Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (47 page)

Then again, southern Blacks did not need these recruiters to entice them to escape a place that in some ways was worse than hell. During the Great War, Black people once again used their legs as activism, escaping from rural towns to southern cities, from southern cities to border-state cities, and from border-state cities to northern cities in what became known as the “Great Migration.” In the first mass antiracist movement of the twentieth century, migrants eschewed beliefs in the New South’s racial progress, in the notion of Jim Crow being better than slavery, and in the claim that Blacks’ political-economic plight was their fault. Segregationists tried to slow the migration through racist ideas, ideas put into action when they terrorized northern labor recruiters, when they arrested migrants, and even when they tried to improve labor conditions. But nothing and no one could stop this movement.

When migrants reached northern cities, they faced the same discrimination they thought they had left behind, and they heard the same racist ideas. The Black and White natives of northern cities
looked down on the migrants and their different (though equal) southern or rural cultural ways as culturally backward. They looked at their families as dysfunctional. And they called these migrants, who had moved hundreds of miles seeking work and a better life, lazy.

In 1918, Harvard-trained historian Carter G. Woodson, who had just founded the first Black history journal and professional association, correctly predicted that “the maltreatment of Negroes will be nationalized.” Migrants faced segregation in the northern “receiving stations,” as journalist Isabel Wilkerson termed them in 2010. Racist Harlemites, for instance, organized to fight off what they called the “a growing menace” of “black hordes,” and ended up segregating their communities. Over the course of six decades, some 6 million Black southerners left their homes, transforming Black America from a primarily southern population to a national and urban one, and segregationist ideas became nationalized and urbanized in the process.
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The Great Migration overshadowed a smaller migration of people from the Caribbean and Africa to the United States. A young, well-read, charismatic Jamaican with a passion for African people and an understanding of racism arrived in New York in March 1916 to raise funds for a school in Jamaica. Seeking out Du Bois, the stocky, dark-skinned Marcus Mosiah Garvey visited the New York offices of the NAACP. Du Bois was absent, and Garvey was “unable to tell whether he was in a white office or that of the NAACP.” The plethora of White and biracial assimilationists on the NAACP’s staff, and all the biracial assimilationists in leadership positions in Black America, no doubt contributed to Garvey’s decision to remain in Harlem and build his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) there. His organizing principles were global African solidarity, the beauty of dark skin and African American culture, and global African self-determination. “Africa for the Africans,” he liked to say. His UNIA quickly attracted antiracists, Black working people, and Black migrants and immigrants who did not like the colorism, class racism, assimilationism, and nativism of the NAACP and the Talented Tenth.
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Marcus Garvey and his admirers were not the only people observing the growing population and power of biracial Americans.
Scholars were taking note. Two years after Garvey’s jarring visit to the NAACP’s headquarters, sociologist and eugenicist Edward Bryon Reuter finished
The Mulatto in the United States
(1918). From his base at the University of Iowa, Reuter made a name for himself arguing that anything Black people achieved was in fact the achievement of biracial people. He situated biracial people as a sort of racial middle class, below superior Whites, but above inferior “full Blacks,” as they were called. (Biracial people often rejected the racist idea of their inferiority to Whites, but some consumed and reproduced the racist idea of their superiority to Blacks.) Reuter stamped biracial people as a “peculiar people”—despite their success—around the same time that homosexuals were being marked as a “peculiar people.”
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Reuter reinforced the fundamentally racist idea that biracial people were
abnormal
. Homosexuals, like biracial people, also were considered abnormal, and the two were sometimes considered in the same breath as “peculiar people” situated in an in-between state. “Between the whitest of men and the blackest negro stretches out a vast line of intermediary races,” proclaimed one of the earlier advocates of homosexual rights, Xavier Mayne, in
The Intersexes
(1908). “Nature abhors the absolute, delights in . . . the half-steps, the between-beings.” Passing bisexuals and biracial people quietly disrupted the so-called normality of heterosexuality and racial purity.
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Eugenicists promoting the need for maintaining the purity of the White race endlessly berated interracial reproduction. In an explosive wartime book published in 1916 called
The Passing of the Great Race
, New York lawyer Madison Grant constructed a racial-ethnic ladder with Nordics (the new term for Anglo-Saxons) at the top and Jews, Italians, the Irish, Russians, and all non-Whites on lower rungs. He reconstructed a world history of rising and falling civilizations based on the “amount of Nordic blood in each nation.” “[The] races vary intellectually and morally just as they do physically,” Grant suggested. “It has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes and going to school and church does not transform a Negro into a white man.” This segregationist passionately told assimilationists that their efforts were
bound to fail. Black people were incapable of development and could not become White. Grant revised and reissued his book three times in five years and it was translated into several foreign languages. Publishers were barely able to supply the voracious demand for segregationist ideas and for the dashing eugenicist movement as White theorists attempted to normalize the social inequities of the day.
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When Germany surrendered in the Great War, an embittered Austrian soldier sprinted into German politics, where he gained some cheers for his nasty speeches against Marxists and Jews. In 1924, Adolf Hitler was jailed for an attempted revolution. He used the time in prison—and Madison Grant’s book—to write his magnum opus,
Mein Kampf
. “The highest aim of human existence is . . . the conservation of race,” Hitler famously wrote. The Nazi czar later thanked Grant for writing
The Passing of the Great Race
, which Hitler called “my Bible.”
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Eugenicist ideas also became part of the fledgling discipline of psychology and the basis of newly minted standardized intelligence tests. Many believed these tests would prove once and for all the existence of natural racial hierarchies. In 1916, Stanford eugenicist Lewis Terman and his associates “perfected” the IQ test based on the dubious theory that a standardized test could actually quantify and objectively measure something as intricate and subjective and varied as intelligence across different experiential groups. The concept of general intelligence did not exist. When scholars tried to point out this mirage, it seemed to be as much in the eye of the beholder as general beauty, another nonexistent phenomenon. But Terman managed to make Americans believe that something that was inherently subjective was actually objective and measurable. Terman predicted that the IQ test would show “enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture.” Standardized tests became the newest “objective” method of proving Black intellectual inferiority and justifying discrimination, and a multimillion-dollar testing industry quickly developed in schools and workplaces.
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IQ tests were administered to 1.75 million soldiers in 1917 and 1918. American Psychological Association president and Princeton psychologist Carl C. Brigham used the results of the army intelligence tests to conjure up a genetic intellectual racial hierarchy, and a few years later, he constructed the SAT test for college admissions. White soldiers scored better, and for Brigham that was because of their superior White blood. African Americans in the North scored better than African Americans in the South, and Brigham argued that northern Blacks had a higher concentration of White blood, and that these genetically superior African Americans had sought better opportunities up North because of their greater intelligence.
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AN ARMISTICE SIGNED
on November 11, 1918, ended the fighting in World War I. It took six months of negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference for colonial powers to come to an agreement on the Treaty of Versailles. W. E. B. Du Bois ventured to Paris in 1918 and sent back gripping letters and editorials to
The Crisis
. He shared the racism faced by Black soldiers, adding to the wartime press reports filled with stories of Black heroism. But this storyline of Black heroism changed in White newspapers to the storyline of Black deficiency when the officers, who were disproportionately White and southern, returned to the United States and began telling their own war stories to reporters. As a collection, Du Bois’s Parisian dispatches and activities displayed his lingering double-consciousness of assimilationism and antiracism. Du Bois witnessed steadily fierce opposition among the victors at the Paris Peace Conference to granting independence to colonial peoples. In “Reconstruction and Africa,” published in the February 1919 issue of
The Crisis
, Du Bois rejected, in antiracist fashion, the notion that Europe was the “Benevolent Civilizer of Africa.” He declared, “White men are merely juggling with words—or worse—when they declare that the withdrawal of Europe from Africa will plunge the continent into chaos.” On the other assimilationist hand, Du Bois helped organize the First Pan-African Congress that month in Paris, which called on the Paris Peace Conference to adopt “gradual” decolonization and
civil rights. Du Bois desired a “chance for peaceful and accelerated development of black folk.”
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At long last, the parties signed the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919. The massive German state was forced to pay reparations. France, Belgium, South Africa, Portugal, and England received Germany’s prized African colonies. The League of Nations was created to rule the world. The Wilson administration joined with England and Australia in rejecting Japan’s proposal that the League’s charter confess a commitment to the equality of all peoples. At least President Wilson was being honest. He feared that the relatively good treatment Black soldiers had received in France had “gone to their heads.” To Wilson’s racist Americans, there was nothing more dangerous than a self-respecting Black person with antiracist expectations of immediate equality, rather than the gradual equality of assimilationists or the permanent inequality of segregationists. In 1919, many Black soldiers returned to their towns, with antiracist expectations, as
New
Negroes. And they were greeted by New Negroes, too.
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These New Negroes heeded Du Bois’s plea. “By the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, long, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land,” Du Bois wrote in “We Return Fighting,” in
The Crisis
of May 1919. The same US Postal Service that for decades had delivered White newspapers doused in lynching kerosene refused to deliver this
Crisis
, judging Du Bois’s words as “unquestionably violent and extremely likely to excite a considerable amount of racial prejudice (if that has not already reached its maximum amongst the Negroes).” Du Bois’s own false 1901 construction of antiracists as being filled with revenge and anger against White people—instead of anger against racist ideas and discrimination—had finally come back to bite him. He had spent his early years urging Black people to calmly focus their efforts on their own moral uplift, on uplift suasion, to change racist minds. He had tried to provide White Americans with the scientific facts of racial disparities, and he had believed that producers of racist ideas and policies could be persuaded through reason to end their production. He had
spent his early years ridiculing leaders like Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Bishop Henry McNeal Turner as unwise, as violent, and as prejudiced when they had passionately called on Black people to fight. But every year, as the failures of education and persuasion and uplift piled up, Du Bois’s urgings for Black people to protest and fight became stronger and more passionate. But then, he had to face the same criticism and censorship that he had dished out to others earlier in his career. After a week’s delay, postal officials finally delivered
The Crisis
. They had found there were even more dangerous antiracist and socialist publications being edited by New Negroes, including Marcus Garvey’s
The Negro World
.

How did those Americans still packing movie houses to watch
Tarzan
and
The Birth of a Nation
, who were still spending their afternoons reading
The Passing of the Great Race
, or attending Klan events, or trying to segregate away Black migrants, respond to the New Negro? James Weldon Johnson described their response during that year of 1919 as the “Red Summer” for all the blood that spilled in the deadliest series of White invasions of Black neighborhoods since Reconstruction. Since racist ideas were not working on New Negroes, violence came rushing forth in at least twenty-five US cities, as if to remind the assertive New Negro of White rule. “If we must die, let it not be like hogs,” Claude McKay’s booming poem of self-defense shouted in July. “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, / Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!”
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