Making Black History

The Color Line, Culture, and Race in the Age of Jim Crow

Jeffrey Snyder

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780820351841
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi afroamericani

In the Jim Crow era, along with black churches, schools, and newspapers, African Americans also had their own history. Making Black History focuses on the engine behind the early black history movement, Carter G. Woodson and his Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH). Author Jeffrey Aaron Snyder shows how the study and celebration of black history became an increasingly important part of African American life over the course of the early to mid-twentieth century. It was the glue that held African Americans together as "a people," a weapon to fight racism, and a roadmap to a brighter future.

Making Black History takes an expansive view of the historical enterprise, covering not just the production of black history but also its circulation, reception, and performance. Woodson, the only professional historian whose parents had been born into slavery, attracted a strong network of devoted members to the ASNLH, including professional and lay historians, teachers, students, "race" leaders, journalists, and artists. They all grappled with a set of interrelated questions: Who and what is "Negro"? What is the relationship of black history to American history? And what are the purposes of history? Tracking the different answers to these questions, Snyder recovers a rich public discourse about black history that took shape in journals, monographs, and textbooks and sprang to life in the pages of the black press, the classrooms of black schools, and annual celebrations of Negro History Week. By lining up the Negro history movement's trajectory with the wider arc of African American history, Snyder changes our understanding of such signal aspects of twentieth-century black life as segregated schools, the Harlem Renaissance, and the emerging modern civil rights movement.

PART ONE

THE COLOR LINE
1915–1926

Du Bois’s 1903 statement in The Souls of Black Folk that the “problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” is the most famous invocation of the “color line” term. It was not the first. In 1881, Frederick Douglass published a penetrating essay called “The Color Line” in the North American Review. The color line, Douglass said, emerged out of the “depths of slavery” and the association of “ignorance . . . servility, poverty [and] dependence” with color. The “insidious influence” of the color line confronted blacks in “nearly every department of American life.” As Douglass explained, “The workshop denies him work, and the inn denies him shelter; the ballot box a fair vote and the jury-box a fair trial.”¹ It took two decades, but the color line eventually became the central metaphor for the racial divide that prevented African Americans from fully participating in the political, economic, social, and cultural life of the country.²

Woodson grew up alongside Jim Crow, his formative years coinciding with the advent, spread, and hardening of the color line. He was born in 1875, the year the Civil Rights Act passed, the last-ditch attempt to ensure the enforcement of the Reconstruction Amendments. When the last northern troops departed the South, he was not yet two. Woodson was eight years old when the U.S. Supreme Court decreed the Civil Rights Act unconstitutional in 1883. He was fourteen in 1890 when the Louisiana legislature passed “An Act to Promote the Comfort of Passengers,” which decreed that rail travel within the state must be racially segregated. (Fourteen too when Mississippi instituted the South’s first poll tax and literacy requirement.) When Booker T. Washington delivered his Cotton Exposition speech in 1895, Woodson was twenty years old and still attending high school. He was twenty-one the following year when the Supreme Court advanced the “separate but equal” doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson. By Woodson’s twenty-fifth birthday at the turn of the century, more than twenty five hundred blacks had been lynched during his lifetime.³ This was the “nadir,” in the famous formulation of Rayford Logan, when “Jim Crow was everywhere, instructing blacks as to where they could legally reside, walk, sit, rest, eat, drink, work, seek entertainment, be hospitalized, and be buried.”⁴

As August Meier and Elliott Rudwick emphasize, Woodson founded the association at a time of unprecedented “popular and scientific racism in Western thought.”⁵ Between 1880 and 1920, tens of thousands of racist images and artifacts circulated throughout the United States, ranging from Sambo and Mammy images on toaster and teapot covers to the graphic and enormously popular lynching postcards, which featured grainy photographs of mangled bodies swinging from trees.⁶ During this era, which saw the rise of “spokeservants” such as Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben, “Niggerhead” became a common product name used to sell everything from tea and tobacco to canned oysters.⁷ As the color bar extended its power and reach, the “black subject, the black body and the black voice” saturated popular culture, forming a “great deal of the basis of a truly national culture.”⁸

Racial oppression in this era, Leon Litwack reminds us, was not only the work of racial demagogues but of “the ‘best people’—the most educated, the most refined, the most respected.”⁹ Professional historians were no exception in this regard, treating African Americans no better than the purveyors of commercial foodstuffs, as they cranked out lurid and contemptuous depictions of black people. Indeed, history played a crucial role in fortifying the color line. Southerners and northerners settled their regional differences by hammering out a “nationalist and racist historiographical consensus” with respect to the Civil War and Reconstruction. The crux of this consensus was the denunciation of Reconstruction’s “criminal outrages.”¹⁰ D. W. Griffith’s block-buster film Birth of a Nation amplified this professional consensus into a kind of racist gospel, which damned blacks as eternally inferior, venerated the Klan as saviors of civilization, and glorified a nation revitalized by the decisive return to white supremacy.

The major scholarly works on Woodson have provided valuable insight into the ways in which racist historiography and the racism of the historical profession shaped the advent of the association.¹¹ These same works have duly noted that the “racism,” “prejudice” and “segregation” of the broader society influenced its development, but this more global racial climate is rarely examined in any real depth.¹² I seek to weave together an “internalist” analysis, which focuses on history as a discipline and profession, with an “externalist” investigation, which concentrates on the larger racial landscape.¹³ Regarding this more expansive racial terrain, Woodson’s effort to build a movement around the pursuit of black history should be seen as part of a larger movement of “black intellectual reconstruction” during which black authors and scholars attempted to shift the “new century’s image of the black away from the stereotypes scattered throughout plantation fictions, blackface minstrelsy, vaudeville, racist pseudo-science and vulgar Social Darwinism.”¹⁴

Covering the years spanning from the foundation of the association in 1915 to the release of the Associated Publisher’s The Mind of the Negro as Reflected in Letters in 1926, the two chapters that follow outline the most significant reference points for the association’s creation and evolution as well as its early accomplishments. Chapter 1 (“The Cause”) explores the different strands of racism that Woodson was forced to confront as a budding black scholar living in the Jim Crow United States—they include the reflexive racism of Woodson’s graduate studies advisers at Harvard and the larger American historical profession, the virulent racism of Reconstruction historiography, the epic racism of Birth of a Nation, and the “racism in the nation’s service” of the Woodrow Wilson administration.¹⁵ It also examines the wellsprings of the association, which were deep and various, reflecting Woodson’s unique personal background as the only professional historian born to former slaves, his knowledge of vibrant nineteenth-century traditions of African American historical writing and freedom festivals, his involvement with turn-of-the-twentieth-century black literary and historical societies, and his commitment to scientific history, especially the ideal of objectivity. With the overarching objective to build black pride and reduce white prejudice, the association continued the mission of earlier communal, lay, and scholarly forms of the black history enterprise. The association institutionalized the black history pursuit, providing a home for the development of the study and celebration of black history as a movement.

Chapter 2 (“Reverse the Stage”) explores how Woodson addressed the fatal flaw of mainstream accounts of U.S. history, which he saw as their “failure to fathom the Negro mind.”¹⁶ Imagine American history performed as a pageant. African Americans had the nonspeaking roles, visible only in the background, as caricatures and stereotypes. How do bit parts get transformed into protagonists, people with hearts and minds of their own? By reversing history’s stage—turning it around 180 degrees—so that the stock figures such as the slave in chains now appear in the foreground. The publication of primary source documents was at the crux of this process of historical reorientation. In the pages of the Journal of Negro History—and in anthologies such as Negro Orators and Their Orations (1925) and Mind of the Negro—Woodson presented materials in which African Americans spoke on their own behalf. The construction of a new, multifaceted archive of African American experiences was one of the association’s first major achievements.

With the appearance of The Negro in Our History in 1922, the black history movement had a flagship publication. Woodson’s textbook—and other race histories written by his colleagues—foregrounded topics such as racial violence that conventional textbooks avoided. Woodson and his colleagues did not merely write “contributionist” histories, which inserted their own “heroes into the American story”; they also retold the story by placing the African American experience at the center of the narrative.¹⁷ If adding black faces to the pantheon of national heroes changed the complexion of U.S. history, the insistence that black history was American history reshaped its trajectory and transformed its larger themes. With the integration of African Americans into the nation’s history, the color line emerged as a principal theme, calling into question the fundamental assumption that the United States was the land of freedom and opportunity for all her peoples.

CHAPTER ONE

“The Cause”

History, for Woodson, was personal before it was ever academic. Woodson’s father, James Henry Woodson, was “owned as a slave” by a man called Jack Toney in Fluvanna County, Virginia, about sixty-five miles west of Richmond. In the summer of 1864, Toney had hired James out to a Mr. Stratton who set him to work digging ditches. When Stratton discovered that James was using his leisure time to make furniture and fish traps that he sold for pocket change, Stratton threatened to whip him for taking advantage. Woodson’s father, however, “turned the scales” and whipped Stratton. Fearing for his life, he fled toward Richmond in search of Union soldiers, eventually encountering a Union cavalry under the command of General Philip H. Sheridan. James waved a white handkerchief and the Union troops took him on as a local guide. He served with the Union army until the close of the war.¹

HISTORY AT HOME

Slavery, the Civil War, and emancipation were integral parts of Woodson’s immediate family history, and his upbringing was filled with stories about black life that would take on iconic historical significance. Among the most dramatic of all the personal stories was the harrowing experience of Woodson’s mother who had spent several days on an auction block in Richmond when she was only eleven years old, where she was “examined as one does a cow or mare for sale.”² From his father and other veterans, Woodson learned about the “trials and battles of the Negro for freedom and equality.” He said that his “interest in penetrating the past of my people was deepened and intensified” during these conversations.³

Woodson met hundreds of veterans but his relationship with one in particular was especially important. As a young man in Huntington, West Virginia, during the 1890s, Woodson grew close to Oliver Jones, a former soldier who had been poised in battle formation to attack Lee’s army in Appomattox the morning he surrendered. Jones was “a well educated man but he could neither read nor write.” As he did for his father, Woodson would read aloud to Jones and his friends from books and newspapers.⁴

In Huntington, Woodson read about and discussed the issues of the day—the gold standard, monopolies, populism, and the like—while digesting the first historical accounts of the Civil War with men who had themselves been on the battlefields. The wide-ranging discussions, according to Woodson, provided him with an invaluable education. Jones’s home was “all but a reading room,” filled with copies of black papers such as the Mountaineer, the Pioneer, and the Richmond Planet as well as books on the “achievements of the Negro,” including W. J. Simmons’s Men of Mark (1887), George Washington Williams’s Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion (1888) and J. T. Wilson’s Black Phalanx (1890).⁵ Simmons, Williams, and Wilson had all fought in the Civil War. Reading their books introduced Woodson to powerful models of African American contributionist historiography, which emphasized black contributions to the United States, highlighting their credentials as full-fledged Americans. “Beating down prejudice and upholding the national cause at the same time,” Wilson affirmed in the dedication to Black Phalanx, black soldiers “have inscribed upon their banners every important battle from April, 1863 to April, 1865.” In Williams’s estimation, the heroic exploits of black troops spoke not only to “the proud and priceless heritage of a race but the glory of a nation.”⁶

In the nineteenth century, most African Americans learned more about their “priceless heritage” from emancipation celebrations than they did from books. Free blacks in the North pioneered emancipation celebrations with the commemoration of the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1808. Great Britain’s abolition of slavery in its West Indian colonies on August 1, 1834, added another date to the freedom festivals calendar. After the Civil War, blacks across the country eagerly participated in a range of emancipation holidays, including Juneteenth, the Fourth of July and, most importantly, January 1 (or “National Freedom Day”), the day Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.

Veterans of the Civil War had the “privilege of occupying the front ranks” of Emancipation Day parades in the postbellum years. Some of the veterans Woodson came to know almost certainly participated in these processions. Woodson himself likely attended one or more emancipation celebrations in Virginia or West Virginia in his youth or as a young man. These festivals of freedom were a staple of African American community life in the postbellum era, and so even if Woodson had not participated in one, he would have been familiar with their basic elements through newspaper or word-of-mouth accounts.⁷

Featuring processions, music, poetry, picnics, amusements, and stem-winding orations, these public ceremonies became the “preeminent forum in which blacks displayed their recalled past,” enabling “vast numbers of blacks to learn, invent, and practice a common language of memory.” Parades were transformed into “mob...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Racial Terminology
• Introduction
• Part One the Color Line 1915–1926
• Part Two Culture 1922–1941
• Part Three Race 1942–1956
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index