Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (44 page)

AS THE ALL-WHITE
, all-male Congress settled into Washington in 1901, these White men were able to ease any twinges of guilt they may have felt by reading Booker T. Washington’s hit autobiography,
Up from Slavery
. Washington expressed faith in God, took personal responsibility, worked mightily hard, overcame incredible hardship, and saw racial progress and “White saviors” at every turn. “White Savior” stories were fast becoming a fixture in American memoirs, novels, and theatrical productions. They were enjoyed by Americans of all races as hopeful signs of racial progress. Individual stories either reflected or deflected common realities. The individual White Savior stories cleverly deflected the reality of White saviors for a few, and White discriminators for the many, along with the reality of racial progress for a few, and deferred progress for the many.
¹⁷

The release of
Up from Slavery
in February 1901 allowed Booker T. Washington to stand at the height of his career. W. E. B. Du Bois watched the national ovation for Washington’s memoir. As the praise carried on into the summer of 1901, and as Du Bois looked up at Washington on the White pedestal of Black leadership, it all started to become too much for him to bear in silence. In his review of
Up from Slavery
in
Dial
on July 16, 1901, Du Bois fired the first shot in the civil war between Washington’s Tuskegee Machine and Du Bois’s elite civil rights activists.

In addition to scolding Washington for his “accommodation,” Du Bois scolded those leaders “who represent the old ideas of revolt and revenge, and see in migration alone an outlet for the Negro people.” A.M.E. bishop Henry McNeal Turner had for years preached that
God was a “Negro,” but he urged African Americans to migrate to Africa so that they could leave all the discriminatory policies behind. Du Bois reduced all back-to-Africa efforts, including those on Black terms, and violent protests against enslavers and re-enslavers to revenge and hate. Antiracists were not defending Black humanity and freedom, he said, as Ida B. Wells had so eloquently advocated doing. It was customary for assimilationists to charge antiracists as being like segregationists—all hate-filled and irrational. These fabricated labels would marginalize antiracists throughout the twentieth century, would one day even marginalize the elderly antiracist Du Bois. But in 1901, Du Bois began to criticize the accommodators and the antiracists in part for his own purposes: in order to set the stage for his “large and important group” opposing the Tuskegee Machine, those reformist assimilationists seeking “self-development and self-realization in all lines of human endeavor” in order to allow Blacks, eventually, to take their place alongside the people of other races.
¹⁸

Washington’s
Up from Slavery
remains an American classic. However, in 1901, another book, released weeks before
Up from Slavery
, received much more praise:
The American Negro: What He Was, What He Is, and What He May Become
. For years, William Hannibal Thomas had tried to desegregate White institutions; he had preached, taught, and written to uplift Blacks, eliminate racial distinctions, and forge a world where Black people would be accepted by White people as their own. And yet, according to a prerelease preview by the
New York Times
, Thomas had presented “his subject without an atom of sentimentality.”

Thomas described a Black “record of lawless existence, led by every impulse and passion,” especially immorality and stupidity. Ninety percent of Black women, he said, were “lascivious by instinct and in bondage to physical pleasure”; they were living lives of filth “without parallel in modern civilization.”

Thomas thought at the junction between assimilationist and segregationist ideas. He argued that a minority of Blacks—by which he meant himself and his kind—had overcome their inferior biological inheritance. These extraordinary Negroes showed that “the redemption of the negro [was] . . . possible and assured through a thorough
assimilation of the thought and ideals of American civilization.” Thomas advocated restricting the voting rights of naturally corrupt Blacks, policing naturally criminal Blacks, placing Black children with White guardians, and pursuing uplift suasion. Blacks should conduct themselves “so worthily as to disarm racial antagonism,” he advised.
¹⁹

As Thomas tried to distance himself from Blackness through
The American Negro
, it was, ironically, his very Blackness that caused White Americans to shower him with the adoration he so desired. Since racist ideas deemed every individual Black person an expert and representative of the race, Black people like Thomas had always proved to be the perfect dispensers of racist ideas. Their Blackness made them more believable. Their Blackness did not invite defensive mechanisms to guard against their racist ideas about Black inferiority.

Racist Americans, from the nation’s most eminent sociologists to ordinary readers, hailed
The American Negro
as the most authoritative, believable, and comprehensive tract ever published on the subject, better than Du Bois’s
The Philadelphia Negro
. William Hannibal Thomas was placed “next to Mr. Booker T. Washington” as “the best American authority on the negro question,” said the
New York Times
. Within Black America, however, Thomas became known as “Black Judas.” Activist Addie Hunton actually classed Thomas a “Judas Iscariot” in her piece “Negro Womanhood Defended.” Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois hated the book. “Mr. Thomas’s book,” Du Bois charged in his review, was a “sinister symptom” of the age, which desired nothing more for “the Negro” than to “kindly go to the devil and make haste about it,” so that the “American conscience [could] justify three centuries of shameful history.” After Black leaders dug up dirt on Thomas and destroyed his credibility, he fell into obscurity. He passed away as a Black man in 1935. He never did become White.
²⁰

ON OCTOBER
16, 1901, the newly sworn-in President Theodore Roosevelt, hearing that Booker T. Washington was in town, invited “the most distinguished member of his race in the world” over to the President’s House for family supper. Roosevelt did not think much of the
invite, clearly unaware of the mood of segregationists. When Roosevelt’s press secretary casually notified Americans the next day of Washington’s visit, the social earthquake was immediate and loud. Black Americans were beside themselves in glee, and many fell in love with Theodore Roosevelt. But to segregationists, Roosevelt had crossed the color line. “When Mr. Roosevelt sits down to dinner with a negro he declares that the negro is the social equal of the white man,” stammered a restrained New Orleans newspaper. South Carolina senator Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman was not restrained: “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger,” he said, “will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again.” Tillman showed in this statement the real purpose of lynchings: if racist ideas won’t subdue Blacks, then violence will. Roosevelt learned his lesson, and he never invited a Black person to the President’s House again. But he failed to quiet segregationists by officially naming the president’s residence the “White House.” Blacks were beasts—segregationist books were declaring in the early years of the twentieth century, starting with Mississippi professor Charles Carroll’s
The Negro a Beast
(1900)—and beasts should not be dining at the “White House.”
²¹

In the midst of this overpowering segregationist discourse, W. E. B. Du Bois had the audacity to publish the most acclaimed book of his career. Released on April 18, 1903, the book title decreed in profoundly antiracist fashion that Blacks were not soulless beasts. Black folk were fully human, and Du Bois made Americans “listen to the strivings in the souls of black folk.” Decades later, James Weldon Johnson, the composer of the “Black National Anthem,” sang the praises of Du Bois’s
The Souls of Black Folk
for having more impact “upon and within the Negro race than any other single book published in this country since
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
” It was a perfect comparison. Like
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, Du Bois’s fourteen essays drilled much deeper into the American mind the racist construction of complementary biological race traits, of the humble, soulful African complementing the hard, rational European. Blacks should be fostering and developing “the traits and talents of the Negro,” Du Bois proposed, “in order that some day on American soil
two world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack.” Black people were “the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.”
²²

It was a racist idea to suppose that the racial groups were not equal, and that a racial group lacked certain human characteristics. In 1903, White people did not lack “simple faith and reverence,” and Black people did not lack materialism and “smartness.” Ironically, many of the northern defenders of slavery and abolition, and now Jim Crow and civil rights, had attested to the “simple faith” of humble Blacks and the “smartness” of strong Whites. In
The Souls of Black Folk
, Du Bois tried to revolutionize the dividing ideal of race into the “unifying ideal of race.”

This “unifying ideal of race” would not only heal the United States, he argued, but also heal the souls of Black folk. In the book’s most memorable passage, he explained further:

This American world . . . yields [the Negro] no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

Blacks must therefore reckon with the fact that “the history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self,” Du Bois wrote. “He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American.”
²³

It was as if many of his Black readers had been straining all these years to do precisely what he had described. Du Bois’s theory of double-consciousness finally gave many of them the glasses they needed to see—to see themselves, to see their own inner struggles. Just as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book met many White folk where they
were, at the warring crossroads between segregationist and assimilationist ideas, Du Bois met many Black folk where they were, at the warring crossroads between assimilationist and antiracist ideas. Du Bois believed in both the antiracist concept of cultural relativity—of every person looking at the self from the eyes of his or her
own
group—and the assimilationist idea of Black individuals seeing themselves from the perspective of White people. In Du Bois’s mind, and for so many like-minded people, this double-desire, or double-consciousness, yielded an inner strife, a conflict between pride in equal Blackness and assimilation into superior Whiteness.

While his opening essay was timeless, his timely case against “Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” carried the book into controversy in 1903. Du Bois had given his opening argument against the Tuskegee Machine two years earlier, and there was no leaving the courtroom now. After again disparaging Washington’s accommodators, and then the singly conscious antiracists, Du Bois asserted the standing of his doubly-conscious group, which he named the Talented Tenth—the top 10 percent of Black America. They knew “that the low social level of the mass of the race is responsible for much discrimination against it,” but they also knew, along with the nation, “that relentless color-prejudice is more often a cause than a result of the Negro’s degradation.” The Talented Tenth sought “the abatement of this relic of barbarism and not its systematic encouragement.”
²⁴

Du Bois identified the Talented Tenth in another published piece in 1903 that was riddled with more assimilationist ideas and class racism. “There are in this land a million men of Negro blood . . . [who] have reached the full measure of the best type European culture,” Du Bois judged. It was the duty of this “aristocracy of talent and character” to lead and civilize the masses, to filter culture “downward,” and to show “the capability of Negro blood.” However, he complained, “as this Talented Tenth is pointed out, the blind worshippers of the Average cry out in alarm: ‘These are exceptions, look here at death, disease and crime—these are the happy rule.’ Of course they are the rule, because a silly nation made them the rule.” Du Bois fumed about the extraordinary-Negro conception, this “silly” conceptual loophole
to uplift suasion. But, somehow, he kept his own faith in the potential of the silly strategy of uplift suasion.
²⁵

Du Bois’s call to arms in
The Souls of Black Folk
to strike down those accommodating to Jim Crow was as insightful and impassioned (and racist) as William Lloyd Garrison’s call to arms to strike down the colonizationists accommodating slavery. And segregationists and accommodators instantly knew it. “This book is indeed dangerous for the negro to read,” admitted the
Nashville American. The Outlook
chided Du Bois, rather accurately, for being “half ashamed of being a negro.” Then the reviewer held up Booker T. Washington, rather inaccurately, as unashamed. The Tuskegee Machine tried to suppress the book, to no avail. Black newspapers, free of Washington, usually shouted the same thing: “
SHOULD BE READ AND STUDIED BY EVERY PERSON
,
WHITE AND BLACK
,” as the
Ohio Enterprise
put it in a headline. University of Pennsylvania sociologist Carl Kelsey, speaking for racist White scholars, admonished Du Bois for emphasizing “the bad,” the discrimination. Prejudice “will cease,” Kelsey wrote, “when the blacks can command the respect and sympathy of the whites.”
²⁶