Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (48 page)

Racist White newspapers, as was customary then as it is today, tended to depict the Black victims as criminals, and the White criminals as victims. Black newspapers, as was also customary after dramatic shows of self-defense, tended to play up the redemption of Black masculinity. “At last our men had stood like men, struck back, were no longer dumb driven cattle,” one Black woman rejoiced in
The Crisis
. For racist White commentators, the Black men who supposedly instigated the Red Summer were beastly cattle; to racist Black commentators, these formerly beastly cattle, by striking back, had proven themselves to be men after all. Racist ideas inflamed both sides in the Red Summer, and gender racism came out of the smoke, especially the horrible
coughing silence about all those courageous Black women who had defended their men and children and communities.
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The Wilson administration somehow conflated the Red Summer with the postwar Red Scare, blaming anticapitalists for the carnage instead of violent White racists. On September 27, 1919, 128 alienated White socialists, inspired by the recent Russian Revolution, gathered in Chicago to form the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). “The racial oppression of the Negro is simply the expression of his economic bondage and oppression, each intensifying the other,” the CPUSA’s program declared, sounding eerily like the founding racial program of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) in 1903. Since then, SPA leaders, such as the party’s five-time presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs, had tended to say that there was “no negro question outside of the labor question.” Like their SPA predecessors, CPUSA officials would also go on to raise capitalist exploitation over racial discrimination, instead of leveling and challenging them both at once. In their incomplete reading of the world’s political economy, racism emerged out of capitalism, and therefore the problem of capitalism came before the problem of racism. The Communists theorized that if they killed capitalism, racism would die, too—not knowing that capitalism and racism had both emerged during the same long fifteenth century, and that since then, they had been mutually fortifying each other while developing separately.
The Communist
of the CPUSA admonished Blacks (and Whites) during the Red Summer to “realize their misery is not due to race antagonism, but the
CLASS ANTAGONISM
” between big business and labor.
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Big business was certainly producing and reproducing racist policies and ideas to divide and conquer the working class, decrease its labor costs, and increase its political power. However, the CPUSA downplayed or ignored the ways in which White laborers and unions were discriminating against and degrading Black laborers to increase their own wages, improve their own working conditions, and bolster their own political power. And why would White labor not continue ruling Black labor if labor gained political and economic control over capital in the United States? The Communists did not address that;
nor did they address their own racist ideas during these formative years, which were pointed out by the antiracist Blacks joining their ranks. In seeking to unify the working class, CPUSA leaders focused their early recruiting efforts on racist White laborers. They refused to update Karl Marx’s scriptures to account for their deeply racialized nation in 1919. CPUSA officials typically stayed silent on what it might mean for the future of racism if a Communist revolution took place that did not simultaneously support a revolution against racism.
¹⁵

W. E. B. Du Bois was inspired by the red hot summer like never before, and not just because he was excited about the New Negro, or because he started closely reading (and updating) Karl Marx. In February 1920, he put out the searing essays of
Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
. Du Bois had wearily come to realize that the segregationist “belief that black folk are sub-human” was not based on any lack of knowledge: “It is simply passionate, deep-seated heritage, and as such can be moved by neither argument nor fact.” In moving away from educational persuasion, Du Bois finally began to turn instead toward a singly antiracist consciousness. But he did not quite reach it. Instead he wrote: “European culture—is it not better than any culture that arose in Africa or Asia? It is.”
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After relegating modern African and Asian cultures, Du Bois spoke out against “The Damnation of Women.” In
Darkwater
, Du Bois did something for Black women that was rarely done: for “their worth” and “their beauty” and “their promise, and for their hard past, I honor the women of my race,” he said. But in honoring the Black woman, he dishonored non-Black women and Black men, especially in their roles as mothers and fathers. He described one global unhappy family. “The father and his worship is Asia; Europe is the precocious, self-centered, forward-striving child; but the land of the mother is and was Africa,” he wrote. Nowhere was a mother’s love stronger and deeper than in Africa. W. E. B. Du Bois—the son of a single mother—not surprisingly declared, “It is mothers and mothers of mothers who seem to count, while fathers are shadowy memories.”
¹⁷

Du Bois followed in the long line of reformers who played up in Black people what racists played down—in his case, he turned the
global projection of the Black woman as the immoral anti-mother, the anti-woman, into the global projection of the Black woman as the moral super-mother, the super-woman. But whether redeeming or degrading Black women, such projections spun reality, generalizing the behavior of immoral individuals or motherly individuals, and in the process propagating racist ideas. An antiracist sketch of Black women would have depicted the same diversity of motherly and un-motherly behavior found in all equally imperfect female racial groups.

For decades, diverse sketches of Black feminine behavior had swayed heads and hips, minds and hearts, in buoyant juke joints. Months after the release of Du Bois’s
Darkwater
, Mamie Robinson brought out the first recording of the great antiracist art form of the 1920s. “Crazy Blues” became a best seller. Record companies capitalized on the blues craze among Black and White listeners alike. Robinson, “Ma” Rainey, Ida Cox, and Bessie Smith sang about Black women as depressed and happy, as settling down and running around, as hating and loving men, as gullible and manipulative, as sexually free and sexually conforming, as assertive and passive, as migrating and staying, as angels and as “Wild Women.” Blueswomen and their male counterparts embraced African American cultural ways, despised the strategy of trying to persuade Whites that Blacks were okay, and were therefore despised by Talented Tenth assimilationists.
¹⁸

FOR ALL ITS
assimilationist ideas, Du Bois’s
Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
was still too well spiced with antiracism for the bland tastes of racist readers. Northern, southern, and foreign racist reviewers almost unanimously condemned the book as a bitter madman’s “hymn of racial hate,” or “what the southerner would write if he turned negro,” as the socialist Harold Laski of the London School of Economics put it. Meanwhile, the overwhelming response of Black readers, including the legions of common sharecroppers and domestics, was that it was “a milestone in the history of the Negro race,” as the
Washington Bee
attested. Some antiracist New Negroes did not like some of the bland moralizing and class racism of
Darkwater
. Yale alumnus William Ferris,
the editor of Garvey’s
The Negro World
, said Du Bois looked down on the Black masses and their ailments “from the heights of his own greatness.”
¹⁹

It was a charge hardly anyone could deny, especially after Du Bois’s views on Marcus Garvey became known. Garvey’s movement would collapse “in a short time,” Du Bois had allegedly said, and “his followers are the lowest type of Negroes, mostly from the West Indies.” The reporter who published this quotation exhibiting class and ethnic racism probably caught Du Bois in a rancorous mood that August 1920. All month long, Du Bois had had to watch and listen to the massive parades and meetings of the first international convention of Garvey’s UNIA. “We shall now organize the 400,000,000 Negroes of the world into a vast organization to plant the banner of freedom on the great continent of Africa,” Garvey had blared on August 2, 1920, to the UNIA convention’s 25,000 enraptured delegates at Madison Square Garden. The bombastic convention left the activist African world in wondrous awe for months. Du Bois and the Talented Tenth, however, felt deeply threatened by Garvey’s exposure of the touchy reality of light skin privilege. “Garvey is an extraordinary leader of men,” Du Bois admitted in
The Crisis
at the end of 1920. But it had been a mistake for him to try to bring Caribbean color politics to the United States. “American Negroes recognized no color line in or out of the race,” Du Bois said, “and they will in the end punish the man who attempts to establish it.”
²⁰

It was probably the silliest statement of Du Bois’s serious career. He sounded as oblivious as the racists who had angered him for decades by discounting the existence of the racial line. In denying the color line, Du Bois discounted the existence of color discrimination, in effect blaming darker Blacks for their disproportionate poverty. Du Bois had eyes. He knew light skins dominated the most desirable political and economic positions available to Blacks. In his own Talented Tenth essay in 1903, he had mentioned twenty-one present and past Black leaders, and all of them except Phillis Wheatley had been biracial. No Ida B. Wells-Barnett or Callie House appeared. He probably heard the circulating Black children’s rhyme: “If you’re white, you’re
right / If you’re yellow, you’re mellow / If you’re brown, stick around / If you’re black, get back.” Du Bois knew that elite, light-skinned folks were still using brown paper bags and rulers to bar dark-skinned folks from churches, jobs, civic groups, historically Black colleges, Black fraternities and sororities, and even neighborhoods and other types of gatherings.
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Du Bois was probably not oblivious. More likely, he and his light-skinned peers felt their color privilege was threatened by discussions of colorism and color equality, not unlike Whites who felt their racial privilege threatened by discussions of racism and racial equality. And so, Du Bois copied his enemies: he used racist ideas and his punishing power to silence the antiracist challenge to color discrimination.

THE CONFLICT BETWEEN
Du Bois and Garvey reached its peak in the early 1920s, when they sparred over the question of interracial relations. In October 1921, President Warren G. Harding went to Birmingham to hunt up southern support, and he insisted that “racial amalgamation there cannot be.” While
The Crisis
reprimanded Harding for rejecting interracial relations, Garvey hailed the president for his endorsement of racial separatism. In contrast to Madison Grant’s eugenicists, who were advocating White racial purity, and opposing interracial reproduction due to the intrusion of
inferior
Black blood, Garvey advocated Black racial purity, opposing interracial reproduction due to the intrusion of
different
White blood. Assimilationists often erroneously confused Garvey’s separatists, who actually believed in separate but equal, with segregationists, who really believed in separate but unequal. It was Garvey’s assimilationist opponents who were constructing Black integration into White spaces as progress. And these assimilationists also were conjoining Garvey’s separatist efforts of racial solidarity with segregationist efforts to maintain the racial exclusion of inferior peoples. Garvey’s assimilationist opponents failed to realize that there was nothing inherently tolerant or intolerant about Americans voluntarily separating themselves or integrating themselves. Americans routinely did separate and integrate themselves, voluntarily, based on
religion, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, profession, class, race, and social interests. Separatist organizing can be racist (and when it is, it turns into segregation), if the emphasis is on excluding inferior peoples. Interracial organizing can be racist (and when it is, it turns into assimilation), if the emphasis is on elevating inferior Blacks by putting them under the auspices of superior Whites. That was Garvey’s somewhat false impression of the interracial program of the NAACP.
²²

Du Bois and Garvey represented a larger and nastier battle within Black America among assimilationists, antiracists, and separatists, between the classes, between natives and West Indians, between nationalists and Pan-Africanists, and between light skins and dark skins. But Garvey had a much bigger enemy trying to silence him: the US government. In June 1923, he was convicted of mail fraud. Out on bail, he ventured to Liberia—as did Du Bois. Upon his return, Du Bois’s anger and sense of privilege got the better of him when in May 1924 he called Garvey the “most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and in the world.” With his days of freedom numbered, Garvey struck back against Du Bois and the Talented Tenth when he presided over the UNIA convention that August. His antiracist affirmations had turned to blisteringly racist ridicule. Black people were “the most careless and indifferent people in the world,” Garvey proclaimed to thousands at Madison Square Garden. Appeals exhausted, six months later Garvey walked into federal prison, only to be deported three years later.
²³

Weeks before Garvey’s final UNIA convention, delegates gathered for the Democratic National Convention of 1924 at that very same Madison Square Garden. The Democrats came within a single vote of endorsing the anti-Black, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic platform promulgated by the powerful Ku Klux Klan. The platform would have been anti-immigrant, too, if Congress had not passed the Immigration Act on a bipartisan vote earlier in the year. It was authored by Washington State Republican Albert Johnson, who was well-schooled in anti-Asian racist ideas and well-connected to Madison Grant. Politicians seized on the powerful eugenicist demands for immigration restrictions on people from all countries outside of Nordic northwestern
Europe. President Calvin Coolidge, the Massachusetts Republican who replaced Harding after his sudden death in 1923, happily signed the legislation before his reelection. “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” Coolidge wrote as vice-president-elect in 1921. “The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides.”
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