Chapter 17: THE LEGACY AND FAILURE OF THE BLACK RADICALS
The Afro-American radicals left a considerable legacy. Harrison, Randolph, Owen, Briggs, Domingo, McKay, and Garvey posed questions, and propounded answers, that remain vitally relevant today. Randolph and the Messenger group published Afro-America's longest-lasting revolutionary publication since the abolitionist era and achieved much during their radical heyday. Almost alone among radical publications, the Messenger survived the government's denial of a second-class mailing permit.[1] The only African-American periodical so honored by the government, the Messenger attained the fourth highest circulation of any black publication (after the Crisis, the Chicago Defender, and the Negro World). Major W.H. Loving, a highly-placed black secret police agent, called Randolph and Owen "high types of intellectual manhood.... forceful and convincing speakers and excellent writers," and said that the Messenger's "editorials have been quoted and commented upon not only by radical journals throughout the country but by the daily press of the large cities." The radicals set the stage for a resurgence of class-based African-American radicalisms during the depression decade.[2] The insights of the Messenger and the other class-conscious black radicals, however ignored at the time, have been fully vindicated by events. Purely race-based reforms have exacerbated white racism, further divided the working class, and indirectly but inevitably devastated millions of Afro-Americans by casting them into an isolated, impoverished, and hopeless underclass worse off, in some important respects, than many blacks during the era of official Jim Crow. The CIO demonstrated the necessity of interracial, industrial unionism for workers of both races. The recent deterioration in the living standards of most workers and the devastation wreaked upon much of the African-American population indicate the precariousness of any temporary ameliorations for anyone under capitalism.
The Messenger claimed a wide readership among "stevedores and porters, as well as teachers and doctors," reached more white readers than all other race publications combined, and "carried to the toiling masses the economic and social truths that will free the enthralled black and white workers from the chains of wage slavery." Randolph spoke of the "marvelous reception" of his message of interracial unity "by an increasing body of unionists and white intellectuals."[3] Progressive unions, including the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and the United Hebrew Trades, advertised regularly in the Messenger. Randolph and Owen inspired enthusiastic crowds at dozens of largely white union meetings. Randolph's organization, the Friends of Negro Freedom, offered the most wide-ranging, innovative, and creative program of any African-American organization of its time. The Messenger's achievement, however, was primarily a moral and intellectual tour de force, crafted in the face of overwhelming obstacles and the lack of any possible social base.
Randolph's philosophy and program were not without problems. Randolph's "vulgar Marxist" (and vulgar capitalist) version of economic determinism--his faith that individuals would ultimately act in their economic self-interest--fundamentally misconstrued human nature. Randolph's error was almost the opposite of that traditionally ascribed to radicals--namely, that radicals vastly overestimate humanity's idealism, beneficence, and selflessness. Randolph ignored the fact that people are complicated cultural beings whose ideas of self-interest are varied, largely based on a moral self-identity, and often contradictory. Randolph believed that once white workers recognized that their own economic interests suffered from white racism they would embrace black liberation. American history, however, has repeatedly belied this faith. The vast majority of whites have always cared more about degrading blacks than organizing for their own economic interest. In the 1920s whites joined the Ku Klux Klan by the millions, while rejoicing in the destruction of working-class organizations like the SP and the IWW.
In 1922, when black troops violently destroyed a white strike in Texas, Randolph exulted that "the white owners of property are disseminating more education to white workers upon their race prejudice than all the labor papers in the United States." A bullet from a black soldier, he said, was an unforgettable lesson.[4] He repeatedly made similar remarks when black scabs broke white strikes. Far from embracing interracial class solidarity, however, whites perceived blacks as bestial threats to their livelihoods and values--precisely as the capitalists who controlled black soldiers and strikebreakers intended. As James Weldon Johnson remarked, in a comment which increasingly characterized the North as well, "the white South of today is using up every bit of its mental energy in this terrible race struggle. All of the mental power of the white South is being used up in holding the Negro back.... The white South is less intensely interested in forging ahead than it is in keeping the Negro from forging ahead."[5] More recently, President Clinton's relatively modest health care initiative failed, while his abolition of "welfare as we know it"--which will eventually torture and kill, by slow starvation and preventable illness, millions of all races--succeeded. Capitalist manipulation only partly accounts for this discrepancy. White workers, given a choice between ensuring health care for themselves and their children or throwing a million children (inaccurately perceived as mostly black) into destitution, predictably chose the latter.
Randolph's "vulgar Marxist" faith that people always act in their perceived economic self-interest proved false. Nor do productive relations, outside of and in contradiction to culture, alone create consciousness. White supremacy comprised a core underpinning for the self-identity of most whites. Poor, oppressed, working-class whites, denied the real satisfactions of meaningful work, control over their own lives, social respectability, leisure, and adequate income, required the artificial self-respect seemingly granted by prefabricated racial, national, and gendered identities. By identifying on a racial basis with their exploiters, they could deny their own degraded position. Racial self-identity was also much safer. White workers who resisted racism courted destruction; those who embraced it proclaimed their superiority and their essential identity with the master class. Randolph himself noted that "the lowest servant class group in every country is always bitterly hated by the bourgeois, more highly favored servant class." When Rose Pastor Stokes reassured the 1921 UNIA convention that white racism predominated only among "the ignorant masses,"[6] she inadvertently (and, for a radical who placed ultimate hope in the workers, ominously) described the white working class.
Josephine Cogdell captured this dynamic in an article for the Messenger in 1925, in which she compared blacks and Jews. Oppressed groups, she wrote (referring to white American workers and Russian peasants), need a scapegoat, a safe target sanctioned by the authorities, on which to vent their hatred and resentment. "The greater a tyranny a people must endure, or the more terrible the crisis it has just come through, the more likely it is to manifest the hatred of its wrongs in some permissible direction," Cogdell said. Just as Russian peasants oppressed Jews, "the poor whites, the dispossessed and the disappointed of America, likewise have their altars whereon they sacrifice their weaker brethren to 'get even' for the wrongs committed by the stronger brethren, their rulers." The Negro was the chief goat, but others, such as Japanese in California and Mexicans in the West, also served. Even specific groups of whites could be targeted at the will of the owning class. "It was so easy to hate the Germans during the war, and this hatred was so spontaneously and quickly aroused merely because the hatred was already there, it had merely to be directed and sanctioned." African Americans were, in much of the country, the "indispensable enemy" that bonded whites of all classes.[7] As Spero and Harris exclaimed:
To the white trade unionist the Negro is not merely an outsider trying to get into the union, but a social and racial inferior trying to force the white man to associate with him as an equal. And the Negro knows that the white worker wants to keep him out of the union not merely as a potential competitor but as a member of a race which must not be permitted to rise to the white man's level. For three hundred years the Negro has been kept in a position of social and economic inferiority, and white organized labor, dominated by the hierarchy of the skilled crafts, has no desire to see him emerge from that condition.[8]
George Schuyler also commented at great length on white racism's debilitating effects on interracial class unity. White workers, he said, were "more blinded by color prejudices than their white masters." Speaking of "the flattery of color superiority," Schuyler said that "no ruling class before in the history of the world has ever possessed such an instrument of keeping slaves quiet and contented. Instead of the white proletarian being on the bottom (or rather, thinking he is), he is made to believe that he has something in common with Rockefeller, Morgan and Ford, i.e. his color, or lack of it. Color is a caste mark in America: those without it believe themselves in the upper class; those with it know themselves to be in the lowest class." Very few white workers (themselves mostly unorganized) would "accept the black worker as a comrade and equal even to defeat the capitalists. Any such association means to them loss of social standing and consequently of self-respect, which is about their only asset these days. Economic conditions may compel a rapprochement between the two laboring groups, but the deeply ingrained consciousness of color that is the distinguishing trait of Homo Americanus makes that event exceedingly remote, regardless of how much it may be desired by intelligent people."[9]
With his usual mordant wit, Schuyler described the impact of white supremacy on three fictionalized and yet typical whites: a recent immigrant, a rural Southern white who left the hills for the city, and a native born, working-class white woman. Schuyler named the immigrant Isadore Shankersoff:
By hook or crook (probably the latter) he grabbed off enough coin of his native land to pay his passage to America. In Russia he was a nobody--hoofed by everybody--the mudsill of society.... Arriving under the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, he is still Isadore Shankersoff, the prey of sharpers and cheap grafters, but now he has moved considerably higher in the social scale. Though remaining mentally adolescent, he is no longer at the bottom; he is a white man! Over night he has become a member of the superior race. Ellis Island marked his metamorphosis. For the first time in his life he is better than somebody. Without the presence of the blackamoor in these wonderfully United States, he would still know himself for the thick-pated underling that he is, but how can he go on believing that when America is screaming to him on every hand that he is a white man, and as such entitled to certain rights and privileges forbidden to Negro scientists, artists, clergymen, journalists, and merchants. One can understand why Isadore walks with firmer tread.[10]
Schuyler next skewered Cyrus Leviticus Dumbell, a poor Southern white:
Cy finally tires of the bushes and descends to one of the nearby towns. There he finds employment in a mill on a twelve-hour shift. The company paternalistically furnishes him everything he needs and thoughtfully deducts the cost regularly from his slender pay envelope, leaving him about two dollars for corn liquor and moving pictures. Cy has never had any cause to think of himself of any particular importance in the scheme of things, but his fellow workers tell him differently. He is a white man, they say, and therefore divinely entitled to "keep the nigger down"....
This country, he learns, is a white man's country, and although he owns none of it, the information strikes him not unpleasantly. Shortly he scrapes together ten dollars, buys Klan regalia, and is soon engaged in attending midnight meetings, burning crosses, repeating ritual from the Kloran, flogging erring white womanhood for the greater purity of Anglo-Saxondom, and keeping vigilantly on the lookout for uppish and offensive zigaboos to lynch. Like the ancient Greeks and Romans, he now believes himself superior to everybody different from him. Nor does the presence of Jim Crow institutions on every hand contribute anything toward lessening that belief. Whatever his troubles may be, he has learned from his colleagues and the politicians, to blame it all of the dark folks, who are, he is now positive, without exception his inferiors.[11]
The "demure little Dorothy Dunce," who attended "the palatial public school" for twelve years, was Schuyler's final victim. "Now, at eighteen, having graduated, she is about to apply her Latin, Greek, English literature, ancient history, geometry and botany to her everyday work as packer in a spaghetti factory." In her girlhood, her mother had terrorized her with tales of bestial black rapists, who would violate her if she disobeyed; now she feared blacks with a very real terror. She also found that "a value is placed upon her that she would not have in Roumania, Scotland, Denmark, or Montenegro. She is now a member of that exalted aggregation known as pure, white womanhood.... Quite naturally she swells with race pride, for no matter how low she falls, she will always be a white woman."[12]
Schuyler contended that blacks reinforced white pride by imitating whites, denigrating their fellow blacks, and spending fortunes on "deleterious chemicals" that whitened skin and straightened kinky hair. "We should not marvel that every white elevator operator, school teacher and bricklayer identifies himself with Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Newton, Edison, Wagner, Tennyson, and Rembrandt as creators of this great civilization," and that the lowliest white considered himself the equal of every other white. Schuyler also noted the incredible value of white supremacy and black degradation as essential underpinnings of American democracy, finding it "not surprising" that "democracy has worked better in this country than elsewhere. This belief in the equality of all white folks--making skin color the gauge of worth and the measure of citizenship rights--has caused the lowest to strive to become among the highest... Without the transplanted African in their midst to bolster up the illusion, America would have unquestionably been a very different place; but instead the shine has served as a mudsill upon which all white people alike can stand and reach toward the stars. I submit that here is the gift par excellence of the Negro to America. To spur ten times our number on to great heights of achievement; to spare the nation the enervating presence of a destructive social caste system, such as exists elsewhere, by substituting a color caste system that roused the hope and pride of teeming millions of ofays--this indeed is a gift of which we can well be proud."[13]
The irrational sexual jealousy that helped inflame white racism was another incendiary topic, perhaps inexplicable on the basis of economic determinism, often discussed by Schuyler. White fear of black male sexual competition was, he asserted, "the crux of the entire color problem. Fear of economic and political competition is a factor, but above it is the bogey of sex competition. Equality in one field will unquestionably lead to equality in the other." He also sardonically noted that the huge number of mulattoes in the United States, and the pervasive laws against intermarriage, belied the Nordic claim of innate racial antipathy.
Schuyler, himself married to white Texan Josephine Cogdell for over forty years, firmly believed that miscegenation would ultimately yet inevitably solve the race problem, despite the increasing social segregation prevalent in the 1920s. The increasing economic independence of white women would give them freedom in choosing their own mates, he claimed; and "[white] women have been bolder in legally crossing the color line in America to find mates than have [white] men," who had illicitly preyed upon black women. "Were there no social taboos in the path of miscegenation, [the Negro] would have long ago vanished as completely as did the Negroes in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Peru," he wrote. "Even in spite of rope, faggot, tar bucket, and social ostracism, he has lightened considerably since his nineteen ancestors landed at Jamestown in 1619.... The whites proceeded to attack the Negroes' racial integrity as soon as they got within reach.... Lower the social barriers, and the tides of life will flow together as they now trickle together..... By 2000 A.D. a full-blooded American Negro may be rare enough to get a job in a museum, and a century from now our American social leaders may be as tanned naturally as they are now striving to become artificially."[14] Schuyler mercilessly ridiculed Nordic evasions, stupidities, and contradictions on the subject of intermarriage and quoted a Brazilian diplomat as saying that intermarriage was the surest preventative of race war. "In South America," the diplomat said, "our experience has taught us that there is no real understanding except the one that comes through the fusion of races."[15]
Afro-American sociologist Abram Harris attacked the economic determinists of both races at another weak spot: their insistence that all racism stemmed from capitalist conspiracies aimed at dividing the working class. Radicals
say that the Negro and white workers are members of the same economic class; their interests are identical, ergo, they will unite in proletarian solidarity against capitalism. But are the interests of white and black workers identical? If white and black workers will not unite in a trade union for economic self-preservation, how much more unlikely is it that they will unite to promote the social revolution? This much seems to me irrefutable: if their interests are identical there is little recognition of it on the part of white and black proletariat. And granting that the capitalists have entered upon a conspiracy to divide the untutored proletariat over the color question, the capitalists surely could not provoke race hostility between white and black workers if the workers themselves did not possess confirmed racial sentiments upon the basis of which appeals to race prejudice can be made.[16]
Harris called the radicals' claim that the capitalists generated white racism an illusion "from which neither logic nor actual race relations in industry can deliver such doctrinnaires." White workers, rather than the capitalists, had closed Afro-Americans out of innumerable industries. "Not only have white workers in the organized labor movement barricaded the entrance to many types of employment against the Negro but unorganized white workers from common laborers to the white-collared aristocracy have protested against being forced by their employers to work in the same shop or plant with 'niggers.'"[17] (Harris predicted the future as well as describing the past; "hate strikes" against black workers would continue for many decades, even in ostensibly egalitarian CIO unions.)[18]
Individual white workers also garnered real material benefits from white racism, even if such workers lost as a class. Recent discussion of the "prisoner's dilemma" has demonstrated that individuals, rationally acting in their own self-interest, often undermine the long-term interests achievable only by collective action. In the short term, white workers benefitted by exclusion of blacks from jobs and unions. Any particular white could benefit from egalitarianism only if the white workers as a group repudiated racism and united as a class with Afro-American workers. Any individual white who associated with blacks faced social ostracism, while the black member of such a friendship would find himself scorned by most whites and criticized as "dicty" and supercilious by some blacks. Harrison had told white Socialists that they must "treat [blacks] frankly as human beings.... No special kindness and no condescension is either needed or expected."[19] Yet McKay's lacerating experiences with Max and Crystal Eastman demonstrated that the structures of white supremacy were not so easily evaded. Both Eastmans evoked humiliation and degradation for McKay simply by treating him merely as a person, heedless of the devastating response their well-intentioned actions evoked from mainstream culture.
Individual members of the white working class, therefore, garnered both psychological satisfactions and material benefits from white supremacy. This was duplicated on the international scene, where American and European imperialism indirectly enriched a privileged stratum of white workers via the phenomenon of superprofits (acknowledged by both Du Bois and Randolph) while providing the psychological gratifications accruing to an imperial people ruling over racialized subordinate groups abroad. Blacks themselves took pride in what the Emancipator called "the empty and abstract glory" of membership in "an imperial race."[20] Randolph's project, therefore, foundered on the shoals of an implacable white racism. Blacks, a permanent minority of the American population who lacked economic, political, military, and educational power, required strong white allies; yet Randolph's preferred group, the white working class, employed what little power it possessed in oppressing, rather than empowering, blacks. Even Garvey once admitted that "if a change must come, it must not come from Negroes; it must come from the white race, for they are the ones who have brought about this estrangement between the races."[21] However, whites changed, if at all, mostly for the worse.
Furthermore, many of the radicals' appeals to white self-interest were inflated and even illusory. Virtually every black radical warned white workers that unorganized blacks excluded from racist unions provided the capitalists with an unlimited reservoir of scabs. But in August 1925 the Messenger (contravening its usual stance) admitted that "the great majority of strikes in this country are broken by white scabs." Only five million of thirty million American workers were organized; therefore, capitalists need not depend on blacks for strikebreakers. Powerful white unions could both win strikes and exclude blacks; scabbing their way into jobs, Schuyler later commented, is "a difficult and hazardous undertaking where unions are so strong and Negroes so numerically weak." Furthermore, even a few black scabs inflamed white racist passions. "The presence of a dozen black men in a force of strikebreakers appears to the strikers like a hundred," Spero and Harris noted. Nor would black union members find immediate acceptance among whites, as the radicals often implied; black Socialist Frank Crosswaith, a strong backer of interracial unions, admitted in 1925 that "the accumulated ideas and impressions made upon the minds of the white people of this country through 250 years of chattel slavery" would not suddenly dissipate when blacks associated with whites in unions. White radical William Z. Foster agreed; in a book that created a sensation among Afro-American radicals, he proclaimed that "they know little of the race problem in industry who declare that it can be settled merely by the unions opening their doors to the negroes. It is much more complex than that, and will require the best thought that conscientious whites and blacks can give it."[22] Sadly, Foster exemplified his own thesis: despite his sincere egalitarianism, he marred his book with subtle, yet unmistakable, condescension towards blacks, and especially the black leadership.
White hostility, violence, and discrimination virtually determined the response of black workers. When white unions excluded blacks, even Randolph and Fletcher urged that blacks scab themselves into jobs. Blacks had an individual and racial interest in breaking into closed industries by any means possible; they would starve if they acted as members of a class when their white competitors behaved as members of a race. Moreover, white capitalist racism ensured that capitalists would hire blacks only if such hiring generated larger profits. Nora Newsome, the first black ACW organizer, found that black women not only distrusted male and white organizers, but also worried that if they joined the ACW they would lose their jobs. Newsome admitted that some white capitalists in the garment industry "employ more colored girls than white because the colored girls are usually unorganized and consequently work for lower wages."[23] Given this reality, Newsome's assertion that antiunion sentiment among black female clothing workers stemmed from simple ignorance seems misplaced. Such workers acted under a rational understanding of their situation. Only a very powerful union, and a very racially egalitarian one, could realistically promise blacks that joining would bring benefits rather than catastrophic losses. Garvey was more realistic: "The capitalist being selfish--seeking only the largest profit out of labor--is willing and glad to use Negro labor wherever possible on a scale reasonably below the standard union wage.... But if the Negro unionizes himself to the level of the white worker, the choice and preference of employment is given to the white worker."[24]
Nor were all-black unions a feasible option. In the north, black workers, while significant in some key industries, could not win a strike on their own, especially during the postwar terrorism and depression. Blacks predominated in very few industries, while black unions in largely white occupations were fatuous. In the South, where blacks had a strategic position and numerical clout, white terrorism and violence crushed any spark of black unionization, whether interracial (the Brotherhood of Timber Workers) exclusively black (the Arkansas sharecroppers), or lily-white (the textile industry). A key Messenger editor admitted that widespread agitation in the South was simply impossible. Although Randolph entertained high hopes for the National Brotherhood Association, a federation of all-black unions, the NBA disintegrated, along with many white unions, during the depression and the antiunion offensive of the early Twenties.
A controversy between Du Bois and Owen concerning the class position of Afro-Americans indicated the dilemma of the black workers. Owen ridiculed Du Bois's contention that blacks were not part of the white working class because the white proletariat did not recognize them as fellow workers. Owen asserted that "this is about as asinine as saying we are not human beings or men because in the South we are largely not so recognized. Is manhood dependent upon recognition? Is proletariat a product of recognition or is it a state of economic position of human beings?"[25] Class, however, is partly a matter of social construction; people who do not regard themselves as workers, or are not so regarded by other workers, are not, in every sense, a member of a working class. Most radicals wrongly believed that class is simply an objective status determined by one's relation to the means of production; they erroneously regarded their task as facilitating working-class recognition of a fact, rather than as creating a consciousness that itself partly determined reality.
Cooperatives and boycotts, two other radical proposals, proved equally futile or impossible. Schuyler proffered an unusually blunt assessment of both tactics when he exclaimed that "the Negroes of the Empire State are precariously hanging onto the fringes of the economic life of the communities in which they live. The whole Negro population could be dispensed with and not be missed except by a few Jewish pawnbrokers, delicatessen proprietors and numbers bankers, Greek shoe repairers, restauranteurs and bootleggers, and Italian icemen, fruit dealers and dope peddlars. The Negroes know it and the whites know it." Far from wielding economic clout, blacks found themselves rapidly displaced even from those menial service industries which they had previously dominated. Gustavus Steward added that Negro boycotts of Jim Crow establishments were hopeless, as integration would lose far more white dollars than it gained in black patronage. Blacks, at any rate, patronized segregated establishments rather than suffer total exclusion from the amenities they offered.[26]
Randolph's recognition that rising expectations, rather than immiseration, often generates revolt, also helps explain the relative quiescence of the black working class. "An unsatisfied stomach is well nigh as dangerous as an empty one," Randolph said. "For being not yet delirious, it can more calmly plan destruction." He claimed that "discontent increases with social improvement.... Revolutions have always come when people's conditions were improved. The taste of liberty makes one reluctant to go back to slavery." He also acknowledged that "when the workers are at their lowest ebb, they seldom respond to the call of unionism."[27]
Such assertions usually bolstered Randolph's recognition that labor seldom won strikes during depressions and his knowledge that relatively privileged blacks often initiated racial agitation. Yet this reality also underscored why poor and working-class blacks--denied leisure, education, an adequate diet, and healthful living conditions--often lacked the energy and organization necessary for effective resistance. A secret police agent, commenting on the lack of enthusiasm accorded Owen during a 1923 visit to Homestead mill workers, noted that Owen had often been squelched by the police, but that "the local men have too many problems of their own demanding solution, without borrowing additional trouble from the outside." Another agent remarked that Grace Campbell, the most prominent radical Afro-American woman, "is conducting an active campaign among the colored women, but so far is unsuccessful as these women are not at all interested in Socialism and don't care to learn." Randolph also recognized that recent migrants (black or white) from the rural South did not make promising recruits for the cause of labor unionism.[28] It is therefore no surprise that blacks, for whom unionism was a mixed blessing, avoided unions in large numbers.
Prominent Afro-American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier highlighted the overwhelming difficulties that poor blacks encountered in scratching out a meager living and protecting their families--difficulties that rendered agitation for distant, utopian goals impossible. Entering a debate that had already raged for some decades--and that has been bitterly renewed in recent years--Frazier addressed "the present disorganization of family life" and "the high rate of illegitimacy" among blacks. The ravages of slavery partly accounted for this, Frazier said; but so did contemporary poverty and discrimination. Blacks worked at the lowest paying and least secure jobs, thus ensuring a high paternal desertion rate. Other families were fatherless because of the high death rate among blacks; still others from male migration North in search of jobs. "In the rural South where the majority of the Negroes live the agricultural system is unfavorable to a stable family life," because of insecure tenancy, the reliance on migratory labor for much seasonal work, and the devastating poverty that prevented many black children from attending school. (Lack of shoes was one telling obstacle.) Large families, although "a characteristic of all people on a low cultural level," greatly hurt blacks. So did "the large number of Negro women in gainful occupations," and the consequent neglect of children. Black servants not only inevitably neglected their own children while raising those of white families, but often imbibed a taste for luxuries and leisure from their white employers. Seemingly blaming the victims, Frazier exclaimed that "we must recognize the place of big economic forces which are to a large extent beyond our control. Yet the substitution of institutional and other forms of control will be of little consequence as long as we permit the fundamental social unit in our society to go to pieces."[29] Frazier's dismal picture, which equally described many poor white families, revealed why Socialist (and NAACP) messages left most poor blacks unmoved.
African-American workers also shared an intense cultural conservatism with similarly situated whites. In the United States and elsewhere, groups stigmatized and excluded from mainstream society often internalize the values of that society and seek inclusion rather than a fundamental overhaul of the system. The Messenger once complained that "the American workingman is the most backward, ignorant, disorganized, reactionary and patriotic laborer in the world, and Mr. Jones [a National Urban League official] assures capital that the Negro shares all those attributes!"[30] Unfortunately for the Messenger, however, African Americans--"100% pure Americans" in any sense of the term--proudly and consciously appropriated, and helped form, mainstream American values. Like most whites, they privileged race over class--an especially appropriate response for blacks. Like poor and working-class whites, they took refuge in racial, national, and gendered identities that offered psychological compensations for their lack of authentic freedom and dignity.
It was precisely the uniforms, pageantry, ceremony and ritual of the UNIA that so attracted masses of blacks, who greeted the Black Star Line and the Back to Africa programs with wild enthusiasm precisely because they bolstered racial pride. Assessing the tremendous success of Garvey, Frazier commented that blacks were
shut out from all serious participation in American life.... The average Negro, like all mediocre people whose personalities must be supported by empty fictions, must find something to give meaning to his life and worth to his personality. One has simply to note how the superficial matter of color raises the most insignificant white man in the South to a place of paramount importance, in order to appreciate how much support a fiction gives to one's personality....
A Negro might be a porter during the day, taking his orders from white men, but he was an officer in the Black Army when it assembled at night in Liberty Hall. Many a Negro went about his work singing in his heart that he was a member of the great army marching to "heights of achievements."[31]
Frazier deplored the irrationality of Garveyite ostentation and display, but regretfully acknowledged that "tests of reasonableness can not be applied to schemes that attract crowds." Crowds "never learn by experience" because "the crowd satisfies its vanity and longings in the beliefs it cherishes." The NAACP (and, he could have added, black radical organizations) "has never attracted the crowd because it does not give the crowd an opportunity to show off in colors, parades, and self-glorification. The Association appeals to intelligent persons who are trying to attain tangible goals through cooperation.... Those who support [the UNIA do so] because it gives them what they want--the identification with something that makes them feel like somebody among white people who have said they were nobody."[32] Sadly, the highly educated black radicals, so unlike the masses of both blacks and whites, never learned this skill.
J.A. Rogers, who opposed Garvey for all of the Messenger's reasons, nevertheless conceded that the UNIA Potentate offered his followers riches comparable to or exceeding those offered by traditional religion. Ridiculing the anti-Garvey animus of many black clergymen, Rogers scornfully said that such clergy promised their followers only a vague heaven after death. "If Garvey, like these Christians, had the power of the law and the sword behind him, his paradise would have been accepted without a murmur." Like all messiahs, Garvey "was a poet and romancer and knew how to soothe the sufferings of his followers with hopes of paradise. He could paint such halcyon pictures of this to his assembled cohorts that they would actually feel themselves already there." Garvey also offered his followers "what they wanted even more than earthly goods: the hope of revenge." Since "hope and promise are about all that the rank and file of any movement have ever received from their messiahs, Garvey, according to this precedent, could not be said to have defrauded his followers."[33]
Afro-American writers acknowledged that racist deformations--another traditional American value--afflicted blacks as well as whites, both in their attitudes toward other ethnic groups and in their intraracial animosities. Schuyler complained that "most Negroes are so busy shouting about the white people's prejudice against them that they forget how prejudiced they are. I continually find Negroes whose attitude towards Greeks, Italians, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Hindus and other peoples, are no different from those held by Imperial Wizard Evans." Blacks were themselves divided by class, nationality, and color; the native-born/West Indian divide was a major chasm, but the differences between those resident in the South, recent Northern migrants, and more settled Northern blacks also produced friction. West Indians were a tiny proportion of American blacks, but were highly concentrated in key cities (especially New York) and produced a vastly disproportionate number of social radicals. (A Harlem street aphorism had it that a black revolutionary was "an overeducated West Indian out of work.")[34] Their estrangement from Afro-Americans was therefore significant. Randolph himself, while welcoming southern migrants, considered them a potential menace threatening Northern blacks because they accepted lower wages and often felt comfortable in segregated settings. (The Messenger's many articles attacking segregation were addressed primarily to its black proponents, rather than to whites.) William Ferris lamented that "you have Negroes from all parts of the country and all parts of the world in New York. You have the Mexican Negro, the Central American Negro and the South American Negro. Those Negroes do nothing but fight all the time."[35]
Indeed, the failure of the Afro-American radicals is highlighted by the vastly disproportionate representation of Caribbean immigrants within the insurgent black movements. Of the radicals who founded their own organization and/or publication, Harrison, Briggs, Domingo, and Garvey were immigrants. The leadership of both the ABB and the UNIA was disproportionately West Indian. The Caribbean population comprised almost 20 percent of blacks in New York City, headquarters of the major black radical organizations, although it represented a mere 1 percent of all Americans of African descent. Domingo recognized that "this large body of foreign-born" contributed "those qualities that make New York so unlike... other cities with large aggregations of American Negroes."[36] Domingo somewhat exaggerated when he claimed that West Indians "largely compose the few political and economic radicals in Harlem" and that "without them the genuinely radical movement among New York Negroes would be unworthy of attention." Nevertheless, an understanding of why so many West Indian immigrants joined radical organizations may shed some light on why so few native-born African Americans joined.
Although West Indians constituted the overwhelming majority of the population in their home islands, all blacks comprised only 2.7 percent of New York's population in 1920. West Indians were accustomed to negotiating a world in which they had scant contact with whites, and where white racism was veiled by and conflated with a seemingly more gentle class bias. West Indians, Domingo asserted, "had experienced no legalized social or occupational disabilities" in their homelands. In the United States, they encountered whites at much closer quarters, and racism in a most blatant form. West Indian immigrants were radicalized by the unimaginably vile white racism, symbolized by that unique American institution of lynching, that they experienced in the United States. Claude McKay, warned of this racism in advance, was still amazed and disheartened by its virulence.[37]
West Indians also came from countries with a more active tradition of slave revolts than American conditions had allowed; many had been organized politically or economically in their homelands; and they were far more educated and skilled than their native American counterparts (and much more literate than American whites). Their native cultures were far less imbued with fundamentalist Christianity, and more receptive to Fabian Socialism and rationalism, than that of American blacks. (Jamaica's governor during part of McKay's youth was a Fabian Socialist.) They were politically independent; the traditional Afro-American loyalty to "the party of Lincoln" meant nothing to them. West Indians were exceptionally well-travelled, many having scoured the Western hemisphere in search of work; they therefore sported an internationalist consciousness. They also found more freedom for militant, oppositional agitation in the United States than their colonial governments permitted. In many respects, therefore, they resembled the highly-educated American blacks who comprised the mainstay of Afro-American protest organizations, than the more typical blacks who remained relatively quiescent. Validating Randolph's "rising expectations" theory of revolution, Caribbean immigrants were both better off and more overtly thwarted in their hopes than many American blacks (in that they were ambitious and educated for positions that white racism denied them). They also migrated in search of greater opportunities which, however seemingly within reach, remained elusive. As Domingo observed, West Indian immigrants comprised "the hardiest and most venturesome of their folk.... Dissatisfied at home," they would revolt against "limitation of opportunity here when they have staked so much to gain enlargement of opportunity."[38]
Domingo summed up many of the experiences which accounted for the peculiarities of the West Indians:
Forming a racial majority in their own countries and not being accustomed to discrimination expressedly felt as racial, they rebel against the "color line" as they find it in America. For while color and caste lines tend to converge in the islands, it is nevertheless true that because of the ratio of population, historical background and traditions of rebellions before and since their emancipation, West Indians of color do not have their activities, social, occupational, and otherwise, determined by their race. Color plays a place but is not the prime determinant of advancement; hence, the deep feeling of resentment when the "color line," legal or customary, is met and found to be a barrier to individual progress. For this reason the West Indian has thrown himself wholeheartedly into the fight against lynching, discrimination, and other disabilities from which Negroes in America suffer.[39]
The prejudice of native Afro-Americans against West Indians, partly motivated by the immigrants' very ambition and success, forged what was once a disparate medley of groups into a more homogeneous and self-conscious population, and generated "an artificial and defensive unity among the islanders." This in itself undoubtedly exacerbated West Indian radicalism, especially when activists such as Garvey were attacked on the basis of their nationality. "The support given Garvey by a certain type of his countrymen is partly explained by their group reaction to attacks made upon him because of his nationality," Domingo said.[40]
Afro-Americans were hobbled by forms of conservatism other than ethnic divisions within their group, however. The Emancipator touched upon a perennial radical dilemma afflicting whites as well as blacks. Oppression, it said, "creates in the consciousness of the oppressed a desire to oppress others."
History abounds with examples of oppressed races, groups and classes themselves becoming the most brutal of oppressors. It seems impossible for the man who has received kicks and buffets to free himself from the desire to exchange his position with some one else. Thus it is noticeable that some Negroes who have been the worst victims of imperialistic exploitation are themselves most anxious to use the same weapons and methods that have been used against them.
Empire with all its glamour, glory, panoply, pomp and power attracts and hypnotizes. It appeals to the elemental passions and sets one's soul on fire. The desire for it on the part of some Negroes is compounded of ignorance, ambition, and a desire for revenge. It is not rational. Appeals having imperialism as a basis reach down to the bottom of group life and rouse the dormant consciousness of race. It is difficult to overcome it by reason, but overcome it must be since it is freighted with so much fallacy and danger.[41]
In another editorial, "Conservatism and Oppression," the Emancipator lamented that "oppressed peoples in almost every country develop a psychology that is favorable to the continuance of their own oppression. It is the poorest, most ignorant and most despised of a population that are usually the most anxious to give up their lives for THEIR country."[42]
Having least to conserve, and suffering most from conditions as they are, we find some Negroes reflecting the most intolerant and reactionary views on social and national questions. Regarded as inferiors by the dominant opinion of the country and denied even the elementary rights of citizens, many Negroes are, nevertheless, to be found voicing the opinions of those who profit most from repression and injustice.
Hoping to justify their inalienable right to equality of treatment, some Negroes seek to palliate those who deny them those rights by assuming an attitude of chauvinistic intolerance to new ideas. Others, perhaps imitating those whom they regard as "best Americans" and "true Britishers" believe that the best evidence of their own untarnished Americanism or genuine Britishism is a superior and ostentatious disdain of Socialists and radicals. Still others, in their pathetic endeavor to conciliate their oppressors and gain their long denied rights, manifest an unreasoning hostility to "foreigners."[43]
Such "inverted psychology" stemmed from the mistaken belief of the oppressed that if they imitated their oppressors, those oppressors "out of gratitude or sympathy, will grant them their long withheld human rights." History, however, belied such hopes. "Not all the wars that Irish and Hindu soldiers have won for England have resulted in freedom for Ireland or India. Instead, the Irish and Hindus now realize that they must wage ceaseless war upon England if their countries are to be freed.... The verdict of history is that the loyalty of an oppressed group to their oppressors has never resulted in bringing freedom to the oppressed."[44]
In the era of the Afro-American radicals, most blacks regarded themselves as hard-working, loyal, patriotic, and respectable American citizens. This self-image was not only a solace in a harsh world, but a means of demanding the rights and privileges of other Americans. William N. Colson, himself an officer during World War I, lamented that when white racists proclaimed the unfitness of blacks for military service, Afro-Americans flocked to the colors to prove the racists wrong. Colson said that blacks were more patriotic than most other American groups, and more so than oppressed peoples elsewhere. Saying that "no intelligent American Negro is willing to lay down his life for the United States as it now exists,"[45] Colson employed a hilarious, if depressing, analogy. Every year, the Universities of Virginia and North Carolina sponsored a football game, from which Afro-American fans were rigidly excluded. When the railroads offered special excursion fares to the big event,
Many ignorant and gullible Negroes took advantage of the popular enthusiasm to travel to the game on the trains. They bought huge pennants and streamers but when they presented themselves for admission at the ball park they were refused entry on account of their color. Some remained, however, to view the spectacle through the holes in the fence, others still merrily flaunted in the public streets their pennants marked with the names of the two schools, but a few, the disillusioned, had the good sense to burn their banners up. Negro patriotism is much like that of those silly and unsuspecting folk who came to see the football game.[46]
Similarly, African Americans supported the Republican party not only out of legitimate detestation of the virulently racist Democrats, but because oppressed peoples often desperately seek to convince themselves that they have friends in high places rather than conceiving themselves as outcast outsiders, as experience seemingly demonstrated. Blacks voted Republican even in overwhelmingly Democratic areas where such a vote was as "wasted" as one for the SP because in so voting blacks claimed inclusion in mainstream society. Because Republican party affiliation served as an underpinning of personal and social identity for masses of blacks (as well as an avenue of personal advancement for a few), the Messenger's and the Crisis's denunciations of Republican perfidy and exposés of its sordid history scarcely affected black voters, who, as Du Bois said in disgust, stupidly gloried in the fact that "I helped elect Coolidge."[47] Even Du Bois, who should have known better, veered erratically (before and after 1928) between the Democrats, the Republicans, and even an all-Negro party, rather than supporting the SP that he clearly preferred.
Afro-American Christianity was another mainstream institution adapted for black identity and survival. Harrison asserted that "the church among the Negroes today exerts a more powerful influence than anything else in the sphere of ideas.... Show me a population that is deeply religious, and I will show you a servile population, content with whips and chains, contumely and the gibbet, content to eat the bread of sorrow and drink the waters of affliction."[48] Black Christianity preached meekness, forgiveness, and otherworldliness as a survival technique, out of pure necessity. Similarly, black churches reinforced racial consciousness because they, more often than the highly stratified white denominations, included members from different economic classes. Ernest Rice McKinley similarly criticized black Christianity.
The security of the master class was in large measure dependent on slave docility. The white preacher talked to the slave and emphasized the inevitableness of his status. The slave preacher unconsciously encouraged humility and docility by laying great stress on the rewards that were laid up in Heaven for the righteous.... The doctrine of nonresistance was talked to Negroes so much that the large majority came to believe it. It never entered their heads that it might be a ruse to keep a race in subjection at very little cost to the stronger race.[49]
Harrison claimed that black "spirits had been completely crushed by the system of slavery"--a theme that Garvey sometimes echoed. McKinney similarly cited a black "inferiority complex similar to that of women in relation to men" derived from slavery. Historians dispute this view; Leon Litwack has demonstrated the courage and resilience of Afro-Americans immediately following emancipation.[50] The crushing failure of Reconstruction, however, intimidated Afro-Americans and seemingly revealed the futility of worldly struggle even when the national government supported black rights. And as Wallace Thurman and others complained, the Afro-American "has always supported his religious institutions even though he would not support his schools or business enterprises."[51]
Yet the attack on Christianity cost radical blacks dearly because the church was the focal point of Afro-American hopes and pride, and the center of their cultural, political, and social life. Black church lyceums gave Harrison his start, and black churches remained indispensable to black radicals seeking a forum. The experience of Randolph at a church in the District of Columbia is indicative of this problem. Randolph gave a long and impassioned speech favoring "a revolution in the head which will bring about a revolution in society.... We are trying to present to you a scientific method, a method that is calculated to achieve the ends aimed at." A church member, G.W. Moton, asked Randolph about his attitude toward Christianity; Randolph evaded the question, claiming a lack of time even as he wasted much time in circumlocutions. Moton repeated his question, and again Randolph stonewalled. To audience applause, Moton responded that "I am heartily in favor of anything that will help the Negro, individually or collectively. I am a radical myself, and I suffer for that reason, but.... We must have God as a foundation. Our old fathers and mothers in the cotton fields, praying in the fence corners, their words live in our hearts today, and by their prayers we are making progress. Let us not forget them as we go along.... I shall subscribe to your magazine, but if it seems in the least to dig at the foundations of the church, at the cornerstone, Christ Jesus, I am not for it." The church's pastor, Reverend Brown, thanked Randolph and noncommittally said that "our church has been a kind of a forum. Anything worth saying, people may come here and say it.... Any organization or institution that has a message for the people may say it here. I am glad to have them."[52] Moton and Brown were almost certainly alienated when they discovered that the Messenger stridently attacked Christianity. Even Harrison ultimately reconciled himself to "the Negro Church, which has done more for the education and spiritual uplift of the masses than any other agency in the race"; any approach to the African-American masses, he realized, must work at least partly through the largest and most widespread Afro-American institution.[53]
The miseducation of blacks, and the lack of education altogether, also accounted for black conservatism. Despite the radicals' belief that class was an objective reality that events themselves would inject into working-class consciousness, class awareness is a cultural construction arising not only from experience, but from interpretation of that experience. Class consciousness arose more readily in Europe, with its long history of formal, legalized class distinctions, than in the United States, which had no officially recognized classes but did legally differentiate between the races and between the sexes. Most radical Americans were (and are) extraordinarily well educated. The Masses group, the Socialist women, Emma Goldman's anarchists, and the black radicals were all composed of world-class intellectuals who read widely and deeply. Members of the IWW and of anarchist groups usually lacked formal schooling, but more than compensated for this by their voracious reading in modern philosophy, economics, politics and science. (The IWW halls offered a more enlightening and modern education than most American universities.) Many Afro-Americans, however, were denied schooling altogether; the relatively lucky ones were consigned either to the manual education advocated by Booker Washington, or the airy, irrelevant classical schooling championed by Du Bois. Few blacks received a modern, scientific, liberal arts education of the kind that stirs rebellion and thought.
Abram Harris also recounted how Afro-Americans, conservative because of their psychology "as a submerged and proscribed race," shared traditional American beliefs in individualism and the get-rich philosophy. Blacks had despised poor whites since the days of slavery, and still found unions closed against them. But their psychology as Americans also militated against radicalism. Typical American individualism, Harris said, derived from the times of the small farm and business, and was enshrined "in a constitution which today is capitalism's legal bulwark." White-collar workers and schoolteachers, unlike their counterparts in Europe, typically embodied the capitalist ethos from which they did not profit. It was Harris said, "a heritage which white and black Americans accept unquestioningly. The life of the latter well exhibits the middle-class mind characteristic of the white American. So the advantaged Negro's hostility or apathy to organized labor is as much attributable to his inheritance of bourgeois temper and training in American institutions as to the racial discrimination practiced by trade unions.... In his desire to become self-sufficient the Negro is typically American." Harris warned white radicals that "it is obvious that one need not expect any early awakening of Negro class consciousness. A priori deductions which ignore the economic and psychological setting of the Negro's present group life and history and his present reaction to unionism by virtue of it, are liable to discover revolution where there is only conservatism."[54]
Frazier described movingly and at length the Afro-American's wholehearted embrace of another bourgeois convention--social distinctions based upon education, property, and family. The Negro group, far from consisting of an undifferentiated mass of proletarians as white and black radicals asserted, was "highly differentiated, with about the same range of interests as the whites." Frazier said that although radicals of both races could "quote statistics" proving "that ninety-eight percent of the Negroes are workers and should seek release from their economic slavery," very few Negroes regarded themselves as wage slaves. "Class differentiation among Negroes is reflected in their church organizations, educational institutions, private clubs, and the whole range of social life. Although these class distinctions may rest upon what would seem to outsiders flimsy and inconsequential matters, they are the social realities of Negro life, and no amount of reasoning can rid his mind of them.... When one probes the tissue of the Negro's social life he finds that the Negro reacts to the same illusions that feed the vanity of white men."[55] Frazier continued:
It has often been observed that the Negro subscribes to all the canons of consumption as the owning class in the present system. Even here we find the same struggle to realize a status that he can envisage and has a meaning for him.... The relatively segregated life which the Negro lives makes him struggle to realize values which give status within his group. An automobile, a home, a position as a teacher, or membership in a fraternity may confer a distinction in removing the possessor from an inferior social status, that could never be appreciated by one who is a stranger to Negro life. Outsiders may wonder why a downtrodden, poor, despised people seem so indifferent about entering a struggle that is aimed to give all men an equal status. But if they could enter the minds of Negroes they would find that in the world in which they live they are not downtrodden and despised, but enjoy various forms of distinction.
A perusal of Negro newspapers will convince anyone that the Negro group does not regard itself as outcasts without status. One cannot appeal to them by telling them that they have nothing to lose but their chains. The chains which Negroes have known in the South were not figurative. Negro newspapers are a good index of the extent to which middle-class ideals have captured the imagination of Negroes.[56]
Frazier commented that Afro-American newspaper society columns reported in detail on the apparel, parties, cars, homes, and jewelry of the elite. "In fact, there is no demand on the part of Negro leaders to tear down social distinctions and create a society of equals," he said. "As the writer heard a colored editor tell a white man recently, 'the white people draw the line at the wrong point and put all of us in the same class.'"[57]
Frazier detailed two other major impediments obstructing black radicalism. First, many blacks worked for at least some of their lives as servants in the homes of the rich; and servants were notorious for imitating the values and tastes of their employers, even as their inability to achieve their hopes undermined their self-respect. Such a group, like the house slaves in the Old South (or white servants in Europe) were an unpromising constituency for revolution. Second, "the Negro can only envisage those things which have meaning for him. The radical doctrines appeal chiefly to the industrial workers, and the Negro has only begun to enter industry." In so escaping the plantation "they have realized a dream that is as far beyond their former condition" as Socialism would be "beyond the present condition of the wage earner." Even the most fervent radical could not demand that individual Negroes forfeit their chances for personal betterment in favor of a distant social revolution. "A Negro business man who gets out of the white man's kitchen or dining room rightly regards himself as escaping from economic slavery. Probably he will maintain himself by exploiting the Negro who remains in the kitchen, but he can always find consolation in the feeling, that if he did not exploit him a white man would.... The idea of the rich man has been held up to him." The Afro-American needed most of all a culture; and, severed from his African past, he could find that culture only in the United States, and--for the successful--only in the upper ranks of white society.[58]
Obliquely criticizing Randolph, Frazier claimed that, pace widespread opinion, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was not "an indication of economic radicalism." The porters demonstrated "little working class psychology and showed a disposition to use their organization to enjoy the amenities of bourgeois social life." Long an Afro-American elite, the porters had recently been overtaken by the rising Negro professional class and now hoped that the BSCP would recoup their lost respectability and relative prosperity within the Negro group. "Collective bargaining will help them" maintain "a role in the colored group which is more in harmony with their conception of their relative status in their group.... The Pullman porters are emerging... as an aristocratic laboring group just as the Railroad Brotherhoods have done."[59] Writing after the virtual collapse of the BSCP, Harris (writing with Sterling Spero) claimed that the porters' bourgeois mentality undermined any unionism requiring sustained risk and effort:
[Randolph's] task was no easy one, for in spite of the fact that the porters' grievances were many and serious, the feeling persisted that his job was a good one and that the Pullman Company was the Negro's steadfast friend. The porter's contact with the well-to-do travelling public led him to absorb its point of view and to seek to emulate its standards. The porter had all of the familiar middle-class prejudices of the white-collar worker and upper servant. It gave him a thrill to have bankers and captains of industry ride in his car, even though their tips were smaller than they might have been. It made him feel like a captain of industry himself, even if it did not make him affluent or ease the burden of his work. Even a vicarious captain of industry is rather poor trade-union material.[60]
Piling insult upon insult, Frazier also insisted that "even the (black) radical movement which had vogue a few years back was subsidized by the white radical group. It did not spring out of any general movement among Negroes towards radical doctrines. Moreover, black radicals theorized about the small number of Negroes who had entered industry from the security of New York City; but none ever undertook to enter the South and teach the landless peasants any type of self-help."[61] Such an effort, Frazier knew full well, would have been suicidal. Frazier also said that the Afro-American businessman "is dealing with economic realities" and could "boast of the fact that he is independent of white support, while the Negro artist still seeks it." He expressed amazement that radicals expected that the Negro intelligentsia, "which represents the most civilized group," would revolt "against the system by which it was created."[62]
Wallace Thurman similarly observed that the diversity within the Afro-American community, and the peculiarities of each of its component sectors, militated against radicalism. Thurman's Negro Life in New York's Harlem briefly sketched the vast differing neighborhoods, ethnic groups, and classes which comprised Harlem and concluded that "there is no typical Harlem Negro as there is no typical American Negro. There are too many different types and classes." The intelligentsia could not lead the Harlem masses, Thurman implied, because its life, values, and expectations vastly differed from those of most blacks. The Negro intelligentsia was "more a part of New York's life than of Harlem's" because members of that select group "are accepted as social and intellectual equals downtown.... Harlem to most of them is just a place of residence; they are not 'fixed' there as are the majority of Harlem's residents."[63]
Thurman noted that black Harlem sported "an elaborate social structure" that divided its inhabitants according to race, the state or country of a person's origin, and "minor divisions determined by color and wealth." Thurman criticized the black middle class in terms resembling Frazier's own critique. "They are for the most part mulattoes of light brown skin and have succeeded in absorbing all the social mannerisms of the white American middle class," he said. "They are both stupid and snobbish as is their class in any race. Their most compelling if sometimes unconscious ambition is to be a near white as possible, and their greatest expenditure of energy is concentrated on eradicating any trait or characteristic commonly known as Negroid."[64]
The black masses depicted by Thurman were consumed by the never-ending struggle for survival, and therefore lacked revolutionary consciousness. The rent party characterized this vast group; although it constituted "the commercialization of spontaneous pleasure," it did help harried tenants pay the landlord and afforded an ersatz intimacy for legions of lost souls. Thurman described the thousands of Harlemites living in crowded squalor and working at miserable jobs who had "no place to go, thousands of people lonesome, unattached and cramped, who stroll the streets eager for a chance to form momentary contacts, to dance, to drink and make merry." Such throngs sought the illusion of "a joyful intimate party, open to the public yet held in a private home." Rent parties served the same "real and vital purpose" of receptions and soirees in the elite neighborhoods, and "gave lonesome Harlemites, caged in by intangible bars, some place to have their fun and forget problems of color, civilization, and economics." Thurman's description increasingly described white American workers as well, who sought diversion and escape in mass commercial culture.[65]
Thurman, a very dark Negro whose Blacker the Berry satirized colorism, also corroborated widespread complaints of racism within the Afro-American community, directly not only against dark-skinned blacks but especially against West Indian immigrants. These immigrants possessed a distinctive accent and mannerisms and would seemingly work for lower wages; cultural differences, "accompanied, as they usually are, by quarrels concerning economic matters," generated inevitable conflict. "This interracial prejudice is an amazing though natural thing," Thurman sadly remarked. "Imagine a community made up of people universally known as oppressed, wasting time and energy trying to oppress others of their own kind, more recently transplanted from a foreign clime. It is easy to explain."[66]
African-American conservatism, therefore, stemmed in party from the same factors which generated white working-class conservatism. Its distinctive origins did not consist exclusively in ignorance, illusion, and hegemony. Conformity to white norms offered almost the only possibility of advancement or security in a homicidally racist society. In a startling article with wide-ranging implications, Owen justified even the use of skin whiteners and hair straighteners by blacks as simple good sense. "Customs and conventions of a place determine the conceptions of beauty," Owen said. "For instance, the dominant group in a city or nation sets the standard. White people control the wealth and all its concomitants so they set the standard in everything." White power, not any internalized sense of racial inferiority, explained the popularity of skin whiteners and hair straighteners among blacks. "Who ever heard of any black face powder?" Owen asked. Even those who protested such cosmetics diligently used them because fashions and styles were established by leading whites and imitated by all other groups, white and black. Conformity was essential; the oppressed, even more than the elites (who could flaunt their idiosyncrasies) must fit in. Owen reminded his readers that good looks could be "sold" in a perfectly respectable sense; the best looking woman, in the sense of having the lightest skin and straightest hair, would more readily find employment even in a UNIA office. Dark girls were not hired for Negro choruses; only "voluntary Negroes" needed apply.[67]
According to Owen, blacks imitated whites out of protective coloration, just as a little cigar store or cab company tried to look like the largest company in its field. Similarly, the poor strived to look rich.
Various animals and insects imitate the form of their enemies in order to screen themselves from their hostile would-be devourers. In other words, to imitate that which is best is to be taken for the best. That is why people stress ostentation and show so much.... What does it mean to "pass for white"? It means that you can go any place if you have the money to pay your way.... Passing for white" is passing for what the Negro is not, because better opportunities are given to what he is not than to what he is.
After all, there is not too much difference between copying a man's skin color and hair texture and copying his suit.... To be more beautiful, that is to be more like the standard set by those who, through their hold on wealth and politics control society with all its ramifications, is and ever may be the great desideratum.
The dominant group is the controlling factor in everything..... [If blacks controlled the world] white people would be making their hair kinky and using black or brown face powder. In other words, Negroes would be setting the standard of fashions. Until that time, however--and that time is nowhere in sight--reasonable conformity with the established standards (assuming that those standards are not deleterious per se) will be indispensable to a normal existence.[68]
African-American conformity, therefore, often stemmed not from ignorance or hegemony, but from a calculated, realistic appraisal of the disposition of social forces. In placing their hopes on rich white capitalists rather than struggling white workers, the masses of blacks displayed a shrewd awareness of actual conditions that eclipsed Randolph's more abstract and theoretical vision.
Black acceptance and even active advocacy of segregation, while apparently based on illusions fostered by white hegemony, also stemmed from a hardheaded appraisal of harsh realities. Sometimes blacks accepted segregation out of resigned bitterness. Schuyler described the feelings of Afro-Americans under such circumstances. After detailing the numerous subterfuges whereby northern white businessmen insulted, segregated, or expelled blacks from public establishments in the face of laws banning such discrimination, Schuyler said that
The bulk of Senegambians just muddle along, apparently resigned to their fate, and avoid as much as possible the places where they are grossly insulted or absolutely refused service. Often they swallow their pride and accept jim crow accommodations: if they want to see a good show that is what they have to do in most places, whether they like it or not.....
The average Negro just turns away when refused, curses the entire white race under his breath, and steers his wife or sweetheart to some other place where there are better prospects. After several such experiences he becomes conditioned and stays away from places where he knows he isn't wanted, or keeps within the narrow confines of his ghetto, that lone haven where he can retain his identity. It takes time and trouble to fight a case of discrimination and then one is liable to lose, so why bother?[69]
Schuyler then quoted an educated young black, thirsting for life and experience, who despairingly enunciated another reason for acquiescing in segregation. "Well, what to do?," this young man asked. "To sit by on the high stool of principle while scraps of the decade's culture go by? To look blank" and "actually to be blank" when cultural stars performed in town, because of a refusal to accept Jim Crow? "At first I could not stomach it--this trek to the upper balcony. The curious glances of whites toward the upper rows went straight through me. But my thirst for the good things of the theatre changed this disgust and rebellion into a sort of amused tolerance" of addle-brained whites "who fancied their seats a few rows nearer the stage made them any better than I. One always rationalizes a situation sooner or later."[70]
An ardent opponent of segregation under most circumstances, even Du Bois endorsed it in cases (such as the Des Moines Officer Training Camp during World War I, or the all-black Tuskegee Hospital) where segregated facilities were the only ones possible. Du Bois said that after the Civil War blacks resisted segregation, "but when it came to schools, though they objected to the separate school in theory, in practice they did not want hateful white people teaching their children, and in their churches they distinctly demanded colored preachers because white religion did not seem to them real religion. Their fight against separation was tempered, therefore, by the potent fact that in a world of enemies one prefers to consort with one's friends in sheer self-defense." Du Bois warned that "the demands of democracy and the demands of group advancement cannot always be reconciled. The race pride of Negroes is not an antidote to the race pride of white people; it is simply the other side of a hateful thing. On the other hand, if you seek to carry out the principles of democracy in America today you deliver your children to the mercies of white teachers who in many cases neglect or hate them."[71]
As cultured blacks found the educational and cultural level of their group rising, Du Bois argued, they found fighting for inclusion in white institutions less pressing. Increasingly, Afro-Americans could meet all of their cultural, business, and professional needs within their own group. Although many Afro-Americans distrusted black professionals, and believed white dentists, doctors, and attorneys better trained and white businesses cheaper and cleaner, others found that black professionals provided services with incomparably greater courtesy and respect. Discussing the all-black, state supported Cheyney teacher-training school in Pennsylvania, Du Bois commented that blacks who opposed the segregated school cut their own throats, but those who supported it embraced segregation. He deplored the growing racism that infected even black colleges; white teachers increasingly followed Southern racial norms and shunned social contact with black teachers. Many black colleges had white presidents, because white teachers would not work under black supervision. (Others, such as Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, hired only white professors.) Du Bois lamented that if blacks demanded their own colleges staffed and financed exclusively by themselves, "they will cut the strongest spiritual tie between the white and black races in America. This cultural contact of white and colored teachers with each other and of students with a mixed faculty has undoubtedly been one of the greatest sources of racial peace in the United States. To end it would not be only unfortunate; it would be calamitous." But if the only alternative was constant and increasing degradation of black students and faculty, Afro-America's choice was distressingly clear.[72]
Finally, segregation afforded a relatively comfortable living for Du Bois's favored "talented tenth," professionals who could find employment only in a segregated environment. Outside of New York and a few other states, whites would not countenance black teachers in mixed classrooms; therefore, black teachers depended on segregation for their livelihoods. Black attorneys, dentists, doctors, and businessmen could count on scant white patronage; they and their employees also prospered because of segregation. Black institutions--churches, clubs, lodges, and community groups--afforded ample outlet for self-expression, camaraderie, and the exercise of leadership skills. Increasing black pride and awareness of white humiliations meant that fewer and fewer blacks begged for admission to white institutions, or attended them even when ostensibly welcomed by whites. Segregation, therefore, was a boon as well as a degradation; indeed, its character, as Harrison and others pointed out, depended in part on the blacks' own attitudes. If blacks considered separate institutions a degradation, they constituted such a humiliation; if Afro-Americans created such institutions out of racial pride and self-sufficiency, they became bulwarks of black achievement and self-confidence.
Randolph, however, an intellectual who moved comfortably in white circles, was worlds apart from the lives of most blacks. His own philosophy was a product of reading and thinking rather than of concrete experience. His weltanschauung was that of a cosmopolitan philosopher and luftmensch, rather than a working-class African American. Randolph and his Messenger cohorts snorted contemptuously at black (and white) folk culture and mass commercial culture. Randolph detested religion and favored prohibition--a toxic combination for any leader wooing the black urban working class. Unlike Du Bois, Randolph mounted soapboxes and mingled in the dirt and grime of labor struggles; yet his temperament was as alien from the masses of workers as was Max Eastman's. Randolph later revealed a remarkable ability to mobilize working-class blacks in pursuit of immediate, realizable goals--such as a union of Pullman porters and the integration of war industries and the armed forces. He could not, however, convince them of, or even explain to them, an underlying philosophy that stemmed from the library rather than the streets. In early 1925 Randolph wrote Elizabeth Gurley Flynn that "our editorial policy has been changed.... We eliminated Socialist propaganda because we found that it alienated the very group we wanted to reach--the Negro workers.... The change of policy in this connection is based on the belief that it is more important that Negro workers be organized into trade unions than they vote the Socialist ticket or that they be organized only as Socialist voters."[73] Randolph, like Margaret Sanger, Helen Keller, Kate Richards O'Hare, and scores of other former Socialists, now concentrated on single-issue reformism--in Randolph's case, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
The Messenger had equally scant success among the tiny black middle class and intelligentsia, for reasons of which Randolph was well aware. The black elites were hostile to unionism and socialism out of economic self-interest and psychological need. The "black bourgeoisie" savaged by Frazier, distanced itself from, rather than identifying with, the black workers. Unlike self-confident white radicals such as Max Eastman, its members feared identification with the lower class. Indeed, they regarded poor and working-class blacks as menaces who reinforced white stereotypes of black licentiousness and irresponsibility. They wanted the privileges of the "better sort" of whites with whom they identified themselves; they craved white validation of their own self-image as cultivated, respectable Americans. Their precarious respectability would crumple if they associated with black workers or with radicals of either race. Racial rather than class justice was their goal. Their education, as Randolph and Harrison complained, was literary and classical rather than modern, economic, and scientific. Much of the black elite directly benefitted from the largesse of rich white capitalists, who heavily subsidized major Afro-American institutions at the national and local levels. Professionals such as attorneys, doctors, dentists, teachers, and businessmen required a segregated society and economy; denied white patronage, they depended upon the Negro clientele whom white professionals shunned. As a Crusader writer complained. "those who have reached the height of their possibilities are content to let the matter rest there, with no thought for any one but themselves."[74]
In a remark applicable to many black professionals, Locke said that Afro-American teachers were ultra-conservative "because they have all of the economic, social, and political problems of the white Americans, plus the disabilities of race. Doubtless one reason for the Negro teacher's conservatism is the fact that should he lose his job, he has less chance of securing an equally renumerative a position as his white brother or sister has." This was particularly threatening because, as Schuyler pointed out, precariously positioned blacks, as their white counterparts, relied upon the trappings of material success as a bulwark of self-respect and respectability. Commenting on the well-dressed blacks promenading on Seventh Avenue on Sundays, Schuyler said that "many of these Negroes will go without proper nourishment in order to present a 'front' to the promenaders, the members of her club, or the sisters of the church. To dress shabbily here is to lose caste--and the peculiar economic situation facing the Negro here makes him lay more stress on social prestige."[75]
The "rage of a privileged class"[76] discussed by the Messenger was real enough, but was directed mostly at racial barriers rather than class oppressions. Randolph, Harrison, and Domingo all complained that so-called black radicals were radical only on issues of race. Domingo said that blacks "cling to past and present economic ideals with the desperation of a drowning man," while Randolph said that so-called Negro radicals were "more accurately characterized as liberals." Harrison explained that "behind the color line one has to think perpetually of the color line, and most of those who grow up behind it can think of nothing else. Even when one essays to think of other things, that thinking is tinged with the shades of the surrounding atmosphere." As a result, "none of the great world movements for social betterment" penetrated the color line until the upheavals of war and revolution temporarily energized everyone. Randolph complained that "by Negro radicalism we mean something different from radicalism proper. One usually thinks of a Negro radical not as one who insists upon economic or political radicalism, but as a Negro who opposes lynching.... while an ultra-radical Negro means a Negro who insists upon social equality." No less a conservative than Locke agreed. Almost all blacks, even the most racially militant, were conservative on almost every other issue. "Many factors account for this," Locke said, "chief among them the tendency the world over for the elite of any oppressed minority to aspire to the conventionally established values and court their protection and prestige. In this the Negro has been no exception, but on that very score is not entitled to exceptional blame or ridicule."[77]
Yet the white capitalists upon whom Booker Washington and many black leaders depended supported black institutions and aspirations only insofar as such support undermined white unions and the wages of workers of both races. When Afro-American institutions or workers backed interracial unions, capitalists withdrew their subsidies. Just as the capitalists distorted the working-class movement by fomenting racial divisions, so they subverted black institutions and leaders by their financial support. As the Messenger editorialized in 1926, both the labor movement and black insurgencies had been retarded "by the employing class capturing the intelligent insurgents with bribery or jobs... the ruling class constantly draining off the militant strong men, by holding up before them, jobs, ease, luxury, social place and wealth."[78] Just as Randolph accused the NAACP, the Urban League, Tuskegee, Hampton, and other "black" institutions as betraying the race for capitalist subsidies, so Harrison, after his own break from the SP, bitterly charged that Randolph's Socialist party affiliations made him a tool of racist whites. The U.S. secret police, meanwhile, fomented discord among radical African Americans, spreading lies, rumors, dissension, and threats of repression everywhere.
Meanwhile, the debilitating conservatism even of most Afro-American male radicals was symbolized by their blindness toward women's issues. Although Harrison, Du Bois, and Randolph energetically supported women's suffrage, they otherwise evinced little feminist consciousness. They did not belittle women or advocate their subserviency; rather, they mostly ignored women as independent persons, and conflated the interests of black women with those of black men. Echoing the larger culture, most radicals frequently used the word "man" as synonymous with "person," and assumed that "manhood" signified a full, dignified life by a person of either gender. Their neglect of women's issues was caused by obliviousness rather than motivated by disdain. Grace Campbell participated as an important leader in both the FNF and the ABB, and ran twice for important office on the Socialist ticket. Harrison spoke often of "the new Negro manhood movement" and sometimes of "the new Negro manhood and womanhood movement," without any indication of a change or broadening of meaning. Randolph also sometimes spoke of Negro "womanhood" as well as "manhood"; the women, however, were obviously added as an afterthought. Du Bois's Crisis unthinkingly covered notable Afro-American women's achievements in its "Men of the Month" column. For the black radicals, as for English common law, the man and the woman were one, and that one was man.
The male radicals' neglect of women's issues is all the more striking in that women occupied, in relation to men, a position which remarkably resembled the subordination of blacks to whites. Like many disabilities inflicted upon blacks, the oppression of fear afflicted (and afflicts) women in far greater proportion than men. Black males faced lynching; black and white women feared rape and other forms of violence from strangers and intimates. "Jane Crow" subordinated and segregated women of both races in the home, at the workplace, and in society much as Jim Crow segregated and subordinated blacks.[79] Women of both races, when compared with men, worked at harder and more dangerous jobs for less pay. Even when they worked at the same jobs as men (such as teaching) they usually received less pay. Until women's suffrage was achieved, Randolph and DuBois did incessantly proclaim that every argument for black suffrage equally argued for women's right to vote; they did not, however, generalize this insight into an overall analysis of women's distinct oppressions, which so closely mirrored those of blacks. Scholars and progressive activists today, the heirs of Socialist and radical feminisms of the 1960s and 1970s, address the triple intersection of class, race, and gender in ways inconceivable to their predecessors of the 1910s and 1920s.
Indicatively, many radical black publications--the Crisis, the Crusader, and, after 1923, the Messenger--graced their covers with pictures of attractive Afro-American women. In some sense, this was an act of resistance against the white culture's standards of feminine beauty that relentlessly excluded Afro-Americans. Black women, Afro-American radical men properly claimed, were as beautiful as women of the dominant race. Yet the habit of putting pictures of comely black women on the covers of radical magazines, however consistent with demands for inclusion as equals in mainstream culture, was grossly inappropriate for radicals who demanded a revolutionary overthrow of that culture. Despite their own laudable intentions, black male radicals used the bodies of Afro-American women as merchandising tools, as bait to attract otherwise reluctant black (male) readers. The perceived necessity of such a tactic itself indicated the catastrophic weakness of the radicals' own appeal.
In addition to mirroring the general culture's insensitivity toward women's needs, the Afro-American male radicals had special concerns generated by their position in a virulently racist society. At a time when white males were anxiously questioning and redefining their masculinity,[80] black men were systematically denied the prerogatives of traditional manhood. White racism rendered providing for, protecting, and controlling "their" women extremely difficult for black men. Afro-American women worked at menial and low-paying jobs outside the home in large numbers, were routinely sexually harassed and raped by white men, and were castigated by those very same men as licentious and impure. Afro-American women, then, were denied the respect routinely accorded white women; and their degradation was intimately related to the lack of traditional masculine powers and perquisites by Afro-American men. To an extent unprecedented among white men, therefore, black men found that asserting their own manhood was indeed a way of elevating and protecting, as well as subordinating, the women of their race. In a society that routinely denied black men the ability to support their families, and then castigated them as irresponsible when they did not, black men naturally eschewed economic independence for women in favor of an empowering family wage for themselves. In this, they only echoed the less oppressed white male working class.
The male radicals' obliviousness toward the distinctive needs and desires of black women eerily paralleled the attitudes of white radicals toward blacks. Just as many white radicals, with no ill will but with a complacent ignorance of their own white skin privilege, blithely assumed that blacks were automatically included in demands for white working-class liberation, so black male radicals implicitly subordinated black women within their strategy, movement, and philosophy. It is no wonder that almost no black women, with the exception of Grace Campbell, assumed an important role in the radical black liberation struggle, or that Campbell herself wrote almost nothing for the radical press.[81] The black male radicals made no distinct appeal to black women of the type that they insisted that white Socialists direct toward Afro-Americans. White workers and Socialists often perceived black demands as irrelevant, counterproductive, and distracting from the more important focus on class; in such a climate, black radicals of both sexes could expect scant consideration for an appeal which emphasized gender as well as race.
Black male radicals almost totally ignored the mass movements headed by black women, such as the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). Part of this reflected social reality. Black women reformers, like black men under immense social pressure from white mainstream society, embraced a relentlessly elitist, middle-class ethos of benevolent paternalism towards their social inferiors. A movement whose motto was "Lifting as We Climb" was a distinctly unpromising milieu for radical recruitment and propaganda.[82] Nevertheless, while male radicals considered Garvey's UNIA a fertile ground for reaching the black masses, they launched no similar recruiting or educational efforts in NACW. (Fiery militant Ida Wells-Barnett, in fact, was virtually expelled from the relatively conservative NAACP, which could not countenance independence in a woman.)[83]
Afro-American women labored under special oppressions which rendered them unlikely recruits for a struggle based on class as well as race. Few black women belonged to the industrial proletariat; most worked on farms or as domestic servants, isolating occupations which were notoriously difficult to organize. Those with the leisure and education to contemplate revolt were often employed by governments as teachers. Such positions inculcated, as a matter of sheer survival, a focus on respectability and decorum, and rendered those who held them (like their white counterparts) vulnerable to dismissal for political activity. Although black women could often find work more readily than black men, they were almost totally excluded from decent jobs; those who secured a toehold in the respectable, well-paid economy were loath to risk it by joining a working-class movement which largely denied their very humanity. The world of black women revolved around race and gender, not class.
Yet Afro-American women were also an unlikely constituency for a radically feminist activism. In periods of African-American insurgency, black women face enormous pressure from male activists to subsume their own special grievances under the rubric of race; raising feminist issues, they are told, constitutes a form of race treason that divides the black community. Male black nationalists in particular are often strongly chauvinistic, demanding that women stay home, produce and raise children, and provide psychological support for their beleaguered men. Feminism in general was in steep decline after the 1920 suffrage victory, and white female activists remained mostly indifferent or hostile to black women's concerns. No Socialist-feminist movement existed. Furthermore, Socialist-feminist attacks on the traditional home and family would not have resonated among black women valiantly defending these institutions against the devastations of racism. Desperately trying to achieve reputable, conventional lives, black women were in no position to repudiate the canons of respectability, especially when their very fitness for such a life was widely doubted or denied. Cheryl Wall's comments about black women writers' defensive conservatism about sex retains a larger applicability: "What strikes many as their conservatism reflects in part a determination not to conform in even the slightest manner to hateful stereotypes. In a society reluctant to recognize sexuality in most women, black women were burdened with an almost exclusively sexual identity."[84] More even than black men, black women strove to break into mainstream society rather than to overthrow it.
Black women, therefore, participated in radical African-American organizations largely as silent partners. Their virtual silencing within the black radical movement was in part voluntary; the NACW took as little interest in the black radicals as the latter evinced for women's activism. Ironically, the only feminist insurgencies within the militant black organizations occurred within the UNIA (after Garvey's irrevocable break with the black Socialists). UNIA women staged an impressive rebellion, which Garvey only partially contained, at the 1922 Convention. After Garvey's imprisonment, his second wife, Amy Jacques Garvey, sponsored (and mostly wrote) a militant "Woman's Page" in the Negro World from February 1924 until April 1927. Amy Jacques bitterly attacked black men in general and Garvey in particular.[85]
The women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters illustrate the dilemmas confronted by black female workers and feminists. A tiny group of black women worked as maids, the female equivalent of a porter. However, they constituted less than 2 percent of the BSCP's constituency, and their particular needs received no special attention. "As men, porters embraced the distinctly masculine culture of travelling men and the railroad brotherhoods," Melinda Chateauvert, the historian of BSCP women, has stated. Porters built their camaraderie around "telling tales, playing cards, and drinking and talking about women." Like most male union members, porters deliberately excluded or subordinated women within their ranks. The Brotherhood's rhetoric, myths, and history, like those of white unions, airbrushed women out. The BSCP told porters' wives that they would benefit from the higher pay and shorter hours the BSCP would win for their husbands. Both the porters, who would work fewer hours, and their wives, who could become respectable ladies freed from paid labor, would spend more time at home with their families. However, by this script, men could achieve manhood only if their wives were admiring and subordinate. The BSCP's founders regarded the wife's role as "bolstering a husband's morale, making him feel like a man, restoring him for the fight. The wife would win vicariously; his victory would be hers. Nothing was said by the porters or their wives about uplifting the spirits of Pullman maids"--or porters' wives.[86] Chateauvert continues:
Grounded in the ideology of black manhood, the Brotherhood story celebrated women whose activities complemented [those of the men] rather than those who challenged sex segregation.... Like the New Negro, the image of the Black Worker was masculine. Negroes were men and men were workers; only the addition of 'women' rendered 'the black worker' feminine.[87]
Women connected with the BSCP responded in different ways to this endemic male sexism. Especially in the early days of the union, women--both BSCP members and society activists whom Randolph enlisted in the Women's Economic Council--performed essential functions. They raised funds and organized the mass meetings that gave some anonymity to porters who feared the Pullman Company's private Gestapo. Porters' wives held meetings in their homes; Company spies, who scrutinized every detail of porters' private lives, considered females harmless, and disdained to monitor what they considered idle feminine gossip. However, the very fact that women performed such essential services evoked gendered conflict within the BSCP; from the beginning, women who wanted participation on equal terms battled men who regarded their activities as merely decorative. "The question of control arouse regularly, becoming the main source of dispute between women and men," Chateauvert says. However, some women also expressed alarm at the very public and unconventional role played by some of their sisters. Such women wanted nothing more (or less) than the home-centered respectability that defined a true "lady."[88]
Male sexism among the porters was reinforced by Randolph's strategy of "community unionism": the BSCP appealed for support throughout the black community, and--in pursuit of backing from white male unions--emulated the organizational and ideological structures of the (racist and sexist) white railroad Brotherhoods. Paradoxically, women were instrumental in mobilizing black community support; but they could do so only by modelling their own activities on the gendered volunteer work of the resolutely middle-class women's clubs.
By the time the BSCP won official recognition during the Great Depression, the maids had been dropped from the union's name (which had, despite its initials, formerly been the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids) and the Women's Economic Councils renamed the Ladies' Auxiliary Order. Speaking of the BSCP's victories in 1935-37, Chateauvert concludes that "when their husbands won manhood, porters' wives believed that they had won respectability and the right to be treated as 'ladies'.... Yet ladyhood weakened the Auxiliary's independence as an organization, because ladies required male protection."[89] Nothing so indicates the cultural conservatism of African Americans as this. Indeed, the BSCP women's trajectory paralleled that of the (mostly white) members of the UAW's Women's Emergency Brigade, whose activities helped underpin the UAW's epochal victory at Flint. Women were exiled from the ranks of the sit-down strikers, confined mostly to traditional women's tasks, and--despite helping win the strike by markedly "unfeminine" activities--subordinated after the victory was won. Their history, like that of the women of the BSCP, was largely suppressed by the men; and although the UAW became a relatively women-friendly union, it, like almost every other union, mainly bolstered patriarchy on the job and in the home. Randolph, who espoused the IWW's radical, egalitarian, and industrial unionism, helped construct a racially-defined craft union based upon collective bargaining and traditional gender roles.
Near the end of the period covered by this book, Schuyler wrote two essays in which he reflected on the present condition and possible future of the Afro-American. In one essay he complained--as did Du Bois and other observers--that blacks "are more widely segregated and discriminated against than before the War for Democracy." The United States, Schuyler said, would get the Negro it deserved, because "what the Negro will become depends largely upon the white folks. Theirs is the power and the glory." As he looked about him, Schuyler noticed an increasing concentration of wealth and a lessening of opportunities even for whites. "Before our eyes," he said, "we see the swift metamorphosis of the independent middle class of shopkeepers and small merchants into a salariat, dependent upon the triumphant chains and trusts for their livelihood; a group increasingly similar to the class of overseers and managers in the slaveholding South." In a passage with a remarkably contemporary ring, Schuyler complained
Controlling preachers, politicians, professors and publishers, the virile plutocracy has developed an almost unbeatable technique for fooling the yokels while picking their pockets. Philanthropy, stock-selling to employees, company unions, welfare work, social service and overstimulated worship of transient heroes, such as endurance dancers, aviators, tennis stars, pugilists, frankfurter-eating and peanut-rolling champions, all play their part in sublimating the combative impulse that might otherwise find an outlet in revolutionary scheming. Docile and unthinking, the American herd fast becomes Peruvianized, like the serfs enslaved by the Incas. Riding the high tide of empire, with the entire world paying tribute, the American ruling class, like its Roman prototype, may last for centuries.[90]
Pulverized by "countless inventions and new methods of production," Schuyler said, the white workers were increasingly unorganized themselves, and were becoming mere "robots." The white proletarian was also enslaved through "installment buying and the fear of losing what few crumbs it has gained." As the position of the average white deteriorated, Afro-Americans would increasingly bear the brunt of white frustrations and resentment. The ofay retained "nothing to look forward to in life save the dubious satisfaction of being free, white and twenty-one. That satisfaction, however, is considerable when there is no other. In such a situation, the Negro may likely prove of the same service to the plutocracy that the Jews were in pre-Bolshevist Russia--that is, he may serve as a convenient red herring to divert the attention of the white proletarians whenever they grow restive under exploitation." Schuyler, however, citing the unexpected upheavals in Russia, admitted that anything could happen, at least in theory.[91]
Schuyler also claimed that the Afro-American had been "only theoretically, nominally freed" in 1863:
Today he is a slave as he has always been since his arrival in the United States. Discriminated against on the job, segregated in unsanitary, tumble-down ghettoes, politically disfranchised or ineffectual, "Jim Crowed" in all public institutions and conveyances, taxed for education and protection which he doesn't get, kept "in his place" by lynch law or the threat of it, last to be hired and first to be fired, it is sheer mockery to refer to him as a free man. On every hand he is hemmed in by restrictions of the most intolerable variety, and the Mason-Dixon Line has, since the late war for democracy, become contiguous with the Mexican and Canadian borders, where it hasn't crossed them. Brought here as a beast of burden to produce wealth for the white owning class and bereft of all rights it was bound to respect, his condition has only superficially improved.... [In fact] the bulk of the Negroes are worse off than they were before the war."[92]
This was not Schuyler's only pronouncement on this issue--in 1930, despite his assertion that blacks were more segregated than ever, he argued that blacks were improving their condition. Even then, however, Schuyler placed his ultimate hopes for equality in miscegenation, even while admitting that the barriers against it were as strong as ever among whites, and increasingly virulent among blacks. For his part, Du Bois decried the increasing segregation of blacks and especially the growing black tolerance and even active fostering of such separation. He predicted that a race war lay ahead:
What will be the end of all this? Remember that the advance of the black American in the past twenty-five years has been, despite himself and unnoted by his friends, mainly along separatist lines. There has been increasing separation, with separate institutions, better leadership in these institutions, a larger group economy... a tremendous and sometimes an almost fanatic increase of race pride.... Larger and larger numbers are escaping all contact with whites. What will be the end? Can we not see it plainly looming? Insult, separation, race pride, hate, war: this is the nasty horrible world-old thing creeping on us.
Impossible? Of course it is impossible for twelve million men to fight a hundred million--but can they not hate the harder for their very impotence?.... Even the blind can see in the segregation of the American Negro a rebirth of racial concentration, of group friction, of reciprocal hate and despising, of world war....[93]
Today, as we inhabit a new millennium, much has superficially changed since the decades surrounding World War I. The formal apparatus of Jim Crow has been destroyed; however, blacks remain far worse off than whites by every measure of income, wealth, education, personal security, and health. A relatively large black middle class has emerged, but this relatively privileged group is in some ways even more embittered than the black underclass, which has also increased in recent years. Huge numbers of Afro-Americans are mired in poverty and despair. As a result of conscious, deliberate, and bipartisan U.S. government policies since 1973, half of all black children are born in destitution, while many more are poor. Most Afro-American children attend dilapidated, underfunded "schools" that resemble instruments of cultural and psychological genocide. By some measurements, more black children attend segregated schools than in 1954, the year of the epochal Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision.[94]
African Americans suffer from pervasive oppression, discrimination, and degradation in every sphere of life, often of kinds that are fiendish in their contradictory, yet reinforcing, brutality. For example, governments at the federal, state, and local level have virtually criminalized young black malehood, meting out savage sentences for petty "crimes" which white youths commit with impunity. Police terrorize, beat, and even kill young black men with the consent of elected officials and white public opinion, while also countenancing, in Afro-American neighborhoods, serious crimes which they would not tolerate in white districts. (White suburban youths often drive to black ghettoes for their drugs.) Millions of African Americans, therefore, cower in their homes, fearing injury or death if they walk the streets of their own neighborhoods. Contemporary mechanisms of white control differ in form from those of the days of slavery and Jim Crow; but in the striking continuity that characterizes United States history, blacks still lack the freedom of mobility which most whites take for granted.
At a time of rapid technological advance and steadily rising national wealth, the vast majority of white families have suffered stagnant or declining incomes since 1973. A tiny minority of rich families appropriates almost all of the vastly increased wealth generated by a vibrant economy. This again has resulted from deliberate, bipartisan policies which have destroyed the American labor movement, increased taxes on poor, working-class, and middle-class families while decreasing them for the rich, and forced a globalization of the economy that spreads starvation, misery, death, and environmental destruction abroad while increasing poverty and inequality at home. For a few years (1997-1999), a robust economy and declining unemployment actually did, at long last, trickle down to many workers, women, and people of color; the Federal Reserve Board responded by a pre-emptive series of interest rate hikes ostensibly designed to fight inflation. The capitalist press freely admitted that inflation remained virtually nonexistent, and that the Federal Reserve feared low unemployment because it allowed workers more freedom in choosing jobs, and enabled them to demand more pay. The Federal Reserve, however, so insisted on throwing people into the streets to die, that it pursued policies which lowered stock and bond prices, just so it could increase unemployment. The policy succeeded; the U.S. economy slipped into a recession that devastated the lives of millions. The victims of this policy, however, remain quiescent. The bipartisan welfare "reforms" of the 1990s were based upon the claim that everyone who seeks work can find it; but one of American's most powerful and least accountable institutions has dedicated itself to ensuring that this remains a deadly lie.
In a horrifying scenario that much resembles the politics of the 1920s, one party demonizes peoples of color, immigrants, gays, the poor, and working women (except the very poor, who are forced to work at degrading jobs paying a starvation wage), while the other party does nothing, and need do nothing, for its alleged constituencies. Indeed, the United States remains a one-party state where the single capitalist party, objectively racist and male chauvinist, parades under two separate names, making elections a farce in which fewer and fewer Americans bother to participate. The outright purchasing of parties, candidates, and officeholders has become even more of a scandal than it was when Randolph complained that the rich openly owned the government, and marketed candidates like packaged soap. Religious fanaticism and bigotry, of the kind skewered by Randolph and his cohorts in the 1920s, is once again ascendent. (Even the attack on evolutionary biology is resurgent.)
Meanwhile, the party of overt white supremacy stole the last Presidential election (2000) partly by disfranchising black voters by methods both legal and criminal. The losing Democratic party candidate whined about "broken chads" but ignored the huge number of African American males deliberately and fraudulently disfranchised by the Republicans in Florida and elsewhere. Even with hundreds of thousands of African Americans deprived of their right to vote throughout the country, the overt party of white supremacy lost the popular vote, and installed itself in power only by capturing the Electoral College, an institution partly designed to give Southern white male slaveholders a disproportionate voice in choosing the President. The new President, whose brother helped steal the election in Florida, won every electoral vote from the old Confederacy. The Electoral College, like so many other American institutions, ran true to form after 200 years.
As the capitalist state increasingly destroys families, neighborhoods, and lives, at home and abroad, the parties visiting this destruction recruit their victims for a right-wing cultural politics which attacks and victimizes minorities of every kind. Americans of every race and most economic classes, and of both genders, seek refuge in prefabricated identities based on race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, gender, and respectable, traditional values to the exclusion of class, even as the "permanent revolution" of capitalism batters and destroys the economic foundations for those traditional identities. The ruling class enjoys a win-win situation: the more it pulverizes increasing sectors of the American population, the more its frightened and demoralized victims clamor for scapegoats, and vote for the agents of their own destruction.
In the year 2003, the insights of the Afro-American radicals of the 1910s and 1920s remain as relevant as they were eighty years ago. Harrison, Domingo, Randolph, and Briggs elaborated a class-based politics which would directly confront, rather than evade, the oppressions of race. (Josephine Conger-Kaneko and her publication, the Socialist Woman, elucidated a similar politics of class and gender in the 1910s). Today, however, almost all opposition to the regime has long since dissipated. Nothing remotely resembling the Socialist party, the Industrial Workers of the World, or a black Socialist intelligentsia addressing a mass audience, exists today. Although historians and radical intellectuals have chronicled, described, and analyzed the mechanisms of ruling-class domination and oppression with a sophistication and facticity impossible for members of previous generations, the organized Left scarcely exists. Most critics of the regime unthinkingly accept its fundamental premises; hegemony reigns supreme.
In the years between Hubert H. Harrison's affiliation with the Socialist party (1911) and Du Bois's later embrace of it (1928), Afro-American radicals--and some of their more conservative critics--achieved intellectual miracles. Yet as all blacks knew, their status and condition in the United States ultimately depended, and depends, on white goodwill and cooperation--upon white enlightened self-interest, if not decency. Yet with each passing year, fewer and fewer white Americans retain even the pretense of caring about the welfare of their colored brethren. Instead, whites are dismantling the very programs that ameliorated the condition of some blacks, even while abandoning, in fear and loathing, an increasingly alienated black underclass cut off from all opportunity and contact with mainstream society. In the year 2003, white America seems intent on proving Garvey's contention that it would never acquiesce in black equality.
Most whites and blacks remain mired in the cultural conservatism of the oppressed. Although black cultural conservatism differs markedly from that of whites, it is still replete with the nativism, homophobia, sexism, nationalism, and capitalist values that retard the necessary revolutionary assault on the very basis of American society. For blacks as well as whites, the oppressions of class which largely determine their lives remain invisible.[95] White cultural conservatism remains an adamantine wall impeding progress even on issues directly affecting the welfare of whites, much less other races. As throughout American history, most whites would rather degrade and oppress blacks than act in their own economic interest, and prefer destroying black families to nurturing their own. A total cultural revolution that repudiates the very essence of American history, society, and culture, is necessary for any interracial, class-based assault on the interlocking systems of capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. Yet such a cultural revolution is impossible exactly because those most oppressed by the system cling most ferociously to their inherited, prefabricated (even if illusory) sources of self-identity as bulwarks of meaning and dignity in lives otherwise devoid of them. Cultural revolution, in short, is necessary but impossible. The American ruling class has, partly by design and partly by historical accident, crafted a system that, unlike the empires of oppression championed by Hitler and Churchill, may indeed last a thousand years.
Notes:
[1] Apparently the Messenger was allowed a month-by-month permit, but did not receive a permanent second-class permit until the spring of 1921. This alone made it far more subject to governmental harassment.
[2] W.H. Loving, "Final Report on Negro Subversion," August 6, 1919, in FSAA, Reel 21. For an account of some of those 1930s radicalisms see Jonathan Scott Holloway, Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris, E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919-1941 (Chapel Hill, 2002) and Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (New York, 1984).
[3] "In the Smoker," TM, October 1923; "Sojourner Truth, the Messenger of a New Day," TM, July 1923; "The Human Hand Threat," TM, October 1922.
[4] "Negro Troops Sent to Texas," TM, September 1922.
[5] JWJ, "American Genius and its Local," New York Age, July 20, 1918, in SWJ, I, 269-270.
[6] "National Paradoxes," TM, October 1920; Convention Speech by Rose Pastor Stokes, August 19, 1921, MGP III, 677-678.
[7] Josephine Cogdell, "Those Inimitable Avatars--The Negroes and the Jews," TM, August 1925. David Pierce, a Jewish writer, wrote in the Crisis (August 1925) that the "Hebrew upon whom fortune has favored must vent his superiority upon somebody. He must look down upon the members of his race who have lived in America for a briefer period than himself; he may perhaps despise the contact with his brethren who hail from more backward sections of Europe; and he must be careful to avoid debasing contact with any group marked as degrading by the ruling Anglo-Saxons. Consequently, he must not know the Negro as an intimate." Jews, Pierce lamented, would follow the lead of the dominant Anglo-Saxons. This remark is even more applicable to other white immigrant groups. Pierce, "Is the Jew a Friend of the Negro?," TC, August 1925.
[8] Spero and Harris, Black Worker, 462.
[9] GSS, Review of Black America, Scott Nearing, Modern Quarterly, Spring 1929.
[10] GSS, "Our Greatest Gift to America," in Charles S. Johnson, ed. Ebony and Topaz: A Collectanea (New York, 1927), 122-124.
[11] ibid. Schuyler's use of the term "fellow workers" was undoubtedly an ironic reference to the epithet (replacing the SP's "comrade") which members of the racially egalitarian IWW used when greeting each other.
[12] ibid.
[13] ibid.
[14] GSS, "A Negro Looks Ahead," American Mercury, February 1930. See also GSS, "Emancipated Women and the Negro," Modern Quarterly, Volume 5, Number 3. Schuyler did, however, believe that the idea of white superiority originated in economic imperatives. The invention of the Cotton Gin, he said, revivified slavery economically, and the peculiar institution (which had fallen into discredit) required new justifications. In the slave South, white slaveowners who preyed on black women generated new property they could sell on the open market; after the Civil War, laws banning intermarriage allowed white men to prey on black women without fear that they would be required to care for their children.
[15] GSS, "Racial Intermarriage in the United States," American Parade, Fall 1928. The Haldeman-Julius company later reprinted this as one of its Little Blue Books.
[16] Abram Harris, "Lenin Casts His Shadow Upon Africa," TC, April 1926. Robert Minor, writing after the disintegration of the UNIA, propounded an unusually sophisticated analysis of the symbiosis of white racism and American capitalism. Rather than positing an ahistorical, reified capitalism and an essentialized racism and ascribing racism's origins to a capitalist conspiracy, Minor admitted that both systems were historical creations that varied over time and between societies. Denying that racism was a necessary part of capitalism, Minor asserted that it was a feudal remnant. "In all capitalist societies there are some remainders of feudal society which become interwoven with and interdependent with the capitalist economic and state systems." These were both a residue of the previous social system and "an integral part which cannot be separated from the capitalist system as it exists here and now." Negro oppressions were "a built-in part of the concrete system of class exploitation" as it existed in the United States. Robert Minor, "After Garvey, What?," Workers Monthly, June 1926, in John Henrik Clarke, Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa (New York, 1974), 165-173. This analysis accounted for the existence of racism before the advent of capitalism, while still maintaining its essential role in buttressing the American version of capitalism.
[17] ibid.
[18] See August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW (New York, 1979) for an example of a massive hate strike by CIO workers during World War II. However, in this case, neither the CIO nor the U.S. government tolerated the strike, which disrupted war production.
[19] HHH, "How to Do it--and How Not," NYC, December 16, 1911.
[20]"Radicals, Liberals, or Conservatives," TE, April 10, 1920.
[21] MG Speech, August 31, 1921, MGP III, 737-738.
[22] "Negroes in the Unions," TM, August 1925; GSS, "These 'Colored' United States," TM, October-November 1925; Spero and Harris, Black Worker, 132; Crosswaith, "The Trade Union Organizing Committee for Organizing Negroes," TM, August 1925. In this article, however, Crosswaith repeated the argument that unorganized blacks defeated strikes. William Z. Foster, The Great Steel Strike and Its Lessons (New York, 1920), 212. McKay quoted this passage in NIA.
[23] Nora Newsome, "The Negro Woman in the Trade Union Movement," TM, July 1923.
[24] Garvey quoted in Spero and Harris, Black Worker, 135.
[25] CO, "Du Bois on Revolution," TM, September 1921. Owen was attacking a recent Du Bois Crisis article, "The Class Struggle."
[26] Steward, "'Your Best People Come Here'," TM, December 1927; Schuyler, "These 'Colored' United States," TM, October-November 1925.
[27] "Bread!," TM, November 1917; "The Election--an Interpretation," TM, December 1921; "The Coal Strike," TM, May 1922.
[28] Secret police report, "Negro Activities," April 2, 1923, FSAA, Reel 5; P-138 report for March 2, 1921, FSAA, Reel 7.
[29] E. Franklin Frazier, "Three Scourges of the Negro Family," OPP, July 1926.
[30] "The Invisible Government of Negro Social Institutions," TM, December 1920.
[31] E. Franklin Frazier, "The Garvey Movement," OPP, November 1926.
[32] ibid.
[33] J.A. Rogers, World's Great Men of Color (Touchstone: 1996), 415-431. Rogers added that Garvey "had profited little or nothing by the millions of dollars he had taken in" and "lived more simply than many a Negro leader who had taken in far less money."
[34] See Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth Century America (London, 1998) for a general account of West Indian immigrant radicals and militants.
[35] GSS, "New Books. Liberia and Her People," TM, July 1925; Ferris, quoted in secret police report "Negro Agitation," October 17, 1919, in FSAA Reel 21; APR, "Editorials. May Day," TM, May 1925; David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York, 1982), 41.
[36] WAD, "Gift of the Black Tropics," in Locke, ed., New Negro, 341-349.
[37] ibid.; James, Aloft, passim.
[38] Domingo, "Gift of the Black Tropics," New Negro, 341-349; James, Aloft, passim.
[39] WAD, "Gift of the Black Tropics," New Negro, 341-348.
[40] ibid. Even the Messenger, it will be recalled, alienated Domingo by its stress on the West Indian origins of Garvey and his followers.
[41] "Should Negroes Strive for Empire?," TE, March 27, 1920.
[42] "Conservatism and Oppression," TE, April 17, 1920.
[43] ibid.
[44] ibid.
[45] Colson, "Propaganda and the American Negro Soldier," TM, July 1919.
[46] Colson, "An Analysis of Negro Patriotism," TM, August 1919.
[47] "Three Achievements and Their Significance," TC, September 1927.
[48] HHH, "On a Certain Conservatism in Negroes," NN, 41-47.
[49] McKinley, "A Vanishing Conservatism," TM, November 1924.
[50] HHH, "On a Certain Conservatism in Negroes," NN, 41-47; McKinley, "A Vanishing Conservatism," TM, November 1924; Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long (New York: 1979).
[51] Wallace Thurman, Negro Life in New York's Harlem (Chicago, 1927), 64.
[52] Stenographic Report of A. Philip Randolph Speech, Washington D.C., John Wesley ME Zion Church, May 30, 1919, in FSAA Reel 21. The meeting's presiding officer also said that when he sold The Messenger on the streets, white Socialists eagerly snapped it up but cultured Negroes disdained it, saying "we can't read books."
[53] Harrison, "Program and Principles of the International Colored Unity League," Voice of the Negro, April 1927, in HHHR 399-405. A New York church, of course, had hosted the first meeting of the Liberty League.
[54] Abram Harris, "The Negro and Economic Radicalism," The Modern Quarterly, volume 2, number 3, 1925.
[55] Frazier, "La Bourgeoisie Noire," Modern Quarterly, November 1929-February 1929.
[56] ibid.
[57] ibid.
[58] ibid.
[59] ibid.
[60] Spero and Harris, Black Worker, 431. Although this comment vastly overestimates the docility of the porters, other observors also noted that the porters' contact with elite whites raised their status in the black community.
[61] Frazier, "La Bourgeoisie Noire," Modern Quarterly, November 1929-February 1929.
[62] ibid.
[63] Thurman, Negro Life, 61-64.
[64] ibid., 21-24. Mae Gwendolyn Henderson sadly concludes that Thurman himself was "a victim of his own self-hatred arising from his racial identity." Henderson, "Portrait of Wallace Thurman, in Arna Bontempts, ed., The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (New York, 1972), 167.
[65] ibid., 41-44.
[66] ibid., 17-18.
[67] CO, "Good Looks Supremacy," TM, March 1924.
[68] ibid.
[69] GSS, "Keeping the Negro in his Place, American Mercury, August 1929.
[70] ibid.
[71] DB, "The Dilemma of the Negro," American Mercury, October 1924.
[72] ibid.
[73] APR to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, January 22, 1925, in JBP, 694.
[74] Drewry, "Educational Opportunity," TCR, March 1921.
[75] Editorial by Alain Locke, TM, September 1925; GSS, "These 'Colored' United States," TM, October-November 1925. See also J.A. Jackson, "The Colored Actors' Union," TM, October-November 1925.
[76] This phrase is from Ellis Cose, The Rage of a Privileged Class (New York, 1993), which argues that successful Afro-Americans are at least as angry as members of the underclass.
[77] HHH, "On a Certain Conservatism in Negroes" and "Socialism and the Negro," reprinted in NN, 41-47, 21-29; APR and CO, "The Negro Radicals," TM, October and December 1919; WAD, "Socialism the Negroes' Hope," TM, July 1919; AL, "Propaganda--or Poetry?," Race, 1, Summer 1936, in CT, 55-61. I have emended Randolph's text, which reads "ultra-Negro radical."
[78] "President Borno of Haiti," Editorial, TM, August 1926.
[79] Women were not physically segregated in the home any more than blacks were physically removed from whites by Jim Crow. Rather, women were assigned subordinate and menial functions within homes which they physically shared with men, just as Jim Crow decreed that Afro-Americans could exist in utmost intimacy with whites, as long as they and their position were clearly stamped with the stigma of inferiority.
[80] Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York, 1996), 81-223.
[81] We know of Campbell's importance mainly from secret police documents. She is rarely mentioned in the black radical press. James, Aloft, 173-177 has an excellent discussion of what little is known about her. Campbell ran twice for the New York Assembly on the SP ticket, helped found the Friends of Negro Freedom, and was an important participant in the African Blood Brotherhood. James concludes, however, that she "never wrote any articles, let alone published a book; there is no evidence that she ever wrote a letter to the press. She frequently spoke, but only the gist and snippets were reported."
[82] Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (New York, 1999).
[83] Linda O. McMurry, To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York, 1998), especially 288-289, 302.
[84] Cheryl Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington, 1995), 14.
[85] James, Aloft, 137-155. In a classic understatement, James says that "the black press, including the radical black press, had nothing like Mrs. Garvey's page." Amy Jacques was more a bitter critic of black men than a feminist, however; she extolled alleged white male chivalry towards white women, and opposed birth control for blacks.
[86] Melinda Chateauvert, Marching Together: Women to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (Urbana, 1998), passim. The quotes are from pages 40, xi, 61, 54.
[87] ibid., 51-54.
[88] ibid., especially pp. 63-64.
[89] ibid., p. 71.
[90] GSS, "A Negro Looks Ahead," the American Mercury, February 1930.
[91] GSS, "A Negro Looks Ahead," the American Mercury, February 1930; GSS, review of Black America, by Scott Nearing, Modern Quarterly, Spring 1929.
[92] GSS, review of Black America, by Scott Nearing, Modern Quarterly, Spring 1929.
[93] DB, "The Dilemma of the Negro," the American Mercury, October 1924.
[94] Full documentation for the assertions in this and following paragraphs would require doubling the length of my bibliography. A small number of the authors addressing these concerns (from vastly differing perspectives) include: Thomas Edsall, William Greider, Robert Kuttner, Andrew Hacker, Michael Parenti, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Susan Faludi, William Julius Wilson, David M. Gordon, Wallace C. Peterson, Christian Parenti, Johnathan Kozol, and Douglas Massey.
[95] The lack of a viable class-based political movement in the United States has intrigued intellectuals for over a century. Werner Sombart's Why is There No Socialism in the United States?, published in Germany in 1906, is perhaps the first sustained treatment of this issue. For a readable survey of the most common explanations, see Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (New York, 2000).
The Messenger claimed a wide readership among "stevedores and porters, as well as teachers and doctors," reached more white readers than all other race publications combined, and "carried to the toiling masses the economic and social truths that will free the enthralled black and white workers from the chains of wage slavery." Randolph spoke of the "marvelous reception" of his message of interracial unity "by an increasing body of unionists and white intellectuals."[3] Progressive unions, including the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and the United Hebrew Trades, advertised regularly in the Messenger. Randolph and Owen inspired enthusiastic crowds at dozens of largely white union meetings. Randolph's organization, the Friends of Negro Freedom, offered the most wide-ranging, innovative, and creative program of any African-American organization of its time. The Messenger's achievement, however, was primarily a moral and intellectual tour de force, crafted in the face of overwhelming obstacles and the lack of any possible social base.
Randolph's philosophy and program were not without problems. Randolph's "vulgar Marxist" (and vulgar capitalist) version of economic determinism--his faith that individuals would ultimately act in their economic self-interest--fundamentally misconstrued human nature. Randolph's error was almost the opposite of that traditionally ascribed to radicals--namely, that radicals vastly overestimate humanity's idealism, beneficence, and selflessness. Randolph ignored the fact that people are complicated cultural beings whose ideas of self-interest are varied, largely based on a moral self-identity, and often contradictory. Randolph believed that once white workers recognized that their own economic interests suffered from white racism they would embrace black liberation. American history, however, has repeatedly belied this faith. The vast majority of whites have always cared more about degrading blacks than organizing for their own economic interest. In the 1920s whites joined the Ku Klux Klan by the millions, while rejoicing in the destruction of working-class organizations like the SP and the IWW.
In 1922, when black troops violently destroyed a white strike in Texas, Randolph exulted that "the white owners of property are disseminating more education to white workers upon their race prejudice than all the labor papers in the United States." A bullet from a black soldier, he said, was an unforgettable lesson.[4] He repeatedly made similar remarks when black scabs broke white strikes. Far from embracing interracial class solidarity, however, whites perceived blacks as bestial threats to their livelihoods and values--precisely as the capitalists who controlled black soldiers and strikebreakers intended. As James Weldon Johnson remarked, in a comment which increasingly characterized the North as well, "the white South of today is using up every bit of its mental energy in this terrible race struggle. All of the mental power of the white South is being used up in holding the Negro back.... The white South is less intensely interested in forging ahead than it is in keeping the Negro from forging ahead."[5] More recently, President Clinton's relatively modest health care initiative failed, while his abolition of "welfare as we know it"--which will eventually torture and kill, by slow starvation and preventable illness, millions of all races--succeeded. Capitalist manipulation only partly accounts for this discrepancy. White workers, given a choice between ensuring health care for themselves and their children or throwing a million children (inaccurately perceived as mostly black) into destitution, predictably chose the latter.
Randolph's "vulgar Marxist" faith that people always act in their perceived economic self-interest proved false. Nor do productive relations, outside of and in contradiction to culture, alone create consciousness. White supremacy comprised a core underpinning for the self-identity of most whites. Poor, oppressed, working-class whites, denied the real satisfactions of meaningful work, control over their own lives, social respectability, leisure, and adequate income, required the artificial self-respect seemingly granted by prefabricated racial, national, and gendered identities. By identifying on a racial basis with their exploiters, they could deny their own degraded position. Racial self-identity was also much safer. White workers who resisted racism courted destruction; those who embraced it proclaimed their superiority and their essential identity with the master class. Randolph himself noted that "the lowest servant class group in every country is always bitterly hated by the bourgeois, more highly favored servant class." When Rose Pastor Stokes reassured the 1921 UNIA convention that white racism predominated only among "the ignorant masses,"[6] she inadvertently (and, for a radical who placed ultimate hope in the workers, ominously) described the white working class.
Josephine Cogdell captured this dynamic in an article for the Messenger in 1925, in which she compared blacks and Jews. Oppressed groups, she wrote (referring to white American workers and Russian peasants), need a scapegoat, a safe target sanctioned by the authorities, on which to vent their hatred and resentment. "The greater a tyranny a people must endure, or the more terrible the crisis it has just come through, the more likely it is to manifest the hatred of its wrongs in some permissible direction," Cogdell said. Just as Russian peasants oppressed Jews, "the poor whites, the dispossessed and the disappointed of America, likewise have their altars whereon they sacrifice their weaker brethren to 'get even' for the wrongs committed by the stronger brethren, their rulers." The Negro was the chief goat, but others, such as Japanese in California and Mexicans in the West, also served. Even specific groups of whites could be targeted at the will of the owning class. "It was so easy to hate the Germans during the war, and this hatred was so spontaneously and quickly aroused merely because the hatred was already there, it had merely to be directed and sanctioned." African Americans were, in much of the country, the "indispensable enemy" that bonded whites of all classes.[7] As Spero and Harris exclaimed:
To the white trade unionist the Negro is not merely an outsider trying to get into the union, but a social and racial inferior trying to force the white man to associate with him as an equal. And the Negro knows that the white worker wants to keep him out of the union not merely as a potential competitor but as a member of a race which must not be permitted to rise to the white man's level. For three hundred years the Negro has been kept in a position of social and economic inferiority, and white organized labor, dominated by the hierarchy of the skilled crafts, has no desire to see him emerge from that condition.[8]
George Schuyler also commented at great length on white racism's debilitating effects on interracial class unity. White workers, he said, were "more blinded by color prejudices than their white masters." Speaking of "the flattery of color superiority," Schuyler said that "no ruling class before in the history of the world has ever possessed such an instrument of keeping slaves quiet and contented. Instead of the white proletarian being on the bottom (or rather, thinking he is), he is made to believe that he has something in common with Rockefeller, Morgan and Ford, i.e. his color, or lack of it. Color is a caste mark in America: those without it believe themselves in the upper class; those with it know themselves to be in the lowest class." Very few white workers (themselves mostly unorganized) would "accept the black worker as a comrade and equal even to defeat the capitalists. Any such association means to them loss of social standing and consequently of self-respect, which is about their only asset these days. Economic conditions may compel a rapprochement between the two laboring groups, but the deeply ingrained consciousness of color that is the distinguishing trait of Homo Americanus makes that event exceedingly remote, regardless of how much it may be desired by intelligent people."[9]
With his usual mordant wit, Schuyler described the impact of white supremacy on three fictionalized and yet typical whites: a recent immigrant, a rural Southern white who left the hills for the city, and a native born, working-class white woman. Schuyler named the immigrant Isadore Shankersoff:
By hook or crook (probably the latter) he grabbed off enough coin of his native land to pay his passage to America. In Russia he was a nobody--hoofed by everybody--the mudsill of society.... Arriving under the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, he is still Isadore Shankersoff, the prey of sharpers and cheap grafters, but now he has moved considerably higher in the social scale. Though remaining mentally adolescent, he is no longer at the bottom; he is a white man! Over night he has become a member of the superior race. Ellis Island marked his metamorphosis. For the first time in his life he is better than somebody. Without the presence of the blackamoor in these wonderfully United States, he would still know himself for the thick-pated underling that he is, but how can he go on believing that when America is screaming to him on every hand that he is a white man, and as such entitled to certain rights and privileges forbidden to Negro scientists, artists, clergymen, journalists, and merchants. One can understand why Isadore walks with firmer tread.[10]
Schuyler next skewered Cyrus Leviticus Dumbell, a poor Southern white:
Cy finally tires of the bushes and descends to one of the nearby towns. There he finds employment in a mill on a twelve-hour shift. The company paternalistically furnishes him everything he needs and thoughtfully deducts the cost regularly from his slender pay envelope, leaving him about two dollars for corn liquor and moving pictures. Cy has never had any cause to think of himself of any particular importance in the scheme of things, but his fellow workers tell him differently. He is a white man, they say, and therefore divinely entitled to "keep the nigger down"....
This country, he learns, is a white man's country, and although he owns none of it, the information strikes him not unpleasantly. Shortly he scrapes together ten dollars, buys Klan regalia, and is soon engaged in attending midnight meetings, burning crosses, repeating ritual from the Kloran, flogging erring white womanhood for the greater purity of Anglo-Saxondom, and keeping vigilantly on the lookout for uppish and offensive zigaboos to lynch. Like the ancient Greeks and Romans, he now believes himself superior to everybody different from him. Nor does the presence of Jim Crow institutions on every hand contribute anything toward lessening that belief. Whatever his troubles may be, he has learned from his colleagues and the politicians, to blame it all of the dark folks, who are, he is now positive, without exception his inferiors.[11]
The "demure little Dorothy Dunce," who attended "the palatial public school" for twelve years, was Schuyler's final victim. "Now, at eighteen, having graduated, she is about to apply her Latin, Greek, English literature, ancient history, geometry and botany to her everyday work as packer in a spaghetti factory." In her girlhood, her mother had terrorized her with tales of bestial black rapists, who would violate her if she disobeyed; now she feared blacks with a very real terror. She also found that "a value is placed upon her that she would not have in Roumania, Scotland, Denmark, or Montenegro. She is now a member of that exalted aggregation known as pure, white womanhood.... Quite naturally she swells with race pride, for no matter how low she falls, she will always be a white woman."[12]
Schuyler contended that blacks reinforced white pride by imitating whites, denigrating their fellow blacks, and spending fortunes on "deleterious chemicals" that whitened skin and straightened kinky hair. "We should not marvel that every white elevator operator, school teacher and bricklayer identifies himself with Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Newton, Edison, Wagner, Tennyson, and Rembrandt as creators of this great civilization," and that the lowliest white considered himself the equal of every other white. Schuyler also noted the incredible value of white supremacy and black degradation as essential underpinnings of American democracy, finding it "not surprising" that "democracy has worked better in this country than elsewhere. This belief in the equality of all white folks--making skin color the gauge of worth and the measure of citizenship rights--has caused the lowest to strive to become among the highest... Without the transplanted African in their midst to bolster up the illusion, America would have unquestionably been a very different place; but instead the shine has served as a mudsill upon which all white people alike can stand and reach toward the stars. I submit that here is the gift par excellence of the Negro to America. To spur ten times our number on to great heights of achievement; to spare the nation the enervating presence of a destructive social caste system, such as exists elsewhere, by substituting a color caste system that roused the hope and pride of teeming millions of ofays--this indeed is a gift of which we can well be proud."[13]
The irrational sexual jealousy that helped inflame white racism was another incendiary topic, perhaps inexplicable on the basis of economic determinism, often discussed by Schuyler. White fear of black male sexual competition was, he asserted, "the crux of the entire color problem. Fear of economic and political competition is a factor, but above it is the bogey of sex competition. Equality in one field will unquestionably lead to equality in the other." He also sardonically noted that the huge number of mulattoes in the United States, and the pervasive laws against intermarriage, belied the Nordic claim of innate racial antipathy.
Schuyler, himself married to white Texan Josephine Cogdell for over forty years, firmly believed that miscegenation would ultimately yet inevitably solve the race problem, despite the increasing social segregation prevalent in the 1920s. The increasing economic independence of white women would give them freedom in choosing their own mates, he claimed; and "[white] women have been bolder in legally crossing the color line in America to find mates than have [white] men," who had illicitly preyed upon black women. "Were there no social taboos in the path of miscegenation, [the Negro] would have long ago vanished as completely as did the Negroes in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Peru," he wrote. "Even in spite of rope, faggot, tar bucket, and social ostracism, he has lightened considerably since his nineteen ancestors landed at Jamestown in 1619.... The whites proceeded to attack the Negroes' racial integrity as soon as they got within reach.... Lower the social barriers, and the tides of life will flow together as they now trickle together..... By 2000 A.D. a full-blooded American Negro may be rare enough to get a job in a museum, and a century from now our American social leaders may be as tanned naturally as they are now striving to become artificially."[14] Schuyler mercilessly ridiculed Nordic evasions, stupidities, and contradictions on the subject of intermarriage and quoted a Brazilian diplomat as saying that intermarriage was the surest preventative of race war. "In South America," the diplomat said, "our experience has taught us that there is no real understanding except the one that comes through the fusion of races."[15]
Afro-American sociologist Abram Harris attacked the economic determinists of both races at another weak spot: their insistence that all racism stemmed from capitalist conspiracies aimed at dividing the working class. Radicals
say that the Negro and white workers are members of the same economic class; their interests are identical, ergo, they will unite in proletarian solidarity against capitalism. But are the interests of white and black workers identical? If white and black workers will not unite in a trade union for economic self-preservation, how much more unlikely is it that they will unite to promote the social revolution? This much seems to me irrefutable: if their interests are identical there is little recognition of it on the part of white and black proletariat. And granting that the capitalists have entered upon a conspiracy to divide the untutored proletariat over the color question, the capitalists surely could not provoke race hostility between white and black workers if the workers themselves did not possess confirmed racial sentiments upon the basis of which appeals to race prejudice can be made.[16]
Harris called the radicals' claim that the capitalists generated white racism an illusion "from which neither logic nor actual race relations in industry can deliver such doctrinnaires." White workers, rather than the capitalists, had closed Afro-Americans out of innumerable industries. "Not only have white workers in the organized labor movement barricaded the entrance to many types of employment against the Negro but unorganized white workers from common laborers to the white-collared aristocracy have protested against being forced by their employers to work in the same shop or plant with 'niggers.'"[17] (Harris predicted the future as well as describing the past; "hate strikes" against black workers would continue for many decades, even in ostensibly egalitarian CIO unions.)[18]
Individual white workers also garnered real material benefits from white racism, even if such workers lost as a class. Recent discussion of the "prisoner's dilemma" has demonstrated that individuals, rationally acting in their own self-interest, often undermine the long-term interests achievable only by collective action. In the short term, white workers benefitted by exclusion of blacks from jobs and unions. Any particular white could benefit from egalitarianism only if the white workers as a group repudiated racism and united as a class with Afro-American workers. Any individual white who associated with blacks faced social ostracism, while the black member of such a friendship would find himself scorned by most whites and criticized as "dicty" and supercilious by some blacks. Harrison had told white Socialists that they must "treat [blacks] frankly as human beings.... No special kindness and no condescension is either needed or expected."[19] Yet McKay's lacerating experiences with Max and Crystal Eastman demonstrated that the structures of white supremacy were not so easily evaded. Both Eastmans evoked humiliation and degradation for McKay simply by treating him merely as a person, heedless of the devastating response their well-intentioned actions evoked from mainstream culture.
Individual members of the white working class, therefore, garnered both psychological satisfactions and material benefits from white supremacy. This was duplicated on the international scene, where American and European imperialism indirectly enriched a privileged stratum of white workers via the phenomenon of superprofits (acknowledged by both Du Bois and Randolph) while providing the psychological gratifications accruing to an imperial people ruling over racialized subordinate groups abroad. Blacks themselves took pride in what the Emancipator called "the empty and abstract glory" of membership in "an imperial race."[20] Randolph's project, therefore, foundered on the shoals of an implacable white racism. Blacks, a permanent minority of the American population who lacked economic, political, military, and educational power, required strong white allies; yet Randolph's preferred group, the white working class, employed what little power it possessed in oppressing, rather than empowering, blacks. Even Garvey once admitted that "if a change must come, it must not come from Negroes; it must come from the white race, for they are the ones who have brought about this estrangement between the races."[21] However, whites changed, if at all, mostly for the worse.
Furthermore, many of the radicals' appeals to white self-interest were inflated and even illusory. Virtually every black radical warned white workers that unorganized blacks excluded from racist unions provided the capitalists with an unlimited reservoir of scabs. But in August 1925 the Messenger (contravening its usual stance) admitted that "the great majority of strikes in this country are broken by white scabs." Only five million of thirty million American workers were organized; therefore, capitalists need not depend on blacks for strikebreakers. Powerful white unions could both win strikes and exclude blacks; scabbing their way into jobs, Schuyler later commented, is "a difficult and hazardous undertaking where unions are so strong and Negroes so numerically weak." Furthermore, even a few black scabs inflamed white racist passions. "The presence of a dozen black men in a force of strikebreakers appears to the strikers like a hundred," Spero and Harris noted. Nor would black union members find immediate acceptance among whites, as the radicals often implied; black Socialist Frank Crosswaith, a strong backer of interracial unions, admitted in 1925 that "the accumulated ideas and impressions made upon the minds of the white people of this country through 250 years of chattel slavery" would not suddenly dissipate when blacks associated with whites in unions. White radical William Z. Foster agreed; in a book that created a sensation among Afro-American radicals, he proclaimed that "they know little of the race problem in industry who declare that it can be settled merely by the unions opening their doors to the negroes. It is much more complex than that, and will require the best thought that conscientious whites and blacks can give it."[22] Sadly, Foster exemplified his own thesis: despite his sincere egalitarianism, he marred his book with subtle, yet unmistakable, condescension towards blacks, and especially the black leadership.
White hostility, violence, and discrimination virtually determined the response of black workers. When white unions excluded blacks, even Randolph and Fletcher urged that blacks scab themselves into jobs. Blacks had an individual and racial interest in breaking into closed industries by any means possible; they would starve if they acted as members of a class when their white competitors behaved as members of a race. Moreover, white capitalist racism ensured that capitalists would hire blacks only if such hiring generated larger profits. Nora Newsome, the first black ACW organizer, found that black women not only distrusted male and white organizers, but also worried that if they joined the ACW they would lose their jobs. Newsome admitted that some white capitalists in the garment industry "employ more colored girls than white because the colored girls are usually unorganized and consequently work for lower wages."[23] Given this reality, Newsome's assertion that antiunion sentiment among black female clothing workers stemmed from simple ignorance seems misplaced. Such workers acted under a rational understanding of their situation. Only a very powerful union, and a very racially egalitarian one, could realistically promise blacks that joining would bring benefits rather than catastrophic losses. Garvey was more realistic: "The capitalist being selfish--seeking only the largest profit out of labor--is willing and glad to use Negro labor wherever possible on a scale reasonably below the standard union wage.... But if the Negro unionizes himself to the level of the white worker, the choice and preference of employment is given to the white worker."[24]
Nor were all-black unions a feasible option. In the north, black workers, while significant in some key industries, could not win a strike on their own, especially during the postwar terrorism and depression. Blacks predominated in very few industries, while black unions in largely white occupations were fatuous. In the South, where blacks had a strategic position and numerical clout, white terrorism and violence crushed any spark of black unionization, whether interracial (the Brotherhood of Timber Workers) exclusively black (the Arkansas sharecroppers), or lily-white (the textile industry). A key Messenger editor admitted that widespread agitation in the South was simply impossible. Although Randolph entertained high hopes for the National Brotherhood Association, a federation of all-black unions, the NBA disintegrated, along with many white unions, during the depression and the antiunion offensive of the early Twenties.
A controversy between Du Bois and Owen concerning the class position of Afro-Americans indicated the dilemma of the black workers. Owen ridiculed Du Bois's contention that blacks were not part of the white working class because the white proletariat did not recognize them as fellow workers. Owen asserted that "this is about as asinine as saying we are not human beings or men because in the South we are largely not so recognized. Is manhood dependent upon recognition? Is proletariat a product of recognition or is it a state of economic position of human beings?"[25] Class, however, is partly a matter of social construction; people who do not regard themselves as workers, or are not so regarded by other workers, are not, in every sense, a member of a working class. Most radicals wrongly believed that class is simply an objective status determined by one's relation to the means of production; they erroneously regarded their task as facilitating working-class recognition of a fact, rather than as creating a consciousness that itself partly determined reality.
Cooperatives and boycotts, two other radical proposals, proved equally futile or impossible. Schuyler proffered an unusually blunt assessment of both tactics when he exclaimed that "the Negroes of the Empire State are precariously hanging onto the fringes of the economic life of the communities in which they live. The whole Negro population could be dispensed with and not be missed except by a few Jewish pawnbrokers, delicatessen proprietors and numbers bankers, Greek shoe repairers, restauranteurs and bootleggers, and Italian icemen, fruit dealers and dope peddlars. The Negroes know it and the whites know it." Far from wielding economic clout, blacks found themselves rapidly displaced even from those menial service industries which they had previously dominated. Gustavus Steward added that Negro boycotts of Jim Crow establishments were hopeless, as integration would lose far more white dollars than it gained in black patronage. Blacks, at any rate, patronized segregated establishments rather than suffer total exclusion from the amenities they offered.[26]
Randolph's recognition that rising expectations, rather than immiseration, often generates revolt, also helps explain the relative quiescence of the black working class. "An unsatisfied stomach is well nigh as dangerous as an empty one," Randolph said. "For being not yet delirious, it can more calmly plan destruction." He claimed that "discontent increases with social improvement.... Revolutions have always come when people's conditions were improved. The taste of liberty makes one reluctant to go back to slavery." He also acknowledged that "when the workers are at their lowest ebb, they seldom respond to the call of unionism."[27]
Such assertions usually bolstered Randolph's recognition that labor seldom won strikes during depressions and his knowledge that relatively privileged blacks often initiated racial agitation. Yet this reality also underscored why poor and working-class blacks--denied leisure, education, an adequate diet, and healthful living conditions--often lacked the energy and organization necessary for effective resistance. A secret police agent, commenting on the lack of enthusiasm accorded Owen during a 1923 visit to Homestead mill workers, noted that Owen had often been squelched by the police, but that "the local men have too many problems of their own demanding solution, without borrowing additional trouble from the outside." Another agent remarked that Grace Campbell, the most prominent radical Afro-American woman, "is conducting an active campaign among the colored women, but so far is unsuccessful as these women are not at all interested in Socialism and don't care to learn." Randolph also recognized that recent migrants (black or white) from the rural South did not make promising recruits for the cause of labor unionism.[28] It is therefore no surprise that blacks, for whom unionism was a mixed blessing, avoided unions in large numbers.
Prominent Afro-American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier highlighted the overwhelming difficulties that poor blacks encountered in scratching out a meager living and protecting their families--difficulties that rendered agitation for distant, utopian goals impossible. Entering a debate that had already raged for some decades--and that has been bitterly renewed in recent years--Frazier addressed "the present disorganization of family life" and "the high rate of illegitimacy" among blacks. The ravages of slavery partly accounted for this, Frazier said; but so did contemporary poverty and discrimination. Blacks worked at the lowest paying and least secure jobs, thus ensuring a high paternal desertion rate. Other families were fatherless because of the high death rate among blacks; still others from male migration North in search of jobs. "In the rural South where the majority of the Negroes live the agricultural system is unfavorable to a stable family life," because of insecure tenancy, the reliance on migratory labor for much seasonal work, and the devastating poverty that prevented many black children from attending school. (Lack of shoes was one telling obstacle.) Large families, although "a characteristic of all people on a low cultural level," greatly hurt blacks. So did "the large number of Negro women in gainful occupations," and the consequent neglect of children. Black servants not only inevitably neglected their own children while raising those of white families, but often imbibed a taste for luxuries and leisure from their white employers. Seemingly blaming the victims, Frazier exclaimed that "we must recognize the place of big economic forces which are to a large extent beyond our control. Yet the substitution of institutional and other forms of control will be of little consequence as long as we permit the fundamental social unit in our society to go to pieces."[29] Frazier's dismal picture, which equally described many poor white families, revealed why Socialist (and NAACP) messages left most poor blacks unmoved.
African-American workers also shared an intense cultural conservatism with similarly situated whites. In the United States and elsewhere, groups stigmatized and excluded from mainstream society often internalize the values of that society and seek inclusion rather than a fundamental overhaul of the system. The Messenger once complained that "the American workingman is the most backward, ignorant, disorganized, reactionary and patriotic laborer in the world, and Mr. Jones [a National Urban League official] assures capital that the Negro shares all those attributes!"[30] Unfortunately for the Messenger, however, African Americans--"100% pure Americans" in any sense of the term--proudly and consciously appropriated, and helped form, mainstream American values. Like most whites, they privileged race over class--an especially appropriate response for blacks. Like poor and working-class whites, they took refuge in racial, national, and gendered identities that offered psychological compensations for their lack of authentic freedom and dignity.
It was precisely the uniforms, pageantry, ceremony and ritual of the UNIA that so attracted masses of blacks, who greeted the Black Star Line and the Back to Africa programs with wild enthusiasm precisely because they bolstered racial pride. Assessing the tremendous success of Garvey, Frazier commented that blacks were
shut out from all serious participation in American life.... The average Negro, like all mediocre people whose personalities must be supported by empty fictions, must find something to give meaning to his life and worth to his personality. One has simply to note how the superficial matter of color raises the most insignificant white man in the South to a place of paramount importance, in order to appreciate how much support a fiction gives to one's personality....
A Negro might be a porter during the day, taking his orders from white men, but he was an officer in the Black Army when it assembled at night in Liberty Hall. Many a Negro went about his work singing in his heart that he was a member of the great army marching to "heights of achievements."[31]
Frazier deplored the irrationality of Garveyite ostentation and display, but regretfully acknowledged that "tests of reasonableness can not be applied to schemes that attract crowds." Crowds "never learn by experience" because "the crowd satisfies its vanity and longings in the beliefs it cherishes." The NAACP (and, he could have added, black radical organizations) "has never attracted the crowd because it does not give the crowd an opportunity to show off in colors, parades, and self-glorification. The Association appeals to intelligent persons who are trying to attain tangible goals through cooperation.... Those who support [the UNIA do so] because it gives them what they want--the identification with something that makes them feel like somebody among white people who have said they were nobody."[32] Sadly, the highly educated black radicals, so unlike the masses of both blacks and whites, never learned this skill.
J.A. Rogers, who opposed Garvey for all of the Messenger's reasons, nevertheless conceded that the UNIA Potentate offered his followers riches comparable to or exceeding those offered by traditional religion. Ridiculing the anti-Garvey animus of many black clergymen, Rogers scornfully said that such clergy promised their followers only a vague heaven after death. "If Garvey, like these Christians, had the power of the law and the sword behind him, his paradise would have been accepted without a murmur." Like all messiahs, Garvey "was a poet and romancer and knew how to soothe the sufferings of his followers with hopes of paradise. He could paint such halcyon pictures of this to his assembled cohorts that they would actually feel themselves already there." Garvey also offered his followers "what they wanted even more than earthly goods: the hope of revenge." Since "hope and promise are about all that the rank and file of any movement have ever received from their messiahs, Garvey, according to this precedent, could not be said to have defrauded his followers."[33]
Afro-American writers acknowledged that racist deformations--another traditional American value--afflicted blacks as well as whites, both in their attitudes toward other ethnic groups and in their intraracial animosities. Schuyler complained that "most Negroes are so busy shouting about the white people's prejudice against them that they forget how prejudiced they are. I continually find Negroes whose attitude towards Greeks, Italians, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Hindus and other peoples, are no different from those held by Imperial Wizard Evans." Blacks were themselves divided by class, nationality, and color; the native-born/West Indian divide was a major chasm, but the differences between those resident in the South, recent Northern migrants, and more settled Northern blacks also produced friction. West Indians were a tiny proportion of American blacks, but were highly concentrated in key cities (especially New York) and produced a vastly disproportionate number of social radicals. (A Harlem street aphorism had it that a black revolutionary was "an overeducated West Indian out of work.")[34] Their estrangement from Afro-Americans was therefore significant. Randolph himself, while welcoming southern migrants, considered them a potential menace threatening Northern blacks because they accepted lower wages and often felt comfortable in segregated settings. (The Messenger's many articles attacking segregation were addressed primarily to its black proponents, rather than to whites.) William Ferris lamented that "you have Negroes from all parts of the country and all parts of the world in New York. You have the Mexican Negro, the Central American Negro and the South American Negro. Those Negroes do nothing but fight all the time."[35]
Indeed, the failure of the Afro-American radicals is highlighted by the vastly disproportionate representation of Caribbean immigrants within the insurgent black movements. Of the radicals who founded their own organization and/or publication, Harrison, Briggs, Domingo, and Garvey were immigrants. The leadership of both the ABB and the UNIA was disproportionately West Indian. The Caribbean population comprised almost 20 percent of blacks in New York City, headquarters of the major black radical organizations, although it represented a mere 1 percent of all Americans of African descent. Domingo recognized that "this large body of foreign-born" contributed "those qualities that make New York so unlike... other cities with large aggregations of American Negroes."[36] Domingo somewhat exaggerated when he claimed that West Indians "largely compose the few political and economic radicals in Harlem" and that "without them the genuinely radical movement among New York Negroes would be unworthy of attention." Nevertheless, an understanding of why so many West Indian immigrants joined radical organizations may shed some light on why so few native-born African Americans joined.
Although West Indians constituted the overwhelming majority of the population in their home islands, all blacks comprised only 2.7 percent of New York's population in 1920. West Indians were accustomed to negotiating a world in which they had scant contact with whites, and where white racism was veiled by and conflated with a seemingly more gentle class bias. West Indians, Domingo asserted, "had experienced no legalized social or occupational disabilities" in their homelands. In the United States, they encountered whites at much closer quarters, and racism in a most blatant form. West Indian immigrants were radicalized by the unimaginably vile white racism, symbolized by that unique American institution of lynching, that they experienced in the United States. Claude McKay, warned of this racism in advance, was still amazed and disheartened by its virulence.[37]
West Indians also came from countries with a more active tradition of slave revolts than American conditions had allowed; many had been organized politically or economically in their homelands; and they were far more educated and skilled than their native American counterparts (and much more literate than American whites). Their native cultures were far less imbued with fundamentalist Christianity, and more receptive to Fabian Socialism and rationalism, than that of American blacks. (Jamaica's governor during part of McKay's youth was a Fabian Socialist.) They were politically independent; the traditional Afro-American loyalty to "the party of Lincoln" meant nothing to them. West Indians were exceptionally well-travelled, many having scoured the Western hemisphere in search of work; they therefore sported an internationalist consciousness. They also found more freedom for militant, oppositional agitation in the United States than their colonial governments permitted. In many respects, therefore, they resembled the highly-educated American blacks who comprised the mainstay of Afro-American protest organizations, than the more typical blacks who remained relatively quiescent. Validating Randolph's "rising expectations" theory of revolution, Caribbean immigrants were both better off and more overtly thwarted in their hopes than many American blacks (in that they were ambitious and educated for positions that white racism denied them). They also migrated in search of greater opportunities which, however seemingly within reach, remained elusive. As Domingo observed, West Indian immigrants comprised "the hardiest and most venturesome of their folk.... Dissatisfied at home," they would revolt against "limitation of opportunity here when they have staked so much to gain enlargement of opportunity."[38]
Domingo summed up many of the experiences which accounted for the peculiarities of the West Indians:
Forming a racial majority in their own countries and not being accustomed to discrimination expressedly felt as racial, they rebel against the "color line" as they find it in America. For while color and caste lines tend to converge in the islands, it is nevertheless true that because of the ratio of population, historical background and traditions of rebellions before and since their emancipation, West Indians of color do not have their activities, social, occupational, and otherwise, determined by their race. Color plays a place but is not the prime determinant of advancement; hence, the deep feeling of resentment when the "color line," legal or customary, is met and found to be a barrier to individual progress. For this reason the West Indian has thrown himself wholeheartedly into the fight against lynching, discrimination, and other disabilities from which Negroes in America suffer.[39]
The prejudice of native Afro-Americans against West Indians, partly motivated by the immigrants' very ambition and success, forged what was once a disparate medley of groups into a more homogeneous and self-conscious population, and generated "an artificial and defensive unity among the islanders." This in itself undoubtedly exacerbated West Indian radicalism, especially when activists such as Garvey were attacked on the basis of their nationality. "The support given Garvey by a certain type of his countrymen is partly explained by their group reaction to attacks made upon him because of his nationality," Domingo said.[40]
Afro-Americans were hobbled by forms of conservatism other than ethnic divisions within their group, however. The Emancipator touched upon a perennial radical dilemma afflicting whites as well as blacks. Oppression, it said, "creates in the consciousness of the oppressed a desire to oppress others."
History abounds with examples of oppressed races, groups and classes themselves becoming the most brutal of oppressors. It seems impossible for the man who has received kicks and buffets to free himself from the desire to exchange his position with some one else. Thus it is noticeable that some Negroes who have been the worst victims of imperialistic exploitation are themselves most anxious to use the same weapons and methods that have been used against them.
Empire with all its glamour, glory, panoply, pomp and power attracts and hypnotizes. It appeals to the elemental passions and sets one's soul on fire. The desire for it on the part of some Negroes is compounded of ignorance, ambition, and a desire for revenge. It is not rational. Appeals having imperialism as a basis reach down to the bottom of group life and rouse the dormant consciousness of race. It is difficult to overcome it by reason, but overcome it must be since it is freighted with so much fallacy and danger.[41]
In another editorial, "Conservatism and Oppression," the Emancipator lamented that "oppressed peoples in almost every country develop a psychology that is favorable to the continuance of their own oppression. It is the poorest, most ignorant and most despised of a population that are usually the most anxious to give up their lives for THEIR country."[42]
Having least to conserve, and suffering most from conditions as they are, we find some Negroes reflecting the most intolerant and reactionary views on social and national questions. Regarded as inferiors by the dominant opinion of the country and denied even the elementary rights of citizens, many Negroes are, nevertheless, to be found voicing the opinions of those who profit most from repression and injustice.
Hoping to justify their inalienable right to equality of treatment, some Negroes seek to palliate those who deny them those rights by assuming an attitude of chauvinistic intolerance to new ideas. Others, perhaps imitating those whom they regard as "best Americans" and "true Britishers" believe that the best evidence of their own untarnished Americanism or genuine Britishism is a superior and ostentatious disdain of Socialists and radicals. Still others, in their pathetic endeavor to conciliate their oppressors and gain their long denied rights, manifest an unreasoning hostility to "foreigners."[43]
Such "inverted psychology" stemmed from the mistaken belief of the oppressed that if they imitated their oppressors, those oppressors "out of gratitude or sympathy, will grant them their long withheld human rights." History, however, belied such hopes. "Not all the wars that Irish and Hindu soldiers have won for England have resulted in freedom for Ireland or India. Instead, the Irish and Hindus now realize that they must wage ceaseless war upon England if their countries are to be freed.... The verdict of history is that the loyalty of an oppressed group to their oppressors has never resulted in bringing freedom to the oppressed."[44]
In the era of the Afro-American radicals, most blacks regarded themselves as hard-working, loyal, patriotic, and respectable American citizens. This self-image was not only a solace in a harsh world, but a means of demanding the rights and privileges of other Americans. William N. Colson, himself an officer during World War I, lamented that when white racists proclaimed the unfitness of blacks for military service, Afro-Americans flocked to the colors to prove the racists wrong. Colson said that blacks were more patriotic than most other American groups, and more so than oppressed peoples elsewhere. Saying that "no intelligent American Negro is willing to lay down his life for the United States as it now exists,"[45] Colson employed a hilarious, if depressing, analogy. Every year, the Universities of Virginia and North Carolina sponsored a football game, from which Afro-American fans were rigidly excluded. When the railroads offered special excursion fares to the big event,
Many ignorant and gullible Negroes took advantage of the popular enthusiasm to travel to the game on the trains. They bought huge pennants and streamers but when they presented themselves for admission at the ball park they were refused entry on account of their color. Some remained, however, to view the spectacle through the holes in the fence, others still merrily flaunted in the public streets their pennants marked with the names of the two schools, but a few, the disillusioned, had the good sense to burn their banners up. Negro patriotism is much like that of those silly and unsuspecting folk who came to see the football game.[46]
Similarly, African Americans supported the Republican party not only out of legitimate detestation of the virulently racist Democrats, but because oppressed peoples often desperately seek to convince themselves that they have friends in high places rather than conceiving themselves as outcast outsiders, as experience seemingly demonstrated. Blacks voted Republican even in overwhelmingly Democratic areas where such a vote was as "wasted" as one for the SP because in so voting blacks claimed inclusion in mainstream society. Because Republican party affiliation served as an underpinning of personal and social identity for masses of blacks (as well as an avenue of personal advancement for a few), the Messenger's and the Crisis's denunciations of Republican perfidy and exposés of its sordid history scarcely affected black voters, who, as Du Bois said in disgust, stupidly gloried in the fact that "I helped elect Coolidge."[47] Even Du Bois, who should have known better, veered erratically (before and after 1928) between the Democrats, the Republicans, and even an all-Negro party, rather than supporting the SP that he clearly preferred.
Afro-American Christianity was another mainstream institution adapted for black identity and survival. Harrison asserted that "the church among the Negroes today exerts a more powerful influence than anything else in the sphere of ideas.... Show me a population that is deeply religious, and I will show you a servile population, content with whips and chains, contumely and the gibbet, content to eat the bread of sorrow and drink the waters of affliction."[48] Black Christianity preached meekness, forgiveness, and otherworldliness as a survival technique, out of pure necessity. Similarly, black churches reinforced racial consciousness because they, more often than the highly stratified white denominations, included members from different economic classes. Ernest Rice McKinley similarly criticized black Christianity.
The security of the master class was in large measure dependent on slave docility. The white preacher talked to the slave and emphasized the inevitableness of his status. The slave preacher unconsciously encouraged humility and docility by laying great stress on the rewards that were laid up in Heaven for the righteous.... The doctrine of nonresistance was talked to Negroes so much that the large majority came to believe it. It never entered their heads that it might be a ruse to keep a race in subjection at very little cost to the stronger race.[49]
Harrison claimed that black "spirits had been completely crushed by the system of slavery"--a theme that Garvey sometimes echoed. McKinney similarly cited a black "inferiority complex similar to that of women in relation to men" derived from slavery. Historians dispute this view; Leon Litwack has demonstrated the courage and resilience of Afro-Americans immediately following emancipation.[50] The crushing failure of Reconstruction, however, intimidated Afro-Americans and seemingly revealed the futility of worldly struggle even when the national government supported black rights. And as Wallace Thurman and others complained, the Afro-American "has always supported his religious institutions even though he would not support his schools or business enterprises."[51]
Yet the attack on Christianity cost radical blacks dearly because the church was the focal point of Afro-American hopes and pride, and the center of their cultural, political, and social life. Black church lyceums gave Harrison his start, and black churches remained indispensable to black radicals seeking a forum. The experience of Randolph at a church in the District of Columbia is indicative of this problem. Randolph gave a long and impassioned speech favoring "a revolution in the head which will bring about a revolution in society.... We are trying to present to you a scientific method, a method that is calculated to achieve the ends aimed at." A church member, G.W. Moton, asked Randolph about his attitude toward Christianity; Randolph evaded the question, claiming a lack of time even as he wasted much time in circumlocutions. Moton repeated his question, and again Randolph stonewalled. To audience applause, Moton responded that "I am heartily in favor of anything that will help the Negro, individually or collectively. I am a radical myself, and I suffer for that reason, but.... We must have God as a foundation. Our old fathers and mothers in the cotton fields, praying in the fence corners, their words live in our hearts today, and by their prayers we are making progress. Let us not forget them as we go along.... I shall subscribe to your magazine, but if it seems in the least to dig at the foundations of the church, at the cornerstone, Christ Jesus, I am not for it." The church's pastor, Reverend Brown, thanked Randolph and noncommittally said that "our church has been a kind of a forum. Anything worth saying, people may come here and say it.... Any organization or institution that has a message for the people may say it here. I am glad to have them."[52] Moton and Brown were almost certainly alienated when they discovered that the Messenger stridently attacked Christianity. Even Harrison ultimately reconciled himself to "the Negro Church, which has done more for the education and spiritual uplift of the masses than any other agency in the race"; any approach to the African-American masses, he realized, must work at least partly through the largest and most widespread Afro-American institution.[53]
The miseducation of blacks, and the lack of education altogether, also accounted for black conservatism. Despite the radicals' belief that class was an objective reality that events themselves would inject into working-class consciousness, class awareness is a cultural construction arising not only from experience, but from interpretation of that experience. Class consciousness arose more readily in Europe, with its long history of formal, legalized class distinctions, than in the United States, which had no officially recognized classes but did legally differentiate between the races and between the sexes. Most radical Americans were (and are) extraordinarily well educated. The Masses group, the Socialist women, Emma Goldman's anarchists, and the black radicals were all composed of world-class intellectuals who read widely and deeply. Members of the IWW and of anarchist groups usually lacked formal schooling, but more than compensated for this by their voracious reading in modern philosophy, economics, politics and science. (The IWW halls offered a more enlightening and modern education than most American universities.) Many Afro-Americans, however, were denied schooling altogether; the relatively lucky ones were consigned either to the manual education advocated by Booker Washington, or the airy, irrelevant classical schooling championed by Du Bois. Few blacks received a modern, scientific, liberal arts education of the kind that stirs rebellion and thought.
Abram Harris also recounted how Afro-Americans, conservative because of their psychology "as a submerged and proscribed race," shared traditional American beliefs in individualism and the get-rich philosophy. Blacks had despised poor whites since the days of slavery, and still found unions closed against them. But their psychology as Americans also militated against radicalism. Typical American individualism, Harris said, derived from the times of the small farm and business, and was enshrined "in a constitution which today is capitalism's legal bulwark." White-collar workers and schoolteachers, unlike their counterparts in Europe, typically embodied the capitalist ethos from which they did not profit. It was Harris said, "a heritage which white and black Americans accept unquestioningly. The life of the latter well exhibits the middle-class mind characteristic of the white American. So the advantaged Negro's hostility or apathy to organized labor is as much attributable to his inheritance of bourgeois temper and training in American institutions as to the racial discrimination practiced by trade unions.... In his desire to become self-sufficient the Negro is typically American." Harris warned white radicals that "it is obvious that one need not expect any early awakening of Negro class consciousness. A priori deductions which ignore the economic and psychological setting of the Negro's present group life and history and his present reaction to unionism by virtue of it, are liable to discover revolution where there is only conservatism."[54]
Frazier described movingly and at length the Afro-American's wholehearted embrace of another bourgeois convention--social distinctions based upon education, property, and family. The Negro group, far from consisting of an undifferentiated mass of proletarians as white and black radicals asserted, was "highly differentiated, with about the same range of interests as the whites." Frazier said that although radicals of both races could "quote statistics" proving "that ninety-eight percent of the Negroes are workers and should seek release from their economic slavery," very few Negroes regarded themselves as wage slaves. "Class differentiation among Negroes is reflected in their church organizations, educational institutions, private clubs, and the whole range of social life. Although these class distinctions may rest upon what would seem to outsiders flimsy and inconsequential matters, they are the social realities of Negro life, and no amount of reasoning can rid his mind of them.... When one probes the tissue of the Negro's social life he finds that the Negro reacts to the same illusions that feed the vanity of white men."[55] Frazier continued:
It has often been observed that the Negro subscribes to all the canons of consumption as the owning class in the present system. Even here we find the same struggle to realize a status that he can envisage and has a meaning for him.... The relatively segregated life which the Negro lives makes him struggle to realize values which give status within his group. An automobile, a home, a position as a teacher, or membership in a fraternity may confer a distinction in removing the possessor from an inferior social status, that could never be appreciated by one who is a stranger to Negro life. Outsiders may wonder why a downtrodden, poor, despised people seem so indifferent about entering a struggle that is aimed to give all men an equal status. But if they could enter the minds of Negroes they would find that in the world in which they live they are not downtrodden and despised, but enjoy various forms of distinction.
A perusal of Negro newspapers will convince anyone that the Negro group does not regard itself as outcasts without status. One cannot appeal to them by telling them that they have nothing to lose but their chains. The chains which Negroes have known in the South were not figurative. Negro newspapers are a good index of the extent to which middle-class ideals have captured the imagination of Negroes.[56]
Frazier commented that Afro-American newspaper society columns reported in detail on the apparel, parties, cars, homes, and jewelry of the elite. "In fact, there is no demand on the part of Negro leaders to tear down social distinctions and create a society of equals," he said. "As the writer heard a colored editor tell a white man recently, 'the white people draw the line at the wrong point and put all of us in the same class.'"[57]
Frazier detailed two other major impediments obstructing black radicalism. First, many blacks worked for at least some of their lives as servants in the homes of the rich; and servants were notorious for imitating the values and tastes of their employers, even as their inability to achieve their hopes undermined their self-respect. Such a group, like the house slaves in the Old South (or white servants in Europe) were an unpromising constituency for revolution. Second, "the Negro can only envisage those things which have meaning for him. The radical doctrines appeal chiefly to the industrial workers, and the Negro has only begun to enter industry." In so escaping the plantation "they have realized a dream that is as far beyond their former condition" as Socialism would be "beyond the present condition of the wage earner." Even the most fervent radical could not demand that individual Negroes forfeit their chances for personal betterment in favor of a distant social revolution. "A Negro business man who gets out of the white man's kitchen or dining room rightly regards himself as escaping from economic slavery. Probably he will maintain himself by exploiting the Negro who remains in the kitchen, but he can always find consolation in the feeling, that if he did not exploit him a white man would.... The idea of the rich man has been held up to him." The Afro-American needed most of all a culture; and, severed from his African past, he could find that culture only in the United States, and--for the successful--only in the upper ranks of white society.[58]
Obliquely criticizing Randolph, Frazier claimed that, pace widespread opinion, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was not "an indication of economic radicalism." The porters demonstrated "little working class psychology and showed a disposition to use their organization to enjoy the amenities of bourgeois social life." Long an Afro-American elite, the porters had recently been overtaken by the rising Negro professional class and now hoped that the BSCP would recoup their lost respectability and relative prosperity within the Negro group. "Collective bargaining will help them" maintain "a role in the colored group which is more in harmony with their conception of their relative status in their group.... The Pullman porters are emerging... as an aristocratic laboring group just as the Railroad Brotherhoods have done."[59] Writing after the virtual collapse of the BSCP, Harris (writing with Sterling Spero) claimed that the porters' bourgeois mentality undermined any unionism requiring sustained risk and effort:
[Randolph's] task was no easy one, for in spite of the fact that the porters' grievances were many and serious, the feeling persisted that his job was a good one and that the Pullman Company was the Negro's steadfast friend. The porter's contact with the well-to-do travelling public led him to absorb its point of view and to seek to emulate its standards. The porter had all of the familiar middle-class prejudices of the white-collar worker and upper servant. It gave him a thrill to have bankers and captains of industry ride in his car, even though their tips were smaller than they might have been. It made him feel like a captain of industry himself, even if it did not make him affluent or ease the burden of his work. Even a vicarious captain of industry is rather poor trade-union material.[60]
Piling insult upon insult, Frazier also insisted that "even the (black) radical movement which had vogue a few years back was subsidized by the white radical group. It did not spring out of any general movement among Negroes towards radical doctrines. Moreover, black radicals theorized about the small number of Negroes who had entered industry from the security of New York City; but none ever undertook to enter the South and teach the landless peasants any type of self-help."[61] Such an effort, Frazier knew full well, would have been suicidal. Frazier also said that the Afro-American businessman "is dealing with economic realities" and could "boast of the fact that he is independent of white support, while the Negro artist still seeks it." He expressed amazement that radicals expected that the Negro intelligentsia, "which represents the most civilized group," would revolt "against the system by which it was created."[62]
Wallace Thurman similarly observed that the diversity within the Afro-American community, and the peculiarities of each of its component sectors, militated against radicalism. Thurman's Negro Life in New York's Harlem briefly sketched the vast differing neighborhoods, ethnic groups, and classes which comprised Harlem and concluded that "there is no typical Harlem Negro as there is no typical American Negro. There are too many different types and classes." The intelligentsia could not lead the Harlem masses, Thurman implied, because its life, values, and expectations vastly differed from those of most blacks. The Negro intelligentsia was "more a part of New York's life than of Harlem's" because members of that select group "are accepted as social and intellectual equals downtown.... Harlem to most of them is just a place of residence; they are not 'fixed' there as are the majority of Harlem's residents."[63]
Thurman noted that black Harlem sported "an elaborate social structure" that divided its inhabitants according to race, the state or country of a person's origin, and "minor divisions determined by color and wealth." Thurman criticized the black middle class in terms resembling Frazier's own critique. "They are for the most part mulattoes of light brown skin and have succeeded in absorbing all the social mannerisms of the white American middle class," he said. "They are both stupid and snobbish as is their class in any race. Their most compelling if sometimes unconscious ambition is to be a near white as possible, and their greatest expenditure of energy is concentrated on eradicating any trait or characteristic commonly known as Negroid."[64]
The black masses depicted by Thurman were consumed by the never-ending struggle for survival, and therefore lacked revolutionary consciousness. The rent party characterized this vast group; although it constituted "the commercialization of spontaneous pleasure," it did help harried tenants pay the landlord and afforded an ersatz intimacy for legions of lost souls. Thurman described the thousands of Harlemites living in crowded squalor and working at miserable jobs who had "no place to go, thousands of people lonesome, unattached and cramped, who stroll the streets eager for a chance to form momentary contacts, to dance, to drink and make merry." Such throngs sought the illusion of "a joyful intimate party, open to the public yet held in a private home." Rent parties served the same "real and vital purpose" of receptions and soirees in the elite neighborhoods, and "gave lonesome Harlemites, caged in by intangible bars, some place to have their fun and forget problems of color, civilization, and economics." Thurman's description increasingly described white American workers as well, who sought diversion and escape in mass commercial culture.[65]
Thurman, a very dark Negro whose Blacker the Berry satirized colorism, also corroborated widespread complaints of racism within the Afro-American community, directly not only against dark-skinned blacks but especially against West Indian immigrants. These immigrants possessed a distinctive accent and mannerisms and would seemingly work for lower wages; cultural differences, "accompanied, as they usually are, by quarrels concerning economic matters," generated inevitable conflict. "This interracial prejudice is an amazing though natural thing," Thurman sadly remarked. "Imagine a community made up of people universally known as oppressed, wasting time and energy trying to oppress others of their own kind, more recently transplanted from a foreign clime. It is easy to explain."[66]
African-American conservatism, therefore, stemmed in party from the same factors which generated white working-class conservatism. Its distinctive origins did not consist exclusively in ignorance, illusion, and hegemony. Conformity to white norms offered almost the only possibility of advancement or security in a homicidally racist society. In a startling article with wide-ranging implications, Owen justified even the use of skin whiteners and hair straighteners by blacks as simple good sense. "Customs and conventions of a place determine the conceptions of beauty," Owen said. "For instance, the dominant group in a city or nation sets the standard. White people control the wealth and all its concomitants so they set the standard in everything." White power, not any internalized sense of racial inferiority, explained the popularity of skin whiteners and hair straighteners among blacks. "Who ever heard of any black face powder?" Owen asked. Even those who protested such cosmetics diligently used them because fashions and styles were established by leading whites and imitated by all other groups, white and black. Conformity was essential; the oppressed, even more than the elites (who could flaunt their idiosyncrasies) must fit in. Owen reminded his readers that good looks could be "sold" in a perfectly respectable sense; the best looking woman, in the sense of having the lightest skin and straightest hair, would more readily find employment even in a UNIA office. Dark girls were not hired for Negro choruses; only "voluntary Negroes" needed apply.[67]
According to Owen, blacks imitated whites out of protective coloration, just as a little cigar store or cab company tried to look like the largest company in its field. Similarly, the poor strived to look rich.
Various animals and insects imitate the form of their enemies in order to screen themselves from their hostile would-be devourers. In other words, to imitate that which is best is to be taken for the best. That is why people stress ostentation and show so much.... What does it mean to "pass for white"? It means that you can go any place if you have the money to pay your way.... Passing for white" is passing for what the Negro is not, because better opportunities are given to what he is not than to what he is.
After all, there is not too much difference between copying a man's skin color and hair texture and copying his suit.... To be more beautiful, that is to be more like the standard set by those who, through their hold on wealth and politics control society with all its ramifications, is and ever may be the great desideratum.
The dominant group is the controlling factor in everything..... [If blacks controlled the world] white people would be making their hair kinky and using black or brown face powder. In other words, Negroes would be setting the standard of fashions. Until that time, however--and that time is nowhere in sight--reasonable conformity with the established standards (assuming that those standards are not deleterious per se) will be indispensable to a normal existence.[68]
African-American conformity, therefore, often stemmed not from ignorance or hegemony, but from a calculated, realistic appraisal of the disposition of social forces. In placing their hopes on rich white capitalists rather than struggling white workers, the masses of blacks displayed a shrewd awareness of actual conditions that eclipsed Randolph's more abstract and theoretical vision.
Black acceptance and even active advocacy of segregation, while apparently based on illusions fostered by white hegemony, also stemmed from a hardheaded appraisal of harsh realities. Sometimes blacks accepted segregation out of resigned bitterness. Schuyler described the feelings of Afro-Americans under such circumstances. After detailing the numerous subterfuges whereby northern white businessmen insulted, segregated, or expelled blacks from public establishments in the face of laws banning such discrimination, Schuyler said that
The bulk of Senegambians just muddle along, apparently resigned to their fate, and avoid as much as possible the places where they are grossly insulted or absolutely refused service. Often they swallow their pride and accept jim crow accommodations: if they want to see a good show that is what they have to do in most places, whether they like it or not.....
The average Negro just turns away when refused, curses the entire white race under his breath, and steers his wife or sweetheart to some other place where there are better prospects. After several such experiences he becomes conditioned and stays away from places where he knows he isn't wanted, or keeps within the narrow confines of his ghetto, that lone haven where he can retain his identity. It takes time and trouble to fight a case of discrimination and then one is liable to lose, so why bother?[69]
Schuyler then quoted an educated young black, thirsting for life and experience, who despairingly enunciated another reason for acquiescing in segregation. "Well, what to do?," this young man asked. "To sit by on the high stool of principle while scraps of the decade's culture go by? To look blank" and "actually to be blank" when cultural stars performed in town, because of a refusal to accept Jim Crow? "At first I could not stomach it--this trek to the upper balcony. The curious glances of whites toward the upper rows went straight through me. But my thirst for the good things of the theatre changed this disgust and rebellion into a sort of amused tolerance" of addle-brained whites "who fancied their seats a few rows nearer the stage made them any better than I. One always rationalizes a situation sooner or later."[70]
An ardent opponent of segregation under most circumstances, even Du Bois endorsed it in cases (such as the Des Moines Officer Training Camp during World War I, or the all-black Tuskegee Hospital) where segregated facilities were the only ones possible. Du Bois said that after the Civil War blacks resisted segregation, "but when it came to schools, though they objected to the separate school in theory, in practice they did not want hateful white people teaching their children, and in their churches they distinctly demanded colored preachers because white religion did not seem to them real religion. Their fight against separation was tempered, therefore, by the potent fact that in a world of enemies one prefers to consort with one's friends in sheer self-defense." Du Bois warned that "the demands of democracy and the demands of group advancement cannot always be reconciled. The race pride of Negroes is not an antidote to the race pride of white people; it is simply the other side of a hateful thing. On the other hand, if you seek to carry out the principles of democracy in America today you deliver your children to the mercies of white teachers who in many cases neglect or hate them."[71]
As cultured blacks found the educational and cultural level of their group rising, Du Bois argued, they found fighting for inclusion in white institutions less pressing. Increasingly, Afro-Americans could meet all of their cultural, business, and professional needs within their own group. Although many Afro-Americans distrusted black professionals, and believed white dentists, doctors, and attorneys better trained and white businesses cheaper and cleaner, others found that black professionals provided services with incomparably greater courtesy and respect. Discussing the all-black, state supported Cheyney teacher-training school in Pennsylvania, Du Bois commented that blacks who opposed the segregated school cut their own throats, but those who supported it embraced segregation. He deplored the growing racism that infected even black colleges; white teachers increasingly followed Southern racial norms and shunned social contact with black teachers. Many black colleges had white presidents, because white teachers would not work under black supervision. (Others, such as Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, hired only white professors.) Du Bois lamented that if blacks demanded their own colleges staffed and financed exclusively by themselves, "they will cut the strongest spiritual tie between the white and black races in America. This cultural contact of white and colored teachers with each other and of students with a mixed faculty has undoubtedly been one of the greatest sources of racial peace in the United States. To end it would not be only unfortunate; it would be calamitous." But if the only alternative was constant and increasing degradation of black students and faculty, Afro-America's choice was distressingly clear.[72]
Finally, segregation afforded a relatively comfortable living for Du Bois's favored "talented tenth," professionals who could find employment only in a segregated environment. Outside of New York and a few other states, whites would not countenance black teachers in mixed classrooms; therefore, black teachers depended on segregation for their livelihoods. Black attorneys, dentists, doctors, and businessmen could count on scant white patronage; they and their employees also prospered because of segregation. Black institutions--churches, clubs, lodges, and community groups--afforded ample outlet for self-expression, camaraderie, and the exercise of leadership skills. Increasing black pride and awareness of white humiliations meant that fewer and fewer blacks begged for admission to white institutions, or attended them even when ostensibly welcomed by whites. Segregation, therefore, was a boon as well as a degradation; indeed, its character, as Harrison and others pointed out, depended in part on the blacks' own attitudes. If blacks considered separate institutions a degradation, they constituted such a humiliation; if Afro-Americans created such institutions out of racial pride and self-sufficiency, they became bulwarks of black achievement and self-confidence.
Randolph, however, an intellectual who moved comfortably in white circles, was worlds apart from the lives of most blacks. His own philosophy was a product of reading and thinking rather than of concrete experience. His weltanschauung was that of a cosmopolitan philosopher and luftmensch, rather than a working-class African American. Randolph and his Messenger cohorts snorted contemptuously at black (and white) folk culture and mass commercial culture. Randolph detested religion and favored prohibition--a toxic combination for any leader wooing the black urban working class. Unlike Du Bois, Randolph mounted soapboxes and mingled in the dirt and grime of labor struggles; yet his temperament was as alien from the masses of workers as was Max Eastman's. Randolph later revealed a remarkable ability to mobilize working-class blacks in pursuit of immediate, realizable goals--such as a union of Pullman porters and the integration of war industries and the armed forces. He could not, however, convince them of, or even explain to them, an underlying philosophy that stemmed from the library rather than the streets. In early 1925 Randolph wrote Elizabeth Gurley Flynn that "our editorial policy has been changed.... We eliminated Socialist propaganda because we found that it alienated the very group we wanted to reach--the Negro workers.... The change of policy in this connection is based on the belief that it is more important that Negro workers be organized into trade unions than they vote the Socialist ticket or that they be organized only as Socialist voters."[73] Randolph, like Margaret Sanger, Helen Keller, Kate Richards O'Hare, and scores of other former Socialists, now concentrated on single-issue reformism--in Randolph's case, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
The Messenger had equally scant success among the tiny black middle class and intelligentsia, for reasons of which Randolph was well aware. The black elites were hostile to unionism and socialism out of economic self-interest and psychological need. The "black bourgeoisie" savaged by Frazier, distanced itself from, rather than identifying with, the black workers. Unlike self-confident white radicals such as Max Eastman, its members feared identification with the lower class. Indeed, they regarded poor and working-class blacks as menaces who reinforced white stereotypes of black licentiousness and irresponsibility. They wanted the privileges of the "better sort" of whites with whom they identified themselves; they craved white validation of their own self-image as cultivated, respectable Americans. Their precarious respectability would crumple if they associated with black workers or with radicals of either race. Racial rather than class justice was their goal. Their education, as Randolph and Harrison complained, was literary and classical rather than modern, economic, and scientific. Much of the black elite directly benefitted from the largesse of rich white capitalists, who heavily subsidized major Afro-American institutions at the national and local levels. Professionals such as attorneys, doctors, dentists, teachers, and businessmen required a segregated society and economy; denied white patronage, they depended upon the Negro clientele whom white professionals shunned. As a Crusader writer complained. "those who have reached the height of their possibilities are content to let the matter rest there, with no thought for any one but themselves."[74]
In a remark applicable to many black professionals, Locke said that Afro-American teachers were ultra-conservative "because they have all of the economic, social, and political problems of the white Americans, plus the disabilities of race. Doubtless one reason for the Negro teacher's conservatism is the fact that should he lose his job, he has less chance of securing an equally renumerative a position as his white brother or sister has." This was particularly threatening because, as Schuyler pointed out, precariously positioned blacks, as their white counterparts, relied upon the trappings of material success as a bulwark of self-respect and respectability. Commenting on the well-dressed blacks promenading on Seventh Avenue on Sundays, Schuyler said that "many of these Negroes will go without proper nourishment in order to present a 'front' to the promenaders, the members of her club, or the sisters of the church. To dress shabbily here is to lose caste--and the peculiar economic situation facing the Negro here makes him lay more stress on social prestige."[75]
The "rage of a privileged class"[76] discussed by the Messenger was real enough, but was directed mostly at racial barriers rather than class oppressions. Randolph, Harrison, and Domingo all complained that so-called black radicals were radical only on issues of race. Domingo said that blacks "cling to past and present economic ideals with the desperation of a drowning man," while Randolph said that so-called Negro radicals were "more accurately characterized as liberals." Harrison explained that "behind the color line one has to think perpetually of the color line, and most of those who grow up behind it can think of nothing else. Even when one essays to think of other things, that thinking is tinged with the shades of the surrounding atmosphere." As a result, "none of the great world movements for social betterment" penetrated the color line until the upheavals of war and revolution temporarily energized everyone. Randolph complained that "by Negro radicalism we mean something different from radicalism proper. One usually thinks of a Negro radical not as one who insists upon economic or political radicalism, but as a Negro who opposes lynching.... while an ultra-radical Negro means a Negro who insists upon social equality." No less a conservative than Locke agreed. Almost all blacks, even the most racially militant, were conservative on almost every other issue. "Many factors account for this," Locke said, "chief among them the tendency the world over for the elite of any oppressed minority to aspire to the conventionally established values and court their protection and prestige. In this the Negro has been no exception, but on that very score is not entitled to exceptional blame or ridicule."[77]
Yet the white capitalists upon whom Booker Washington and many black leaders depended supported black institutions and aspirations only insofar as such support undermined white unions and the wages of workers of both races. When Afro-American institutions or workers backed interracial unions, capitalists withdrew their subsidies. Just as the capitalists distorted the working-class movement by fomenting racial divisions, so they subverted black institutions and leaders by their financial support. As the Messenger editorialized in 1926, both the labor movement and black insurgencies had been retarded "by the employing class capturing the intelligent insurgents with bribery or jobs... the ruling class constantly draining off the militant strong men, by holding up before them, jobs, ease, luxury, social place and wealth."[78] Just as Randolph accused the NAACP, the Urban League, Tuskegee, Hampton, and other "black" institutions as betraying the race for capitalist subsidies, so Harrison, after his own break from the SP, bitterly charged that Randolph's Socialist party affiliations made him a tool of racist whites. The U.S. secret police, meanwhile, fomented discord among radical African Americans, spreading lies, rumors, dissension, and threats of repression everywhere.
Meanwhile, the debilitating conservatism even of most Afro-American male radicals was symbolized by their blindness toward women's issues. Although Harrison, Du Bois, and Randolph energetically supported women's suffrage, they otherwise evinced little feminist consciousness. They did not belittle women or advocate their subserviency; rather, they mostly ignored women as independent persons, and conflated the interests of black women with those of black men. Echoing the larger culture, most radicals frequently used the word "man" as synonymous with "person," and assumed that "manhood" signified a full, dignified life by a person of either gender. Their neglect of women's issues was caused by obliviousness rather than motivated by disdain. Grace Campbell participated as an important leader in both the FNF and the ABB, and ran twice for important office on the Socialist ticket. Harrison spoke often of "the new Negro manhood movement" and sometimes of "the new Negro manhood and womanhood movement," without any indication of a change or broadening of meaning. Randolph also sometimes spoke of Negro "womanhood" as well as "manhood"; the women, however, were obviously added as an afterthought. Du Bois's Crisis unthinkingly covered notable Afro-American women's achievements in its "Men of the Month" column. For the black radicals, as for English common law, the man and the woman were one, and that one was man.
The male radicals' neglect of women's issues is all the more striking in that women occupied, in relation to men, a position which remarkably resembled the subordination of blacks to whites. Like many disabilities inflicted upon blacks, the oppression of fear afflicted (and afflicts) women in far greater proportion than men. Black males faced lynching; black and white women feared rape and other forms of violence from strangers and intimates. "Jane Crow" subordinated and segregated women of both races in the home, at the workplace, and in society much as Jim Crow segregated and subordinated blacks.[79] Women of both races, when compared with men, worked at harder and more dangerous jobs for less pay. Even when they worked at the same jobs as men (such as teaching) they usually received less pay. Until women's suffrage was achieved, Randolph and DuBois did incessantly proclaim that every argument for black suffrage equally argued for women's right to vote; they did not, however, generalize this insight into an overall analysis of women's distinct oppressions, which so closely mirrored those of blacks. Scholars and progressive activists today, the heirs of Socialist and radical feminisms of the 1960s and 1970s, address the triple intersection of class, race, and gender in ways inconceivable to their predecessors of the 1910s and 1920s.
Indicatively, many radical black publications--the Crisis, the Crusader, and, after 1923, the Messenger--graced their covers with pictures of attractive Afro-American women. In some sense, this was an act of resistance against the white culture's standards of feminine beauty that relentlessly excluded Afro-Americans. Black women, Afro-American radical men properly claimed, were as beautiful as women of the dominant race. Yet the habit of putting pictures of comely black women on the covers of radical magazines, however consistent with demands for inclusion as equals in mainstream culture, was grossly inappropriate for radicals who demanded a revolutionary overthrow of that culture. Despite their own laudable intentions, black male radicals used the bodies of Afro-American women as merchandising tools, as bait to attract otherwise reluctant black (male) readers. The perceived necessity of such a tactic itself indicated the catastrophic weakness of the radicals' own appeal.
In addition to mirroring the general culture's insensitivity toward women's needs, the Afro-American male radicals had special concerns generated by their position in a virulently racist society. At a time when white males were anxiously questioning and redefining their masculinity,[80] black men were systematically denied the prerogatives of traditional manhood. White racism rendered providing for, protecting, and controlling "their" women extremely difficult for black men. Afro-American women worked at menial and low-paying jobs outside the home in large numbers, were routinely sexually harassed and raped by white men, and were castigated by those very same men as licentious and impure. Afro-American women, then, were denied the respect routinely accorded white women; and their degradation was intimately related to the lack of traditional masculine powers and perquisites by Afro-American men. To an extent unprecedented among white men, therefore, black men found that asserting their own manhood was indeed a way of elevating and protecting, as well as subordinating, the women of their race. In a society that routinely denied black men the ability to support their families, and then castigated them as irresponsible when they did not, black men naturally eschewed economic independence for women in favor of an empowering family wage for themselves. In this, they only echoed the less oppressed white male working class.
The male radicals' obliviousness toward the distinctive needs and desires of black women eerily paralleled the attitudes of white radicals toward blacks. Just as many white radicals, with no ill will but with a complacent ignorance of their own white skin privilege, blithely assumed that blacks were automatically included in demands for white working-class liberation, so black male radicals implicitly subordinated black women within their strategy, movement, and philosophy. It is no wonder that almost no black women, with the exception of Grace Campbell, assumed an important role in the radical black liberation struggle, or that Campbell herself wrote almost nothing for the radical press.[81] The black male radicals made no distinct appeal to black women of the type that they insisted that white Socialists direct toward Afro-Americans. White workers and Socialists often perceived black demands as irrelevant, counterproductive, and distracting from the more important focus on class; in such a climate, black radicals of both sexes could expect scant consideration for an appeal which emphasized gender as well as race.
Black male radicals almost totally ignored the mass movements headed by black women, such as the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). Part of this reflected social reality. Black women reformers, like black men under immense social pressure from white mainstream society, embraced a relentlessly elitist, middle-class ethos of benevolent paternalism towards their social inferiors. A movement whose motto was "Lifting as We Climb" was a distinctly unpromising milieu for radical recruitment and propaganda.[82] Nevertheless, while male radicals considered Garvey's UNIA a fertile ground for reaching the black masses, they launched no similar recruiting or educational efforts in NACW. (Fiery militant Ida Wells-Barnett, in fact, was virtually expelled from the relatively conservative NAACP, which could not countenance independence in a woman.)[83]
Afro-American women labored under special oppressions which rendered them unlikely recruits for a struggle based on class as well as race. Few black women belonged to the industrial proletariat; most worked on farms or as domestic servants, isolating occupations which were notoriously difficult to organize. Those with the leisure and education to contemplate revolt were often employed by governments as teachers. Such positions inculcated, as a matter of sheer survival, a focus on respectability and decorum, and rendered those who held them (like their white counterparts) vulnerable to dismissal for political activity. Although black women could often find work more readily than black men, they were almost totally excluded from decent jobs; those who secured a toehold in the respectable, well-paid economy were loath to risk it by joining a working-class movement which largely denied their very humanity. The world of black women revolved around race and gender, not class.
Yet Afro-American women were also an unlikely constituency for a radically feminist activism. In periods of African-American insurgency, black women face enormous pressure from male activists to subsume their own special grievances under the rubric of race; raising feminist issues, they are told, constitutes a form of race treason that divides the black community. Male black nationalists in particular are often strongly chauvinistic, demanding that women stay home, produce and raise children, and provide psychological support for their beleaguered men. Feminism in general was in steep decline after the 1920 suffrage victory, and white female activists remained mostly indifferent or hostile to black women's concerns. No Socialist-feminist movement existed. Furthermore, Socialist-feminist attacks on the traditional home and family would not have resonated among black women valiantly defending these institutions against the devastations of racism. Desperately trying to achieve reputable, conventional lives, black women were in no position to repudiate the canons of respectability, especially when their very fitness for such a life was widely doubted or denied. Cheryl Wall's comments about black women writers' defensive conservatism about sex retains a larger applicability: "What strikes many as their conservatism reflects in part a determination not to conform in even the slightest manner to hateful stereotypes. In a society reluctant to recognize sexuality in most women, black women were burdened with an almost exclusively sexual identity."[84] More even than black men, black women strove to break into mainstream society rather than to overthrow it.
Black women, therefore, participated in radical African-American organizations largely as silent partners. Their virtual silencing within the black radical movement was in part voluntary; the NACW took as little interest in the black radicals as the latter evinced for women's activism. Ironically, the only feminist insurgencies within the militant black organizations occurred within the UNIA (after Garvey's irrevocable break with the black Socialists). UNIA women staged an impressive rebellion, which Garvey only partially contained, at the 1922 Convention. After Garvey's imprisonment, his second wife, Amy Jacques Garvey, sponsored (and mostly wrote) a militant "Woman's Page" in the Negro World from February 1924 until April 1927. Amy Jacques bitterly attacked black men in general and Garvey in particular.[85]
The women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters illustrate the dilemmas confronted by black female workers and feminists. A tiny group of black women worked as maids, the female equivalent of a porter. However, they constituted less than 2 percent of the BSCP's constituency, and their particular needs received no special attention. "As men, porters embraced the distinctly masculine culture of travelling men and the railroad brotherhoods," Melinda Chateauvert, the historian of BSCP women, has stated. Porters built their camaraderie around "telling tales, playing cards, and drinking and talking about women." Like most male union members, porters deliberately excluded or subordinated women within their ranks. The Brotherhood's rhetoric, myths, and history, like those of white unions, airbrushed women out. The BSCP told porters' wives that they would benefit from the higher pay and shorter hours the BSCP would win for their husbands. Both the porters, who would work fewer hours, and their wives, who could become respectable ladies freed from paid labor, would spend more time at home with their families. However, by this script, men could achieve manhood only if their wives were admiring and subordinate. The BSCP's founders regarded the wife's role as "bolstering a husband's morale, making him feel like a man, restoring him for the fight. The wife would win vicariously; his victory would be hers. Nothing was said by the porters or their wives about uplifting the spirits of Pullman maids"--or porters' wives.[86] Chateauvert continues:
Grounded in the ideology of black manhood, the Brotherhood story celebrated women whose activities complemented [those of the men] rather than those who challenged sex segregation.... Like the New Negro, the image of the Black Worker was masculine. Negroes were men and men were workers; only the addition of 'women' rendered 'the black worker' feminine.[87]
Women connected with the BSCP responded in different ways to this endemic male sexism. Especially in the early days of the union, women--both BSCP members and society activists whom Randolph enlisted in the Women's Economic Council--performed essential functions. They raised funds and organized the mass meetings that gave some anonymity to porters who feared the Pullman Company's private Gestapo. Porters' wives held meetings in their homes; Company spies, who scrutinized every detail of porters' private lives, considered females harmless, and disdained to monitor what they considered idle feminine gossip. However, the very fact that women performed such essential services evoked gendered conflict within the BSCP; from the beginning, women who wanted participation on equal terms battled men who regarded their activities as merely decorative. "The question of control arouse regularly, becoming the main source of dispute between women and men," Chateauvert says. However, some women also expressed alarm at the very public and unconventional role played by some of their sisters. Such women wanted nothing more (or less) than the home-centered respectability that defined a true "lady."[88]
Male sexism among the porters was reinforced by Randolph's strategy of "community unionism": the BSCP appealed for support throughout the black community, and--in pursuit of backing from white male unions--emulated the organizational and ideological structures of the (racist and sexist) white railroad Brotherhoods. Paradoxically, women were instrumental in mobilizing black community support; but they could do so only by modelling their own activities on the gendered volunteer work of the resolutely middle-class women's clubs.
By the time the BSCP won official recognition during the Great Depression, the maids had been dropped from the union's name (which had, despite its initials, formerly been the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids) and the Women's Economic Councils renamed the Ladies' Auxiliary Order. Speaking of the BSCP's victories in 1935-37, Chateauvert concludes that "when their husbands won manhood, porters' wives believed that they had won respectability and the right to be treated as 'ladies'.... Yet ladyhood weakened the Auxiliary's independence as an organization, because ladies required male protection."[89] Nothing so indicates the cultural conservatism of African Americans as this. Indeed, the BSCP women's trajectory paralleled that of the (mostly white) members of the UAW's Women's Emergency Brigade, whose activities helped underpin the UAW's epochal victory at Flint. Women were exiled from the ranks of the sit-down strikers, confined mostly to traditional women's tasks, and--despite helping win the strike by markedly "unfeminine" activities--subordinated after the victory was won. Their history, like that of the women of the BSCP, was largely suppressed by the men; and although the UAW became a relatively women-friendly union, it, like almost every other union, mainly bolstered patriarchy on the job and in the home. Randolph, who espoused the IWW's radical, egalitarian, and industrial unionism, helped construct a racially-defined craft union based upon collective bargaining and traditional gender roles.
Near the end of the period covered by this book, Schuyler wrote two essays in which he reflected on the present condition and possible future of the Afro-American. In one essay he complained--as did Du Bois and other observers--that blacks "are more widely segregated and discriminated against than before the War for Democracy." The United States, Schuyler said, would get the Negro it deserved, because "what the Negro will become depends largely upon the white folks. Theirs is the power and the glory." As he looked about him, Schuyler noticed an increasing concentration of wealth and a lessening of opportunities even for whites. "Before our eyes," he said, "we see the swift metamorphosis of the independent middle class of shopkeepers and small merchants into a salariat, dependent upon the triumphant chains and trusts for their livelihood; a group increasingly similar to the class of overseers and managers in the slaveholding South." In a passage with a remarkably contemporary ring, Schuyler complained
Controlling preachers, politicians, professors and publishers, the virile plutocracy has developed an almost unbeatable technique for fooling the yokels while picking their pockets. Philanthropy, stock-selling to employees, company unions, welfare work, social service and overstimulated worship of transient heroes, such as endurance dancers, aviators, tennis stars, pugilists, frankfurter-eating and peanut-rolling champions, all play their part in sublimating the combative impulse that might otherwise find an outlet in revolutionary scheming. Docile and unthinking, the American herd fast becomes Peruvianized, like the serfs enslaved by the Incas. Riding the high tide of empire, with the entire world paying tribute, the American ruling class, like its Roman prototype, may last for centuries.[90]
Pulverized by "countless inventions and new methods of production," Schuyler said, the white workers were increasingly unorganized themselves, and were becoming mere "robots." The white proletarian was also enslaved through "installment buying and the fear of losing what few crumbs it has gained." As the position of the average white deteriorated, Afro-Americans would increasingly bear the brunt of white frustrations and resentment. The ofay retained "nothing to look forward to in life save the dubious satisfaction of being free, white and twenty-one. That satisfaction, however, is considerable when there is no other. In such a situation, the Negro may likely prove of the same service to the plutocracy that the Jews were in pre-Bolshevist Russia--that is, he may serve as a convenient red herring to divert the attention of the white proletarians whenever they grow restive under exploitation." Schuyler, however, citing the unexpected upheavals in Russia, admitted that anything could happen, at least in theory.[91]
Schuyler also claimed that the Afro-American had been "only theoretically, nominally freed" in 1863:
Today he is a slave as he has always been since his arrival in the United States. Discriminated against on the job, segregated in unsanitary, tumble-down ghettoes, politically disfranchised or ineffectual, "Jim Crowed" in all public institutions and conveyances, taxed for education and protection which he doesn't get, kept "in his place" by lynch law or the threat of it, last to be hired and first to be fired, it is sheer mockery to refer to him as a free man. On every hand he is hemmed in by restrictions of the most intolerable variety, and the Mason-Dixon Line has, since the late war for democracy, become contiguous with the Mexican and Canadian borders, where it hasn't crossed them. Brought here as a beast of burden to produce wealth for the white owning class and bereft of all rights it was bound to respect, his condition has only superficially improved.... [In fact] the bulk of the Negroes are worse off than they were before the war."[92]
This was not Schuyler's only pronouncement on this issue--in 1930, despite his assertion that blacks were more segregated than ever, he argued that blacks were improving their condition. Even then, however, Schuyler placed his ultimate hopes for equality in miscegenation, even while admitting that the barriers against it were as strong as ever among whites, and increasingly virulent among blacks. For his part, Du Bois decried the increasing segregation of blacks and especially the growing black tolerance and even active fostering of such separation. He predicted that a race war lay ahead:
What will be the end of all this? Remember that the advance of the black American in the past twenty-five years has been, despite himself and unnoted by his friends, mainly along separatist lines. There has been increasing separation, with separate institutions, better leadership in these institutions, a larger group economy... a tremendous and sometimes an almost fanatic increase of race pride.... Larger and larger numbers are escaping all contact with whites. What will be the end? Can we not see it plainly looming? Insult, separation, race pride, hate, war: this is the nasty horrible world-old thing creeping on us.
Impossible? Of course it is impossible for twelve million men to fight a hundred million--but can they not hate the harder for their very impotence?.... Even the blind can see in the segregation of the American Negro a rebirth of racial concentration, of group friction, of reciprocal hate and despising, of world war....[93]
Today, as we inhabit a new millennium, much has superficially changed since the decades surrounding World War I. The formal apparatus of Jim Crow has been destroyed; however, blacks remain far worse off than whites by every measure of income, wealth, education, personal security, and health. A relatively large black middle class has emerged, but this relatively privileged group is in some ways even more embittered than the black underclass, which has also increased in recent years. Huge numbers of Afro-Americans are mired in poverty and despair. As a result of conscious, deliberate, and bipartisan U.S. government policies since 1973, half of all black children are born in destitution, while many more are poor. Most Afro-American children attend dilapidated, underfunded "schools" that resemble instruments of cultural and psychological genocide. By some measurements, more black children attend segregated schools than in 1954, the year of the epochal Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision.[94]
African Americans suffer from pervasive oppression, discrimination, and degradation in every sphere of life, often of kinds that are fiendish in their contradictory, yet reinforcing, brutality. For example, governments at the federal, state, and local level have virtually criminalized young black malehood, meting out savage sentences for petty "crimes" which white youths commit with impunity. Police terrorize, beat, and even kill young black men with the consent of elected officials and white public opinion, while also countenancing, in Afro-American neighborhoods, serious crimes which they would not tolerate in white districts. (White suburban youths often drive to black ghettoes for their drugs.) Millions of African Americans, therefore, cower in their homes, fearing injury or death if they walk the streets of their own neighborhoods. Contemporary mechanisms of white control differ in form from those of the days of slavery and Jim Crow; but in the striking continuity that characterizes United States history, blacks still lack the freedom of mobility which most whites take for granted.
At a time of rapid technological advance and steadily rising national wealth, the vast majority of white families have suffered stagnant or declining incomes since 1973. A tiny minority of rich families appropriates almost all of the vastly increased wealth generated by a vibrant economy. This again has resulted from deliberate, bipartisan policies which have destroyed the American labor movement, increased taxes on poor, working-class, and middle-class families while decreasing them for the rich, and forced a globalization of the economy that spreads starvation, misery, death, and environmental destruction abroad while increasing poverty and inequality at home. For a few years (1997-1999), a robust economy and declining unemployment actually did, at long last, trickle down to many workers, women, and people of color; the Federal Reserve Board responded by a pre-emptive series of interest rate hikes ostensibly designed to fight inflation. The capitalist press freely admitted that inflation remained virtually nonexistent, and that the Federal Reserve feared low unemployment because it allowed workers more freedom in choosing jobs, and enabled them to demand more pay. The Federal Reserve, however, so insisted on throwing people into the streets to die, that it pursued policies which lowered stock and bond prices, just so it could increase unemployment. The policy succeeded; the U.S. economy slipped into a recession that devastated the lives of millions. The victims of this policy, however, remain quiescent. The bipartisan welfare "reforms" of the 1990s were based upon the claim that everyone who seeks work can find it; but one of American's most powerful and least accountable institutions has dedicated itself to ensuring that this remains a deadly lie.
In a horrifying scenario that much resembles the politics of the 1920s, one party demonizes peoples of color, immigrants, gays, the poor, and working women (except the very poor, who are forced to work at degrading jobs paying a starvation wage), while the other party does nothing, and need do nothing, for its alleged constituencies. Indeed, the United States remains a one-party state where the single capitalist party, objectively racist and male chauvinist, parades under two separate names, making elections a farce in which fewer and fewer Americans bother to participate. The outright purchasing of parties, candidates, and officeholders has become even more of a scandal than it was when Randolph complained that the rich openly owned the government, and marketed candidates like packaged soap. Religious fanaticism and bigotry, of the kind skewered by Randolph and his cohorts in the 1920s, is once again ascendent. (Even the attack on evolutionary biology is resurgent.)
Meanwhile, the party of overt white supremacy stole the last Presidential election (2000) partly by disfranchising black voters by methods both legal and criminal. The losing Democratic party candidate whined about "broken chads" but ignored the huge number of African American males deliberately and fraudulently disfranchised by the Republicans in Florida and elsewhere. Even with hundreds of thousands of African Americans deprived of their right to vote throughout the country, the overt party of white supremacy lost the popular vote, and installed itself in power only by capturing the Electoral College, an institution partly designed to give Southern white male slaveholders a disproportionate voice in choosing the President. The new President, whose brother helped steal the election in Florida, won every electoral vote from the old Confederacy. The Electoral College, like so many other American institutions, ran true to form after 200 years.
As the capitalist state increasingly destroys families, neighborhoods, and lives, at home and abroad, the parties visiting this destruction recruit their victims for a right-wing cultural politics which attacks and victimizes minorities of every kind. Americans of every race and most economic classes, and of both genders, seek refuge in prefabricated identities based on race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, gender, and respectable, traditional values to the exclusion of class, even as the "permanent revolution" of capitalism batters and destroys the economic foundations for those traditional identities. The ruling class enjoys a win-win situation: the more it pulverizes increasing sectors of the American population, the more its frightened and demoralized victims clamor for scapegoats, and vote for the agents of their own destruction.
In the year 2003, the insights of the Afro-American radicals of the 1910s and 1920s remain as relevant as they were eighty years ago. Harrison, Domingo, Randolph, and Briggs elaborated a class-based politics which would directly confront, rather than evade, the oppressions of race. (Josephine Conger-Kaneko and her publication, the Socialist Woman, elucidated a similar politics of class and gender in the 1910s). Today, however, almost all opposition to the regime has long since dissipated. Nothing remotely resembling the Socialist party, the Industrial Workers of the World, or a black Socialist intelligentsia addressing a mass audience, exists today. Although historians and radical intellectuals have chronicled, described, and analyzed the mechanisms of ruling-class domination and oppression with a sophistication and facticity impossible for members of previous generations, the organized Left scarcely exists. Most critics of the regime unthinkingly accept its fundamental premises; hegemony reigns supreme.
In the years between Hubert H. Harrison's affiliation with the Socialist party (1911) and Du Bois's later embrace of it (1928), Afro-American radicals--and some of their more conservative critics--achieved intellectual miracles. Yet as all blacks knew, their status and condition in the United States ultimately depended, and depends, on white goodwill and cooperation--upon white enlightened self-interest, if not decency. Yet with each passing year, fewer and fewer white Americans retain even the pretense of caring about the welfare of their colored brethren. Instead, whites are dismantling the very programs that ameliorated the condition of some blacks, even while abandoning, in fear and loathing, an increasingly alienated black underclass cut off from all opportunity and contact with mainstream society. In the year 2003, white America seems intent on proving Garvey's contention that it would never acquiesce in black equality.
Most whites and blacks remain mired in the cultural conservatism of the oppressed. Although black cultural conservatism differs markedly from that of whites, it is still replete with the nativism, homophobia, sexism, nationalism, and capitalist values that retard the necessary revolutionary assault on the very basis of American society. For blacks as well as whites, the oppressions of class which largely determine their lives remain invisible.[95] White cultural conservatism remains an adamantine wall impeding progress even on issues directly affecting the welfare of whites, much less other races. As throughout American history, most whites would rather degrade and oppress blacks than act in their own economic interest, and prefer destroying black families to nurturing their own. A total cultural revolution that repudiates the very essence of American history, society, and culture, is necessary for any interracial, class-based assault on the interlocking systems of capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. Yet such a cultural revolution is impossible exactly because those most oppressed by the system cling most ferociously to their inherited, prefabricated (even if illusory) sources of self-identity as bulwarks of meaning and dignity in lives otherwise devoid of them. Cultural revolution, in short, is necessary but impossible. The American ruling class has, partly by design and partly by historical accident, crafted a system that, unlike the empires of oppression championed by Hitler and Churchill, may indeed last a thousand years.
Notes:
[1] Apparently the Messenger was allowed a month-by-month permit, but did not receive a permanent second-class permit until the spring of 1921. This alone made it far more subject to governmental harassment.
[2] W.H. Loving, "Final Report on Negro Subversion," August 6, 1919, in FSAA, Reel 21. For an account of some of those 1930s radicalisms see Jonathan Scott Holloway, Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris, E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919-1941 (Chapel Hill, 2002) and Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (New York, 1984).
[3] "In the Smoker," TM, October 1923; "Sojourner Truth, the Messenger of a New Day," TM, July 1923; "The Human Hand Threat," TM, October 1922.
[4] "Negro Troops Sent to Texas," TM, September 1922.
[5] JWJ, "American Genius and its Local," New York Age, July 20, 1918, in SWJ, I, 269-270.
[6] "National Paradoxes," TM, October 1920; Convention Speech by Rose Pastor Stokes, August 19, 1921, MGP III, 677-678.
[7] Josephine Cogdell, "Those Inimitable Avatars--The Negroes and the Jews," TM, August 1925. David Pierce, a Jewish writer, wrote in the Crisis (August 1925) that the "Hebrew upon whom fortune has favored must vent his superiority upon somebody. He must look down upon the members of his race who have lived in America for a briefer period than himself; he may perhaps despise the contact with his brethren who hail from more backward sections of Europe; and he must be careful to avoid debasing contact with any group marked as degrading by the ruling Anglo-Saxons. Consequently, he must not know the Negro as an intimate." Jews, Pierce lamented, would follow the lead of the dominant Anglo-Saxons. This remark is even more applicable to other white immigrant groups. Pierce, "Is the Jew a Friend of the Negro?," TC, August 1925.
[8] Spero and Harris, Black Worker, 462.
[9] GSS, Review of Black America, Scott Nearing, Modern Quarterly, Spring 1929.
[10] GSS, "Our Greatest Gift to America," in Charles S. Johnson, ed. Ebony and Topaz: A Collectanea (New York, 1927), 122-124.
[11] ibid. Schuyler's use of the term "fellow workers" was undoubtedly an ironic reference to the epithet (replacing the SP's "comrade") which members of the racially egalitarian IWW used when greeting each other.
[12] ibid.
[13] ibid.
[14] GSS, "A Negro Looks Ahead," American Mercury, February 1930. See also GSS, "Emancipated Women and the Negro," Modern Quarterly, Volume 5, Number 3. Schuyler did, however, believe that the idea of white superiority originated in economic imperatives. The invention of the Cotton Gin, he said, revivified slavery economically, and the peculiar institution (which had fallen into discredit) required new justifications. In the slave South, white slaveowners who preyed on black women generated new property they could sell on the open market; after the Civil War, laws banning intermarriage allowed white men to prey on black women without fear that they would be required to care for their children.
[15] GSS, "Racial Intermarriage in the United States," American Parade, Fall 1928. The Haldeman-Julius company later reprinted this as one of its Little Blue Books.
[16] Abram Harris, "Lenin Casts His Shadow Upon Africa," TC, April 1926. Robert Minor, writing after the disintegration of the UNIA, propounded an unusually sophisticated analysis of the symbiosis of white racism and American capitalism. Rather than positing an ahistorical, reified capitalism and an essentialized racism and ascribing racism's origins to a capitalist conspiracy, Minor admitted that both systems were historical creations that varied over time and between societies. Denying that racism was a necessary part of capitalism, Minor asserted that it was a feudal remnant. "In all capitalist societies there are some remainders of feudal society which become interwoven with and interdependent with the capitalist economic and state systems." These were both a residue of the previous social system and "an integral part which cannot be separated from the capitalist system as it exists here and now." Negro oppressions were "a built-in part of the concrete system of class exploitation" as it existed in the United States. Robert Minor, "After Garvey, What?," Workers Monthly, June 1926, in John Henrik Clarke, Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa (New York, 1974), 165-173. This analysis accounted for the existence of racism before the advent of capitalism, while still maintaining its essential role in buttressing the American version of capitalism.
[17] ibid.
[18] See August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW (New York, 1979) for an example of a massive hate strike by CIO workers during World War II. However, in this case, neither the CIO nor the U.S. government tolerated the strike, which disrupted war production.
[19] HHH, "How to Do it--and How Not," NYC, December 16, 1911.
[20]"Radicals, Liberals, or Conservatives," TE, April 10, 1920.
[21] MG Speech, August 31, 1921, MGP III, 737-738.
[22] "Negroes in the Unions," TM, August 1925; GSS, "These 'Colored' United States," TM, October-November 1925; Spero and Harris, Black Worker, 132; Crosswaith, "The Trade Union Organizing Committee for Organizing Negroes," TM, August 1925. In this article, however, Crosswaith repeated the argument that unorganized blacks defeated strikes. William Z. Foster, The Great Steel Strike and Its Lessons (New York, 1920), 212. McKay quoted this passage in NIA.
[23] Nora Newsome, "The Negro Woman in the Trade Union Movement," TM, July 1923.
[24] Garvey quoted in Spero and Harris, Black Worker, 135.
[25] CO, "Du Bois on Revolution," TM, September 1921. Owen was attacking a recent Du Bois Crisis article, "The Class Struggle."
[26] Steward, "'Your Best People Come Here'," TM, December 1927; Schuyler, "These 'Colored' United States," TM, October-November 1925.
[27] "Bread!," TM, November 1917; "The Election--an Interpretation," TM, December 1921; "The Coal Strike," TM, May 1922.
[28] Secret police report, "Negro Activities," April 2, 1923, FSAA, Reel 5; P-138 report for March 2, 1921, FSAA, Reel 7.
[29] E. Franklin Frazier, "Three Scourges of the Negro Family," OPP, July 1926.
[30] "The Invisible Government of Negro Social Institutions," TM, December 1920.
[31] E. Franklin Frazier, "The Garvey Movement," OPP, November 1926.
[32] ibid.
[33] J.A. Rogers, World's Great Men of Color (Touchstone: 1996), 415-431. Rogers added that Garvey "had profited little or nothing by the millions of dollars he had taken in" and "lived more simply than many a Negro leader who had taken in far less money."
[34] See Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth Century America (London, 1998) for a general account of West Indian immigrant radicals and militants.
[35] GSS, "New Books. Liberia and Her People," TM, July 1925; Ferris, quoted in secret police report "Negro Agitation," October 17, 1919, in FSAA Reel 21; APR, "Editorials. May Day," TM, May 1925; David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York, 1982), 41.
[36] WAD, "Gift of the Black Tropics," in Locke, ed., New Negro, 341-349.
[37] ibid.; James, Aloft, passim.
[38] Domingo, "Gift of the Black Tropics," New Negro, 341-349; James, Aloft, passim.
[39] WAD, "Gift of the Black Tropics," New Negro, 341-348.
[40] ibid. Even the Messenger, it will be recalled, alienated Domingo by its stress on the West Indian origins of Garvey and his followers.
[41] "Should Negroes Strive for Empire?," TE, March 27, 1920.
[42] "Conservatism and Oppression," TE, April 17, 1920.
[43] ibid.
[44] ibid.
[45] Colson, "Propaganda and the American Negro Soldier," TM, July 1919.
[46] Colson, "An Analysis of Negro Patriotism," TM, August 1919.
[47] "Three Achievements and Their Significance," TC, September 1927.
[48] HHH, "On a Certain Conservatism in Negroes," NN, 41-47.
[49] McKinley, "A Vanishing Conservatism," TM, November 1924.
[50] HHH, "On a Certain Conservatism in Negroes," NN, 41-47; McKinley, "A Vanishing Conservatism," TM, November 1924; Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long (New York: 1979).
[51] Wallace Thurman, Negro Life in New York's Harlem (Chicago, 1927), 64.
[52] Stenographic Report of A. Philip Randolph Speech, Washington D.C., John Wesley ME Zion Church, May 30, 1919, in FSAA Reel 21. The meeting's presiding officer also said that when he sold The Messenger on the streets, white Socialists eagerly snapped it up but cultured Negroes disdained it, saying "we can't read books."
[53] Harrison, "Program and Principles of the International Colored Unity League," Voice of the Negro, April 1927, in HHHR 399-405. A New York church, of course, had hosted the first meeting of the Liberty League.
[54] Abram Harris, "The Negro and Economic Radicalism," The Modern Quarterly, volume 2, number 3, 1925.
[55] Frazier, "La Bourgeoisie Noire," Modern Quarterly, November 1929-February 1929.
[56] ibid.
[57] ibid.
[58] ibid.
[59] ibid.
[60] Spero and Harris, Black Worker, 431. Although this comment vastly overestimates the docility of the porters, other observors also noted that the porters' contact with elite whites raised their status in the black community.
[61] Frazier, "La Bourgeoisie Noire," Modern Quarterly, November 1929-February 1929.
[62] ibid.
[63] Thurman, Negro Life, 61-64.
[64] ibid., 21-24. Mae Gwendolyn Henderson sadly concludes that Thurman himself was "a victim of his own self-hatred arising from his racial identity." Henderson, "Portrait of Wallace Thurman, in Arna Bontempts, ed., The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (New York, 1972), 167.
[65] ibid., 41-44.
[66] ibid., 17-18.
[67] CO, "Good Looks Supremacy," TM, March 1924.
[68] ibid.
[69] GSS, "Keeping the Negro in his Place, American Mercury, August 1929.
[70] ibid.
[71] DB, "The Dilemma of the Negro," American Mercury, October 1924.
[72] ibid.
[73] APR to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, January 22, 1925, in JBP, 694.
[74] Drewry, "Educational Opportunity," TCR, March 1921.
[75] Editorial by Alain Locke, TM, September 1925; GSS, "These 'Colored' United States," TM, October-November 1925. See also J.A. Jackson, "The Colored Actors' Union," TM, October-November 1925.
[76] This phrase is from Ellis Cose, The Rage of a Privileged Class (New York, 1993), which argues that successful Afro-Americans are at least as angry as members of the underclass.
[77] HHH, "On a Certain Conservatism in Negroes" and "Socialism and the Negro," reprinted in NN, 41-47, 21-29; APR and CO, "The Negro Radicals," TM, October and December 1919; WAD, "Socialism the Negroes' Hope," TM, July 1919; AL, "Propaganda--or Poetry?," Race, 1, Summer 1936, in CT, 55-61. I have emended Randolph's text, which reads "ultra-Negro radical."
[78] "President Borno of Haiti," Editorial, TM, August 1926.
[79] Women were not physically segregated in the home any more than blacks were physically removed from whites by Jim Crow. Rather, women were assigned subordinate and menial functions within homes which they physically shared with men, just as Jim Crow decreed that Afro-Americans could exist in utmost intimacy with whites, as long as they and their position were clearly stamped with the stigma of inferiority.
[80] Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York, 1996), 81-223.
[81] We know of Campbell's importance mainly from secret police documents. She is rarely mentioned in the black radical press. James, Aloft, 173-177 has an excellent discussion of what little is known about her. Campbell ran twice for the New York Assembly on the SP ticket, helped found the Friends of Negro Freedom, and was an important participant in the African Blood Brotherhood. James concludes, however, that she "never wrote any articles, let alone published a book; there is no evidence that she ever wrote a letter to the press. She frequently spoke, but only the gist and snippets were reported."
[82] Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (New York, 1999).
[83] Linda O. McMurry, To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York, 1998), especially 288-289, 302.
[84] Cheryl Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington, 1995), 14.
[85] James, Aloft, 137-155. In a classic understatement, James says that "the black press, including the radical black press, had nothing like Mrs. Garvey's page." Amy Jacques was more a bitter critic of black men than a feminist, however; she extolled alleged white male chivalry towards white women, and opposed birth control for blacks.
[86] Melinda Chateauvert, Marching Together: Women to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (Urbana, 1998), passim. The quotes are from pages 40, xi, 61, 54.
[87] ibid., 51-54.
[88] ibid., especially pp. 63-64.
[89] ibid., p. 71.
[90] GSS, "A Negro Looks Ahead," the American Mercury, February 1930.
[91] GSS, "A Negro Looks Ahead," the American Mercury, February 1930; GSS, review of Black America, by Scott Nearing, Modern Quarterly, Spring 1929.
[92] GSS, review of Black America, by Scott Nearing, Modern Quarterly, Spring 1929.
[93] DB, "The Dilemma of the Negro," the American Mercury, October 1924.
[94] Full documentation for the assertions in this and following paragraphs would require doubling the length of my bibliography. A small number of the authors addressing these concerns (from vastly differing perspectives) include: Thomas Edsall, William Greider, Robert Kuttner, Andrew Hacker, Michael Parenti, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Susan Faludi, William Julius Wilson, David M. Gordon, Wallace C. Peterson, Christian Parenti, Johnathan Kozol, and Douglas Massey.
[95] The lack of a viable class-based political movement in the United States has intrigued intellectuals for over a century. Werner Sombart's Why is There No Socialism in the United States?, published in Germany in 1906, is perhaps the first sustained treatment of this issue. For a readable survey of the most common explanations, see Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (New York, 2000).