Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (46 page)

At the NAACP, Du Bois butted heads with Oswald Garrison Villard, who along with Du Bois was one of the co-founders of the new organization. Like his grandfather, Villard was more of an assimilationist than an antiracist, and he looked upon Black people as social problems. Then again, while his grandfather had loved aggressive antiracist Blacks, such as early Black feminist Maria Stewart, Villard “naturally expected” African Americans “to be humble and thankful or certainly not assertive and aggressive,” Du Bois accurately noted. For instance, Villard tried, unsuccessfully, to push Ida B. Wells-Barnett out of the Committee of Forty, which had been responsible for organizing the NAACP.
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Assimilationists and antiracists launched the NAACP at a crucial moment. Segregationists had just launched their eugenics movement, demonstrating the progression of their racist policies and the racist ideas to justify them. Social Darwinism had fully immigrated to the United States. In 1910, former University of Chicago biologist Charles Davenport secured some financial support from a railroad heiress to establish the Eugenics Record Office at the nation’s first center dedicated to improving the nation’s genetic stock, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. Davenport was the son of an abolitionist and had studied at Harvard during Du Bois’s tenure. Davenport sought to prove one of the most oppressive figments of the human imagination: that personality and mental traits were inherited, and that superior racial groups inherited superior traits.

“So you see that the seed sown by you is still sprouting in distant countries,” Davenport wrote to England’s pioneering eugenicist Frances Galton, Darwin’s cousin, in 1910. And the vines of eugenics surely sprouted after 1910, watered incessantly by Davenport and the
250 eugenicists whom he trained. “Permanent advance” would only come about by “securing the best ‘blood,’” he wrote in the movement’s manifesto,
Heredity in Relation to Eugenics
(1911). The eugenics movement quickly rushed into American popular culture: in Better Babies contests, in magazines, in college courses, in popular lectures, and in a society assessing moguls and criminals as having good or bad genes, good or bad “blood.” It did not matter that people did not change after blood transfusions. Nor did it matter that eugenicists never uncovered any evidence proving that heredity shaped behavior. The eugenics movement created believers, not evidence. Americans wanted to believe that the racial, ethnic, class, and gender hierarchies in the United States were natural and normal. They wanted to believe that they were passing their traits on to their children.
¹²

As eugenics gained ground, Du Bois used
The Crisis
to combat the movement and to publicize “those facts and arguments which show the danger of race prejudice.” As part of that agenda, he printed a piece by Franz Boas, prepping readers for Boas’s 1911 magnum opus,
The Mind of Primitive Man
. Boas echoed the old creed of assimilationists in
The Mind of Primitive Man
: rejection of the segregationist “theory of hereditary inferiority” and belief that the “complete loss” of African cultures and the pressures of slavery and discrimination had made Black people inferior. “In short, there is every reason to believe that the negro when given facility and opportunity, will be perfectly able to fulfill the duties of citizenship as well as his white neighbor,” Boas wrote. “It may be that he will not produce as many great men as the white race, and that his average achievement will not quite reach the level of the average achievement of the white race; but there will be endless numbers who will be able to outrun their white competitors.”
¹³

“North American negroes . . . in culture and language,” Boas said, were “essentially European.” Boas was “absolutely opposed to all kinds of attempts to foster racial solidarity,” including among his own Jewish people. He, like other assimilationists, saw the United States as a melting pot in which all the cultural colors became absorbed together (into White Americanness). Ironically, assimilationists like Boas hated racial solidarity, but kept producing racist ideas based on racial solidarity.
¹⁴

Boas composed a preface for another popular book in 1911,
Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York
, by NAACP co-founder and scholar Mary White Ovington. While pointing out some racial discrimination, she put a new statistical spin on the old racist stereotype of the oversexed, irresponsible Black woman. The higher the ratio of Black women to men, she said, made these “surplus women” prone to prostitution and prone to playing “havoc with their neighbors’ sons, even with their neighbors’ husbands.” Along the same lines, social-work forerunner Jane Addams alleged, in
The Crisis
, that Black mothers were less able than Italian mothers to control their girls’ sexual behavior. Ida B. Wells-Barnett could not let these attacks from White women go by unchecked. Black women, she wrote, had the “same love for husbands and children, the same ambitions for well-ordered families that white women have.”
¹⁵

As part of his effort to expand readership and demonstrate the capability of Black folk, Du Bois unveiled a popular section in
The Crisis
on Black firsts in June 1911—those individual Black professionals breaking through racial barriers. As America desegregated over the next century, praises rained down on Black firsts, such as hair industry mogul Madame C. J. Walker, and
Chicago Defender
founder Robert Abbott, who became the first Black millionaires. At their antiracist best, praises for Black firsts turned into demonstrations against racial discrimination, and demands for Black seconds and tenths and thirtieths. At their racist worst, Americans held up Black firsts as extraordinary Negroes, or as signposts of racial progress. As more Blacks broke free from the discriminatory barriers, society could find more ways to ignore the barriers themselves, and could even argue that something else was holding Black people back. With every Black first, the blame shifted to those Black people who failed to break away. Du Bois’s
The Crisis
tried to assign blame to both: the Black have-nots, and the discriminatory barriers. But accommodating Black firsts advocated for a greater Black work ethic as a better social policy than action against discriminatory bars. If some could break away, the logic went, then all could, if they worked hard enough. Racist logic didn’t have to be logical; it just had to make common sense. And so, as much as Black
firsts broke racial barriers, the publicity around Black firsts sometimes, if not most times, reinforced racist ideas blaming Blacks and not the remaining discriminatory barriers.
¹⁶

BY
1913,
THE CRISIS
had accumulated a captivated audience: captivated by the leadership of the Talented Tenth and the NAACP, captivated by popular sections of the publication, such as Black firsts, and captivated, more than anything else, by the brilliant editorial pen of W. E. B. Du Bois. In March, Du Bois joined the rest of the publishing nation in reporting on the first major suffrage parade in Washington, DC, organized by the segregated National American Woman Suffrage Association. In their march down Pennsylvania Avenue, 5,000 suffragists faced a funnel of White male policemen and hecklers. In
The Crisis
, Du Bois reported the “remarkable” contrast between the nasty White male opposition and the reportedly respectful Black male observers. In a rush of biting anti-assimilationist sarcasm, he asked his Black male readers: “Does it not make you burn with shame to be a mere black man when such mighty deeds are done by the Leaders of Civilization? Does it not make you ‘ashamed of your race’? Does it not make you ‘want to be white’?”
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A few years later, Du Bois published a forum on women’s suffrage, particularly for the Black woman. Not many of the Black contributors advanced the popular (and sexist) argument of White suffragists: that women’s innate (childlike) morality gave them a distinct entitlement to the vote. But educator Nannie H. Burroughs took this argument and refashioned it. She was one of the more articulate and hard-nosed leaders of her time. Back in 1904, Burroughs had indicted racist colorism in “Not Color But Character.” There were legions of Black men “who would rather marry a woman for her color than her character,” Burroughs charged. And so, Black women went about trying to change their appearance, straightening their hair and bleaching their skin to look like White women. “What every woman who . . . straightens out needs, is not her appearance changed but her mind changed,” Burroughs charged. “If Negro women would use half of their time
they spend on trying to get White, to get better, the race would move forward.”
¹⁸

On the suffrage issue in
The Crisis
forum, Burroughs skipped over into racist ideas, and especially into the idea of the weak Black male selling out his vote (and the strong Black woman not selling out hers). This gender racism had been articulated by everyone from Anna Julia Cooper to Frances Ellen Harper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and southern segregationists James K. Vardaman and Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman. Immoral, corrupt, and weak Black men had “bartered and sold” the vote, Burroughs argued. “The Negro woman . . . needs the ballot to get back, by the wise
use
of it, what the Negro man has lost by the
misuse
of it,” Burroughs argued. In claiming that Black women would not have sold out their votes, Burroughs was simultaneously rewriting history and regarding Black women as politically superior to Black men. She was ignoring the history of Black male and female resistance to the ambush of laws, violence, and economic intimidation that forcibly stole Black male voting power.
¹⁹

Then again, Burroughs may have still been upset about that loud minority of Black male voters who went for the Democrat in the 1912 presidential election. Though Woodrow Wilson, a Virginia-born Democrat, was a former Princeton political scientist who had made a name for himself conjuring up the Black terrors of Reconstruction and defending the re-enslaving White South, he had secured Du Bois’s vote and the votes of thousands of other Black men by pledging moderation on race. Once in office, Wilson gave southern segregationists a dominant influence in his administration, while encouraging Blacks to focus on uplift suasion. W. E. B. Du Bois felt hoodwinked. An American politician had once again played Black voters like a drum, and forced them to hear the deadening beat of segregation in Washington, DC, and federal offices across the South.
²⁰

During his first term, Wilson enjoyed the first-ever film screening at the White House, and the selection was a stark symbol of his ideas about race. The 1915 film was Hollywood’s first feature-length studio production, D. W. Griffith’s
The Birth of a Nation
, based on Thomas Dixon’s popular novel
The Clansmen
. The film signaled the birth of
Hollywood and of the motion-picture industry in the United States. It became the newest visual medium by which to circulate racist ideas, eclipsing the fading minstrel shows. The silent film depicted Reconstruction as an era of corrupt Black supremacists petrifying innocent Whites. At the climax, a Black male rapist (played by a White actor in blackface) pursues a White woman into the woods until she leaps to her death. “Lynch him! Lynch him!” moviegoers shouted in Houston, and nearly one hundred Blacks were actually lynched in 1915. In the end, the victim’s brother in the film organizes Klansmen to regain control of southern society. A White Jesus—brown-haired, brown-eyed, and white-robed—appears to bless the triumph of White supremacy as the film concludes.
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“It is like writing history with lightning,” Wilson reportedly said after the film. “And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” Millions of White northerners and southerners packed movie houses beginning on February 8, 1915, to watch the widely believed truth of the Reconstruction era. By January 1916, more than 3 million people had viewed the film in New York alone. It was the nation’s highest-grossing film for two decades, and it enabled millions of Americans to feel redeemed in their lynchings and segregation policies. The film revitalized the Ku Klux Klan, drawing millions of Americans by the 1920s into the club that terrorized Jews, immigrants, socialists, Catholics, and Blacks.

Angry at its terrible lies, Black communities everywhere protested
The Birth of a Nation
. In the final days of his life, Booker T. Washington tried to accomplish behind the scenes what the NAACP and other civil rights groups were trying to do openly: block its showing. They failed. Du Bois took a different approach, challenging the film’s historical racism in his sweeping history
The Negro
, published right on time in 1915. He tore up the fairytales of the non-African ancient Egypt, the absence of sophisticated pre-modern African states, the horrors of Reconstruction, and so on. He had seemingly dropped his biological concept of race. But he had not dropped his racist notions about the traits of the Negro, whom he termed “the most lovable of men.”
²²

For all the northern activists’ efforts to block
The Birth of a Nation
—or to rewrite the history it depicted, or to challenge the mass disenfranchisement of Black men that it endorsed—southern Black activists did infinitely more. They protested southern segregationists with their feet. By the time they finished, they had indeed given birth to a new nation.

CHAPTER 25

The Birth of a Nation

“WAR IS HELL
but there are things worse than Hell, as every Negro knows.” W. E. B. Du Bois had a knack for packaging the complex feelings of Black folk into words. After World War I cut off immigration from Europe, labor recruiters from northern industries headed into southern towns searching for a new labor supply. Even if
The Birth of a Nation
had never appeared before excited southern audiences, southern Blacks would probably have still been all ears to northern industrial recruiters.
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