Chapter One: THE GREAT DEBATE
During the years surrounding World War I, Afro-Americans and Afro-Caribbean immigrants debated an issue that has forever vexed Africans of the diaspora: how to achieve not only racial equality, but also true freedom. Four options presented themselves. Blacks could work with white liberals within mainstream institutions; create their own separatist political, economic, and cultural organizations; ally themselves with predominately white radical movements--the Socialist party (SP), the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or the Bolsheviks--or improve themselves and their social position by artistic achievement. From 1910 until the onset of the Depression, this dialogue engaged a stellar constellation of black working-class intellectuals resident in the United States. Hubert H. Harrison, West-Indian born "father of Harlem radicalism" founded the Liberty League (LL) and its publication the Voice; his forays into social radicalism and black nationalism in the years 1910-1917 generated two wings of the Great Debate between radicals, nationalists, liberals and literati that has raged ever since. A. Philip Randolph succeeded Harrison as the SP's most prominent writer and agitator. He started the Friends of Negro Freedom (FNF) and edited the Messenger, its monthly magazine; he was also the moving force behind the National Association for the Promotion of Labor Unionism Among Negroes. Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant, organized the black-nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and created its weekly organ, the Negro World. Cyril Briggs (also from the West Indies) founded the Crusader magazine and then the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB); he fused black nationalism with loyalty to the emerging Communist movement. W.A. Domingo (another West Indian), a brilliant intellectual associated at various times with Randolph, Garvey, and Briggs, briefly edited his own publication, the Emancipator. W.E.B. Du Bois, educated at Harvard and at the Friedrich-Wilhelm III University in Berlin, helped start the (largely white) National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and for over two decades edited its monthly review, the Crisis. Claude McKay, Jamaican-born, was a poet, novelist, and sometime Communist. Many others contributed to this efflorescence of radical Afro-American thought in the years 1910-1928.
This discussion, with such great relevance for us almost a century later, has been largely ignored by historians. Yet it comprises a fascinating and hidden intellectual history, vastly superior in richness, diversity, and insight to the relatively arcane controversies that diverted more famous mainstream thinkers. Scholars have written superb biographies of some of the main contestants and assembled a vast array of primary sources; yet we lack a coherent, analytical account of the Great Debate in all its complexity. Familiarity with the intellectual ferment of the time is essential, however, for understanding any individual participant. Accounts of the racial views and efforts of white radicals are usually brief, sometimes distort the historical record, and largely neglect black responses to white initiatives.[1]
Moreover, this era of Afro-American intellectual history ranks as one of the most creative epochs not only of black thought, but of American radicalism in general. The issues that divided the black liberals, radicals, nationalists, and artistic uplifters directly paralleled those which divided white feminists, socialists, and labor activists; and their resolution remains central to the future of the American Left, and of American society as a whole. For this reason, I make no pretense of remaining a detached chronicler of the Great Debate. Rather, I write as an active participant in the ongoing conversation sparked by the writers I consider; my discussion therefore includes my own analysis and criticism as well as expositions of the thinkers under investigation. I seek the underlying causes which generated the Great Debate's protagonists--why their ideas gained currency in the years 1910-1928. I will sympathetically understand each participant's own reasons for his views and explain why the radicals could neither convert masses of either race or achieve their desired transformation of American society. The efflorescence of radical Afro-American thought emerged from a particular historical milieu which, paradoxically, militated against its ultimate success. Although the participants cogently criticized each other, the pressing contemporary relevance of their ideas demands that we also evaluate, criticize, refine, and learn from the ideas of these brilliant Afro-American intellectuals. Only in that way can the relevance of these ideas for our own situation be assessed. Although some will call this presentism, respect for the contributions, genius, and moral purpose of the Great Debate's participants demands no less of us.
Every student of American history is well acquainted with the historic debate between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois.[2] Yet this controversy, whatever its urgency for its own times, is largely irrelevant for us today. Although some historians have partly rehabilitated Washington as a proto-nationalist and harbinger of black economic development, his accommodationism, dependence on conservative white support, and active disparagement of mass activism render his philosophy (arguably suitable for blacks residing in an overtly terrorist South) obsolete today. The Great Debate among the Harlem radicals, which quickly succeeded the Washington/Du Bois controversy, speaks to our present concerns. It was in fact a national and even international conversation, although most of its principals lived and wrote in New York. The LL was founded in Boston as well as Manhattan, and Harrison lectured widely in the East; the NAACP, FNF, and ABB boasted branches throughout the United States; McKay worked and published in the UK as well as the US; and the UNIA threatened white colonial governments throughout the world.
In addition to focusing on the Washington/Du Bois dispute that preceded the Great Debate, historians have amply described the Harlem Renaissance, an outpouring of Afro-American literature and art, and associated debates over "art versus propaganda," that blossomed in the 1920s.[3] Ironically, however, "The New Negro," a term baptized in mass consciousness by Alain Locke's 1926 literary anthology of that name, originated not as a description of a new literary generation, but of social and political radicals who attacked the entire apparatus of capitalism and white supremacy. Only after the catastrophic defeat of black radicalism in the early 1920s--a defeat directly related to the suppression of larger, multiracial radical organizations such as the SP and the IWW--was the appellation "New Negro" appropriated by literary innovators whose endeavors comprised no economic or political threat to the white capitalist status quo (although their debates curiously echoed those of the social radicals). This process, unsurprisingly, paralleled the trajectory of the white Left. It deflected a vibrant economic and political radicalism onto relatively harmless literary and lifestyle innovations, largely devoid of political implications; it displaced a defeated mass, working-class insurgency embracing economic, political, and cultural radicalism, with a relatively tepid and largely symbolic cultural revolt.
But economic concerns overshadowed these literary debates even during the Jazz Age. The key insight of the economic radicals elaborated by Harrison--that blacks must unite with white workers in an interracial, class-based alliance--permeated Afro-American thought during the 1920s. Harrison's emphasis on black pride and black nationalism also survived, albeit in transmuted form, not only as the "literary Garveyism," of the Renaissance,[4] but also as Pan-Africanism, group consciousness and effort, a renewed emphasis on racial pride and institutions, and Du Bois's increasing emphasis on a group economy. Even the most ardent proponents of the Harlem Renaissance championed such ideas, and saw literature and art as ancillary weapons in the struggle for a just society. Yet Afro-American intellectuals and activists, however brilliant, found no way out of their race's intractable dilemmas. Systematic terrorism and violence, combined with ruling-class hegemony, effectively throttled any attempt at either an interracial class alliance of black and white workers, or an enduringly effective black nationalism.
The rise and decline of radical black organizations, directly relevant to our plight, also sharpen understanding of the largely white revolutionary movements of the time, particularly the IWW and Debsian SP. Many historians have commented on the SP's Marxist orthodoxy, which so focused on class analysis that it almost ignored the realities of race, gender, and culture. Yet radical Afro-Americans demanded that the Socialists confront the realities of racism within their ranks and in mainstream American society, and revise their doctrine and strategy accordingly. Other insurgencies simultaneously challenged Second International orthodoxy: Josephine Conger-Kaneko's Socialist Woman represented an organized intraparty movement that propounded a socialist feminism and a feminist socialism; the IWW vehemently denounced social and cultural inequalities that oppressed women, blacks, and immigrants, as well as the masses of industrial laborers; and Max Eastman's Masses (suppressed by Woodrow Wilson and resumed as the Liberator) demanded a programmatic and philosophical revision of Marxism that would incorporate feminism and birth control, racial egalitarianism, and daring new emphases in literature and art. From outside the party, Emma Goldman and her anarchist circle also condemned the narrow economic determinism and fixation on class that characterized the Debsian Socialists. The radical blacks, therefore, were part of a varied left alternative that advocated a revivifying expansion of the American Socialist project; and their ultimate failure strikingly paralleled, in both causes and effects, that of their comrades in this larger dissident movement.
The Socialist feminists, Wobblies, literary radicals, and anarchists all directly addressed gender issues, and each movement contained prominent women within its ranks. The Afro-American radical enterprise, however, was almost exclusively a masculine project. Grace Campbell, the movement's only woman of importance, apparently left no writings; we know of her only through numerous references in the voluminous secret police reports on radical blacks. Even the massive Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia has no entry on her. In an important debate paralleling that of "race first versus class first," Afro-American women discussed the relative importance of race and gender in their own oppression. Their debate concerned "race first versus gender first," and slighted class consciousness. Indeed, the major Afro-American women's groups were resolutely middle class in philosophy, strategy, and composition. Reclaiming their status as women and as people were top priorities for Afro-American women denied both identities by a patriarchal and white supremacist society.[5]
For their part, the radical men were only mildly interested in feminism. Harrison, Randolph and Du Bois supported women's suffrage with a fervor atypical among Afro-American men, while Randolph advocated birth control as well. Most male radicals acknowledged the special devastations that white racism wreaked upon black women, but, rather than advocating female equality, paternalistically vowed that they would fulfill their traditional male role and protect "their" women's purity. Fulfilling their masculine role, they believed, would enable black women to fulfill their feminine one. Black male radicals, as their white male comrades, too often assumed that the interests of men represented archetypical human concerns. Like many men and women of their time, they considered "manhood" a prized value, but often assumed that it included rather than excluded women. When they said "manhood" they often meant "personhood"; a "man" was an autonomous, free-thinking individual who stood up for his (or her) rights. This phrasing included women in the movement even while eliding their specific grievances, including those against black men. Indeed, Harrison sometimes used the epithet "New Negro Manhood and Womanhood movement" without acknowledging that black women may suffer injuries incomprehensible to black men--indignities sometimes inflicted by their fathers, husbands, brothers, and co-workers. Even the fiery antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells, whose forceful personality and lived feminism frightened many black men, used the masculinist rhetoric of "manhood and self-respect". Like most other African-American female leaders, she largely eschewed issues of class, and spoke mostly for and to middle-class club women.[6]
The experiences of the radical Afro-Americans also greatly illuminate the mechanisms by which the ruling elite controls the United States--casting particular light upon the relationship between raw violence and seemingly nonviolent hegemony over the hearts and minds of oppression's victims. Few master classes rule with brutality alone. Hegemony--the insinuation of ruling-class ideology into the very personalities of the oppressed, which makes the victims somewhat complicit in their own exploitation--is crucial. In the United States and elsewhere, capitalist hegemony requires that workers emphasize their socially imposed differences while ignoring their common interests--that wage earners perceive each other as competitors with incompatible values and goals rather than as a unified class that will benefit from social transformation. A vibrant Socialist movement uniting black and white workers requires that proletarians of both races overlook their economic, political, and cultural differences (themselves created by a common oppression) and unite as a class against the capitalist system that destroys them both. Yet pervasive terrorism against both Afro-Americans and white workers--differently motivated and experienced--ensured that blacks and whites could not unite across the assiduously created and maintained chasm that separated them; their historical experiences, concrete situations, and cultural identities were mutually incomprehensible. The apparatus of terrorism and violence that operated over the entire range of American life and institutions affected blacks far differently than whites. When the IWW, the SP, and black radicals insisted that black and white workers were essentially similar, their claim seemed belied by the realities of everyday life. Afro-Americans and whites simply were different in the eyes of the vast majority of both races.
The conventional distinction between ruling-class violence and hegemony as instruments of social and economic control, therefore, seems exaggerated.[7] Hegemony depends upon violence, and violence underwrites hegemony. In the United States of the 1910s and 1920s and beyond, violence created a world in which blacks (and women) had their specified place; everyone, of whatever race (or gender) matured in this world, and usually perceived it as natural and inevitable. Pulitzer-prize winning historian Leon Litwack remarks that many Afro-Americans considered themselves a cursed and servant race because that notion largely "mirrored harsh day-to-day realities." Litwack quotes a black woman who wished she was white because "we worked every day, hard work, and we never did have food. The people that wasn't working, which was the white folks, they had food and they had clothes and everything. So I wanted to be white." Another black woman observed that her world did not want or tolerate an accurate perception, much less description, of reality; "Indeed, its very survival depended on not knowing, not seeing--and, certainly, not saying anything at all about what it was really like."[8] Even when radicals denounced white supremacy and struggled against it, they perforce accepted and used its own discursive categories and assumptions. More subtle means of hegemony, such as newspapers, the movies, and other forms of popular culture, depended for their effectiveness on the largely invisible, because omnipresent, violence directed both at blacks and at white workers. Understanding this symbiosis between violence and hegemony requires a brief recapitulation of the problems confronting blacks and the white working class.
Notes:
[1] Most histories of the Socialist party briefly discuss the party's racial attitudes. For more detailed analysis see Philip Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans: From the Age of Jackson to World War II (Westport, 1977), and Sally Miller, Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Early Twentieth Century American Socialism (New York, 1996).
[2] Of the numerous secondary accounts of the Washington/Du Bois controversy, three stand out: August Meier, Negro Thought in American, 1880-1915 (Ann Arbor, 1969); Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915 (New York, 1983); and David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race (New York, 1993).
[3] Of the vast library of general books about the Harlem Renaissance, I have relied primarily on four: David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York, 1979); Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York, 1971); Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem (New York, 1982); and Edward E. Waldron, Walter White and the Harlem Renaissance (Port Washington, 1978). For a more general discussion of the "art vs. propaganda" debate see Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson, Propaganda and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of Afro-American Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Amherst, 1979).
[4] The term is Tony Martin's, from Literary Garveyism: Garvey, Black Arts and the Harlem Renaissance (Dover, 1983).
[5] For discussions of contemporary black women's agency and movements, see Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (New York, 1999), 13-141; Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York, 1988), 17-31, 85-197; Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, From Slavery to the Present (New York, 1985), 79-195. For women writers, see Cheryl A. Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington, 1995). For a brief discussion of Grace Campbell, see Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth Century America (London, 1998), 173-177. Darlene Clark Hine, ed., Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (Brooklyn, 1993) has no information on Campbell and almost nothing on Afro-American Socialist women in the decades 1912-1928.
[6] The effect of masculinist rhetoric on black women and black feminism is contested. For differing views on its effect on the Afro-American women involved with A. Philip Randolph's Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids, discussed in chapter twelve below, see Beth Tompkins Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925-1945 (Chapel Hill, 2001), 65-74; and Melina Chateauvert, Marching Together (Urbana, 1998).
[7] For a short and illuminating discussion of the concept of hegemony see T. Jackson Lears, "The Concept of Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities," American Historical Review (June 1985), 567-593.
[8] Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York, 1998), 17, 33-34.
This discussion, with such great relevance for us almost a century later, has been largely ignored by historians. Yet it comprises a fascinating and hidden intellectual history, vastly superior in richness, diversity, and insight to the relatively arcane controversies that diverted more famous mainstream thinkers. Scholars have written superb biographies of some of the main contestants and assembled a vast array of primary sources; yet we lack a coherent, analytical account of the Great Debate in all its complexity. Familiarity with the intellectual ferment of the time is essential, however, for understanding any individual participant. Accounts of the racial views and efforts of white radicals are usually brief, sometimes distort the historical record, and largely neglect black responses to white initiatives.[1]
Moreover, this era of Afro-American intellectual history ranks as one of the most creative epochs not only of black thought, but of American radicalism in general. The issues that divided the black liberals, radicals, nationalists, and artistic uplifters directly paralleled those which divided white feminists, socialists, and labor activists; and their resolution remains central to the future of the American Left, and of American society as a whole. For this reason, I make no pretense of remaining a detached chronicler of the Great Debate. Rather, I write as an active participant in the ongoing conversation sparked by the writers I consider; my discussion therefore includes my own analysis and criticism as well as expositions of the thinkers under investigation. I seek the underlying causes which generated the Great Debate's protagonists--why their ideas gained currency in the years 1910-1928. I will sympathetically understand each participant's own reasons for his views and explain why the radicals could neither convert masses of either race or achieve their desired transformation of American society. The efflorescence of radical Afro-American thought emerged from a particular historical milieu which, paradoxically, militated against its ultimate success. Although the participants cogently criticized each other, the pressing contemporary relevance of their ideas demands that we also evaluate, criticize, refine, and learn from the ideas of these brilliant Afro-American intellectuals. Only in that way can the relevance of these ideas for our own situation be assessed. Although some will call this presentism, respect for the contributions, genius, and moral purpose of the Great Debate's participants demands no less of us.
Every student of American history is well acquainted with the historic debate between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois.[2] Yet this controversy, whatever its urgency for its own times, is largely irrelevant for us today. Although some historians have partly rehabilitated Washington as a proto-nationalist and harbinger of black economic development, his accommodationism, dependence on conservative white support, and active disparagement of mass activism render his philosophy (arguably suitable for blacks residing in an overtly terrorist South) obsolete today. The Great Debate among the Harlem radicals, which quickly succeeded the Washington/Du Bois controversy, speaks to our present concerns. It was in fact a national and even international conversation, although most of its principals lived and wrote in New York. The LL was founded in Boston as well as Manhattan, and Harrison lectured widely in the East; the NAACP, FNF, and ABB boasted branches throughout the United States; McKay worked and published in the UK as well as the US; and the UNIA threatened white colonial governments throughout the world.
In addition to focusing on the Washington/Du Bois dispute that preceded the Great Debate, historians have amply described the Harlem Renaissance, an outpouring of Afro-American literature and art, and associated debates over "art versus propaganda," that blossomed in the 1920s.[3] Ironically, however, "The New Negro," a term baptized in mass consciousness by Alain Locke's 1926 literary anthology of that name, originated not as a description of a new literary generation, but of social and political radicals who attacked the entire apparatus of capitalism and white supremacy. Only after the catastrophic defeat of black radicalism in the early 1920s--a defeat directly related to the suppression of larger, multiracial radical organizations such as the SP and the IWW--was the appellation "New Negro" appropriated by literary innovators whose endeavors comprised no economic or political threat to the white capitalist status quo (although their debates curiously echoed those of the social radicals). This process, unsurprisingly, paralleled the trajectory of the white Left. It deflected a vibrant economic and political radicalism onto relatively harmless literary and lifestyle innovations, largely devoid of political implications; it displaced a defeated mass, working-class insurgency embracing economic, political, and cultural radicalism, with a relatively tepid and largely symbolic cultural revolt.
But economic concerns overshadowed these literary debates even during the Jazz Age. The key insight of the economic radicals elaborated by Harrison--that blacks must unite with white workers in an interracial, class-based alliance--permeated Afro-American thought during the 1920s. Harrison's emphasis on black pride and black nationalism also survived, albeit in transmuted form, not only as the "literary Garveyism," of the Renaissance,[4] but also as Pan-Africanism, group consciousness and effort, a renewed emphasis on racial pride and institutions, and Du Bois's increasing emphasis on a group economy. Even the most ardent proponents of the Harlem Renaissance championed such ideas, and saw literature and art as ancillary weapons in the struggle for a just society. Yet Afro-American intellectuals and activists, however brilliant, found no way out of their race's intractable dilemmas. Systematic terrorism and violence, combined with ruling-class hegemony, effectively throttled any attempt at either an interracial class alliance of black and white workers, or an enduringly effective black nationalism.
The rise and decline of radical black organizations, directly relevant to our plight, also sharpen understanding of the largely white revolutionary movements of the time, particularly the IWW and Debsian SP. Many historians have commented on the SP's Marxist orthodoxy, which so focused on class analysis that it almost ignored the realities of race, gender, and culture. Yet radical Afro-Americans demanded that the Socialists confront the realities of racism within their ranks and in mainstream American society, and revise their doctrine and strategy accordingly. Other insurgencies simultaneously challenged Second International orthodoxy: Josephine Conger-Kaneko's Socialist Woman represented an organized intraparty movement that propounded a socialist feminism and a feminist socialism; the IWW vehemently denounced social and cultural inequalities that oppressed women, blacks, and immigrants, as well as the masses of industrial laborers; and Max Eastman's Masses (suppressed by Woodrow Wilson and resumed as the Liberator) demanded a programmatic and philosophical revision of Marxism that would incorporate feminism and birth control, racial egalitarianism, and daring new emphases in literature and art. From outside the party, Emma Goldman and her anarchist circle also condemned the narrow economic determinism and fixation on class that characterized the Debsian Socialists. The radical blacks, therefore, were part of a varied left alternative that advocated a revivifying expansion of the American Socialist project; and their ultimate failure strikingly paralleled, in both causes and effects, that of their comrades in this larger dissident movement.
The Socialist feminists, Wobblies, literary radicals, and anarchists all directly addressed gender issues, and each movement contained prominent women within its ranks. The Afro-American radical enterprise, however, was almost exclusively a masculine project. Grace Campbell, the movement's only woman of importance, apparently left no writings; we know of her only through numerous references in the voluminous secret police reports on radical blacks. Even the massive Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia has no entry on her. In an important debate paralleling that of "race first versus class first," Afro-American women discussed the relative importance of race and gender in their own oppression. Their debate concerned "race first versus gender first," and slighted class consciousness. Indeed, the major Afro-American women's groups were resolutely middle class in philosophy, strategy, and composition. Reclaiming their status as women and as people were top priorities for Afro-American women denied both identities by a patriarchal and white supremacist society.[5]
For their part, the radical men were only mildly interested in feminism. Harrison, Randolph and Du Bois supported women's suffrage with a fervor atypical among Afro-American men, while Randolph advocated birth control as well. Most male radicals acknowledged the special devastations that white racism wreaked upon black women, but, rather than advocating female equality, paternalistically vowed that they would fulfill their traditional male role and protect "their" women's purity. Fulfilling their masculine role, they believed, would enable black women to fulfill their feminine one. Black male radicals, as their white male comrades, too often assumed that the interests of men represented archetypical human concerns. Like many men and women of their time, they considered "manhood" a prized value, but often assumed that it included rather than excluded women. When they said "manhood" they often meant "personhood"; a "man" was an autonomous, free-thinking individual who stood up for his (or her) rights. This phrasing included women in the movement even while eliding their specific grievances, including those against black men. Indeed, Harrison sometimes used the epithet "New Negro Manhood and Womanhood movement" without acknowledging that black women may suffer injuries incomprehensible to black men--indignities sometimes inflicted by their fathers, husbands, brothers, and co-workers. Even the fiery antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells, whose forceful personality and lived feminism frightened many black men, used the masculinist rhetoric of "manhood and self-respect". Like most other African-American female leaders, she largely eschewed issues of class, and spoke mostly for and to middle-class club women.[6]
The experiences of the radical Afro-Americans also greatly illuminate the mechanisms by which the ruling elite controls the United States--casting particular light upon the relationship between raw violence and seemingly nonviolent hegemony over the hearts and minds of oppression's victims. Few master classes rule with brutality alone. Hegemony--the insinuation of ruling-class ideology into the very personalities of the oppressed, which makes the victims somewhat complicit in their own exploitation--is crucial. In the United States and elsewhere, capitalist hegemony requires that workers emphasize their socially imposed differences while ignoring their common interests--that wage earners perceive each other as competitors with incompatible values and goals rather than as a unified class that will benefit from social transformation. A vibrant Socialist movement uniting black and white workers requires that proletarians of both races overlook their economic, political, and cultural differences (themselves created by a common oppression) and unite as a class against the capitalist system that destroys them both. Yet pervasive terrorism against both Afro-Americans and white workers--differently motivated and experienced--ensured that blacks and whites could not unite across the assiduously created and maintained chasm that separated them; their historical experiences, concrete situations, and cultural identities were mutually incomprehensible. The apparatus of terrorism and violence that operated over the entire range of American life and institutions affected blacks far differently than whites. When the IWW, the SP, and black radicals insisted that black and white workers were essentially similar, their claim seemed belied by the realities of everyday life. Afro-Americans and whites simply were different in the eyes of the vast majority of both races.
The conventional distinction between ruling-class violence and hegemony as instruments of social and economic control, therefore, seems exaggerated.[7] Hegemony depends upon violence, and violence underwrites hegemony. In the United States of the 1910s and 1920s and beyond, violence created a world in which blacks (and women) had their specified place; everyone, of whatever race (or gender) matured in this world, and usually perceived it as natural and inevitable. Pulitzer-prize winning historian Leon Litwack remarks that many Afro-Americans considered themselves a cursed and servant race because that notion largely "mirrored harsh day-to-day realities." Litwack quotes a black woman who wished she was white because "we worked every day, hard work, and we never did have food. The people that wasn't working, which was the white folks, they had food and they had clothes and everything. So I wanted to be white." Another black woman observed that her world did not want or tolerate an accurate perception, much less description, of reality; "Indeed, its very survival depended on not knowing, not seeing--and, certainly, not saying anything at all about what it was really like."[8] Even when radicals denounced white supremacy and struggled against it, they perforce accepted and used its own discursive categories and assumptions. More subtle means of hegemony, such as newspapers, the movies, and other forms of popular culture, depended for their effectiveness on the largely invisible, because omnipresent, violence directed both at blacks and at white workers. Understanding this symbiosis between violence and hegemony requires a brief recapitulation of the problems confronting blacks and the white working class.
Notes:
[1] Most histories of the Socialist party briefly discuss the party's racial attitudes. For more detailed analysis see Philip Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans: From the Age of Jackson to World War II (Westport, 1977), and Sally Miller, Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Early Twentieth Century American Socialism (New York, 1996).
[2] Of the numerous secondary accounts of the Washington/Du Bois controversy, three stand out: August Meier, Negro Thought in American, 1880-1915 (Ann Arbor, 1969); Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915 (New York, 1983); and David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race (New York, 1993).
[3] Of the vast library of general books about the Harlem Renaissance, I have relied primarily on four: David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York, 1979); Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York, 1971); Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem (New York, 1982); and Edward E. Waldron, Walter White and the Harlem Renaissance (Port Washington, 1978). For a more general discussion of the "art vs. propaganda" debate see Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson, Propaganda and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of Afro-American Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Amherst, 1979).
[4] The term is Tony Martin's, from Literary Garveyism: Garvey, Black Arts and the Harlem Renaissance (Dover, 1983).
[5] For discussions of contemporary black women's agency and movements, see Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (New York, 1999), 13-141; Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York, 1988), 17-31, 85-197; Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, From Slavery to the Present (New York, 1985), 79-195. For women writers, see Cheryl A. Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington, 1995). For a brief discussion of Grace Campbell, see Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth Century America (London, 1998), 173-177. Darlene Clark Hine, ed., Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (Brooklyn, 1993) has no information on Campbell and almost nothing on Afro-American Socialist women in the decades 1912-1928.
[6] The effect of masculinist rhetoric on black women and black feminism is contested. For differing views on its effect on the Afro-American women involved with A. Philip Randolph's Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids, discussed in chapter twelve below, see Beth Tompkins Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925-1945 (Chapel Hill, 2001), 65-74; and Melina Chateauvert, Marching Together (Urbana, 1998).
[7] For a short and illuminating discussion of the concept of hegemony see T. Jackson Lears, "The Concept of Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities," American Historical Review (June 1985), 567-593.
[8] Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York, 1998), 17, 33-34.