Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (50 page)

The cross-class, cross-generational, cross-ideological portrayals debate was on in the 1920s, and it was centered in the portrayals of blues and then jazz, in
Nigger Heaven
, and then in Claude McKay’s
Home to Harlem
in 1928.
Home to Harlem
, the first Black-authored best seller, made Du Bois feel “distinctly like taking a bath.” Raging, Du Bois released his own
Dark Princess: A Romance
that year, portraying strong, intelligent women and sensitive, intelligent men, as he always did in his fiction, seemingly unaware that he, too, was reinforcing racist ideas.
¹⁰

Du Bois was reinforcing assimilationist ideas, and in the 1920s these ideas were advancing on American northern minds—particularly among intellectuals. The acceptance of those ideas appeared to be the by-product of the ongoing Great Migration of Black folk out of the segregated South, the ongoing activism of New Negroes
to desegregate the North and northern scholarship, and the ongoing reproduction of Black folk. The advance was not the by-product of Talented Tenth activists successfully persuading racist Americans that Black domestics and farmers could live and work in the industrial North. Migrants to the North were forcibly breaking out of the confines of agricultural and domestic labor in the segregated South, and thus the racist ideas justifying those confines. In 1928, some of the leading race scholars came together to publish a landmark special issue on “The Negro” in the prestigious
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
. Over the past fifteen years, the
Annals
editor wrote, “students of race as well as laymen have had to discard or even reverse many of their theories.” The Great Migration had “upset” the “widely accepted theory” that segregating Blacks in their “tropical nature” would solve the Negro problem. Black people “of both sexes” had demonstrated their ability to work in industrial occupations formerly thought to be beyond them. And the theory of poor Black health causing “extinction through degeneracy,” the editor said, had “suffered severe shocks”: “The old theories concerning absorption through biological assimilation have been unable in their original form to withstand the tests of research.” Moreover, “[Black] ethical and moral standards are developing,” the editor beamed, in assimilationist fashion. In short, the most prestigious social scientific journal in American academia symbolically announced the retreat of segregationist ideas. Segregationists had dominated American academe for nearly a century, since the pre–Civil War days of Samuel Morton and the polygenesists.
¹¹

The special issue comprised a star-studded lineup of Black and White male scholars, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Robert Park, and esteemed University of Pennsylvania sociologist Thorsten Sellin. Sellin disclosed the “unreliability” of racial crime statistics for assessing actual levels of crime. “The colored criminal does not as a rule enjoy the racial anonymity which cloaks the offenses of individuals of the white race,” Sellin wrote. “In setting the hall-mark of his color upon him, his individuality is in a sense submerged, and instead of a mere thief, robber, or murderer, he becomes a representative of his race.”
And yet Sellin could not go as far as antiracist New Negro criminologists and concede that the “Negro’s
real
criminality is lower or as low as the white’s.”
¹²

Walter White, who on several occasions in the 1920s courageously “passed” to conduct brilliant NAACP investigations of southern lynching parties, suggested that the “color line” existed not only in America, but also in Europe and South Africa, and in “approximately the same proportions.” Possibly to remain politically correct, he did not mention Communist Russia, where state views on race did not approximate the other colonizing European nations. In the summer of 1928, the Sixth Congress of the Soviet Comintern declared that “the Party must come out openly and unreservedly for the right of Negroes to national self-determination in the southern states, where the Negroes form a majority of the population.”
¹³

American Communists were stirred to action. The “central slogan” of the party should be: “
Abolition of the whole system of race discrimination
”, blared
The Communist
. For Black labor activists, the Comintern’s 1928 statement (and expanded version in 1930) sounded like a lifeline for drowning Black labor. When American Federation of Labor head Samuel Gompers died in 1924, William Green continued his policy of saying Blacks were welcome in the AFL and denying the existence of racial discrimination in the ranks of labor unions. In doing so, Green effectively blamed Blacks for segregated unions and for their disproportionate placement at the bottom of labor pools.
¹⁴

CLAUDE G. BOWERS
probably did not read the essays in the special issue of
Annals
. His attention was focused elsewhere in November 1928—on the election returns. Bowers was the editor of the
New York Post
, a prominent biographer of Thomas Jefferson, and as aggressively loyal to the Democratic Party as anyone. Angrily watching the GOP snatch southern states in the presidential election, he decided to remind White southerners that the Republicans had been responsible for the horror of Reconstruction. His best-selling book, published in 1929, was called
The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln
. “Historians have
shrunk from the unhappy tasks of showing us the torture chambers,” he said, where guiltless southern Whites were “literally” tortured by vicious Black Republicans. We will never know just how many Americans read
The Tragic Era
, and then saw
The Birth of a Nation
again at their local theaters, and then pledged never to vote again for the Republican Party, never to miss a lynching bash, and never to consider desegregation—in short, never to do anything that might revive the specter of Blacks voting on a large scale and Whites being tortured. But there were many of them. More than any other book in the late 1920s,
The Tragic Era
helped the Democratic Party keep the segregationists in power for another generation.
¹⁵

“It seems to me that the
Tragic Era
should be answered—adequately, fully, ably, finally[,] & again it seems to me Thou art the Man!” Du Bois received this encouragement to answer the book from the legendary Black educator Anna Julia Cooper. Du Bois dove into his research for the book he later considered to be his best, better even than
The Souls of Black Folk
. America could never have a truthful history “until we have in our colleges men who regard the truth as more important than the defense of the white race,” Du Bois concluded in
Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880
, published in 1935. Far from a tragic era, Du Bois argued, Reconstruction was the first and only time the United States had ever truly tasted democracy. After the Civil War, Black and White commoners came together to build democratic state governments providing public resources for the masses of southerners. White elites overthrew these governments by securing the loyalty of White commoners, a feat accomplished not by offering them higher wages, but by holding up the rewards of the lucrative “public and psychological wage.” From Du Bois, historians now term these rewards the “wages of whiteness”: they were the privileges that would accrue to Whites through application of racist ideas and segregation. And to receive them, White laborers needed only stand shoulder to shoulder with White elites on lynched and raped and exploited Black bodies.
¹⁶

To a
New Yorker
reviewer, Du Bois took the “odd view, in distinction to most previous writers, that the Negro is a human being.” Du Bois’s Reconstruction history “changed or swept away” our “familiar
scenes and landmarks,” wrote the reviewer for
Time
. But Du Bois did not blunt the appeal of
The Tragic Era
among southern segregationists. It is unlikely that racist readers would have their minds changed by a Black scholar. Indeed, it would take the legitimacy of a White historian and native southerner, historian Howard K. Beale of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to break the consensus of Columbia’s Dunning School in 1940.
¹⁷

THOUGH HIS BOOK
certainly helped, Claude Bowers did not necessarily need to write
The Tragic Era
to break the back of the Republican Party. On October 29, 1929, the stock market crashed, ending the decades-long dominion of the pro-business GOP. The Great Depression hit the South and Black America particularly hard. “No jobs for niggers until every white man has a job,” became the Deep South’s slogan. In the North, Black migrants and natives were often found standing on “slave markets,” as these street corners were called in northern cities. White employers would come by and choose the cheapest day laborers. Sexual and fiscal exploitation were rampant.
¹⁸

In the midst of the Great Depression, with so many Americans suffering, it became harder to embrace eugenics—harder to blame one’s economic plight on hereditary factors. Assimilationists took advantage of this lull and continued to assume control of the scientific community. Franz Boas blasted segregationists in his presidential address before the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1931. Princeton psychologist Carl C. Brigham confessed in 1932 that his earlier findings about IQ tests determining genetic Black inferiority were “without foundation” (although the use of Brigham’s SAT test only expanded). Scientific disciplines split into bickering factions, with geneticists distancing themselves from eugenicists. Meanwhile, eugenics was kept afloat by Nazi Germany and by the American birth control movement, the latter run by Margaret Sanger and her American Birth Control League.
¹⁹

Physical anthropology, a discipline studying biological racial distinctions, had split off from cultural anthropology, which studied
cultural distinctions. Boas was at the helm of cultural anthropology; the anthropologists at the helm of physical anthropology were Earnest A. Hooton and Carleton S. Coon at Harvard. In 1931, Hooton authored
Up from the Ape
, which became a staple in physical anthropology courses over the next few decades. “Physical characteristics,” Hooton explained, “which determine race are associated, in the main, with specific intangible and non-measurable but nevertheless real and important, temperamental and mental variations.”
²⁰

Many of Hooton’s students entered the health-care sector, where segregationist ideas of biological races were rampant, and where workers were still treating diseases differently by race. Syphilis harmed Blacks much more than it did Whites, argued syphilis “expert” Thomas Murrell in
Journal of the American Medical Association
in 1910. But this theory had never been definitively proven. So in 1932, the US Public Health Service began its “Study of Syphilis in the Untreated Negro Male.” Government researchers promised free medical care to six hundred syphilis-infected sharecroppers around Tuskegee, Alabama. They secretly withheld treatment to these men and waited for their deaths, so they could perform autopsies. Researchers wanted to confirm their hypothesis that syphilis damaged the neurological systems of Whites, while bypassing Blacks “underdeveloped” brains and damaging their cardiovascular systems instead. The study was not halted until the press exposed it in 1972.
²¹

Hooton’s
Up from the Ape
received a complement when
King Kong
appeared on the big screen in 1933. The film shares the adventure tale of a colossal, primordial, island-dwelling ape who dies attempting to possess a young and beautiful White woman. Americans scraped their pennies together, took their minds off the Depression, and gave the film stunning box-office sales. Reviewers were captivated. “One of the most original, thrilling and mammoth novelties to emerge from a movie studio,” radiated the
Chicago Tribune
. Actually,
King Kong
was nothing but a remake of
The Birth of a Nation
, set in the island scenery of
Tarzan
, and then New York. But
King Kong
did not invite the controversy of
The Birth of a Nation
. The filmmakers had veiled the physically powerful Black man by casting him as the physically powerful ape. In
both films, the Negro-Ape terrorizes White people, tries to destroy White civilization, and pursues a White woman before a dramatic climax—the lynching of the Negro-Ape.
King Kong
was stunningly original for showing images of racist ideas—without ever saying a word about Black people, like those southern grandfather clauses, poll taxes, and understanding clauses that had disenfranchised Black people.
²²

Black critics struggled to condemn
King Kong
, but they had no trouble launching an attack on NBC’s radio comedy program
Amos
’
n
’
Andy
. More than 40 million White and Black listeners tuned in nightly in the 1930s to hear “The Perfect Song” from the score of
The Birth of a Nation
, and then Amos and Andy came on. The stereotypical characters included Coons, Toms, Mammies, and even a nagging, assertive, emasculating Sapphire—the first major media representation of an angry Black woman. While racist listeners laughed
at
the characters, antiracist listeners laughed
with
them, especially the profoundly likeable and imperfectly human main characters played by two White minstrel-show veterans, who shared the relatable troubles, fears, frustrations, and restrictions of urban Black life in the Great Depression. Those African Americans who turned up their noses at
Amos ’n’ Andy
usually also despised Hollywood’s first Black celebrity: Stepin Fetchit, who played a series of roles depicting the “laziest man in the world.” Stepin Fetchit starred in
Hearts in Dixie
(1929), the first studio production to boast a majority Black cast. He was clever, for in all of his laziness, Fetchit’s characters hardly ever did any work, and the exasperated White characters were compelled to do the work themselves. Antiracist Blacks loved Fetchit’s character. He was a trickster of racists, harkening back to slavery’s tricksters.
²³