Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (53 page)

Hurston was ahead of her time. When her time came in the 1970s, long after her death, and antiracist feminists rediscovered
Their Eyes Were Watching God
, they fittingly partook of their own self-defining love affair, like Janie. They self-defined the novel’s greatness in a literary world rejecting it, unabashedly thrusting the once-rejected novel into the conversation as one of the finest—if not
the
finest—American novels of all time.
²⁸

IN CRITICIZING THE
greatest antiracist novelist of the interwar era, Richard Wright made way for himself. When W. E. B. Du Bois first laid his eyes on Wright in 1940, he was laying his eyes on the author of
Native Son
, a novel Du Bois admired.
Native Son
received a Book-of-the-Month Club award, and it made Wright the toast of the literary world in the 1940s. The novel’s main character, the bewildered (and bewildering) Bigger Thomas, represented “many” Negroes who “had become estranged from the religion and folk culture of his race” and lived “so close to the very civilization which sought to keep them out,” Wright explained. Bigger Thomas “was hovering unwanted between two worlds.” Thomas ended up killing both worlds—as embodied in the calculating rape and murder of his Black girlfriend and impulsive murder of a White girl. Through Bigger Thomas, Wright offered a
gripping assimilationist ultimatum in
Native Son
: if African Americans were not allowed into White civilization, then they would turn violent.
²⁹

By the end of March 1940,
Native Son
had sold 250,000 copies and garnered rave reviews from Whites and Blacks alike—more sold books and rave reviews than Hurston and Langston Hughes had received in two decades. Wright seemed untouchable until a twenty-four-year-old upstart Harlem writer began his literary coup with an essay, called “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” in 1949. This literary lightning bolt struck media suasion and the assimilationist underpinning of “social protest fiction,” with its original cornerstone, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, and its latest cornerstone,
Native Son
. In “overlooking, denying, evading” the “complexity” of Black humanity for persuasion’s sake, these protest novels were “fantasies, connecting nowhere with reality,” wrote James Baldwin, five years before releasing his finest novel,
Go Tell It on the Mountain
. Like Stowe’s Uncle Tom, Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas tragically “admits that possibility of his being sub-human, and feels constrained, therefore, to battle for his humanity.” What Blacks needed to do was “infinitely more difficult”: they had to accept their imperfectly equal humanity, Baldwin declared. “It is the peculiar triumph of society—and its loss—that it is able to convince those people to whom it has given inferior status of the reality of this decree.”
³⁰

All these literary battles played out during and after the Second Great War. It was a war that ended with the global triumph of American power. It ended with the need to convince the decolonizing world of the reality of the newest American decree: that the United States should take its place as leader of the free world.

CHAPTER 28

Freedom Brand

LIKE MANY ACTIVISTS
, W. E. B. Du Bois reeled from the height of the Nazi Holocaust of Jews and other non-Aryans. After the United States entered World War II in 1942, Du Bois felt energized by Black America’s “Double V Campaign”: victory against racism at home, and victory against fascism abroad. The Double V Campaign kicked the civil rights movement into high gear, especially up North, and the long-awaited comprehensive study of the Negro financed by the Carnegie Foundation kicked it into yet another gear, especially down South.

In 1936, Carnegie Foundation president Frederick P. Keppel had briefly considered some White American scholars when he had decided to heed Cleveland mayor Newton Baker’s recommendation to sponsor a study on the “infant race.” But there was almost no consideration of Zora Neale Hurston or the elder statesmen, W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson. Although White assimilationists and philanthropists were taking over the racial discourse in the academy, they were customarily shutting out Black scholars as being too subjective and biased to study Black people. It was amazing that the same scholars and philanthropists who saw no problem with White scholars studying White people had all these biased complaints when it came to Black scholars studying Black people. But what would racist ideas be without contradictions.
¹

Carnegie officials drew up a list of
only
foreign European scholars and White officials stationed in European colonies who they believed could complete the study “in a wholly objective and dispassionate
way.” They ended up selecting the Swedish Nobel-laureate economist Gunnar Myrdal, bringing him to the United States in 1938. With $300,000 in Carnegie funds, Myrdal employed a classroom of leading Black and White scholars, including Frazier and Herskovits—seemingly everyone except Hurston, Du Bois, and Woodson.
²

In his two-volume, nearly 1,500-page study, published in 1944, Myrdal shined an optimistic light on what he termed, in his title,
An American Dilemma
. He identified the racial problem as a “moral problem,” as assimilationists long had since the days of William Lloyd Garrison. White Americans display an “astonishing ignorance about the Negro,” Myrdal wrote. Whites ignorantly viewed Negroes as “criminal,” as having “loose sexual morals,” as “religious,” as having “a gift for dancing and singing,” and as “the happy-go-lucky children of nature.” Myrdal convinced himself—and many of his readers—that ignorance had produced racist ideas, and that racist ideas had produced racist policies, and therefore that “a great majority of white people in America would be prepared to give the Negro a substantially better deal if they knew the facts.” W. E. B. Du Bois probably shook his head when he read this passage. “Americans know the facts,” he may have thought to himself, as he once wrote. Du Bois had been sharing the facts for nearly fifty years, to no avail.
³

Du Bois did enjoy most of the two volumes, including the devastating assault on the rationales of segregationists, the encyclopedic analysis of racial discrimination, and the fallacy of southerners’ separate-but-equal brand. “Never before in American history,” Du Bois admitted, had “a scholar so completely covered this field. The work is monumental.” E. Franklin Frazier agreed in his two glowing reviews. He praised Myrdal’s “objectivity” and willingness to describe “the Negro community for what it was—a pathological phenomenon in American life.”
⁴

And yet one of Myrdal’s solutions to White racism was still Black assimilation. “In practically all its divergences, American Negro culture is . . . a distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American culture,” Myrdal surmised. “It is to the advantage of American Negroes as individuals and as a group to become assimilated
into American culture.”
An American Dilemma
did for cultural assimilationists what Darwin’s
Origin of Species
had done for Social Darwinists, what Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
had done for abolitionists, what Samuel Morton’s
Crania Americana
had done for polygenesists, and what Robert Finley’s
Thoughts on Colonization
had done for colonizationists. The book inspired a cadre of key politicians, lawyers, judges, preachers, scholars, capitalists, journalists, and activists to power up the next generation of racist ideas and the assimilationist wing of the civil rights movement. To Myrdal, neither segregationist scholars, with their “preconceptions about the Negroes’ inherent inferiority,” nor antiracist scholars, who were “basically an expression of the Negro protest,” could be objective the way he and the new assimilationists could.
⁵

AS WORLD WAR II
neared its end in April 1945, W. E. B. Du Bois joined representatives of fifty countries at the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco. He pressed, unsuccessfully, for the new UN Charter to become a buffer against the political racism of colonialism. Then, later in the year, Du Bois attended the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, England, and was fittingly introduced as the “Father of Pan-Africanism.” A sense of determination pervaded the Fifth Congress. In attendance were two hundred men and women, some of whom would go on to lead the African decolonization movements, like Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta. These delegates did not make the politically racist request of past Pan-African congresses of gradual decolonization, as if Africans were not ready to rule Africans. The antiracist “Challenge to the Colonial Powers” demanded immediate independence from European colonial rule.
⁶

The United States emerged from World War II, looked over at the ravaged European and East Asian worlds, and flexed its unmatched capital, industrial force, and military arms as the new global leader. Only the Communist Soviet Union seemed to stand in America’s way. The Cold War between capitalism and communism to win the economic and political allegiances of decolonizing nations, and of their
markets and resources, had begun. In March 1946, Dean Acheson warned that the “existence of discrimination against minority groups in this country has an adverse effect on our relations with other countries.” Acheson was a source as reliable as they came. He had headed the State Department’s delegation at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, which rebuilt the international capitalist system. President Harry S. Truman, who took over after Roosevelt died in 1945, listened to Acheson’s warning that globally circulating reports of discrimination, fanned by the flames of Russian media outlets, were harming US foreign policy and causing doors to shut on American businessmen, especially in the decolonizing non-White nations.
⁷

President Truman was prepared to make some reforms, but southern segregationists fought tooth and nail to maintain the racial status quo. Mississippi’s firebrand senator Theodore Bilbo, for one, did not get the memo from Acheson. “I call on every red-blooded white man to use any means to keep the niggers away from the polls,” Bilbo said on a reelection campaign stop in 1946. Bilbo’s call to arms ignited such a firestorm that when he won his election, the newly elected Republican majority blocked him from reentering the Senate in 1947. (His southern peers preaching “states’ rights” to keep Blacks from the polls were allowed to take their seats.) Not to be silenced, Bilbo retired to his estate in southern Mississippi and self-published
Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization
to rally the troops against egalitarians. “That the Negro is inferior to the Caucasian has been proved by six thousand years of world-wide experimentation,” Bilbo claimed.
⁸

Take Your Choice
hit southern bookstores during a landmark publishing year, 1947. Howard historian John Hope Franklin’s sweeping history of Black folk,
From Slavery to Freedom
, was a milestone, and pushed hard against the racist version of history promoted by Bilbo and Columbia’s fading Dunning School.
From Slavery to Freedom
wasn’t wholly antiracist, though. Franklin began with the racist historical conception that slavery had induced Black inferiority. This assertion did at least counteract Jim Crow historians’ claims of enslavement as “a civilizing force.” But both historical pictures were wrong and racist—one started Black people in inferiority before slavery, and the other
ended Black people in inferiority after slavery. And Franklin cast Black women and poor people as impotent spectators in the Negro’s “struggle for the realization of freedom.” Prodded by Black feminist historians like Mary Frances Berry, Nell Irvin Painter, Darlene Clark Hine, and Deborah Gray White, John Hope Franklin—and the historically male-centered field of African American history—spent the rest of the century trying to correct these mistakes in subsequent editions and books.
⁹

As Franklin set the new course of Black (male) historiography in 1947 (decades before Black women’s history set a newer course), Columbia evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky and anthropologist Ashley Montagu set the new course of Social Darwinism—away from eugenics. The Ukraine-born Dobzhansky had famously joined evolution and genetics by defining evolution as a “change in the frequency of an allele within a gene pool.” The England-born Montagu had succeeded his mentor, Franz Boas, as America’s most eminent anthropological opponent of segregation when Boas died in 1942. Montagu’s
Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race
topped the charts that year, with Americans still shuddering from news of the Holocaust. Montagu exposed the dangerous myth of biological racial hierarchy and shared the antiracist concept that “all cultures must be judged in relation to their own history . . . and definitely not by the arbitrary standard of any single culture.” Montagu did not always follow his own advice, however. In his “example of cultural relativity,” he judged that in the past 5,000 years, while European cultures will have advanced, “the kingdoms of Africa have undergone comparatively little change.”
¹⁰

On June 6, 1947, these two commanding scholars published their groundbreaking article in the all-powerful
Science
journal. “Race differences,” Dobzhansky and Montagu wrote, “arise chiefly because of the differential action of natural selection on geographically separate populations.” They rejected eugenic ideas of fixed races, fixed racial traits, and a fixed racial hierarchy. Human populations (or races) were evolving, they argued, and changing genetically through two evolutionary processes: one biological, one cultural. It was not nature
or
nurture distinguishing humans, but nature
and
nurture. This formulation became known as the dual-evolution theory, or the modern evolutionary consensus. The consensus held as evolutionary biology grew over the course of the century. It was an area of growth that sometimes complemented the growth of molecular biology, particularly after American James Watson and Brits Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin discovered the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) in 1953.