Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (40 page)

SOUTHERN BLACK PEOPLE
felt a range of emotions as they trekked from slavery to war to emancipation to Radical Reconstruction to Black Redemption to White Redemption. Their feelings seem to have resembled the range of emotions a parent might feel living through the exciting birth, hopeful growth, and tragic death of a beloved child. Some Blacks, angry over Reconstruction’s demise, felt the need to run away from their second slavery. “It is impossible for us to live with these slaveholders of the South,” said one Louisiana organizer, representing more than 60,000 “hard-laboring people” eager to flee the South. Resettlement to Africa or the North or far West was not nearly as popular in the late 1870s as the “Exodus” to Kansas. The “Exodusters” ignored the opposition of Frederick Douglass and increased Kansas’s Black population by 150 percent. Northern allies did all they could to fund-raise for Exodusters. William Lloyd Garrison, at seventy-four years old, exhausted himself raising money for hundreds of Black Exodusters fleeing Mississippi and Louisiana.

On April 24, 1879, Garrison had hoped to address a rally for the Exodusters at Boston’s Faneuil Hall, but he was too weak to attend. Still, he made sure his voice was heard, sending a reverberating statement. “Let the edict go forth, trumpet-tongued, that there shall be a speedy end put to all this bloody misrule; that the millions of loyal colored citizens at the South, now under ban and virtually disfranchised, shall be put in the safe enjoyment of their rights—shall freely vote and be fairly represented—just where they are located. And let the rallying-cry be heard from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, ‘Liberty and equal rights for each, for all, and forever, wherever the lot of man is cast without our broad domains!’” He had hoped for immediate emancipation when all hope had been lost. He now hoped for immediate equality when all hope had been lost. The thrilling statement of hope on April 24, 1879, proved to be the last will and testament of William Lloyd Garrison. Four weeks later, he was dead.
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PART IV

W. E. B. Du Bois

CHAPTER 21

Renewing the South

“THE SLAVE WENT FREE
; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again towards slavery.” W. E. B. Du Bois had lived almost seven decades before he gave this classic summation of the Reconstruction era. He was born under the sun on February 23, 1868, the day before the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. While Garrison applauded Johnson’s impeachment from the eastern end of Massachusetts, “Willie” Du Bois came into being on the western end of Massachusetts in the small town of Great Barrington. He grew up between two encircling mountain ranges: the Berkshires to the east and the Taconic chain to the west, assimilationist ideas to the north and segregationist ideas to the south.
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Mary Silvina Burghardt raised Willie. Alfred Duboise, Willie’s Franco-Haitian father, had left his wife and child for Connecticut by 1870. Burghardt became the single mother of two boys. She had already birthed the only out-of-wedlock child in recent family memory, Willie’s older half-brother, Adelbert. In a way, Burghardt resembled Garrison’s mother, Frances Maria Lloyd, who had defied her family, lived on the social edge, married a rover, and, after being deserted and devastated, poured what was left of herself into her children. And their prized youngest sons wanted nothing more than to make their distressed mothers happy.

Willie gleaned his first sense of racial difference on an interracial playground at ten years old in 1878. The exchange of “gorgeous visiting-cards . . . was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my
card—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others,” he later wrote. From then on, Willie Du Bois fiercely competed with his White peers in the game of uplift suasion, in an attempt to prove “to the world that Negroes were just like other people.” He would go on to hike and reach the summit of the European intellectual world. However, he did not like what he saw when he reached the top.
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IN THE
1870
S
and 1880s, no matter what Willie and other young Blacks like him achieved in school and in life, they were not changing the minds of the discriminators. The discriminators were subscribing to Social Darwinism and to the idea that Blacks were losing the racial struggle for existence. For ages, enslavers had pictured Black people as physically hardy, hardy enough to survive the heat of southern enslavement. With emancipation, racist ideas progressed to suit this new world. Discriminators started picturing Blacks as weak, too weak to survive in freedom, beings that desperately needed to learn to be strong without their masters and government assistance.
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In 1883, the US Supreme Court declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. Civil rights activists loudly protested the funeral of the Reconstruction era, but not loud enough for a fifteen-year-old lad in Great Barrington. Willie Du Bois launched his publishing career, complaining about local indifference to the Court ruling in T. Thomas Fortune’s immensely popular Black newspaper, the
New York Globe
.
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Drowning out the young Willies and the older Fortunes in 1883, the united North and South hailed the decision to trash the 1875 Civil Rights Act. The
New York Times
applauded the Supreme Court’s “useful purpose in . . . undoing the work of Congress.” In the majority opinion, Justice Joseph Bradley wrote that the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments did not bestow on Congress any power to prohibit discrimination in privately run public accommodations, but only “state action” that denied equal protection of the laws. “When a man has emerged from slavery and with the aid of beneficent legislation has
shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state,” Bradley concluded, “there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be a special favorite of the laws, and when his rights . . . are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men’s rights are protected.” A mere citizen without special favors protected in the ordinary modes? Did Justice Bradley not understand that Black people only wanted to be mere citizens? Did Justice Bradley not understand that their rights were not being protected from planters and Klansmen?
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Maybe the New York–born Bradley was indeed in the dark, especially if he believed the optimistic propaganda of what was being billed as the “New South.”
Atlanta Constitution
editor Henry W. Grady was the chief propagandist of the New South in the 1880s. “The friendliness that existed between the master and slave . . . has survived war, and strife, and political campaigns,” Grady imagined. Methodist bishop and Emory College president Atticus Haygood also marketed the New South in speeches across the country, and in his popular 1881 book,
Our Brother in Black
. The “great majority of the slaves did truly love the white people,” Haygood presumed. White enslavers taught them labor habits, English, the principles of free institutions, and Christianity. Whites must continue the elevating legacy of slavery in a nicely segregated free labor society, Haygood instructed. How could wise Whites teach unwise Blacks if the races were separated? Haygood disregarded the contradiction.
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But an Episcopal bishop, Thomas U. Dudley, could not. He opposed racial “separation” because it would mean “continued and increasing degradation and decay” for Blacks. Their hope for salvation must come from association [with White people],” Dudley stressed. A famous New Orleans novelist of prewar Creole life, George Washington Cable, also challenged these New South segregationists, inviting their wrath. In April 1885, Grady issued his “official” reply in
Century Magazine
to Cable and other assimilationist and antiracist critics: “The assortment of races is wise and proper, and stands on the platform of equal accommodations for each race but separate.” With that statement, Grady birthed the New South’s defense of racial segregation.
The system of separation had been created to ensure racial inequality, yet Grady propagated the notion that it was intended to ensure racial equality and bring racial progress. Truth never did stop the concocters of racist ideas. Grady had a separate-but-equal brand to invent, to defend, and to sell to the American mind. And millions of Americans bought it in the 1880s.
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In buying this New South, Americans had adopted a new tool for blaming racial disparities on Black people: faith in racial progress (and ignoring the simultaneous progression of racism). It was being taught that American slavery had developed those backward people who had been brought over from the wilds of Africa. Northern missionaries and New South stalwarts, it was said, were developing those backward people who were now freed from the wilds of slavery. And the Reconstruction Amendments, claimed the proponents of the New South, had indeed lessened racial discrimination and brought on equal opportunity. All this racist propaganda coalesced into an indelible postwar faith in racial progress, specifically, that “prejudice against color is slowly but surely dying out,” as a Philadelphia newspaper reported in 1888. An aversion “to industry and frugality”—not discrimination—caused the socioeconomic disparities between the races, the newspaper stated. “Racial progress” became the most powerful racist rejoinder to antiracists, who were still pointing out discrimination and disparities. The New South really became the New America of racial progress.
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Social Darwinists, conjuring Black regression since slavery, and Confederate holdovers of the Old South rejected the New South’s racial progress brand and the separate-but-equal formulation. The Reverend Robert L. Dabney, one of southern Presbyterianism’s most influential intellectuals and an old Confederate Army chaplain, argued that only enslavement could provide Black people with a civilizing education. Lawyer-turned-writer Thomas Nelson Page spent his writing career sharply contrasting what he considered the hard, industrializing capitalism and the disobedient African of the New South with the soft, agricultural capitalism and the obedient African of the Old South. Through his short story collection
In Ole Virginia, or Marse Chan and Others
(1887), Page pioneered the postwar plantation school
of fiction—a carbon copy of the prewar idyllic plantation fiction—reimagining his lovely childhood days surrounded by happy captives on his Virginia plantation. And then, in 1889, the most popular anti–New South book appeared,
The Plantation Negro as a Freeman
. Harvard alumnus Philip Alexander Bruce, Page’s brother-in-law, claimed that Black people, “cut off” from their civilizing White masters, had degenerated back into the “African type,” leading to “bold and forward” Black women advancing on White men, Black male criminals raping White women (compelling White men to lynch them), and Black parents producing problem children who were “less inclined to work.”
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AS A TEENAGER
, Willie Du Bois had dreamed of going to Harvard. Charitable local Whites, unwilling to send their town’s extraordinary Negro to the nation’s best historically White college, raised funds in 1885 to send him to the nation’s best historically Black college: Fisk University of Nashville. Controlled by White philanthropists and instructors, Fisk was one of the nation’s preeminent factories of uplift suasion and assimilationist ideas. Du Bois consumed these ideas like his peers and started reproducing them when he became the editor of Fisk’s student newspaper,
The Herald
. In one of his published pieces, he eagerly reviewed the first full-length history of African Americans, George Washington Williams’s
History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880
. “At last,” Du Bois rejoiced, Black people “have a historian”!
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Other reviews of the book, which was first released in 1883, were also favorable. But one critique from the
Magazine of American History
—saying that Williams was “not sufficiently restrained”—signified the conundrum that many Black revisionist scholars would face in future decades. When Black revisionists chose not to revise, then they seemingly allowed racist studies excluding or denigrating Blacks to stand for truth. When they did revise racist scholarship, they apparently lacked objectivity. Only White scholars apparently could be “sufficiently restrained” to write on race: only racist studies reflected scholarly truth.
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Williams’s major antiracist (and sexist) historical revision had been to show that Black (male) Americans had played an integral part in US
history. He challenged the racist ideas of scholars arguing that Black people had regressed since slavery with his own racist ideas of the “weak Black man” and the “strong Black woman.” Williams liberally cited from the 1864 tract
Savage Africa
. “If the women of Africa are brutal,” he wrote, “the men of Africa are feminine.” According to Williams’s assimilationist reading of history, freedom had facilitated Black adoption of civilized values and norms, of “better and purer traits of character.” Black women “have risen to take their places in society.” Black men were again becoming “enduring in affection, and benevolent to a fault.”
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Du Bois embraced Williams’s
History
and seemed to have been influenced by the book’s assimilationist ideas and gender racism. In his Fisk graduation speech in June 1888, Du Bois offered the founder and first chancellor of Germany, Otto von Bismarck, as a model for Black leadership. Bismarck was well known for bringing together dozens of communities to form the mighty Germany in 1871. Du Bois said that Bismarck’s Second Reich “should serve as a model for African-Americans ‘marching forth with strength and determination under trained leadership.’” He did not mind that Bismarck had hosted the Berlin Conference in 1885, where European colonizers had partitioned Africa on the dishonest pretext that they were bringing civilization to the continent. “I did not understand at all, nor had my history courses led me to understand,” he later admitted, that colonialism had so viciously exploited African raw materials and labor. “I was blithely European and imperialistic in outlook.”
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