Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (51 page)

Economically depressed Black folk had to find some way to eat, some way to lessen their oppressive workloads in the nastiest and most taxing jobs, even if it meant feigning laziness. They did not find much help from the government, receiving the same Old Deal of racial discrimination. NAACP chapters tried to assist, but their membership and resources took a drastic plunge. And the association’s national office was busy heading away from Du Bois and the struggles of poor Black folk.

CHAPTER 27

Old Deal

W. E. B. DU BOIS
did not share the vision of the new executive secretary of the NAACP in 1933, Walter White. Du Bois envisioned an association of common people like the Scottsboro Boys, the nine Black teenagers falsely convicted in 1931 by an all-White Alabama jury of gang-raping two young White women on a train. These poor, dark, unschooled, unassimilated teens—whom activists around the world rallied to free—did not necessarily suit Walter White’s vision. He wanted to transform the NAACP into a top-down litigating and lobbying outfit that put “refined” folks like himself before courts and politicians to persuade the White judges and legislators to end racial discrimination. Walter White, who sometimes passed as White, envisioned what a young, doubly-conscious Du Bois had envisioned. But in 1933, a sixty-five-year-old Du Bois had almost completely turned to antiracism.
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Du Bois escaped the internal battles of the NAACP offices for a five-month visiting professorship at his old stomping ground, Atlanta University. With the Great Depression spinning nearly every thinker onto economic matters, Du Bois taught two courses that spring semester of 1933 and mailed off two pieces to
The Crisis
on Marxism and the Negro. Howard’s orthodox Marxist economist Abram Harris begged Du Bois to reconsider his intertwining of Marxist and antiracist ideas, saying that Marx had not fully addressed the racial issue, despite his famous declaration that “labor in a white skin can never be free as long as labor in a black skin is branded.” But the present depressing reality,
not an old theory, convinced Du Bois it was time to break ground on the ideology of antiracist socialism. In one of the 1933 articles, he described the United States as a “post-Marxian phenomenon” with a White “working-class aristocracy.” At the end of the decade, Du Bois would expound on his antiracist socialism in
Dusk of Dawn
(1940). “Instead of a horizontal division of classes, there was a vertical fissure, a complete separation of classes by race, cutting square across the economic layers,” Du Bois put forward. The vertical cutting knife was constructed of centuries of racist ideas. “This flat and incontrovertible fact, imported Russian Communism ignored, would not discuss.”
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Du Bois’s antiracist socialism reflected his disenchantment with not just capitalism, but assimilationist thinking. In June 1933, Du Bois challenged those HBCU educators who were copying White college curricula during a commencement address at his alma mater, Fisk. Du Bois knew Thurgood Marshall’s class of 1929 at Lincoln University, in Pennsylvania, had overwhelmingly voted against the acquisition of Black professors and “Negro Studies,” explaining their votes through racist ideas. The antiracist calls for Negro Studies at Negro colleges kept coming from Du Bois, from Langston Hughes, and from the 1926 architect of the popular Negro History week, Carter G. Woodson. In his 1933 book, Woodson called attention to the subject. In his title, he called it
The Mis-Education of the Negro
. “It was well understood that . . . by the teaching of history the white man could be further assured of his superiority,” Woodson wrote. “If you can control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his action. . . . If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself”; and “if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.” And so assimilationist Black scholars were demanding the back door, decelerating the advance of Negro Studies in the 1930s.
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The more antiracist W. E. B. Du Bois became, the more he realized that trying to persuade powerful racists was a waste of time, and the more certain he felt that Black people must rely on each other. What probably solidified the need for Black solidarity in Du Bois’s mind the most was studying the remedies for the Great Depression
coming out of Washington. After taking office, President Franklin D. Roosevelt powered through what he called the “New Deal,” the flurry of government relief programs, job programs, labor rights bills, and capitalism-saving bills passed from 1933 to 1938. To secure the congressional votes of southern Democrats, Roosevelt and northern Democrats crafted these bills such that, to southern Blacks, they seemed more like the Old Deal. Just like in the old days before Roosevelt, segregationists were given the power to locally administer and racially discriminate the relief coming from these federal programs. And segregationists made sure that farmers and domestics—Blacks’ primary vocations—were excluded from the laws’ new job benefits, like minimum wage, social security, unemployment insurance, and unionizing rights. Not to be denied, Black southerners secretly joined sharecropper and industrial unions organized inside and outside of the CPUSA to fight for their own New Deal in the 1930s. Alabama Blacks during the Depression blended their homegrown antiracist socialism and Christian theology in a popular saying: “And the day shall come when the bottom rail shall be on top and the top rail on the bottom. The Ethiopians will stretch forth their arms and find their place under the sun.”
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Northern Blacks joined the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which emerged in 1935. Some unions supported them in their dual fight against capitalism and racism. Other unions handed Black workers the Old Deal: in order to join the unions, “the Negroes will have to forget they are Negroes” and stop talking about that race stuff. These racist unions refused to do what could bring that about, eliminating racial discrimination.
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Next to employment, there may have been no more devastating area of discrimination than housing. The Roosevelt administration’s new Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) handed Black residents the Old Deal when these agencies drew “color-coded” maps, coloring Black neighborhoods in red as undesirable. The maps caused brokers to deny residents new thirty-year mortgages and prevented Black renters from purchasing a home and acquiring wealth. But, of course, the
discrimination was ignored or discounted, and the fiscal habits of Black people were blamed for the growing fiscal inequities and segregation created by the policies. Discrimination for Blacks and government assistance for Whites usually won the day.
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Although they received disproportionately less than Whites, Black Americans, especially northerners, did receive some assistance from the New Deal, more than they had from any other federal government program in recent memory. Grateful Black Republicans flocked to Roosevelt’s Democratic Party. They were enticed also by Roosevelt’s famed “Black cabinet” of forty-five Blacks in his administration. But no one endeared Black Americans more to the Roosevelt administration, and thereby to the Democratic Party, than FDR’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1934, the First Lady publicly endorsed the anti-lynching measure lying in Congress’s intensive care unit. She befriended the only woman in the “Black cabinet,” Mary McLeod Bethune, and the NAACP’s Walter White, and rejoiced about the Black gifts “of art and of music and of rhythm” that “come by nature to many of them.”
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President Roosevelt made 1933 a pivotal year in the economic history of the United States, pushing through a series of economy-jump-starting bills during his first one hundred days in office. It could have also been a pivotal year in the racial history of the United States, but Roosevelt was too beholden to his party’s segregationists. Meanwhile, powerful Blacks were too beholden to assimilationists or persuasion tactics for Du Bois’s igniting articles to spark an antiracist movement. In the September 1933 issue of
The Crisis
, Du Bois published “On Being Ashamed,” a look back at the lifelong course of his own thinking, which he generalized as Black America’s thinking. From emancipation to around 1900, the “upper class of colored Americans,” he said, had striven “to escape into the mass of Americans,” practically “ashamed” of those who were not assimilating. But since then, “colored America has discovered itself,” and Du Bois had discovered himself and his singular antiracist consciousness. Again in the November
Crisis
, Du Bois admonished the “large number of American Negroes who in all essential particulars conceive of themselves as belonging to the white race.” And then, in the January 1934 issue, he surprised readers who were
used to his integrationist politics by publishing “Segregation.” Following Marcus Garvey, Du Bois distinguished between voluntary and nondiscriminatory separation and involuntary and discriminatory segregation. Opposition to voluntary Black separation should not come from racist ideas, he insisted, or from “any distaste or unwillingness of colored people to work with each other, to cooperate with each other, to live with each other.”
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Scores of Black newspapers reported reactions to the pieces, which ranged from approval to confusion to rage. Assimilationists who finally felt they were making some headway desegregating northern White America, religious believers in uplift suasion, and those who were stubbornly committed to the political racism that Black advancement could only come from White hands all looked upon Du Bois as a traitor. “The vast majority of the Negroes in the United States are born in colored homes, educated in separate colored schools, attend separate colored churches, marry colored mates, and find their amusements in colored YMCA’s and YWCA’s,” Du Bois went on to argue in 1934. Instead of using our energy to break down the brick walls of White institutions, why not use our energy refurbishing our own? Du Bois’s bosses at the NAACP and the presiding officers of the National Association of Colored Women did not agree. Among the older or richer or more assimilated or more doctrinaire voices of the Talented Tenth, Du Bois was “slipping,” as the
Philadelphia Tribune
editorialized.
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But with each essay, Du Bois was winning the respect of a new generation. Carter G. Woodson, Zora Neale Hurston, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Langston Hughes all agreed with his assessments. And to the unionized southern sharecroppers, the migrants laughing at
Amos ’n’ Andy
and Stepin Fetchit, and the workers and students preparing to organize the National Negro Congress and its youth offshoot, the Southern Negro Youth Congress, Du Bois had never been better. Bolstered by this support, Du Bois swung back at the critics who believed that assimilation and “accomplishment by Negroes [could] break down prejudice.” “This is fable,” Du Bois thundered in the April 1934
Crisis
. “I once believed it passionately. It may become true in 250 or 1,000 years. Now it is not true.” Du Bois never again seriously promoted uplift suasion.
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W. E. B. DU BOIS
knew he was “entering the eye of one of the deadliest political storms in modern times” when his train rolled into Berlin on June 30, 1936. The new Atlanta University professor was on a research trip after being pushed out of the NAACP for advocating Black empowerment instead of integration and assimilation. It did not take long for Du Bois to write home that the Jew was the Negro in Germany’s second year of Adolf Hitler’s chancellorship.
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Eleven days before Du Bois’s arrival, the German-born Max Schmeling had squared off at Yankee Stadium against the pride of African America—and the scorn of segregationist America—the undefeated Brown Bomber, Joe Louis. Since the days of Jack Johnson, White masculinity had attempted to redeem itself not just through Tarzan, but by classing Black boxers like Joe Louis as “the magnificent animal,” as the
New York Daily News
dubbed him before the bout. Stunningly, Schmeling knocked Louis out, inspiring the cheers of White supremacists from Brooklyn to Berlin. Two years later, Louis avenged the loss in the racial “Fight of the Century.”
¹²

Hitler aimed to project the supremacy of Aryan athleticism through hosting the 1936 Summer Olympics. The disinterested Du Bois remained away from Berlin for much of August, but Jesse Owens, a little-known son of Alabama sharecroppers, made history at the games. He sprinted and leaped for four gold medals and received several stadium-shaking ovations from viewers, Nazis included. When Owens arrived back in the states to a ticker tape parade, he hoped he had also managed to change Americans’ racist ideas. That was one race he could not win. In no time, Owens was running against horses and dogs to stay out of poverty, talking about how the Nazis had treated him better than Americans.
¹³

If anything, Jesse Owens’s golden runs deepened the color line, and especially the racist ideas of animal-like Black athletic superiority. Racist Americans refused to acknowledge the extraordinary opportunities Blacks received in sports like boxing and track, and the fact that a disciplined, competitive, and clever mind, more than a robust physique, was what set the greatest athletes apart. Instead, athletic racists served up an odd menu of anatomical, behavioral, and historical explanations
for the success of Black sprinters and jumpers in the 1932 and 1936 Olympics. “It was not long ago that his ability to sprint and jump was a life-and-death matter to him in the jungle,” explained University of Southern California legend Dean Cromwell, Owens’s Olympic track coach. But Jesse Owens did not possess the “Negroid type of calf, foot and heel bone” that supposedly gave Blacks a speed advantage, Howard anthropologist W. Montague Cobb found in 1936. Since some track stars could pass for White, “there is not a single physical characteristic, including skin color, which all the Negro stars have in common which definitely classify them as Negroes.” Cobb did not receive many admirers in a United States where people were convinced about the benefits of natural Black athleticism and biological distinctions. Almost everyone still believed that different skin colors actually meant something more than different skin colors.
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