II. The Racial Thought of the SlavesCh.5 “Devils and Good People Walking de Road at de Same Time”

White People in Black Folk Thought

Khary WorldPeace AMH 5905 Slavery & EmancipationProfessor A. Diallo Summer 2011

• Description & Definition of “White” by former slaves pg. 151• Former slaves’ reluctance to discuss white behavior pg.151• Discretion & Reticence in Former slaves’ testimonies pg.152• Accuracy, Reliability & Truthfulness issues in slave narratives

pg. 152- 153• Richness & Complexity in Ex-slaves’ testimony pg. 153• The decision to tell it all…or not! pg. 153

MAJOR POINTS

“Freedman Jack Maddox told his interviewer he loved white folks ‘like a dog loves [a] hickory [stick]…I can say these things now…I’d say them anywhere- in the court house- before the judges, before God. ‘Cause they done done all to me that they can do” pg. 153

“White folks ‘jes naturally different from darkies” How Whites defined Blacks pg.153

• “…the racial thought of the slaves is profoundly different from that of whites of the same era for whom race served” pg. 153

• Race used by whites was “a social construction that helped ‘produce and maintain relations of power & subordination’” pg. 154

• “White supremacy provided white workers with an important source of status and positive self-definition” pg.154

• “Cultural and social differences divided [blacks] from [whites]…received further reinforcement from a variety of inescapable forms of legal, civil, and political discrimination that set black Americans apart from white Americans” pg.154

DRED SCOTT CASEDRED SCOTT CASE• 1847 Scott vs. 1847 Scott vs.

Emerson in the Emerson in the Federal-State Federal-State Courthouse in St. Courthouse in St. Louis, MissouriLouis, Missouri

• 10 years of litigation 10 years of litigation lands the case in lands the case in the US Supreme the US Supreme CourtCourt

• Maybe the most Maybe the most infamous US infamous US Supreme Court Supreme Court decision of all time. decision of all time. Chief Justice Chief Justice Taney’s defined Taney’s defined race during slavery.race during slavery.

• Decided that all Decided that all people of African people of African descent, slaves as descent, slaves as well as free, could well as free, could never become US never become US citizens and citizens and therefore could not therefore could not sue in federal courtsue in federal court

• Established that Established that the federal the federal government could government could not ban slavery not ban slavery anywhere in the anywhere in the United StatesUnited States

• Dred Scott died 9 Dred Scott died 9 months after the months after the Court’s decisionCourt’s decision

How does the DRED SCOTT case reinforce the idea of a “black” race ?

How Blacks defined Whites• Historian Barbara Fields suggests that “African

American’s viewed themselves as a nation rather than a race” pg. 155

• African-Americans conflated race and class, with full awareness of class distinctions amongst whites, yet the general term- “white folks” pg.155

• Slaves understood class distinctions amongst whites but expressed little sentiment to lower class whites “because enslaved African Americans tended to encounter property less whites under the worst circumstances…[overseers], patrollers” pg.155

• Rich whites = Buckras pg.155• Poor whites = White Trash pg.155

Buckras vs.White Trash

• “You never see classy white buckra men patrollin!…” commented freedwoman Mauda Walker pg.156

• “A rich man wouldn’t ever whip a slave…they [the rich men] always hire someone to do this” according to an un-named freedwoman pg.156

• Ex-slave Hannah McFarland said “The overseer was sho’ nothing but poor white trash, the kind who didn’t lak niggers and dey still don’t, old devils.” pg.155

• “…low down white men, dat never owned a nigger in deir life, doin de patrollin’ and strippin’ de clothes off men, lak pappy, right befo’ de wives and chillun and beatin’ de blood out of him.” said Walker pg.156.

Recognition of Whiteness by Slaves“Us Darkies was taught dat poor white folks didn’t amount to much. Course we

knowed dey was white and we was black and dey was to be respected for dat, but dat was about all” pg.156

Ex-Slave Tom W. Woods from Alabama, WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives

• Southern law required black Americans to defer to all whites, rich and poor

• Ex. Pass Laws “which gave whites the power to detain, question, and punish any black person encountered outside the supervision of his or her owner- including free blacks who could not produce their papers” pg. 156

• Southern law “gave black Southerners every incentive to distrust whites as a class” pg. 156

Such laws “’gave the lowest villain in the country, should he be a white man’ broad powers over all African-Americans” pg.156

Fugitive slave couple William and Ellen Craft, in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, 1860

Black Unity through Armed Resistance• “The racial division of allegiance that shaped the

slave world may have emerged most decisively in those rare moments when the power relations that sustained the slave system came under attack: when the slaves organized armed resistance to their condition” pg. 157

• “The goals of the black insurrectionists were expressed in strikingly similar terms”- get the “white people” pg. 157

Four Slave Rebellions which Define RaceGabriel Prosser’s Virginia Rebellion- “…an

abortive slave plot to take Richmond organized in 1800 by a slave blacksmith…set their plan in motion by recruiting enlistees willing to join ‘a society to fight the white people for freedom’” pg.157

Denmark Vesey’s South Carolina Plot- “Inspired by the black revolt that took place in St. Domingue in 1792, Vesey enlisted slave supporters into what he called a ‘rising to kill the whites’” in 1820 pg.157

#2

#1

Four Slave Rebellions which Define Race

Nat Turner’s Virginia Rebellion- “The slaves who followed the visionary slave preacher Nat Turner on a bloody rampage through Southhampton, Virginia, in 1831 ‘intended to rise and kill all the white people’” pg. 158

Civil War Slave Revolt in Natchez, Mississippi- @ the beginning of the Civil War “in the incident at Second Creek, a plantation district ten miles south of Natchez, Mississippi, discontented slaves once again plotted to ‘kill the white folks’. An able and well-informed group, many of the conspirators worked as coachmen for wealthy planters” giving them access of to news which led to the plot pg.158

#3

#4

Significance of the Four Slave Rebellions pg.159

• “…provides us with a rare glimpse into the racial worldview they probably shared not only with other slave rebels but with man slaves who did not rebel”.

• “…rebels’ plans bear out the sense of racial difference” used by slaves.

• “no distinction between rich and poor planters”• “between slaveholding whites and slaveless”• “all white people [were] the common enemy

even when their plans included the possibility of incorporating white allies”

American Slave Rebellions Through Time

Slaves’ Racial Worldview- Gender & Piety as Occasional Exceptions

• Religion- “In Vesey and Gabriel rebellions the conspirators considered exempting certain whites on religious grounds, some of Denmark Vesey’s followers did not want to kill the ministers while one of Gabriel’s lieutenants understood that Quakers and Methodists would be spared along with their potential allies” pg. 159-160

• Gender- “One participant in Gabriel’s rebellion…intended ‘to spare all poor white women who had no slaves’…in both Vesey’s Rebellion and the Second Creek plot, the conspirators considered exempting white women from the carnage, sometimes with the aim of seizing them for sexual purposes…one defiant second Creek conspirator said “ the blacks were to kill all the men and take young ladies and women for wives” pg.160

Real Meaning of “White Folks”in Slave Rebel Jargon

• “slave rebels’ qualms about killing white women and men of the cloth, like the plans of some of these rebels to enlist white allies, [is] often lost in the racial language…”p.160

• “…for the slaves ‘whiteness had become synonymous with authority and oppression’’’ pg.160

• “white people in black folk thought are defined above all by the superior economic and social power that accompanied their whiteness rather than by their color or any special racial characteristics” pg. 161

From Bay’s description of slaves’ racial worldview, how do we identify the “white folks” in this picture?

Power & Authority Inverse in American Racial Difference

• “The power and authority that nineteenth-century African-Americans saw in white people were in a sense the inverse of the qualities their white contemporaries associated with black people: namely inferiority and degradation. But the inversion of white racial ideology in black folk thought had distinct limits” pg.161

Closer Look at Racial Difference

• “associated white people with power, authority, and oppression” pg. 162

• No “strong associations between the power and authority of white people and their physical characteristics” pg.162

• “denigrated temperament and conduct…rarely mention color” pg.162

• “White people…described …with no elaboration regarding skin color, eye color, or any vagaries of complexion” pg.163

• Freeborn Victoria McMullen- “He look like an old possum. He had a long beard down to his waist and he had long side burns too,” in Arkansas Narratives, v.10 pt.5

• Negative assessments of Negro’s color and human capabilities pg. 161

• “Laws of the land” favored whites pg. 162

• White saw “exploited, degraded, and largely unfree class pg.162

• “Understood black inferiority as more natural than political” pg. 162

• James Campbell & James Oakes- “a vision of innate, ineradicable inferiority, rooted in the body”, in “The Invention of Race: Rereading White Over Black,” Reviews in American History 21, no.1 (March 1993) pg.162

White View Black View

VERSUS

“White”- the Ideal• “…ex-slaves occasionally expressed an

awareness that white people found the appearance of black people unlovely” pg.163

• “absence of slave testimony on [racial difference]” pg. 163

• “both slave and free African-Americans commonly used black and white color imagery in their religious practice in a manner similar to that of white Americans, identifying black with evil and sin, and white with purity and holiness” pg.163

The Color of God?

• “In ex-slave religious visions the newly white souls of black folk often joined a white God in an all-white heaven” pg. 163

• “Some of the color imagery in slave religion may have been fostered by white slaveowners” pg. 164

• “The religious imagery the slaves used may have had African roots that antedated their experiences in America” pg.164

“Some day I’ze gwine to be with my ole frien’s an’ if our skins here are black dey won’t be no colors in Heaven”- predicted Oklahoma freedman Frances Banks. “Our souls will be white.”--- AS, Oklahoma Narratives, Supplement, Series I, v. 12, 12

“I don’t believe in all that people have to say about having to see a little white man. That is all Fogeyism…Don’t believe nothing like that,” said an un-named ex-slave preacher in AS, Unwritten History of Slavery (Fisk University), v. 18, 50

Which image of Christ or God might this enslaved person be calling on?

Is this enslaved person calling on a Christ or God?

Real Origins of Black Color Preference• “…for black Americans white power and authority

never became linked to the physical being of white people” pg.164

• Closer attention paid to complexion- “black, brown and yellow” than a “simple polarity,” according to Lawrence Levine in his book- Black Culture, Black Consciousness. pg. 165

• African Americans rarely “demonized or valorized the physical characteristics of white people as a mark of…power and authority” pg.165

• African American intellectuals sometimes “attributed the status and wealth of white people to the rapacious, acquisitive character of the Anglo-Saxon race” pg. 165

No Explanation for the Power and Authority of

Whitespg.166

• A few ex-slave “told their questioners that black subjugation was in fact natural and divinely ordained”

• “But these kinds of explanations…do not prevail…Far more ex-slaves describe the power of whites over blacks without any elaboration of its causes, as an inescapable reality”

• “the legal and disciplinary powers that Southern whites wielded over their slaves were only the beginning of their resources”

• “freedpeople identified no special qualities or personal traits distinctive to the white race that would explain white people’s priviledged position or oppresive behavior”

The “one-dimensional…omnipresent and yet curiously shadowy” white person

according to ex-slaves • Described “either kindhearted and good to their

slaves or ‘mean’” pg.166

• Defined “more by their powerful position vis-à-vis black people than by any distinctive set of personal characteristics” pg. 167

Reflections on White Power in 19th Century African American Songs,

Folklore & Humor• “the black folk who sang these songs

expressed ‘a deep feeling of injustice and enduring sense of being used unfairly’,” according to Levine pg. 167

• African-Americans’ songs “both depicted and expressed their resentment toward white power and privilidge pg.167

• “black songs…simply described the advantages of whites over blacks without linking them to inborn white characteristics” pg. 167

“White man goes to collegeNigger to the fieldWhite man learns to read and writePoor Nigger learn to steal”

--- Common African American turn-of-century work song

“The bee flies high,The little bee makes honey;The black folks makes the cottonAnd the white folks gets the money

--- transcribed by William Wells Brown in Clotel, or the President’s Daughter 1853

“White man in a starched shirt settin’ in the shadeLaziest man that God ever made.

--- 1920s work song in Levine’s Black Culture, Black Consciousness pg.248

How are white people described in each of the three folksongs/poems?

What observations about white behavior, white expectation?

Enduring Rhyme-Critique Through Song

Black Folk Culture as a Lens

• “in African-American jokes from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, white people typically appear as authority figures whose pretensions and hypochrisy are lampooned, rather than racial temperment” pg. 167

• “Subversive humor [which] challenged white authority by exposing the absurdities inherent in the American racial system” pg. 167

• “Black folk culture challenged racial stereotypes rather than revising them” pg. 168

• “Ex-slaves assigned no personal characteristics to white folks that they did not see in themselves” pg. 168

• “…took pride in the ability of lowly black slaves to outwit white folks…however such pride rarely led to claims that blacks were naturally stronger or smarter than whites” pg. 168

• “most slave tales offered a moral far more complex than black superiority” pg.168

“All Kind of White Folks”: White Power and White Character

• Ex-slaves claimed a moral and behavioral superiority, not an intellectual or physical one pg. 168

• “Some slaves were so impressed by white power and privilege that they assumed white people were divine” pg. 169

“Nobody could read de Bible when I was a boy, and dey wasn’t no white preachers who talked to de niggers. We had meeting sometimes, but de nigger preacher jest talk about being a good nigger and doing to please de Master, and I allus thought he meant to please old Master, and I always wanted to do dat anyways--- Oklahoma freedman Charley Williams

“I member well when de stars fell…I wasn’t scared ‘cause I thought long as I staid where de white folks was--- Missouri freedman Edward Taylor

White Power versus Slave Conjure• “White power frequently defied the wiles of

slave magic, compromising the cultural authority of the powerful slave conjurers” pg.170

• “slaves who doubted that conjure could affect their masters and mistresses appear to have assumed that white people had a natural and racially distinct immunity to the powers of black conjurers” pg. 170

• Yet “in the slaves’ deeply religious worldview, there were many kinds of power, and whites did not control all of them” pg. 170

Slave Stereotypes & Why pg.171• SAMBO- “Good natured and docile slave”• NAT- “rebellious trouble maker” • MAMMY- “devout”, doting housekeeper/cook• JEZEBEL- “lascivous”, irresistable, sex hungry

• Slave stereotypes “allowed whites to think about black people in contradictory ways as both docile and dangerous, childlike and savage, sexless and seductive…reflected the dominant culture’s need and ability to impose a multipurpose set of negative images on an exploited racial class” pg. 171

Which labels applies to each picture, why?

Ex-Slaves Views of Native Americans• “The shadowy racial character of

white people in black folk thought is all the more striking because …[they] do appear to have assigned a distinctive racial character to Native Americans” pg.171

• Black view of Native Americans- a) naturally fierce b) independent c) hot-tempered d) defiant pg.171

“One Virginia man explained that he was ‘proud, fearless, and full of the devil’ because his mother was ‘part Red Indian which is one of the fiercest tribes of Indians that lived as you probably know’”, as described in Robert Ellett’s Weevils in the Wheat, 84.

Shared Views of Native Americans

• “The character African-Americans assigned to blacks with Indian blood is similar to the character white Americans assigned to the Native American race as a whole” pg.171

• “In addition to attributing a fierce and independent character to people with Indian blood, ex-slaves extended this characterization to Indians themselves” pg.172

Comparing African American Views of Whites, Native Americans & Mulattoes

• “In characterizing American Indians as a naturally fierce people, the ex-slaves spoke of this group quite differently than they did of whites: no comparable racial stereotypes about white character emerge in black folk thought” pg.172

• “Few ex-slaves attributed any personal characteristics possessed by individuals of mixed black and white ancestry to the influence of white blood,” but they did to people of mixed Native American & African blood pg.172

Jim Henry, a an ex-slave from South Carolina said he had “three bloods in my veins, white folks, Indian folks, and Negro folks” making him “thrifty like de white man, crafty like de Indians, and hard workin’ like de Negroes.”

The Romantic Native American in African American Ideals

• “Since Many African Americans had little contact with Native Americans, they took much of their information…from white stereotypes about the Indian” pg. 173

• African Americans reconfigured “these stereotypes to suit their own needs,” associating “Indian blood with ‘cherished traits of rebelliousness, ferocity and fortitutde’” pg.173

• “Ex-slave stereotypes about Indians break down,” when slave narratives from Oklahoma are included as “many belonged to slaveholding Indian families relocated there in the 1830s.” but “many [conclude] that Indian master were preferable” pg. 173

• “Proximity and power shaped black Southeners’ relationships with whites in ways that discouraged the former from making loose generalizations about white people or discussing whites in term of a set of racial stereotypes” pg.173

• African Americans took “a very pragmatic interest in the individual characteristics of white people” pg.173

• “As a subordinate group, African-Americans needed to be able to read white behavior accurately and well to survive in a white dominated world” pg.173

African American Reticence in Describing Whites

“Whites Were Not All Alike”• “Unequal power required” African Americans “to

be keen students of white behavior” pg. 174Olaudah Equiano described this awareness after being purchased by an

English naval lieutenant- “ I had sails to lie on and plenty good victuals to eat; and everybody aboard treated me very kindly, quite contrary to what I had seen of white people before; I therefore began to think they were not all of the same disposition”

One ex slave reported that…he trained himself ‘to watch the changes in my master’s physiognomy, as well as those of the parties he associated with, so as to frame my conduct in accordance with what I had reason to believe was their prevailing mood at the time’”

Isaac Green, an ex-slave from Georgia, said “Yo’ actual treatment depended on de kind o’ marster you had”.

Continuity of White Behavior Before and After Slavery pg.175

• “Freedpeople’s observations about the mixed character of whites applied to their behavior after emancipation as well.”

• “The varying behavior of whites during slavery was identical to that of contemporary whites”

“Folks is no different today than in slavery time. Some of them is good and some of them is bad,” said ex-slave Charlie Bowen as he remembered telling a fellow ex-slave who made a case for reparations.

“It was den, boss, just same wd white men as ‘tis in dis day and time. Dere is a heap of good white folks now and dere is a heap of dem what ain’t so good,” said Arkansas freedman James Gill

“Devils and good people walking in de road at de same time”

- Oklahoma Freedman Anthony Dawson pg. 176

During

Slavery

After

Slavery

During

Slavery

After

Slavery

Comparing Racial Attitudes pg.177

• “Slaves could not afford to obscure the differences among individual whites by thinking of them in terms of simple stereotypes, nor did they have the cultural power to impose stereotypical images on white people”

• African Americans’ “emphasis on the mixture of good and bad individuals in the white race was quite unlike the racial stereotypes white Americans imposed on black people”

• Stereotypes “served to distance whites from individual blacks through negative imagery that divided the racial character of all blacks into a few superficial personality types”.

• “When African Americans resisted slavery and racial discrimination as an injustice to black humanity…they asserted their fundamental kinship with white people”.

Belief in a Just God pg.178• “By the late antebellum period, Christianity

pervaded the American slave community”.• Christianity “provided the interpretive framework

through which African-Americans understood their lives and the peculiar world of slavery”.

• “African Americans looked to the Lord to pass judgement on white people in the next world”.

The Color of Heaven? White Beliefs

• “Although their Bible told them that all souls would meet as equals in Heaven, masters and slaves alike found such an afterlife hard to imagine.” pg.178

• Southern White Christians held a variety of views about the intersection between race and the afterlifea) “all earthly distinctions would vanish”b) slaves’ color “would bar them from entering heaven”c) separate heavens for whites and blacksd) segregated heaven (blacks on one side/whites on the other)e) “Negro heaven” aka “Kitchen heaven” for good slaves

A slave mistress told Eliza Washington, an ex-slave from Arkansas, “I would give anything if I could have Maria in heaven with me to do little things for me” pg. 179

• “African Americans’ visions of heaven were ultimately quite different from those of their white contemporaries.” pg.181

• Southern Black Christians “cherished the idea of achieving freedom in the next world.” pg.180

• Black beliefs in the afterlife encompassed-a) recognized humanityb) leaving “white people behind altogether”c) a place of vengeanced) reversal of status of blacks and whitese) place where justice would be found & served

The Color of Heaven? African American Beliefs

“the Good Shepherd will give the best white man a heaben that is hotter than the worstest nigger’s hell,” said Texas ex-slave Millie Manuel

“Now dat slavery is over I wish and hope dat God would treat all dem slave owners as dey did us when dey get in hell,” said Oklahoma freedman Robert Burns

III. New Negroes, New WhitesBlack Racial Thought in the Twentieth Century

If God is white, Why should I

pray?If I called him,He’d turn away

T.Thomas Fortune Fletcher

“White God” (1927)

Ch.6 “A New Negro for a New Century” Black Racial Ideology, 1900-1925

Ch.6 A New Negro for a New Century

Black Racial Ideology, 1900-1925

• Academic ideas about ‘Race’ at the turn-of-the-century 1) Demise of scientific racism aka ‘ethnology’ in Academia 2) Spread of Liberal Environmentalism as reason for racial differences- Social Darwinism to Environmental determinism

• Rise of 20th century African American Intellectual Giants Dubois, Washington, Locke, & more

• Racial violence, racial invective aimed @ blacks throughout the New south and in the Urban north- Black exploitation, Disenfranchisement, Segregation, Discrimination, Lynching, Contempt

• World Wars as accelerators of racial equality

MAJOR POINTS

MAJOR POINTS

• Great Migration North into Urban Centers

• African-Americans organize (Civil Rights Mvmt.) as racism loses the authority of science

• Cultural Revitalization movements within early 20th century African-American communities featuring

1) messianic black nationalism

2) religious racialism

The Fall of Scientific Racism pg.187

• “The early decades of this century ushered in the slow demise of scientific racism”

• Scientific Racism aka Ethnology was a feature of 19th century racial thought

• Lent itself to polygenesis, idea that blacks and whites come from separate creations

• “Liberal Environmentalism’s ultimate triumph…would not be decisive until after WW II”

• “This scientific revolution was less revolutionary among black thinkers, who had long attributed most racial differences to culture and environment”

Franz BoasFranz Boas• German born,

Doctorate in Physics from Kiel University

• “world’s greatest anthropologist”

• Curator @ American Museum of Natural History from 1896 to 1936

• Columbia University Professor 1899 – 1936

Franz Boas• Investigated biological basis of race• Proved that culture and environment were

primary arbiters of human difference, not “race• Attacked idea of ‘innate racial differences”• Argues against “innate inferiority” of blacks• Cites Culture and Environment and main

determiners of human differences• Boas picks up on racial ideas already

expressed within African-American intelligentsia in the late 1800s

• Boas brings those arguments into the mainstream

Gunnar Myrdal’s American Dilemma

• Nobel Prize winner 1974 Nobel Nobel Prize winner 1974 Nobel Economic ScienceEconomic Science

• Received more than 30 honorary Received more than 30 honorary degreesdegrees

• An American Dilemma: The An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Negro Problem and Modern Democracy is his most well Democracy is his most well known textknown text

• Established foundation of racial Established foundation of racial liberalism aka equality of racesliberalism aka equality of races

Social Darwinism- Turn of the Century Racial Thought

pg.190• Social Darwinism- the status quo in society evolved out of an evolutionary struggle. Theory after the Civil War.

• Championed by Herbert Spencer, countryman & contemporary of Charles Darwin

• Used by 1800s white writers to establish a racial hierarchy with blacks at the bottom

• Appeals to some black thinkers because it rules out Pre-Civil War polygenesis which claimed blacks weren’t human

Social Darwinism & African-American leaders

• W.E.B DuBois “embraced [social darwinism] it as a social theory of black uplift that promised racial redemption of the uneducated black freedmen and freedwomen…” pg.190

• Booker T. Washington “sought to provide black laborers with the skills and discipline needed to compete more successfully in the Darwinian struggle” pg. 190

• “Assigned women a more clearly defined role in racial uplift”. Viewed women as critical to the success of the “race” pg. 191

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

• Feb. 23, 1868 thru Aug. 27, 1963• Sociologist, Historian, Civil Rights

Activist, Pan-Africanist, Organizer, Writer, Advocate, Fraternity member

• 1st African-American PhD holder- History, Harvard 1895

• Early member of Alpha Phi Alpha• Published more than 4000 articles,

essays & books• Early member of NAACP• Harlem Renaissance editor and

publisher• Founded Niagara Movement• 1st African American to address

American Historical Association (AHA)

Early Dubois 1897 to 1906

• “embraced race as an organic distinction between human beings in order to call for the cultural uplift of the black race” pg. 189

• Sees blacks as “an ‘un-awakened’ race that had yet to find its own destiny” pg.190

• “had little patience for scriptural accounts of the history of the races” pg.193

Booker Taliaferro Washington

• Apr. 5, 1856- Nov. 14, 1915• Born a slave, dies leading

African-American authority• Founder, leader of Tuskegee

Institute, University aimed at training African American in fundamental job skills

• “industry, thrift, intelligence and property” were his main goals

• authored 14 books including “Up from Slavery” 1901

• Saw “blacks as an undeveloped race” pg.194

• Did not believe in the equality of the races

Jobs, jobs & jobs= African American Opportunities to close the Social

Darwinian gap

Booker T’s Views

Gender, Race & the shift from Ethnology to Social Darwinism

pg.192

• Anna Julia Cooper, in Voice from the South (1892), said “every attempt to elevate the Negro…cannot but prove abortive unless so directed as to utilize the indispensable agency of an elevated and trained womanhood”

• National Association of Colored Women (1896) formed to defend [women] and their race against “unjust and unholy” charges. P.192

• 1st work of Ethnology by an African-American woman- Pauline E. Hopkins’ Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African Race and the Possibility of Restoration by its Descendents…(1905), said that racial differences were due to environment and took on the assertion that abolitionists were “emissaries of Satan”.

• Druscilla Dunjee Houston’s The Wonderful Ethiopians of the Cushite Empire (1926), establishes Africans @ the origin of civilization through Arabia, Persia, Babylonia & India pg.

Dubois Shifts 1907 to 1915• Even though Du Bois preached conservation of the race in

1897, “he admitted that ‘essential difference of races’ was hard to identify”. pg 194

• “When the matter of race became a question of comparative culture, I was in revolt. I began to see that the cultural equipment attributed to any people depended largely on who estimated it; and conviction came later in a rush as I realized what in my education had been suppressed concerning Asiatic and African culture,” said Du Bois in Dusk of Dawn, in Writings(626-627). pg.196

• Boas research had an effect on Du Bois in 1907. In a challenge to southern racial segregationists at a meeting of the American Sociological Society, Du Bois used Boas’ findings “to argue that there was no scientific evidence for significant differences between races”. pg.196

• Dubois stated in The Negro (1915), “ It is generally recognized to-day that no scientific definition of race is possible. Differences, and striking differences, there are between men, and groups of men, but they fade into each other so insensibly that…”. pg.197

Roman & Locke Argue Legitimacy of Race

• CV Roman used science and research to prove human equality by comparing racial features of Africans, Europeans, Asians & Native Americans pg. 197-198

• Alain Locke lectured and intellectualized racial equality, stating “any true history of race must be a sociological theory of race” pg.199

• “Locke sought to replace biological theories of race with a sociological theory in order to preserve racial conciousness” pg. 199

• Both Roman and Locke critque White/Anglo-Saxon culture as the inferior culture, turning white supremacy on its head pg.199-200

CV Roman, prominent Turn-of-the-centuryAfrican American Physician

Alain Locke, Father of the Harlem Renaissance, PhD in Philosophy from Howard University 1918

WW I: as proof positive

• “The traditional African American critique of the brutal white man took on renewed vitality” as a result of the war pg.200

• Black minister Frances Grimke said “Germany hardly equaled the United States in savagery” as he commented on “ever-worsening relations between the races” in the US pg.200

Over 380,000 African American served in WWI, with 42,000 seeing combat action. Below are soldiers of the 369th Infantry Regiment which won the Croix de Guerre for gallantry in action in 1919.

Post WW I:Catalyst of Cultural

Revitalization

• “In the period immediately following World War I, economic and social stresses created by an enormous migration of Southern blacks to the urban North combined with heightening racial discrimination to spur aggressive protest and an enhanced sense of racial consciousness among American blacks” pg. 203

The 369th “Harlem Hellfighters” Infantry Regiment in action in the trenches.

Henry Johnson, a soldier of the famous 369th infantry was honored with the “Croix de Guerre from France.

Why African Americans MovedJim Crow Segregation reigns supreme. Sharecropping, cotton picking, menial agriculture based on black labor is prominent

Racial Violence, Racial INVECTIVE• Lynching is

the illegal execution of an accused person by a mob. Terrorism

• Close to 3500 African Americans lynched between 1882-1968

Florida’s History of Racial Violence, Racial Invective

• An early FL Lynching• Highest per capita rate of lynchings

1900-1930• 282 lynchings between 1882-1968

ROSEWOOD FL 1923

• Two segregated communities- 1) Prosperous, All-African American Rosewood & 2) Economically Stagnant, All-white Sumner

• Starts when a white woman accuses a black man of assault

• Only 7 people confirmed killed, but the entire black community was displaced

LYNCHING&

LANDGRAB

• Nicknamed “Wall Street” because it was so prosperous- home to many African American millionaires & thriving businesses

• Started on the accusation of a white woman that a black man had assaulted her

• Resulted in 39 dead (26 black + 13 white), over 800 injured, over 10,000 people displaced

• Tulsa Confronts Past

Black Wall Street akaTulsa, Oklahoma 1921

Hard Economics of Early 20th Century

African American MigrationPush PullWhat factors conspire to push African-Americans out of the south and into Northern Cities?

What factors conspire to pull African –Americans out of the south and into Northern Cities?

What is the relationship between the Klu Klux Klan and African-American migration patterns?

Great Migration(s) North“They were drawn north by the prospect of industrial

jobs- work that became available to large numbers of black laborers only during World War I.”

pg. 203

The Great Migration refers to the mass movement of approximately 1.5 million people from the primarily rural South to the Urban dominated North between 1916-1930.

Based on the picture of “A Negro Family” (bottom left), which state(s) are the African Americans pictured likely to have come from?

a) What does Map #1 tell us about early 20th century African-American population growth rates?

b) What types of information about African American migration can be gleaned from Map#2?

c) Which northern US cities received the most African Americans, using Map#3?

Great Migration(s) North:By the numbers#1

#2

#3

Living Conditions in the NorthDunbar Housing Project in

Harlem, New YorkHousing in Detroit

Housing in AkronHousing in ChicagoHousing in Pittsburgh

Torched School in New Jersey

Based on the pictures, how would you describe average living conditions of southern African Americans who traveled north in the Great Migration?

Great Migration(s)’ Cultural Legacy

In what ways did the migration of southern African Americans into northern US cities change the cultural landscape of the north?

Harlem Renaissance:The New Negro Movement

“The Harlem Renaissance ‘was viewed as a result of social and cultural change deriving from, but not limited to, the migration of black peasants out of the South and into Harlem,’ said Wilson Jeremiah Moses, an African American historian, describing the new black confidence and assertiveness.” pg. 204

“‘New Negroes were not only bohemian artists, but staid intellectuals, rugged labor leaders, tough minded preachers, and conservative pan-Africanists’ writes Moses. ‘Most of them did not see themselves as breaking with past literary and intellectual traditions. During the twenties, they simply continued to engage in the same sort of activities that had always interested them.’” ---pg.205

Harlem Renaissance:Connecting the Diaspora

Birth of theCivil Rights Movement

• National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is founded in 1909 to “ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination.”

• National Urban League is founded in 1910 to advocate on behalf of African Americans and against racial discrimination in the US

W.E.B Du Bois, Ida B. Wells were among W.E.B Du Bois, Ida B. Wells were among several influential and diverse thinkers several influential and diverse thinkers concerned with race relations around the turn of concerned with race relations around the turn of the century who founded the Niagara the century who founded the Niagara Movement and later, the NAACP.Movement and later, the NAACP.

Expressions of Rage & Passion

Post WW I“The militant mood of the American

black community in the postwar era, together with the challenges the war and modern science had posed to nineteenth-century black ideas about race, combined to create a variety of new forms of discourse about race and white people in black thought.” pg.205

"The white world's vermin and filth:All the dirt of London,All the scum of New York;Valiant spoilers of womenAnd conquerors of unarmed men;Shameless breeders of bastards,Drunk with the greed of gold,Baiting their blood-stained hooksWith cant for the souls of the simple;Bearing the white man's burden Of liquor and lust and lies!"-W.E.B. Du Bois, 1920  Valiant Spoilers of Women

Eloquent FuryEloquent Furyexpressing “Black Chauvinism” expressing “Black Chauvinism”

(pg.207)(pg.207)

If we must die, let it not be like hogsHunted and penned in an inglorious spot,While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,Making their mock at our accursed lot.If we must die, O let us nobly die,So that our precious blood may not be shedIn vain; then even the monsters we defyShall be constrained to honor us though dead!O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!What though before us lies the open grave?Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

- Claude McKay, If We Must Die 1919

Featuring the most firebrand work of Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, Countee Cullen and more, this edgy medium published by Wallace Thurman only released 1 issue.

Cultural Revitalization “The Harlem Renaissance

critique of European civilization was cultural rather than racial, and it partook of the general disillusionment with Western civilization and search for authentic, primal experience that took place among both American and European intellectuals in the wake of World War I.” pg. 207

“Up You Mighty Race”

“Garvey’s black chauvinism looked to the race’s past and future for its glories…” pg.208

“The UNIA [Marcus Garvey’s Pan-Africanist organization]- whose motto was ‘One God! One Aim! One Destiny!’- had a distinctive theology and liturgy” pg.206

Organizing for an African Renaissance

• “The White people have Negroes to write [this] kind of stuff so that the Negro can still be regarded as a monkey or some imbecile creature” Garvey wrote of Claude McKay’s risque’ novel of black working-class life, Home to Harlem, in the Sept. 1928 edition of his periodical- Negro World. pg.208

• Garvey believed (like Washington) that African Americans should compete to win in the competition between races- “civilizationism” pg.208

Garvey’s Legacy: Messianic Black Nationalism

• “…the size of the Garvey movement testified to its appeal among the uneducated black masses, as well as educated churchmen of many denominational affiliations” pg.209

• Garvey appealed “to the black masses because their religious racialism addressed concerns about religion and race that had a long history in the black South” pg.209

• According to historian E. Franklin Frazier in his text- Opportunity, “Garvey re-introduced the idea of a Moses, who was incarnate in himself…” pg.209

• “Marcus Garvey resolved the issue of God’s color and racial affiliation” when he said “’God is not white or black, angels have no color…but if [whites] say God is white, this organization says that God is black…” pg.210

• Garvey’s followers paraded “with paintings of an Ethiopian Christ and a black Madonna and child to celebrate Garvey’s Fourth International Convention of Negroes”, but “Garvey held to a more universalistic vision of Christ” pg.210

• Garvey used racial particularism to critique mainstream “white” Christianity. Ex. “Oh Jesus the Christ, Oh Jesus the redeemer, when white man scorned you, when white men pierced your side out of which blood and water gushed forth, it was a black man in the person of Simon the Cyrenian who took the cross and bore it on the heights of Calvary” pg.211

• Garveyism [amongst others] “ posited that the black race had an especially close relationship with God, and a lineage superior to that of the white race” pg 212

• Garveyism branded “the white race ‘devils’” while it “delighted in references to the greatness of colored civilization at a time when white men were barbarians and savages” pg.213

Garvey’s Legacy: Messianic Black Nationalism

Garvey’s The Tragedy of White Injustice

(1)Lying and stealing is the whiteman's game;For rights of God nor man he has no shame(A practice of his throughout the whole world)At all, great thunderbolts he has hurled;He has stolen everywhere-land and sea;A buccaneer and pirate he must be,Killing all, as he roams from place to place,Leaving disease, mongrels-moral disgrace-

“…not an attempt at poetry; just a peculiar style of using facts as they impress me as I go through the pages of history and as I look at and note the conduct of the white race” said Garvey as he described the 1927 poem pg. 213

(7)They have stolen, murdered, on their way here,Leaving desolation and waste everywhere;Now they boastingly tell what they have done,Seeing not the bloody crown they have won;Millions of Blacks died in America,Coolies, peons, serfs, too, in Asia;Upon these dead bones Empires they builded,Parceling out crowns and coronets gilded.

(20)With a past brilliant, noble and grand,Black men march to the future hand in hand;We have suffered long from the white man's greed,Perforce he must change his unholy creed.Stealing, bullying and lying to allWill drag him to ignominious fall;For men are wise-yes, no longer are fools,To have grafters make of them still cheap tools.

Religious Racialism in the form ofNoble Drew Ali’s

MOORISH SCIENCE TEMPLE• “Sects such as the Muslims

mainly attracted the poorest and least-educated negroes in the North, many of them born in the south.” pg.209

• “The Moorish ‘back-to-Islam’ movements that began in the 1920s under the leadership of a black carolinian who called himself Noble Drew Ali regarded their religion as secret and guarded their teachings so zealously…Ali’s Holy Koran.” pg.212

Moorish Science Temple & Black Muslim Teachings

• Holy book called Circle 7 Holy Koran. pg. 212

• “White race originated from Yakub, a black scientist who selectively bred black babies to create a mutant white race.” pg. 212

• “This ‘big-headed scientist’…made this race of devils to plague the peaceable Black Nation…employing ‘the ugliest colors, as everyone knows,’ he colored them ‘pale white with blue eyes’…and he called them Caucasians’…[they] were aggressive troublemakers who were inferior to black people in every way.” pg.212

• “Rejection of the Judeo-Christian tradition…the black race has an exceptionally close relationship with God, and a lineage superior to that of the white race.” pg.212

Other Black Messianic Teachings“Charismatic leaders, such as Daddy Grace and

Father Divine, were understood by their followers as living gods.” pg. 209

Daddy Grace

“Divine’s followers believed that ‘Father Divine had come in his present form because the Negro is one of the lowliest creatures on earth.” pg. 209

Father Divine

“The black Jewish followers of the Church of God held that both God and Jesus- whom they accepted into their Judaic doctrine- were black, as were the original inhabitants of the earth.” pg.209

Black Jews

Noble Drew Ali’s Legacy

Conclusion• “Boas’s culture concept

caught on among educated blacks who were eager to abandon the 19th century hierarchy of racial civilizations” pg.216

• “By the 1930s…trained black intellectuals such as E. Franklin Frazier, Abram Harris, and Ralph Bunche” saw “race [as] ‘a useful myth which had been perpetuated by powerful whites and manipulated by the black leadership class for its own selfish interests’.” pg.217

“The AfraAmerican, being more tolerant than the Caucasian, is ready to admit that white people are not all the same…I venture to say, he rises several notches higher than the gentility of the ofays, to whom, even in this day and time, all coons look alike- George Schuyler in “Our White Folks” (1927), in The Black Man and the American Dream: Negro Aspirations in America, 1900-1930