that Frederick Hoffman had manipulated statistics to present his prediction of
Black extinction. Hoffman’s native Germany, Du Bois pointed out, had death rates that matched or exceeded that of African Americans. Were Germans headed toward extinction? Du Bois mockingly asked, before rejecting Hoffman’s supposition that higher Black death rates indicated imminent Black extinction. But Du Bois could not reject Hoffman’s supposition that higher Black arrest and prison rates indicated that Blacks actually committed more crimes. Not Hoffman, not Du Bois, no one really knew the actual crime rates—all of the instances of Americans breaking the law, whether caught or not. But the higher Black arrest and prison rates substantiated the racist ideas of more Black crime. And these racist ideas spun the cycle of racial discrimination in the criminal justice system, more suspicions of Black people, more police in Black neighborhoods, more arrests and prison time for Black people, and thus more suspicions, and on and on.

In all of his intellectual power, Du Bois proved unable to stop the cycle of racial profiling and crime statistics and racist ideas. He substantiated the disparities in arrest and prison rates through both antiracist (“dogged Anglo-Saxon prejudice” had “subjected [Blacks and Whites] to different standards of justice”) and racist explanations (the “dazed freedman” lacked a moral foundation). Du Bois was far from alone. None of the scholars who became members of the first national Black intellectual group, the American Negro Academy, formed in 1897, could reject the statistics, or refute them as indicators of greater Black crime. Instead, they accepted the numbers as fact and tried to push against the stereotypes of criminal Blacks through education and persuasion, thus reproducing the racist ideas they were working to eliminate.
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For instance, in his 1897 address for the opening meeting of the American Negro Academy, entitled “The Conservation of Races,” Du Bois put forth the argument of biologically distinct races with distinct histories, characteristics, and destinies. African Americans were “members of a vast historic race that from the dawn of creation has slept, but half awakening in the dark forests of its African fatherland,” he said. “The first and greatest step toward the settlement of the present friction between the races,” that is, toward social equilibrium, he said,
“lies in the correction of the immorality, crime, and laziness among the Negroes themselves, which still remains as a heritage of slavery.” The speech was hastily published, circulated, and acclaimed. Du Bois and the American Negro Academy hoped the pamphlet would refute the popular conception of the destructive, decaying, dying African in the post-
Plessy
, post-Hoffman era. But it was riddled with racist ideas, speaking of “blood” races, race traits, backward Africa, imbruting enslavement, criminally minded and effeminate African American men, strong Europeans, and the idea that African Americans were superior to continental Africans. Du Bois reinforced as much racism as he struck down.
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Du Bois was also working on a more antiracist tome, however. As a visiting researcher at the University of Pennsylvania in 1896 and 1897, he worked on
The Philadelphia Negro
, a thoroughly antiracist “social study” about racism being “the spirit that enters in and complicates all Negro social problems.” And yet, he was unrestrained in his moral attacks on the poor, on Black criminals, and on women, saying, for example, that it was “the duty of Negroes” to “solve” the problem of Black female “unchastity.” Though the book is now regarded as a classic sociological text, only a few academic journals reviewed it upon its release in 1899. One anonymous reviewer, in the leading
American Historical Review
, commended Du Bois for “laying all necessary stress on the weakness of his people,” and then ridiculed him for believing that these supposed weaknesses could be cured. Reading this review, Du Bois should have gathered that when he tried directing his readers from the crossroads of racist and antiracist ideas, they oftentimes would not reach his desired antiracist destination. Then again, Du Bois, like his elite Black peers, hardly considered their attacks on the
Black
poor and
Black
women to be racist.
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Whatever Du Bois achieved, whatever he published, he failed to gain the following—or the financial support—of northern philanthropists that Booker T. Washington enjoyed. On his fund-raising travels, Washington had a knack for putting White audiences at ease by sharing his famously funny (or infamously offensive) southern “darky” jokes. Washington gave wealthy Whites what they wanted—a
one-man minstrel show—and they gave him what he wanted—a check for Tuskegee. Washington somehow demeaned Black people as stupid for an hour and then received donations to educate those same stupid people.
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Washington was ingeniously playing the racial game, but it was a dangerous game to play at the end of the nineteenth century. A surge of racist violence to snatch Black economic and political power spread from North Carolina in 1898 to Georgia in 1899. Du Bois witnessed some of this violence in Georgia. He had taken a professorship at Atlanta University in 1897, and had started spearheading annual scientific studies on all aspects of southern Black life. But in April 1899, he became heartbroken over his inability to prevent the infamous lynching near Atlanta of Sam Hose, who had killed an oppressive White employer in self-defense. In August, armed Blacks in coastal Georgia’s McIntosh County drove back a lynching mob. “One could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved; and secondly, there was no such demand for scientific work of the sort that I was doing as I had confidently assumed would be easily forthcoming,” Du Bois later wrote. Firmly believing “that the majority of Americans would rush to the defense of democracy . . . if they realized how race prejudice was threatening it,” Du Bois adopted a more aggressive commitment to educational persuasion.
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In July 1900, he attended the First Pan-African Conference in London, sponsored by Booker T. Washington. “To be sure, the darker races are today the least advanced in culture according to European standards,” said Du Bois in assimilationist style. But they had the “capacity” to one day reach those “high ideals.” And so, “as soon as practicable,” Du Bois proclaimed, there should be decolonization in Africa and the Caribbean.
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Du Bois’s rationale for gradual decolonization—Black nations were not ready for independence—echoed the old racist rationales for gradual emancipation—Black people were not ready for freedom. Du Bois echoed those proclaiming in 1899 that Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, the colonies the United States had received from winning the 1898 Spanish-American War, were not ready for
independence. Segregationists and antiracists opposed, while assimilationists supported, the formal launching of the American Empire. In a poem printed in
McClure’s Magazine
in 1899, the literary prophet of British imperialism, Rudyard Kipling, urged Americans to “Take up the White Man’s burden— / Send forth the best ye breed— / Go send your sons to exile / To serve your captives’ need / To wait in heavy harness / On fluttered folk and wild— / Your new-caught, sullen peoples / Half devil and half child.”
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Imperial assimilationists won the debate among the mostly White male electorate, if President William McKinley’s successful reelection campaign in 1900 was any indication. His running mate, Theodore Roosevelt, declared, in 1901, “It is our duty toward the people living in barbarism to see that they are freed from their chains, and we can free them only by destroying barbarism itself.” While US leaders publicly debated the colonial peoples’ capacity for civilization and assimilation, they privately debated military bases, puppet politics, natural resources, foreign markets, and war costs. This public humanitarian debate, which was also a private political-economic debate, became a twentieth-century staple as the American Empire publicly and privately warred to extend its sphere of influence. At home and abroad, a profound political racism cast non-Whites as incapable of self-rule, or capable of self-rule one day—in order to justify both their subjection and the resulting socioeconomic disparities. Some Black newspaper editors saw through the mask, connecting the nation’s foreign racial policy to its domestic racial policy. They blasted the “robbers, murderers, and unscrupulous monopolists,” to quote the Salt Lake City
Broad Ax
in 1899. The federal government “could not deal justly with dark-skinned peoples,” another paper blared, “as evidenced by its do-nothing record at home.”
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In this new American Empire, American racist ideas went through what seemed very much like a revolving door, constantly going out into the colonizing world and then coming back into the country after conditioning the immigrant minds of the people arriving in the United States in the early 1900s. When Irish, Jewish, Italian, Asian, Chicana/o, and Latina/o people in America were called anti-Black
racial epithets like “greasers” or “guineas” or “White niggers,” some resisted and joined in solidarity with Black people. But most probably consumed the racist ideas, distancing themselves from Black people. Blacks in the early twentieth century would joke that the first English word immigrants learned was “nigger.”
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ON JANUARY
29, 1901, the lone Black representative, George H. White of North Carolina, gave his farewell address to Congress. About 90 percent of the nation’s Black people resided in the South, but they were no longer represented by Black politicians in the state legislatures and in Congress. Their mass disenfranchisement, and charges of incompetency leveled against Black politicians by White ones, had made sure of that. “This, Mr. Chairman, is perhaps the negroes’ temporary farewell to the American Congress,” said White, “but let me say, Phoenix-like he will rise up someday and come again.” Not many believed him. As White trotted out of the hall, the leading American historians and political scientists looked upon him as the Reconstruction era’s final defective product in the nation’s capital.
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At the time, William Archibald Dunning reigned as the director of Columbia University’s preeminent Dunning School of Reconstruction history. The school was at the forefront of an academic revolution highlighting the “objective” use of the scientific method in the humanities. “For the first time meticulous and thorough research was carried on in an effort to determine the truth rather than to prove a thesis,” was how one historian described the impact of the Dunning School in the
American Historical Review
in 1940. The “truth,” though, meant Dunning school historians of the Reconstruction era chronicling the White South as victimized by the corrupt and incompetent Black politicians, and the North mistakenly forcing Reconstruction before quickly correcting itself and leaving the noble White South to its own wits. “All the forces that made for civilization were dominated by a mass of barbarous freedmen,” Dunning supposed in his 1907 classic,
Reconstruction: Political and Economic, 1865–1877
.
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Dunning trained a generation of influential southern historians who became department chairs and dominated the discipline of history for decades in the twentieth century. His most notable student was Georgia native Ulrich Bonnell Phillips. In
American Negro Slavery
(1918), along with eight more books and a duffel bag of articles, Phillips erased the truth of slavery as a highly lucrative enterprise dominated by planters who incessantly forced a resisting people to labor through terror, manipulation, and racist ideas. Instead he dreamed up an unprofitable commerce dominated by benevolent, paternalistic planters civilizing and caring for a “robust, amiable, obedient and content” barbaric people. Phillips’s pioneering use of plantation documents legitimated his racist dreams and made them seem like objective realities. Phillips remained the most respected scholarly voice on slavery until the mid-twentieth century.
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Until midcentury, the Dunning School’s fables of slavery and Reconstruction were transferred into schoolbooks, or at least into those that mentioned Black people at all. Most textbook writers excluded Black people from schoolbooks as deliberately as southern Democrats excluded them from the polls. But the greatest popularizer of the Dunning story of Reconstruction was none other than a novelist, Thomas Dixon Jr. In one of his earliest memories, Dixon witnessed a lynching in his North Carolina town. “The Klan are . . . guarding us from harm,” his mother told him that night, indoctrinating him into the racist justification for White terror. When he came of age, Dixon wept at the “misrepresentation of southerners” inflicted by northerners upon seeing a theatrical version of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
. Vowing to share the “true story,” he composed a “Reconstruction Trilogy” of best-selling novels—
The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden—1865–1900
(1902),
The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan
(1905), and
The Traitor: A Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire
(1907). His goal was “to teach the North . . . what it has never known—the awful suffering of the white man during the dreadful Reconstruction period[,] . . . [and] to demonstrate to the world that the white man must and shall be supreme.” In the fictional trilogy, which was
taken as historical fact by millions, Dixon posed Reconstruction as a period when corrupt, incompetent northerners and Black legislators ruled, terrorized, disenfranchised, and raped southern Whites until they were redeemed by the might and virtue of the Ku Klux Klan. Nothing arrested the national mind in the hazards of Black voting, nothing justified the do-nothing attitude, better than this racist fiction of Reconstruction, whether it was written by novelists or by scholars.
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