Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (45 page)

In the aftermath of
The Souls of Black Folk
and Du Bois’s Talented Tenth essay, racial reformers and scholars of race, whether White or Black, whether applauding or critiquing Du Bois, seemed to have formed a consensus on the solution to the “Negro problem.” They spoke of the need for more strident uplift suasion, for upwardly mobile Talented Tenths persuading away the racist ideas of White folk. The strategy remained deeply racist. Black people, apparently, were responsible for changing racist White minds. White people, apparently, were not responsible for their own racist mentalities. If White people were racist and discriminated against Blacks, then Black people were to blame, because they had not commanded Whites’ respect? Uplift suasion had been deployed for more than a century, and its effect in 1903? American racism may have never been worse. But neither its undergirding racist ideas, nor its historical failure, nor the extraordinary Negro construction ensuring its continued failure had lessened the faith of reformers. Uplift suasion had been and remained one of the many great White hopes of racist America.

CHAPTER 24

Great White Hopes

IN MAY
1906, W. E. B. Du Bois welcomed to Atlanta University the nation’s most eminent anthropologist, a Columbia University professor who was actually questioning segregationist ideas of Blacks as beasts. Franz Boas had emigrated from Germany in 1886, when American racial classifiers were almost uniformly identifying the “organic inferiority,” or Blackness, of his Jewish people. The “predominant mouth of some Jews,” one anthropologist maintained, was “the result of the presence of black blood.” Boas’s own experiences with anti-Semitism had shaped his hostility to segregationist ideas of biologically distinct races (and ethnicities), of the natural human hierarchy of racial and ethnic groups—that is, ideas positioning Whites over Blacks, and further positioning lily-White Anglo-Saxons over semi-White Jews.
¹

Franz Boas attended Du Bois’s Atlanta University conference on “The Health and Physique of the Negro-American.” Scholars questioned or rejected the widely held impression that races were biologically distinct, and that cardiologists could actually distinguish “Black blood,” and that below the skin and hair, doctors and scientists could actually distinguish a Black body, or a “Black disease.” Du Bois presented, but he also learned about the absence of scientific proof for his long-held biological race concept.
²

Two days after the May 1906 conference, Boas delivered Atlanta University’s commencement address. “To those who stoutly maintain a material inferiority of the Negro race,” he proclaimed, “the past history of your race does not sustain [that] statement.” Boas then astonished
Du Bois and probably many of his Black students by recounting the glories of precolonial West African kingdoms like those of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay. Boas awakened Du Bois from the paralysis of his historical racism, or, as Du Bois explained it, “from the paralysis of the commonly held judgement taught to me in high school and in two of the world’s great universities”: that Africans had “no history.”
³

Du Bois’s intellectual high, that May, came crashing down with Black America by the end of the year. The day after Republicans used Black votes to regain the House in the 1906 midterm elections, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the dishonorable discharge (and loss of pensions) of 167 Black soldiers in the 25th Infantry Regiment, a Black unit that had been a huge source of Black pride. A dozen or so members of the regiment had been falsely accused of murdering a bartender and wounding a police officer in the horrifically racist town of Brownsville, Texas, on August 13, 1906. Overnight, the most popular US president in Black communities since Abraham Lincoln became the most unpopular. “Once enshrined in our hearts as Moses,” shouted out a Harlem pastor, the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr., Roosevelt was “now enshrouded in our scorn as Judas.” In the final days of 1906, it was hard to find an African American who was not spitting ire at the Roosevelt administration. Roosevelt’s efforts to regain Black support with new Black federal appointments failed. Sounding the indignation of the observant press, the
New York Times
reported that “not a particle of evidence” had been given to prove the men were guilty. Roosevelt was defiant in his Annual Message to Congress on December 3, 1906 (defiant in his crude attempts to gain southern White voters). He warned “respectable colored people . . . not to harbor criminals,” meaning the criminals of Brownsville. And then he turned to lynchings: “The greatest existing cause of lynching is the perpetration, especially by black men, of the hideous crime of rape.”
⁴

President Roosevelt was speaking to a national choir of scholars. In
Pure Sociology
(1903), Brown sociologist and former abolitionist Lester Ward had claimed that Black men who lusted after and raped White women
and
the White mobs who lynched them in retaliation were both ordered by their racial nature to do so. In
Lynch Law
(1905), Wellesley
economist James Elbert Cutler argued that in executing criminals, the White mobs were “merely [acting] in their sovereign capacity.” Even Du Bois complained, in a 1904 Atlanta University study (“Some Notes on Negro Crime, Particularly in Georgia”), that there were “enough well authenticated cases of brutal assaults on women by black men” to “make every Negro bow his head in shame.” Negroes must recognize, he said, their responsibility for their own so-called worst classes.
⁵

When Black criminality ceased, lynchings would cease, and Black criminality could cease through education at “schools like Hampton and Tuskegee,” President Roosevelt suggested. While in past years Booker T. Washington had rejoiced when Roosevelt had promoted his program, this time he probably felt uneasy. Given advance notice, Washington begged Roosevelt to reconsider the discharge, knowing the Tuskegee Machine would also feel the wrath of Black America. As Washington fell with Roosevelt, Du Bois’s Talented Tenth rose in influence.
⁶

THEODORE ROOSEVELT DID
not become toxic in White communities. His groomed presidential successor, William Howard Taft, cruised to victory, weeks before African Americans lauded a victory of their own on December 26, 1908. At the center of the victory was a Texas-born colored heavyweight champion, the first counterpunching boxer in a sport of brawlers, who had finally received his shot at the heavyweight championship and knocked out Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia. “No event in forty years has given more satisfaction to the colored people of this country than has the signal victory of Jack Johnson,” reported the
Richmond Planet
. Almost immediately, the cry for a “Great White Hope” went up to redeem Whiteness. All eyes turned to retired heavyweight champion James J. Jeffries.

When the freely smiling Jack Johnson stepped from the Canadian-Australian liner onto the docks of Vancouver on March 9, 1909, American reporters peppered him with questions about whether he would fight Jeffries. And then they noticed the most newsworthy element of all for racist America: the champion’s “white wife, a former
Philadelphia woman who threw in her lot with him,” as newspaper readers found out in the Associated Press dispatch.

Jack Johnson’s earlier “heartaches” with two Black women had caused him to date primarily White women. Johnson loathed that “no matter how colored women feel toward a man, they don’t spoil him and pamper him and build up his ego.” White women did, and thus they were superior partners, in Johnson’s version of gender racism. In actuality, some White women refused to build up their man’s ego, while some Black women catered to their man’s ego. But by 1909, the gender racism of the submissive White woman and the hard Black woman was attracting patriarchal Black men to White women—just as the gender racism of the weak Black man being unable to handle the hard Black woman had attracted some Black women to the strong White man; and just as the gender racism of hypersexual Black people, embodied in the large penis or buttocks, attracted some White people to Black people; and just as the assimilationist belief that the Whiter and straighter the skin and hair, the more beautiful a person was, attracted Black people to (light and) White people. All these racist myths only hardened over the next century as Americans became better able to act on their interracial attractions in public. What did love have to do with those interracial attractions based in racist ideas? Only the couples knew. There were many interracial relationships
not
based in racist ideas. But how many were, and how many were not? Only the couples knew.

The most famous Black man in America quickly became the most hated Black man in America. By 1908, Johnson had won three of the four greatest prizes of patriarchal White masculinity—wealth, the heavyweight title, and the White woman. Taft winning the White House hardly could calm the fury of White men, especially when Jack Johnson went on to flaunt his White woman, his wealth, and his title.
⁷

“If the black man wins, thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory as justifying claims to much more than mere physical equality with their white neighborhoods,” predicted a writer in the
New York Times
months before the biggest sporting event in American history on July 4, 1910. It was the first
to be reported live through wireless telegraphy. The former heavyweight champion, the mammoth Jim Jeffries, dubbed the “Great White Hope,” came out of retirement to seek the heavyweight title for the White race and win it back from the nation’s most hated and beloved man, Jack Johnson. The match was held in Reno, Nevada, before 12,000 raging White spectators. Johnson knocked Jeffries out in the fifteenth round, sending a surge of excitement through Black America and a surge of fury through racist America. Racist mobs tried to beat Black bodies back down, and racist writers tried to beat Black minds back down. “Do not swell your chest too much,” warned the
Los Angeles Times
. “No man will think a bit higher of you because your complexion is the same as that of the victor at Reno.” Later, in
Knuckles and Gloves
(1922), London boxing aficionado John Gilbert explained that White men were “at a disadvantage” in boxing because of their “physical inequality.” The US government soon accomplished what White boxers failed to do: knocking out Jack Johnson, though only in a metaphorical sense. He was arrested on trumped-up charges of transporting a prostitute (or rather a White woman) across state lines. After skipping bail, he lived abroad for seven years before turning himself in, and then he spent almost a year in jail.
⁸

WITH RACIST AMERICANS
hungry for the restoration of superior White masculinity after Johnson knocked it down and out, a pulp fiction writer served them what they needed. Edgar Rice Burroughs, who lived in Johnson’s stomping ground of Chicago, had been moved by Henry Morgan Stanley’s nineteenth-century productions of Africa’s savagery. In
All-Story Magazine
in October 1912, Americans first tasted Burroughs’s novel
Tarzan of the Apes
.

Tarzan
tells the story of an orphan infant of White parents abandoned in Central Africa who is raised by the she-ape Kala in a community of apes. The orphan, John Clayton, is named “Tarzan” by the apes; it means “White skin” in their language. As he grows up, Tarzan becomes the community’s most skilled hunter and warrior, more skilled than any of the nearby ape-Africans. He eventually finds his
parents’ cabin and teaches himself to read. In subsequent stories, Tarzan protects a White woman named Jane from ravishing Black men and apes all around her. Tarzan goes on to teach his children, the Africans, how to fight and grow food.

It is hard to imagine a more famous fictional character during the twentieth century than Tarzan—and it is hard to imagine a more racist plot than what Burroughs wrote up in the Tarzan adventure series books, which he was writing and publishing almost up until his death in 1950. The plot became a Hollywood staple, reappearing again and again, most recently in the 2009 blockbuster
Avatar
. Burroughs made the association between animals, savages, and Africa permanent in the American mind. The defining message of the Tarzan series was clear: whether on Wall Street or in the forests of Central Africa, swinging through Greek literature or swinging from trees, White people will do it better than the African apelike children, so much better that Whites will always, the world over, become teachers of African people. Forget Jack Johnson’s heavyweight title, White men had something better now. They had Tarzan, the instant sensation, a cultural icon for the ages, the character that inspired comic strips, merchandise, twenty-seven sequels, and forty-five motion pictures, the first appearing in 1918.
⁹

W. E. B. DU BOIS
couldn’t have cared less about Jack Johnson and boxing in 1909. He was worried about his biography of the antislavery activist John Brown. The darling of White liberal America—the publisher of the
Evening Post
and
The Nation
and the grandson of William Lloyd Garrison—had also published a biography of Brown that year. Oswald Garrison Villard’s biography was widely hailed as definitive and it sold well. Du Bois’s sales were as disappointing as the reviews. Black scholars were routinely ignored by the White media and by White readers, even when they had nationally recognizable names, like Du Bois. “We rated merely as Negroes studying Negroes,” Du Bois recalled, “and after all, what had Negroes to do with America or science?” What did science have to do with the fierce fight against the Tuskegee Machine
and Jim Crow segregation? “What with all my dreaming, studying, and teaching was I going to do in this fierce fight?” Du Bois asked. Losing faith in scientific persuasion, he decided to “lead and inspire and decide.” He left Atlanta University in the summer of 1910 and moved to New York to become the founding editor of
The Crisis
, the organ of the recently founded National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
¹⁰