Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture 9780822385783

Citation preview

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photography

on the color line

A John Hope Franklin Center Book

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Photography on the Color Line W. E . B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture shawn michelle smith

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duke university press Durham & London 2004

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© 2004 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper  Designed by CH Westmoreland Typeset in Janson by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Catalogingin-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of

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this book.

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For Sandy, Jay, Shannon, and especially for Joe

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Contents

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xv

introduction Photography on the Color Line 1

chapter one Envisioning Race 25

chapter two The Art of Scientific Propaganda 43

chapter three ‘‘Families of Undoubted Respectability’’ 77

chapter four Spectacles of Whiteness: The Photography of Lynching 113

epilogue The Archivist in the Archive 147 Notes 161 Bibliography 203

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Index 217

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List of Illustrations

plates (between pages 110–111) plate 1. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 2 plate 2. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 11 plate 3. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 12 plate 4. Bazoline Estelle Usher, Atlanta University student. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 5 plate 5. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 59 plate 6. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 2, no. 144 plate 7. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 63 plate 8. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 91 plate 9. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 99 plate 10. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 66 plate 11. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 53 plate 12. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 3, no. 210 plate 13. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 42

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plate 14. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. The Summit Avenue Ensemble. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 356

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plate 15. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 274 plate 16. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 350 plate 17. Dr. McDougald’s drug store. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 284 plate 18. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 360 plate 19. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 3, no. 247 plate 20. Interior view of grocery store. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 3, no. 236 plate 21. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 286 plate 22. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. The home of an African American lawyer, Atlanta, Georgia. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 352 plate 23. David Tobias Howard, an undertaker, his mother, and wife, Atlanta, Georgia. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 283 plate 24. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 363

figures 1. Thomas E. Askew, photographer, Atlanta, Georgia. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 3, no. 201 . . . . . . 5 2. Henry A. Rucker, internal revenue collector, Atlanta, Georgia. Active in the Niagara Movement and the naacp. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 281 . . . . . . 5 3. The American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition . . . . . . 13 4. Stereograph, Keystone View Company. Trocadéro entrance to the exposition, Colonial Section in foreground, Paris, 1900 . . . . . . 15 5. Stereograph, Underwood and Underwood. The famous Trocadéro Palace from the end of the Seine Bridge, Paris, 1900 . . . . . . 16 6. Stereograph, Underwood and Underwood. Natives of Dahomey, Africa— Dahomey Village, Paris, 1900 . . . . . . 17 7. Cartoon, ‘‘Darkies’ Day at the Fair,’’ World’s Fair Puck . . . . . . 18 8. W. E. B. Du Bois at the 1900 Paris Exposition . . . . . . 19 9. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 1 . . . . . . 45 10. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 2 . . . . . . 45 11. Daguerreotype by Joseph T. Zealy, for Louis Agassiz. Drana, front view, 1850 . . . . . . 48

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12. Daguerreotype by Joseph T. Zealy, for Louis Agassiz. Drana, profile view, 1850 . . . . . . 48

x list of illustrations

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13. Photograph by John Lamprey. Frontal view of a Malayan man, c. 1868– 69 . . . . . . 50 14. Photograph by John Lamprey. Profile view of a Malayan man, c. 1868– 69 . . . . . . 50 15. Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, vol. 1, plate 62 (1887), Running at Full Speed . . . . . . 51 16. Francis Galton’s ‘‘standard photograph’’ of himself . . . . . . 52 17. Composite portraits by Francis Galton. ‘‘The Jewish Type’’ . . . . . . 53 18. Portraits of young African American men and women . . . . . . 56 19. Portraits of young African American men and women . . . . . . 58 20. Portraits of young African American men and women . . . . . . 59 21. Bazoline Estelle Usher, Atlanta University student. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 6 . . . . . . 60 22. Bazoline Estelle Usher, Atlanta University student. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 5 . . . . . . 60 23. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 2, no. 197 . . . . . . 61 24. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 3 . . . . . . 62 25. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 40 . . . . . . 64 26. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 39 . . . . . . 64 27. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. Henry Hugh Proctor, minister, First Congregational Church, Atlanta, Georgia. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 62 . . . . . . 68 28. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. Henry Hugh Proctor, minister, First Congregational Church, Atlanta, Georgia. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 61 . . . . . . 68 29. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. Mamie Westmorland, schoolteacher. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 79 . . . . . . 70 30. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. Thomas E. Askew Prepares to Scold His Five Mischievous Sons, c. 1870 . . . . . . 73 31. Cartoon, ‘‘A Step in the Darwinian Development,’’ Harper’s Weekly . . . . . . 81 32. Drawing by Sol Eytinge Jun., ‘‘Wedding Trip of the Twins—Off for Europe,’’ Harper’s Weekly, September 7, 1878 . . . . . . 84 33. Drawing by Sol Eytinge Jun., ‘‘After Doing Paris and the Rest of Europe, the Bridal Party Return to Blackville,’’ Harper’s Weekly, October 26, 1878 . . . . . . 85 34. From Alphonse Bertillon, Identification anthropométrique, instructions signalétiques . . . . . . 89

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35. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 275 . . . . . . 94

list of illustrations xi

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36. Negro city tenements, Atlanta, Georgia, W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 300 . . . . . . 95 37. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 327 . . . . . . 95 38. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 3, no. 251 . . . . . . 96 39. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 3, no. 237 . . . . . . 97 40. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 3, no. 220 . . . . . . 101 41. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 354 . . . . . . 105 42. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 289 . . . . . . 106 43. Detail from photographic postcard. The lynching of Lige Daniels. August 3, 1920, Center, Texas . . . . . . 120 44. Detail from photographic postcard. The lynching of Jesse Washington. May 16, 1916, Robinson, Texas . . . . . . 123 45. Detail from photographic postcard, verso side. The lynching of Jesse Washington. May 16, 1916, Robinson, Texas . . . . . . 123 46. Detail from photographic postcard, verso side. The lynching of Jesse Washington. May 16, 1916, Robinson, Texas . . . . . . 124 47. Detail from photographic postcard. The lynching of Jesse Washington. May 16, 1916, Robinson, Texas . . . . . . 124 48. Detail from photographic postcard. The lynching of Lige Daniels. August 3, 1920, Center, Texas . . . . . . 126 49. Detail from photograph, verso side. The charred torso of an African American male. 1902, Georgia . . . . . . 131 50. Detail from photograph. The lynching of Rubin Stacy. July 19, 1935, Fort Lauderdale, Florida . . . . . . 133 51. Detail from photograph. The lynching of Rubin Stacy. July 19, 1935, Fort Lauderdale, Florida . . . . . . 133 52. Detail from photograph. The lynching of Rubin Stacy. July 19, 1935, Fort Lauderdale, Florida . . . . . . 134 53. Detail from photograph. The lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. August 7, 1930, Marion, Indiana . . . . . . 136 54. Detail from photograph. The lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. August 7, 1930, Marion, Indiana . . . . . . 136 55. Detail from photograph. The burning corpse of William Brown. September 28, 1919, Omaha, Nebraska . . . . . . 140 56. Cover art by John Henry Adams, Voice of the Negro. January 1905 . . . . . . 150 57. Sketch by John Henry Adams, Du Bois at Seventeen Months Old, and His Mother, Voice of the Negro, March 1905 . . . . . . 153

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58. Sketch by John Henry Adams, Du Bois at Six Years of Age, Voice of the Negro, March 1905 . . . . . . 154

xii list of illustrations

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59. Sketch by John Henry Adams, Du Bois at Seventeen, Voice of the Negro, March 1905 . . . . . . 154 60. Sketch by John Henry Adams, Du Bois Spending a Quiet Half Hour, Voice of the Negro, March 1905 . . . . . . 155 61. Sketch by John Henry Adams, Head Picture of the Du Bois of Today at His Desk, Voice of the Negro, March 1905 . . . . . . 157 62. Sketch by John Henry Adams, Du Bois Bracing a Stiff Breeze, Voice of the Negro, March 1905 . . . . . . 157

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Acknowledgments

It is a great pleasure to formally thank the many people and institutions that have supported the production of this book. Generous funding for research and writing was provided by a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Center for the Humanities, Oregon State University, an Irene Diamond Foundation Fellowship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center, University of Utah. The directors and staff at each of these institutions helped make these years particularly productive and enjoyable, and I would like to acknowledge Peter Copek, Wendy Madar, Howard Dodson, Diana Lachatanere, Dian Alleyne, Peter Hobbs, Gene Fitzgerald, Holly Campbell, Lindsey Law, Emily Heward, and Richard Tuttle. Colleagues I met at each of these places enriched my thinking as this project developed, and I’d like to thank especially Colin Palmer, Carolyn Adenaike, Ivor Miller, Lydia Lindsey, Kim Lau, Janet Theiss, Marouf Hasian, Ed Rubin, Katie PearceSassen, Ryan Spellecy, Crystal Parikh, Brian Locke, Gillian Brown, and Vince Cheng. Kathryne Lindberg was a particularly engaging and rigorous interlocutor, and she, along with Martha Biondi and Shannon Miller, made periods of hard work fun. Mary Ison, Barbara Natanson, and Jan Grenci in the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress were very helpful over the course of many years, and I am especially indebted to Jan for first introducing me to the W. E. B. Du Bois collections and for later spending several afternoons working through the albums with me. Mary Yearwood and Sharon Howard at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture shared their expertise and aided me in

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situating the Georgia Negro photographs within a broader historical context. I would also like to thank Karen Jefferson at the Archives Department of the Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, the staff of the Atlanta History Center Archives, and that of the Auburn Avenue Research Center. Several people gave me opportunities to present portions of this work to stimulating audiences whose questions helped refine my argument, and in this context I’d like to acknowledge especially Wilfred Samuels, Richard Stein, and the graduate students of Northwest Passages, an American Studies research group at the University of Washington. Some of my initial thoughts along these lines were first developed in the article ‘‘ ‘Looking at One’s Self through the Eyes of Others’: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Photographs for the 1900 Paris Exposition,’’ African American Review 34, 4 (winter 2000): 581–99, reprinted in The Souls of Black Folk: One Hundred Years Later, edited by Dolan Hubbard (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 189–217. I thank both publishers for permission to rework that material here. Most of the research and writing for this book was undertaken while I was a faculty member at Washington State University, and I am grateful to Sue McLeod and Victor Villanueva, chairs of the Department of English during my tenure, for enabling me to take research leaves in order to develop this project. I would also like to thank my colleagues, especially Alex Hammond, Joan Burbick, Carol Siegel, and Noël Sturgeon, for making my work at wsu so enriching. Two College of Liberal Arts Initiation and Completion Grants, an Arts and Humanities Travel Grant, and funds from the Department of English and the Graduate School at wsu, helped me to purchase negatives and prints during my initial research, and I am especially grateful to Karen DePauw for her support. I completed the final stages of this work as a member of the Department of American Studies at Saint Louis University, and I would like to thank my current chair, Matt Mancini, and dean Mike May for their extraordinarily generous help in securing funds for final reproduction of the images. I am grateful for support from a Mellon Faculty Development Grant, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Department of American Studies at Saint Louis University. My research assistants, Angie Dietz and Nancy Thompson, were a great help in securing images, proofreading, and preparing the index. As the manuscript was enter-

xvi acknowledgments

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ing the final stages of production, I had the pleasure of coteaching a graduate seminar on W. E. B. Du Bois and race with my colleague Jonathan Smith, and I hope this book will resonate with some of the richness of that conversation. I sincerely appreciate the long-standing support of Michael Davidson and Wai Chee Dimock, and I am truly indebted to them for responding to many calls for help over the years. I also continue to benefit from the insights Roddey Reid, Nicole Tonkovich, Phel Steinmetz, and Stephanie McCurry offered early on in my thinking. The friends and colleagues I have turned to most often for intellectual camaraderie, creative inspiration, and just for the fun of it, include Shelli Fowler, T. V. Reed, Wendy Walters, Ralph Rodriguez, Loren Glass, Amy Mooney, Geof Bradfield, Joseph Heathcott, Ashley Cruce, Jo Nutter, Marsanne Brammer, Elise Hanley, and Krista Lydia Roybal. Beth Freeman is that rare combination of good friend and rigorous critic, and my work has benefited considerably from her influence. Deborah Willis’s encouragement has meant a very great deal to me, and her foundational work in the history of African American photography is a constant source of inspiration. Writing this book has also brought me into new and renewed conversation with many people working on photography, race, and visual culture, and for their insights, and the example of their scholarship, I would like to thank Sally Stein, Maren Stange, Alan Trachtenberg, Lisa Bloom, Elizabeth Abel, Jeannene Przyblyski, Eric Breitbart, Lisa Gail Collins, and Leigh Raiford. My admiration for the work of Laura Wexler and Priscilla Wald, and my deep appreciation for the kindness of their support and the rigor of their intellectual challenge, is boundless. Ken Wissoker has been a wonderful editor, guiding me carefully through revisions and the nervous final stages, and I am especially indebted to him for imagining a book that aims to do justice to the remarkable photographs at its center. I would also like to thank Kate Lothman and Petra Dreiser for their diligent help in fine-tuning the manuscript. I am profoundly grateful to my parents, Sandy and Jay Smith, for their enthusiastic and steadfast support, and for their continual reminders of the many pleasures of visual culture. Shannon Smith and Derek Hutchinson have cheered this work on along its way, and I would like to thank them especially for letting me share in their own

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very thrilling project, that of Haley Smith Hutchinson. Finally, this book keenly registers Joe Masco’s thoughtful engagement throughout, and I am most grateful to him for keeping it under his close and constant care.

xviii acknowledgments

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introduction

Photography on the Color Line

Looking back over an extraordinarily long and distinguished career, W. E. B. Du Bois would remember: ‘‘At the beginning of the twentieth century, when I was but ten years out of college, I visited the Paris Exposition of 1900. It was one of the finest, perhaps the very finest, of world expositions. . . . I had brought with me, as excuse for coming, a little display showing the development of Negroes in the United States, which gained a gold medal.’’ 1 Despite his somewhat modest account, Du Bois’s participation in the American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition marked a formative moment in his early intellectual life. The Paris Exposition launched Du Bois into national and international recognition as an African American scholar and a leader in the emerging field of sociology.2 Further, Du Bois introduced one of his ‘‘little displays’’ with what would become his most prophetic pronouncement: ‘‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.’’ At the Paris Exposition, Du Bois declared that ‘‘race’’ would prove the defining and most fundamental problem of the age, and his own work from that period has shaped critical thinking about race for the past century. Du Bois’s predictions about the color line continue to resonate in the current historical moment, but some of the important nuances of his original understanding of the color line have been lost to us over the hundred years since his first articulation. This book aims to recover the visual meanings of the color line, to excavate from Du Bois’s initial conception the visual theater of racist projection and inscription, as well as antiracist resistance, which, for Du Bois, structures the process of racial identification. While scholars have productively employed the material meaning of the color line as the marker of social and economic divides engendered by slavery, segregation, colo-

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nialism, and imperialism, they have largely left untapped the conceptual meaning of the color line as a nexus of competing gazes in which racialization is understood as the effect of both intense scrutiny and obfuscation under a white supremacist gaze. It is this latter sense of the color line that this book teases out and deciphers, an understanding that I bring into focus largely through a reading of the remarkable collection of photographs Du Bois compiled for the 1900 Paris Exposition. In Photography on the Color Line, I argue that the 363 photographs Du Bois procured for the American Negro Exhibit collectively function as a counterarchive that challenges a long legacy of racist taxonomy, intervening in turn-of-the-century ‘‘race science’’ by offering competing visual evidence.3 But the photographs themselves do not simply or transparently offer up such a reading. Indeed, Du Bois’s archive is almost impossibly enigmatic, and, at first, intractable. Unlike other photographic displays included in the American Negro Exhibit, Du Bois’s Georgia Negro albums do not offer an explanatory text; the photographs do not have captions. The albums present hundreds of photographs of unnamed individuals, unmarked buildings, unlocated streets, and vacant fields. In part, the very interpretive challenge of these images captured and held my attention, compelling me to theorize ways to approach an archive that gives one very little help in deciphering its meaning. I found the Georgia Negro albums especially provocative, for while the message they contain is impenetrable to contemporary viewers, in 1900, an international jury awarded Du Bois a gold medal in part for these images and the cultural work they performed. In other words, what remains obscure today was apparently self-evident in 1900; the images themselves, without captions or an introductory text, performed recognizable cultural work at the turn of the century. It is thus my task here to make these images comprehensible once again for a contemporary audience, to recover their lost meaning, and to revitalize them as an antiracist visual archive by restoring a signifying context that makes the images readable and their critical cultural work intelligible. To do so, I argue first that Du Bois himself was an early visual theorist of race and racism. The 1900 photographs call attention to the visual nexus of understanding and imagery that underpins some of Du Bois’s most influential written work on race at the turn of the century, underscoring the visual paradigms that inform ‘‘double2 photography on the color line

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consciousness,’’ ‘‘the Veil,’’ and ‘‘second-sight.’’ Du Bois aimed not simply to challenge ‘‘racist images’’ but also to reconfigure the racialized structures of the gaze through which he suggested race was formulated and racial identification negotiated. Second, I propose a critically comparative interpretive visual methodology, which reads visual archives against one another to find photographic meaning in the interstices between them, in the challenges they pose to one another, and in the competing claims they make on cultural import. Drawing from Du Bois’s insights, this methodology opens up ways for contemporary scholars to understand the multivalenced critical cultural work that photographic images, and photographic archives, perform. Thus Photography on the Color Line not only offers a critical assessment and recovery of Du Bois’s visual practice and theory but also an exercise in visual cultural analysis, one that seeks to make the photographic archive resonate with all its cultural and historical significance. This book demonstrates that visual culture was fundamental not only to racist classification but also to racial reinscription and the reconstruction of racial knowledge in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My reading of Du Bois’s photographs shows how contested, mutable, and flexible visual culture has been as a site through which race is posed and challenged. Photography on the Color Line models a critical methodology that sees race as fundamental to and defined by visual culture, that understands race and visual culture to be mutually constitutive, and that reads photographic archives as racialized sites invested in laying claim to contested cultural meanings.

Du Bois’s Georgia Negro Exhibit

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For the 1900 Paris Exposition, Du Bois organized 363 photographs into three albums, entitled Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (volumes 1–3), and Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. The albums constituted part of Du Bois’s larger Georgia Negro Exhibit,4 which he produced at Atlanta University in collaboration with students and recent graduates.5 Roughly modeled on his groundbreaking work The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois’s Georgia Negro Exhibit was designed to show ‘‘what the negro really is in the South,’’ 6 and it included, in addiintroduction 3

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tion to the photographs studied here, a series of charts and graphs documenting the social and economic status of African Americans,7 maps depicting the African American population of various Georgia counties, and a multivolume set containing all the Georgia state laws pertaining to African Americans from 1732 to 1899.8 The studies were highly regarded, and, as noted earlier, Paris Exposition judges awarded Du Bois a prestigious gold medal for his work as ‘‘compiler of [the] Georgia Negro Exhibit.’’ 9 Du Bois’s Georgia Negro albums are large horizontal folios filled with images rendered in the soft warm tones of albumen paper prints.10 Almost two-thirds of the photographs are portraits, generally paired on a page, and they typically offer two views of an individual, one frontal, the other in varying degrees of profile.11 The remaining photographs depict domestic interiors, homes, businesses, churches, rural scenes, street scenes, group portraits, and an occasional single portrait.12 The now decaying leather bindings on the albums present title, volume number, and the words Du Bois in goldleaf lettering.13 Beyond the simple denotation of title and compiler, the albums offer viewers little in the way of directive cues. Individuals and places represented remain unnamed, except as being from ‘‘Georgia, U.S.A.’’; photographers are not credited; and no methodology is discussed. Once again, the images have no captions. Only after seeing one of the Georgia Negro photographs reproduced in Deborah Willis’s groundbreaking Reflections in Black, there attributed to Thomas E. Askew, Atlanta’s first African American photographer, was I able to recover, reading across several Atlanta archives, other portraits made by Askew also included in the Du Bois albums. Finally, a signature lace curtain and tapestry linked even more of the images to Askew. I have thus discovered that Thomas E. Askew produced many of the studio portraits for Du Bois’s Georgia Negro albums, including one of the most striking images in the collection, which depicts his sons in the Summit Avenue Ensemble (plate 14).14 I have also discerned that Askew himself is represented in one of the photographs (figure 1),15 and portraits taken by him include those of Henry Hugh Proctor, minister of the First Congregational Church of Atlanta (figures 27 and 28),16 Mamie Westmorland, a schoolteacher (figure 29), and her stepdaughter, Ernestine Bell,17 as well as group portraits of families posed outside their lovely homes (plate 22).18 4 photography on the color line

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1. Thomas E. Askew, photographer, Atlanta, Georgia. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 3, no. 201. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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2. Henry A. Rucker, internal revenue collector, Atlanta, Georgia. Active in the Niagara Movement and the naacp. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 281. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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Not surprisingly, many of the photographs in the Georgia Negro albums present scenes and people from Atlanta, Du Bois’s home at the turn of the century. At least two churches are represented,19 and prominent Atlantans include David Tobias Howard, an undertaker, photographed in his carriage with his mother and wife (plate 23),20 and Henry A. Rucker, an Internal Revenue collector, photographed in his large office at his imposing desk (figure 2).21 I have identified one of the young women represented in the initial series of portraits as Bazoline Estelle Usher, a student at Atlanta University from 1899 to 1906 (plate 4),22 and it is almost certain that similar portraits also depict Atlanta University students. While a small number of the images in Du Bois’s collection present rural scenes, including a few of men and women farming (plate 19), and one of a small group of men seated together on a rustic front porch, by and large they represent a wellto-do urban population, Du Bois’s ‘‘Talented Tenth’’ of ‘‘influential and forceful men,’’ 23 and the educated youth who will replace and surpass them. While residents of Georgia might have recognized some of the places and people in Du Bois’s albums, a larger national and international audience would not have had the benefit of such visual clues. Those first viewers would have seen the albums as they remain today, without captions or credits. They would have been left simply to follow the images themselves, to read the visual narrative pasted in place in Du Bois’s albums, and perhaps to heed the one public statement Du Bois himself made concerning the photographs, namely, that visitors to the American Negro Exhibit would find ‘‘several volumes of photographs of typical Negro faces, which hardly square with conventional American ideas.’’ 24 If Du Bois conceived his Georgia Negro photographs as contestatory images, as representations that challenged ‘‘conventional American ideas,’’ then it is important to read them against the racist ‘‘conventions’’ of U.S. visual culture in order to understand fully the resistant nature of Du Bois’s visual project. This book offers such a critical inroad by considering Du Bois’s photographs in relation to scientific, institutional, and sensational photographic archives intent on defining racial identities and reinforcing racial hierarchies at the turn of the century. Du Bois’s Georgia Negro photographs signified in a cultural context dominated by scientific racism, racial segregation, and lynching. As we shall see, the photographs challenge the distortions of mug 6 photography on the color line

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shots made to uphold scientific discourses of ‘‘Negro inferiority’’ and ‘‘Negro criminality,’’ and they proclaim an African American presence in the face of the spectacular erasures produced by lynching.

Albums as Counterarchive Du Bois’s photographs for the American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition evoke multiple codes of photographic meaning. As my analysis in subsequent chapters will show, the images formally resemble a wide range of disparate kinds of photographs, from the instrumental records of scientific and criminological mug shots to middle-class portraits. Given this diversity in genre and the paucity of explanatory information provided by the albums, the photograph collection demands a creative investigatory framework—one that critically compares archives, and one that might be adapted to assess the many different kinds of photographs that exist without ancillary documentation. Despite the fact that his name is embossed on the album spines, Du Bois does not emerge as the ‘‘author’’ of the Georgia Negro photographs in any simple way. Once again, Thomas E. Askew made at least some of the photographs, and there is no evidence suggesting that Du Bois ever used a camera himself. And yet, Du Bois is clearly marked as the framer and organizer of the images—it is his name on the spine of the albums, and it is Du Bois who was awarded a gold medal for this work. Thus, if Du Bois does not exactly function as an author in this case, he is certainly an archivist—an assembler of already prepared parts, making meaning by choosing and placing and pasting images in relation to one another. An archive circumscribes and delimits the meaning of the photographs that comprise it, investing images with import calculated to confirm a particular discourse. Even as it purports simply to supply evidence, or to document historical occurrences, the archive maps the cultural terrain it claims to describe. In other words, the archive constructs the knowledge it would seem only to register or make evident. Thus archives are ideological; they are conceived with political intent, to make specific claims on cultural meaning. Archivists choose certain images while excluding others, and by comparing contemporary archives, one can decipher the range of imaging options available at a introduction 7

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particular moment, and thus begin to interpret the significance of the choices an archivist has made. Because archives claim contested signifying terrain, they proclaim importance in strained relation to one another, and often the stakes involved in the cultural work that visual archives perform are very high. For example, at the turn of the century, the meaning of race, as visually codified, registered one’s claims to social and legal justice, economic opportunity, political rights, and even basic human rights, including one’s very survival. Photographic archives defining race supported, or, in Du Bois’s case, aimed to dismantle, the racial hierarchies that fundamentally informed legal and scientific knowledge around 1900. Once an archive is compiled, it makes a claim on history; it exists as a record of the past. The archive is a vehicle of memory, and as it becomes the trace on which an historical record is founded, it makes some people, places, things, ideas, and events visible, while relegating others, through its signifying absences, to invisibility. In this sense, then, archives have an ideological function not only in the moment of their inception but also across time, for they determine in large part what will be collectively remembered and how it will be remembered. Thus, at the most basic level, Du Bois’s archive (and its recovery) resists the erasure of African Americans from the national historical record, redressing the distortions and violence of racist caricature and scientific typology. But as Du Bois’s Georgia Negro photographs make clear, with the passing of time, an archive’s specific import can also become obscured; its particular engagement of historical debates can be lost. To recover the original power of an archive, one must aim to restore the cultural contexts of its originary moment by reading it in relation to the other archives it first engaged. This book thus addresses the general problem of how the archive signifies over time by endeavoring to recover the contexts that illuminate the cultural work Du Bois’s specific archive performed at the moment of its inception, reconstructing its historical resonance and restoring its first meaning to provide a basis on which this archive can continue to produce new meanings for our own time. In his foundational essay, ‘‘The Body and the Archive,’’ Allan Sekula suggests that ‘‘the archive became the dominant institutional basis for photographic meaning’’ between 1880 and 1910.25 He argues that the institutional archive produced photographs (and bodies) as transparent, equivalent, exchangeable texts organized according to an over8 photography on the color line

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riding ideological surveillance invested in constructing middle-class norms against criminal deviance. According to Sekula, the popular middle-class portrait and the institutional criminal mug shot have always been integrally intertwined, the police repository serving as the limit that defines the bounds of middle-class self-possession.26 And yet, Du Bois’s archive troubles that oppositional mutual reinforcement by subtly demonstrating how hard an emergent black bourgeoisie had to fight the racist imagery meant to inscribe and contain the black body in criminal archives. Not everyone had equal access to privileged middle-class representations, and certainly part of Du Bois’s project at the turn of the century was to reject the whitewash of normative middle-class archives, claiming a space for African Americans within the middle classes. With his Georgia Negro albums, Du Bois produces a counterarchive that reconfigures the contours of institutional knowledge, refocusing photographic meaning and visual identification out from the archival margin, shifting the apex of normalcy to rest squarely on an African American middle class. Du Bois’s photograph collection intervenes in dominant ways of knowing and representing race, reenvisioning a culturally authorized visual record’s codification of racial information. Du Bois grounds African American identity in a contestatory archive, offering a place from which a counter-history can be imagined and narrated, and, as a counterarchive, Du Bois’s Georgia Negro albums underscore the ways in which both identity and history are founded, at least partially, through representation. If one cannot or does not produce an archive, others will dictate the terms by which one will be represented and remembered; one will exist, for the future, in someone else’s archive. Du Bois’s counterarchive specifically highlights the racialized contours of ‘‘official’’ photographic meaning and scientific knowledge, precisely as it challenges such authorized claims to truth. Du Bois’s Georgia Negro images signify in critical relation to, and ‘‘signify on,’’ the scientific, eugenicist, and criminological archives that attempted to proclaim African American inferiority at the turn of the century.27 The albums trouble the normative, assumed transparency of authorized institutional knowledge. But Du Bois’s albums employ other visual tactics as well; they also reproduce the sentimental and commodified forms of the middle-class portrait to contest the conflation of African Americans under the visual signs of crimiintroduction 9

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nality or biological inferiority. As bell hooks has argued, the ubiquitous snapshot can become a site of resistance and reorientation: ‘‘The camera was the central instrument by which blacks could disprove representations of us created by white folks.’’ 28 Indeed, the nineteenth-century counterparts to the later snapshots that hooks examines—those myriad popular forms Geoffrey Batchen has called ‘‘vernacular photographies’’ 29—rivaled institutional archives as preeminent cultural sites producing photographic meaning throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is, in part, the personal photograph that Du Bois wields in order to challenge and undermine dominant institutional archives of racialized photographic meaning. Indeed, Du Bois’s albums subtly recall that most sentimental of cultural forms, the family photograph album.30 Du Bois’s archive does explicitly what all collections of photographs do implicitly, namely, signify in relation to other archives. Each photograph enters a visual terrain that has been mapped and codified by other photographs, in the service of competing discourses. One recognizes a photograph and deciphers its various meanings by posing it (consciously or not) in relation to other photographs. Each photograph negotiates not only the past of its split-second historical referent but also a photographic past of other images. But this is not to say that the relative relation of one photographic archive to another remains neutral: once again, the stakes in the production of archival knowledge are very high, for particular photographic forms, placed in specific collections, are utilized to support state disciplinary technologies. For example, today, paired frontal and hard profile head shots—the ‘‘mug shots’’ of early anthropologists, criminologists, biological racialists, and eugenicists—are nearly impossible to read outside of a long legacy of instrumental function and identification; they cannot signify neutrally. Particular photographic meanings depend on a viewer experienced in reading culturally specific visual histories. Visual perception is mapped by a web of intersecting gazes, some sanctioned, others denied, their visions, even of self, obscured. Du Bois’s Georgia Negro photographs demonstrate how the codifications of the color line instruct viewers to see race in specific ways, and they simultaneously work to retrain viewers. My own reading of the photographs, and of Du Bois’s resistant visual project, demonstrates how race and visual culture have been mutually constituted in the United States. By this 10 photography on the color line

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I mean to suggest that the problem of the color line is much more fundamental than the problem of racist representation, which is itself immense. Indeed, visual archives reinforce the racialized cultural prerogatives of the gaze, which determine who is authorized to look, and what will be seen, such that looking itself is a racial act, and being looked at has racial effects. Archives train, support, and disrupt racialized gazes, infusing race into the very structures of how we see and what we know. However, by arguing that race is conceived not simply through representation but also through acts of looking, I do not mean to reinforce a literal notion of ‘‘color’’; instead, I wish to emphasize the ways in which racial identification and recognition are negotiated through, and even instigated by, racialized gazes in a racist culture. Beginning here with the site of the American Negro Exhibit, its history and place within the 1900 Paris Exposition, and moving from this point to the wider context of a history of representations of race in subsequent chapters, I am interested in how Du Bois’s images evoke and contest the ‘‘authorizing discourses’’ that enable viewing.31 Du Bois’s Georgia Negro photographs refuse the fiction of ‘‘the disengaged look of universal man,’’ 32 challenging the continued authorization of a white gaze; indeed, such disruptions of a racialized normative gaze are central to the ways in which the images function as a counterarchive. Du Bois’s photographs engage viewers that occupy particular historical and cultural positions, and they work to dismantle and reconfigure the popular and scientific visual genealogies of African Americans that inform dominant turn-of-the-century viewing practices. If the viewer, at least in part, produces photographic meaning, Du Bois’s albums suggest that the viewer can also be directed to look and see differently. Signifying between instrumental archives and sentimental albums, Du Bois’s photographs suggest that representations and viewing are both determined and determining forces. The middle-class portrait presupposes the emotional labor of an invested viewer,33 and with his albums, Du Bois could use that affective force as a critical wedge against racist interpretation. By combining and juxtaposing objectifying photographs with images that evoke a sentimental register, Du Bois reminds viewers that institutional archives cannot contain individuals, nor univocally determine photographic meaning. Identification is the effect not only of an institutionally authorized surintroduction 11

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veillance but also of self-inscription, performance, and posing for a sympathetic viewer. Personal archives, with their quotidian images, always compete with institutional archives over the foundations of knowledge. Indeed, Du Bois’s albums, as counterarchive, suggest that photographic meaning, and even identity itself, is situated somewhere between the institutional and the vernacular, between determination and agency, between the archive and the album.

Displaying Race at the 1900 Paris Exposition The 1900 American Negro Exhibit was a relatively new kind of exhibition, representing African American achievements for an international audience. While so-called Colored Departments were created to oversee displays organized by African Americans for world’s fairs as early as 1885,34 separate exhibits showcasing African American works were inaugurated most conspicuously in 1895, with the Negro Building at the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition.35 Two years after African Americans were denied official participation in the 1893 Chicago Columbian World’s Exposition, they were invited to present their cultural achievements and industrial innovations to the world at the Atlanta Exposition of 1895, and again at the Tennessee Centennial Exposition of 1897. Following in this new tradition, and at the encouragement of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, the U.S. commissioner-general, Ferdinand W. Peck, invited Thomas Junius Calloway to oversee the production of an American Negro Exhibit for the Paris Exposition of 1900.36 Calloway’s exhibit would win the highest honor, a Grand Prix, from Paris Exposition judges,37 and from Paris it would travel to Buffalo, New York—to be included in the 1901 Pan-American Exposition—and then to Charleston, South Carolina—to be included in the 1901–2 South Carolina Interstate and West Indian Exposition—before finally being stored at the Library of Congress.38 In Paris, the American Negro Exhibit was housed within the Palace of Social Economy, a wooden structure built in the style of Louis XVI. It was situated next to the Palace of Horticulture, on the banks of the Seine, across from the national buildings of European and North American countries.39 In addition to the exhibits Du Bois prepared from Georgia, the American Negro Exhibit included a large 12 photography on the color line

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3. The American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Reproduced from the collections of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

portrait of Booker T. Washington, hanging over the exhibit; portraits of B. K. Bruce, U.S. senator from Mississippi, and Judson W. Lyons, registrar of the Treasury; a bronze statuette of Frederick Douglass;40 photographs, reports, and artifacts from Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes, as well as from Fisk University; exhibits showing the work of professional schools at Howard and Atlanta Universities; a display devoted to African American Medal of Honor men; four volumes containing the official patent sheets issued to nearly four hundred African Americans; and two hundred texts from Daniel Murray’s extensive collection of African American literary works.41 Within the Palace of Social Economy, the American Negro Exhibit was joined by other U.S. exhibits, including models of tenement houses, maps of industrial plants, and the work of factory inspectors, as well as displays from other countries, including the state insurance of Germany, the mutual aid societies of France, and the international Red Cross Society.42

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Situated within the Palace of Social Economy, and thereby rooted introduction 13

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in the modern ‘‘science of society,’’ the American Negro Exhibit participated ideologically in the celebration of Western European ‘‘civilization’’ and ‘‘progress.’’ Further, as one of the most ‘‘scientific’’ of the exhibits within the Palace of Social Economy,43 the American Negro Exhibit claimed a place at the forefront of a Western advance, offering evidence of African American ability and leadership. The exhibit emblematized Du Bois’s then strong ‘‘faith in the power of empirical sociology,’’ 44 in the power of ‘‘empirical investigation, the statistical method, [and] unbiased evaluation’’ to bring about social change.45 However, the American Negro Exhibit’s narrative of progress and success was also easily appropriated for varied, and even contradictory, purposes. Placed beside model tenement houses and mutual aid societies, it was posed as a ‘‘solution’’ to a social problem, as a remedy, undoubtedly, to what Du Bois decried as the ‘‘half-named’’ American ‘‘Negro problem.’’ 46 Within the larger context of the 1900 Paris Exposition as a whole, the American Negro Exhibit existed in complicated relation to other racialized displays. In one sense, it clearly contested the racialized evolutionary scale on which so-called native village exhibits were founded. Such exhibits, prominent at international expositions from 1889 to 1914, helped to popularize white supremacist scientific theories of evolution and human development.47 At the turn of the century, people from all over the world, and particularly from European colonies, were brought to international expositions to construct, and then to live in, ‘‘native villages.’’ 48 Arranged around the outskirts of European centers celebrating Western industrial progress, the native villages served to display exotic otherness, to showcase imperial spoils. These exhibits functioned both as entertainment and education, and anthropologists in France and the United States saw them as important means for furthering ethnological study.49 Feeding a fantasy of white supremacist evolutionary theory, the native villages proposed to offer (white) Westerners a glimpse ‘‘back,’’ down a ‘‘sliding scale of humanity,’’ toward a ‘‘primitive’’ past of savagery. At many of the world’s fairs, the geographical layout of buildings and exhibits was designed explicitly to reproduce this fantasy: Visitors to the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition were encouraged to walk through the Midway, with its native villages, toward the center of the fair, marked by its literally white, Greco-Roman buildings, displaying the latest European and North American scientific and cultural achievements.50 14 photography on the color line

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4. Stereograph, Keystone View Company. Trocadéro entrance to the exposition, Colonial Section in foreground, Paris, 1900. Reproduced from the collections of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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The ‘‘scientific’’ displays that drew evolutionary ‘‘evidence’’ of primitive savagery from the colonies ideologically reinforced, in turn, the virtues of European conquest, American imperialism, and racial segregation. In France, according to Paul Greenhalgh, such exhibits ‘‘ ‘revealed’ the apparently degenerate state the conquered peoples lived in, making the conquest not only more acceptable but necessary for their moral rescue.’’ 51 In the United States, according to Robert Rydell, ‘‘these hierarchical displays of race and culture’’ suggested that ‘‘seemingly backward ‘types’ of humanity, including blacks, could legitimately be treated as wards of the factory and field until an indeterminate evolutionary period rendered them either civilized or extinct.’’ 52 The native village exhibits situated peoples of color outside of history, placing them back in time in a permanent prehistory of the white Western world, and they suggested that the path to the present was paved with subordination and service to what Du Bois called the ‘‘white masters of the world.’’ 53 The Paris Exposition of 1900, by far the largest international exhibition of its time, drawing some 48 million attendants,54 greatly expanded the tradition of native village exhibits. The entire area of the Trocadéro gardens was devoted to these colonial displays, and France alone presented over twenty of them.55 The Dahomeyan village was among the most popular at the exposition, and one writer described introduction 15

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it as follows: ‘‘Superb negroes are at work in their cabins, which are covered with thatch. In the midst of them stands the table for the human sacrifices . . . ; the hatchets exhibited on it have sent many unfortunates to the kingdom of shadows.’’ 56 The American Negro Exhibit was forced implicitly to negotiate such constructions of ‘‘Negro savagery’’ in the native villages. Many African Americans were highly attuned to and disturbed by the ways in which the sciences of biological racialism and eugenics conflated all peoples of African descent into a racial category or ‘‘type,’’ defined as the essence and emblem of the ‘‘primitive’’ and ‘‘savage.’’ According to eugenicists, African Americans shared a common biological destiny with diverse African peoples, one that would severely impair their ascension in white Western ‘‘civilization.’’ Distressed by the assumptions that linked African Americans to African peoples represented as primitive by the native village, Frederick Douglass proclaimed that the Dahomeyan village at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition

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5. Stereograph, Underwood and Underwood. The famous Trocadéro Palace from the end of the Seine Bridge, Paris, 1900. Reproduced from the collections of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 16 photography on the color line

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6. Stereograph, Underwood and Underwood. Natives of Dahomey, Africa—Dahomey Village, Paris, 1900. Reproduced from the collections of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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exhibited ‘‘the Negro as a repulsive savage.’’ 57 Protesting the exclusion of African Americans from official participation in the 1893 world’s fair, Douglass stated that while no African American ‘‘gentlemen’’ served as fair commissioners, ‘‘the Dahomeyans were there to exhibit their barbarism and increase American contempt for the Negro intellect.’’ 58 While Douglass’s denigration of Dahomeyans is certainly troubling, it also clearly represents a response to racist discourses in the United States. A cartoon from World’s Fair Puck, entitled ‘‘Darkies’ Day at the Fair,’’ lampooned the so-called Colored People’s Day, the one concession fair managers made in response to African Americans’ protests concerning their exclusion from the 1893 Columbian Commission. The cartoon depicts a long line of grossly caricatured African and African American men and women—‘‘savages’’ with spears and ‘‘Zip Coons’’ in ill-fitting suits and top hats—as all essentially the same in a white racist imagination. It jumbles racist stereotypes in much the same way that the biological ‘‘type’’ collapses distinct ethnic groups into one scientific category. In ‘‘Darkies’ Day at the Fair,’’ Africans and African Americans alike, despite extreme distinctions in nation, ethnicity, and culture, all become the same Sambo types—all of them have the huge white lips of American minstrelsy, and all of them are waiting for watermelon. The Puck cartoon demonstrates how the scientific ‘‘facts’’ of eugenicists and biological racialists and the racist introduction 17

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7. Cartoon, ‘‘Darkies’ Day at the Fair,’’ World’s Fair Puck. Reproduced from the collections of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

caricatures of white supremacists mutually reinforced one another in popular responses to the evolutionary ‘‘lesson’’ of the native village. Against such constructions of ‘‘Negro savagery,’’ the American Negro Exhibit—with its books, patents, sociological studies, and documentary photographs—situated African Americans at the forefront of Western social science and progress. Both in method and content the American Negro Exhibit argued for the superior intellect and strength of character of a people who could make such advances just decades after emancipation, and in the face of segregation and devastating discrimination. In this light, a photograph of Du Bois himself on his visit to the 1900 Paris Exposition proves instructive. In his tails and top hat, Du Bois stands as the man of science and culture, of elite education and superior refinement. He embodies the very position Frederick Douglass was so troubled to see erased and supplanted at the Chicago Columbian Exposition, namely that of the African American gentleman. Indeed, Du Bois is himself on display as a kind of embodied evidence in Paris, as a walking, talking ‘‘American Negro Exhibit’’ of one.59

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Despite, or paradoxically, because of its narrative of progress and 18 photography on the color line

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success, the American Negro Exhibit could be harnessed to arguments critical of U.S. racism and European colonialism or to arguments complacent about such global violence. In fact, Thomas J. Calloway aimed to present a largely accommodationist account of African American progress in the American Negro Exhibit, a narrative reminiscent of that forwarded by Booker T. Washington in his famous ‘‘Atlanta Compromise’’ speech at the 1895 Atlanta Cotton States Exposition.60 Calloway celebrated Washington as a hero and a race leader, and using Washington’s portrait to frame the American Negro Exhibit literally, he drew on Washington’s political positions to frame the exhibit ideologically.61 In 1895, Washington had argued that segregation might be tolerated in the short term for economic advances in the long term, and in 1900, Calloway suggested that lynchings, ‘‘horrible’’ as they were, must not be allowed to overshadow the efforts of the United States in educating African Americans.62 Rather than celebrating African American resistance to overwhelming U.S. racism, Calloway sought to congratulate the United States on a triumph of racist paternalism.

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8. W. E. B. Du Bois at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Reproduced courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, W. E. B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

introduction 19

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In outlining ‘‘three strong reasons for a negro exhibit at the Paris exposition,’’ Calloway suggests that African Americans need ‘‘occasional opportunities to show in a distinctive way the evidences of their progress’’—to ‘‘prove’’ their ‘‘value to the body politic.’’ That value, according to Calloway, lies in labor, in producing the raw materials of national wealth. ‘‘The average American citizen never stops to consider that practically every cotton fabric he wears is a product of negro labor so far as the raw material is concerned.’’ 63 Arguing further for the political import of the American Negro Exhibit, Calloway proclaims that the display will answer international critiques of U.S. imperialism: ‘‘Much criticism of the United States is indulged in abroad on the ground that this country has assumed to annex new territory largely populated with dark races, when, it is charged, this nation proscribes in every possible way the ten millions of such people in its own borders. This exhibit can show other nations the other side of the story and can furnish evidences of marvelous progress of the colored people as an offset to the charges of proscription.’’ 64 In Calloway’s vision, the American Negro Exhibit could prove U.S. beneficence, and legitimize U.S. imperialism, by showing how much ‘‘better off’’ men and women of color were under the ‘‘civilizing’’ influence of the United States. If, as Robert Rydell has argued, the United States hoped, with its participation in the 1900 Paris Exposition, ‘‘to demonstrate to the world and to Americans back home that the newly reconstructed American nation-state had come of age as an imperial power,’’ 65 then it also hoped to show the righteousness of that empire, and the American Negro Exhibit could be held up as an example of U.S. ‘‘success’’ in ‘‘handling’’ people of color.66 As the native village might be conceived as an emblem of the problem to be solved by the so-called civilizing forces of Europe and the United States, the American Negro Exhibit might be perceived as a solution to that problem. Once again, Calloway argues:

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The ‘‘Fashoda incident’’ and the present Boer war are only the outcroppings of a tremendous European invasion of Africa. This ‘‘dark continent’’ is no longer dark, as the most gigantic efforts of capital are being directed toward opening up the continent for the overplus population of Europe. The millions of native Africans in the continent, who must in some way be assimilated into the body politic, will more and more force upon the statesmen of Europe and Africa the 20 photography on the color line

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same negro problem which this country has struggled with for three centuries. Whatever faults may be charged to the people of the United States, the people of African descent in this country are civilized, Christianized possessors of vast educational privileges and owners of perhaps a half billion dollars’ worth of property. They are engaged in every industry and pursuit common to white Americans, and universally accredited with rapid progress. America can, therefore, furnish Europe with such evidences of the negro’s value as a laborer, a producer and a citizen that the statecraft of the old world will be wiser in the shaping of its African policies.67

According to Calloway, the American Negro Exhibit might serve as a kind of how-to guide to civilizing and Christianizing ‘‘the Negro.’’ By following the American Negro Exhibit’s example, Calloway suggests, European colonizers might transform ‘‘problems’’ into valuable laborers and producers.68 Du Bois’s vision of an educated, elite Talented Tenth, of ‘‘coworker[s] in the kingdom of culture,’’ 69 is clearly antithetical to Calloway’s colonial propaganda, and despite Calloway’s intent, his ideological framing of the American Negro Exhibit could not contain all voices and visions of dissent represented in the exhibit. In fact, as Robert Rydell has argued, ‘‘Just as the 1895 Atlanta Exposition had propelled Washington to a position of national prominence, so the Paris Exposition bestowed international recognition on Du Bois as an equally authoritative spokesperson for people of African descent.’’ 70 Du Bois’s 1900 Georgia Negro studies provide a multivalenced example of his own newly powerful antiracist vision at the turn of the century. The global racializing of labor that Calloway seemed to support was the problem of the color line that Du Bois first condemned in his Georgia Negro studies for the 1900 Paris Exposition. A result of the African slave trade and of European and North American colonialism and imperialism, the racializing of labor enabled the ‘‘doctrine of the Superior Race,’’ a theory of white supremacism that harnessed Western sciences and history to its purposes.71 According to Du Bois, ‘‘the real European imperialism pictured in the Paris Exposition of 1900’’ (16) was not the image Europe projected, of ‘‘Wealth and Science’’ (2; emphasis added) but a vision of ‘‘wealth and power’’ (16; emphasis added) in which science was called on to legitimize power, to introduction 21

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‘‘prove the all but universal assumption that the color line had a scientific basis,’’ and thereby to support racial segregation, discrimination, exploitation, and slavery in biological terms (20). Against this vision of scientifically legitimized white supremacism, Du Bois wields his own science in the Georgia Negro studies. He denaturalizes the color line, wrenching it from biology and biological explanations, to relocate it back in the terrain of social history, economics, and global politics. The introductory chart that framed Du Bois’s social study of ‘‘The Georgia Negro’’ for visitors at the Paris Exposition of 1900 carried his lasting declaration: ‘‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.’’ 72 A couple of months later, Du Bois would repeat those words at the first PanAfrican Congress in London,73 and he would later use them to introduce his best-known work, The Souls of Black Folk (1903).74 Du Bois’s social and economic critique of the color line has had tremendous influence on the scholarship of race (and of Du Bois himself ) for over a century. And while fundamentally important, the critical emphasis on these particular structural insights has overshadowed Du Bois’s visual conception of the color line. This book’s task is to restore the visual significance of the color line, an understanding of particular consequence now, as scholars work to define an emergent visual culture studies. As Irit Rogoff and Nicholas Mirzoeff have argued, the study of visual culture is best defined by a common set of questions, rather than a canon of objects or a privileged group of media.75 Visual culture scholars seek to understand how viewing creates viewers, how acts of looking are encouraged and circumscribed culturally, and how access to the gaze shapes subjectivity.76 What I aim to contribute to that conversation, along with bell hooks and others, is an understanding of how race fundamentally informs these visual dynamics.77 I argue that the questions we ask as visual culture scholars must account for the ways in which race both determines and is determined by acts of looking, and for the ways in which the viewer and those viewed are racially inscribed. In recovering Du Bois’s visual sense of the color line, this book demonstrates both how fundamentally the visual has been racialized, and how race has been envisioned.

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Photography on the Color Line reads Du Bois’s Georgia Negro photographs against archives that sought to pose African American bodies 22 photography on the color line

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and contain African American identities in the service of a racial hierarchy at the turn of the century. Methodologically, then, this book conceives historical context as the contest of cultural meaning produced between and across archives. But archives do not produce meaning solely in dialogue with one another. Archives are created and utilized as evidence to support varied cultural discourses; they emblematize epistemologies. In chapter 1, I aim to tease out such ways of knowing by reading Du Bois’s articulation of double consciousness as the ‘‘sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others’’ within an emergent psychological conversation that posed self-recognition as a visual process. ‘‘Envisioning Race’’ examines the visual paradigms that inform Du Bois’s understanding of double consciousness, the Veil, and second sight, and suggests that race and visual culture were mutually constitutive in the Jim Crow United States. In the second chapter, I read Du Bois’s Georgia Negro portraits against the scientific archives that constructed a visual racial typology at the turn of the century. I argue that Du Bois replicates scientific methodology in the Georgia Negro albums to undermine the assumptions about race forwarded by biological racialists, especially by eugenicists. Further, Du Bois represents elite class standing and cultural refinement to contest scientific claims about innate ‘‘Negro inferiority,’’ thereby evoking class to trump (an essentialized hierarchy of ) race. ‘‘The Art of Scientific Propaganda’’ explains how photographs can critically ‘‘signify’’ on specific visual genealogies, undermining the presumed neutrality of visual evidence, and argues that even the most commodified and sentimentalized of photographic forms can be transformed into sites of resistance. In chapter 3, ‘‘ ‘Families of Undoubted Respectability,’ ’’ I investigate the ideologically laden nature of this critical strategy, teasing out the limitations of Du Bois’s particular resistance to racism. I suggest that Du Bois anchors his antiracist critique in a patriarchal model of an African American elite, envisioning a restrained and disciplined African American manhood in critical contrast to the images of black manhood figured in the discourses enabling lynching at the turn of the century. Here I examine how Du Bois’s vision of an elite African American patriarchy depends on controlling, containing, and even condemning the sexuality of African American women. By heralding class to challenge race, Du Bois reinscribes the constraints of a (middle-class) gender hierarchy. introduction 23

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The fourth and final chapter focuses more directly on the racial terror of lynching, returning to the visual nexus of understanding that informs Du Boisian double consciousness, the Veil, and second sight, but this time examining representations of whiteness and the processes of white identification in early twentieth-century lynching photographs. While my initial work with these concepts in chapter 1 is focused through The Souls of Black Folk, in chapter 4, I read these ideas through Du Bois’s later essay ‘‘The Souls of White Folk.’’ In ‘‘Spectacles of Whiteness: The Photography of Lynching,’’ I examine the representations of spectators’ bodies in lynching photographs, assessing these images as an obscured archive of whiteness. I conclude with an epilogue that situates the archivist in the archive, exploring how representations of Du Bois himself signified in relation to the emergent imagery of the New Negro that his 1900 Paris Exposition photographs helped to define. Through this analysis, the epilogue reinforces the value of a critically comparative archival methodology, arguing that such work can generate a distinct visual genealogy, and a new cultural vision. This book, therefore, assesses how Du Bois’s Georgia Negro photographs engage and challenge the meaning of the color line. It recuperates Du Bois as a visual theorist of race, demonstrating how he conceived and contested the color line from within the domain of visual culture—in visual terms and through visual media. Deciphering the contestatory meanings of the Georgia Negro photographs, Photography on the Color Line also models a way of reading photographic archives that is critically comparative, that examines archives as ideological projects with distinct visual genealogies. In so doing, the book suggests new ways for scholars of visual culture to understand images as directly informed by and participating in vital cultural debates. Finally, the book demonstrates how central race has been to visual cultural production and how visual culture has also fundamentally shaped and informed the meaning of race in the United States.

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1

Envisioning Race

In what has become one of his most widely quoted propositions, W. E. B. Du Bois describes ‘‘double-consciousness’’ as ‘‘the sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,’’ 1 thereby drawing on a visual paradigm to articulate African American identity in the Jim Crow United States. It is the negotiation of disparate gazes and competing visions that imposes the ‘‘two-ness’’ of double consciousness. The recognition of violently distorted images of blackness— those projected ‘‘through the eyes of [white] others’’—produces the psychological and social burden of attempting to assuage ‘‘two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals.’’ 2

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Many of Du Bois’s most influential concepts from the turn of the century are focused through visual imagery, including, in addition to double consciousness, what he calls ‘‘the Veil’’ and ‘‘second-sight,’’ and this chapter argues for Du Bois as an early visual theorist of race and racism. Du Bois not only utilized visual images to describe racial constructs but also conceptualized the racial dynamics of the Jim Crow color line as visual culture. In Du Bois’s early writings, the color line represents not only the systemic inequity of racialized labor but also a visual field in which racial identities are inscribed and experienced through the lens of a ‘‘white supremacist gaze.’’ 3 While race may be structurally codified and entrenched according to the movement of global capital via colonialism, imperialism, and the slave trade, in Du Bois’s understanding, the experiences of racialization and racial identification are focused through a gaze and founded in visual misrecognition. Attending to the visual in Du Bois’s early written works enables one to see identity and race as both effects and cornerstones of visual processes, as both products and producers of visual culture.4

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Double Consciousness as Visual Culture Over the course of the century following his initial proclamations, double consciousness has proven to be one of Du Bois’s most evocative conceptions, framing and shaping much creative and scholarly work on the cultures of the African diaspora.5 Despite its influence, however, double consciousness remains a subtle and complicated insight, and recently scholars have begun to historicize Du Bois’s use of the term by tracing its genealogy.6 In my own assessment here, I aim to draw out the relatively unexplored legacy of visual psychological ideas that Du Bois draws on and fundamentally reconfigures to theorize double consciousness.7 Once again, it is the image of himself that Du Bois sees through the eyes of white others that makes him feel his ‘‘two-ness’’; it is the image of self as other that Du Bois cannot fully assimilate. By focusing on the visual terms through which Du Bois conceives double consciousness, one finds that the connections between his theory and William James’s early work in psychology are both less direct and more fundamental than others have posited. Indeed, the most important conceptual links shared by Du Bois and James, which clarify Du Bois’s unique use of double consciousness, become fully apparent only when considered through a visual lens. My argument necessarily takes issue with part of Shamoon Zamir’s recent and important study, Dark Voices, in which he spends considerable energy distancing Du Bois’s thought from that of James. Zamir has argued that during Du Bois’s years at Harvard, it was not his studies with James, but his studies with George Santayana, of Hegel and German philosophy, that most influenced Du Bois’s understanding of double consciousness. In a detailed comparison of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind to Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Zamir suggests that Hegel provided a means by which Du Bois could theorize ‘‘the relationship of consciousness to history.’’ 8 But while Zamir argues carefully and convincingly for the Hegelian thematics in The Souls of Black Folk, his analysis fails to account for the visual dynamics central to Du Bois’s conception of double consciousness. Indeed, the one aspect of Du Boisian double consciousness Zamir cannot reconcile with Hegelian philosophy—‘‘the linking of self-consciousness to seeing and being seen’’ 9— can be illuminated by a closer analysis of James’s Principles of Psychol26 photography on the color line

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ogy. And as Zamir notes, James was teaching portions of Principles in 1889, the year Du Bois studied with him at Harvard.10 While I will persist in drawing connections between the early work of Du Bois and the contemporary work of James, I do not aim to make a case for scholarly influence by tracing a genealogy of great ideas through great men. For certainly, as David Levering Lewis suggests, ‘‘the irreducible fact that Du Bois’s existence, like that of other men and women of African descent in America, amounted to a lifetime of being ‘an outcast and a stranger in mine own house,’ as he would write, was a psychic purgatory fully capable by itself of nurturing a concept of divided consciousness, whatever the Jamesian influences.’’ 11 And yet, the particular manner in which Du Bois articulated double consciousness does run parallel to James’s thought in important ways. Ultimately, however, I am interested, as is Zamir, in demonstrating how Du Bois adapted, rather than adopted, the critical thinking of his day, and further, like Priscilla Wald, in how Du Bois’s adaptations commented on the limitations of the thought he worked with and transformed.12 Du Bois’s thinking was clearly in flux at the turn of the century. He was struggling to refashion received models of inquiry, attempting to develop new languages and methods for assessing and articulating African American life in all its geographic, economic, and gendered variety. He sought fervently to develop an anti-essentialist methodology that could challenge the legacy of biological racialism and the emergence of eugenics, both of which claimed to delineate a hierarchy of innate, inherent, biological racial differences. Following an elite education and training in the United States and Germany, Du Bois modified and reformulated the purportedly ‘‘universal’’ theories that he inherited—theories outwardly unmarked but clearly Eurocentric, white supremacist, and masculinist—to make them adequate to his own experience and race-conscious social, economic, cultural, and psychological analysis. Thus, while the particular psychological conversations he entered into shaped his own thinking at the turn of the century, Du Bois also pushed the limits and challenged the foundations of those conversations by attending to the question of race. Several scholars have noted James’s use of double consciousness to discuss personality disorders and pathologies. And while interesting overlaps exist between James’s clinical psychological use of the concept and Du Bois’s adaptation, Du Bois’s specific articulation of double consciousness in visual terms resonates most powerfully with the envisioning race 27

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more general processes of identity formation and self-recognition that James describes as fundamental to the development of ‘‘normal’’ consciousness. In other words, Du Bois does not adopt the category of an anomalous pathology to articulate African American distinctiveness; instead, he racializes the very process of identity formation itself, as posited by James, demonstrating how race in a racist culture fundamentally changes and determines everything. Du Bois’s use of double consciousness transposes James’s theory of social selfrecognition into African American experience; it places James’s undifferentiated ‘‘Me’’ back into a world divided by the color line, and specifically into an African American world shut off from the white world by ‘‘a vast veil.’’ 13 Du Bois’s adaptation of James’s psychological theories explores an African American psyche to emphasize the social pathology of a racist American culture. Having said that, however, there are significant connections between James’s discussion of personality disorders and Du Bois’s conception of a racialized double consciousness. In his analysis of ‘‘alternating personality’’ in The Principles of Psychology, James discusses several cases of double consciousness, describing individuals who have experienced a spontaneous, radical transformation of personality concomitant with severe memory loss.14 He comments on the case of Félida X., a young woman who at age fourteen began to pass into a ‘‘secondary’’ state marked by a significant loss of inhibitions. While in the second state, she could remember the first, but once restored to her original state, she could not remember the second. Thus, over the course of several years, her original self would express bewilderment at changes that had occurred during her secondary state, such as becoming pregnant, of which she had no memory.15 Another young woman, Mary Reynolds, fell into a deep, unshakeable sleep and woke up twenty hours later with an entirely new personality. The formerly melancholy young woman awakened cheerful and mischievous, with no memory whatsoever of her previous self. She did not recognize family and friends, and she forgot how to read and write, and initially, she even forgot how to speak. After five weeks, Reynolds awakened to find herself restored to her usual self, as if nothing had happened in the interim. These severe alterations in personality continued over the course of fifteen years.16 James accounts for these pathological states by suggesting that the ‘‘brain-condition’’

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must allow for distinctly organized ‘‘association-paths.’’ According to James, the brain must be structured to permit ‘‘the processes in one system [to] give rise to one consciousness, and those of another system to another simultaneously existing consciousness.’’ Explaining the memory loss that occurs in a state of double consciousness, James suggests that the two selves remain largely unknown to one another: ‘‘Each of the selves is due to a system of cerebral paths acting by itself.’’ 17 For Du Bois, double consciousness is marked by a similar two-ness, by ‘‘two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.’’ 18 And yet, Du Bois is acutely aware of both selves simultaneously. His is a strangely conscious double consciousness. And further, for Du Bois, double consciousness does not arise from two distinct ‘‘cerebral paths’’; it is not a ‘‘brain-condition,’’ a biological structure, but a social construct. Du Boisian double consciousness results when one attempts to reconcile radically different perceptions of self; competing representations split consciousness, not competing cerebral paths. In short, two-ness is an effect of the color line. Du Bois does not outline an anomalous psychological pathology, but the condition of being African American in white supremacist America. Ultimately, he describes the struggle of a healthy mind forced to confront and inhabit a perverse world; pathology finally resides not in an African American brain, but in America’s social body. Du Bois’s understanding of double consciousness most closely resembles James’s description of the basic components of selfconsciousness. For Du Bois, African American consciousness is marked by the discordant splitting that James describes as an effect of disjunctions between one’s various ‘‘social selves.’’ The two-ness of Du Bois’s self-consciousness is engendered by the conflicting images he finds of himself held in social worlds divided by the color line. In Psychology: The Briefer Course (1892), William James describes the self as ‘‘duplex,’’ ‘‘partly known and partly knower, partly object and partly subject,’’ both ‘‘Me’’ and ‘‘I.’’ 19 The elusive I is finally, for James, thoughts themselves as thinkers (83); the I is that which ‘‘is conscious,’’ and the Me is simply one of the things the I is ‘‘conscious of ’’ (62). The Me is the more readily apparent aspect of the self, according to James, for it is, quite literally, that which is known, that which the thinker thinks about.

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In James’s understanding, the Me is constituted by three parts, namely, the material me, the spiritual me, and the social me (44). The material me includes one’s body, clothes, family, house, and possessions, and is thus characterized by external attributes. The spiritual me, on the other hand, is specifically internal; it is ‘‘the entire collection of [one’s] states of consciousness,’’ most notably marked by ‘‘active-feeling states’’ (48). Finally, one’s social me is ‘‘the recognition which [one] gets from his mates’’ (46). According to James, ‘‘Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind ’’ (46; emphasis added). The social self is multiple, and divided, sometimes even by ‘‘discordant splitting’’ (47), as one shows different sides of one’s self to different groups of people (46). What James describes as one’s sense of ‘‘images of [one’s] person in the minds of others’’ holds incredible importance within his theory of the self (61). Just as one must take an intense self-interest in one’s own body, so, proclaims James, one must also be guided and directed by the ways in which one is perceived: ‘‘I should not be extant now had I not become sensitive to looks of approval or disapproval on the faces among which my life is cast’’ (61). What Du Bois would call the ‘‘sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,’’ is, then, for James, fundamental to selfknowledge and even to one’s survival.20 In James’s depiction of the functions of the social self, one finds an avowedly social, and developmentally secondary, rendition of what Jacques Lacan would later describe as the mirror stage.21 Lacan’s mirror stage depicts ego formation as a process founded in misrecognition, in one’s misrecognition of self in and as an image reflected in the mirror. According to Lacan, such a process generally takes place between the ages of six and eighteen months. During the mirror stage, an infant’s fragmentary experience of self coheres as the ego around a unified image of self seen in the mirror. This idealized image of wholeness is illusory, greater than the sum of felt, fragmented parts it magically combines in spectacle. The image initiates the infant into the psychological cycle of lack and desire, for the child will forever attempt to maintain this illusion (this self-delusion) of ideality and wholeness realized only in reflection. Through the mirror stage, the ego is thus founded both in the split between body (or physical experience) and image and in the perpetual psychological effort of suturing self-identification to image.22 30 photography on the color line

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According to Lacan, the mirror stage takes place at a time in which the infant is still ‘‘unable as yet to walk, or even to stand up,’’ when he or she is ‘‘still sunk in his [or her] motor incapacity and nursling dependence.’’ 23 As such, it is a process that requires ‘‘some support, human or artificial,’’ 24 and most likely maternal. While Lacan downplays the mother’s role in the mirror stage, proclaiming that this development takes place ‘‘before [the ego’s] social determination,’’ 25 the mother is the phantom support that carries the child in its ‘‘nursling dependence,’’ and I would argue that she provides important social reinforcement for the child’s misrecognition through her own approving gaze. One might suppose that as the infant looks into the mirror, the mother corroborates the child’s misrecognition– ‘‘Look! Who’s that? Yes. That’s you!’’–affirming the child’s identification with his or her reflection.26 Thus the infant’s initial identification with an idealized image of self is reinforced by the intimate gaze of the mother, whose adoring eyes corroborate and accept the idealized (whole) image as an adequate representation of the child’s self. For a brief moment, the infant’s fantasy of wholeness is shared by another, and thus the mirror stage (what one might call primary (mis)identification), despite Lacan’s assertions to the contrary, can also be considered social. Viewing the mirror stage through the lens of Jamesian psychology, what distinguishes this first moment of misrecognition (in the mirror stage) from later scenes of social misrecognition is that the image of self reflected in the eyes of the mother (the social other) is not partial, nor distorted by ‘‘discordant splitting’’ or multiplicity, but is equivalent (for the child) to the child’s own (mis)perception of self. In this revised rendition of Lacan’s mirror stage, the adoring gaze of the mother supports misrecognition and reinforces the suturing of self and image. One can read Du Bois’s depiction of double consciousness as the result of the ( Jamesian) social self ’s first direct encounter with the color line. This violent negotiation proves shocking and transformative, and its effects reverberate back to and disrupt the very foundations of one’s initial, idealized misrecognition of self as image in the (Lacanian) mirror stage. Indeed, for Du Bois, double consciousness results from an inverted mirror stage brought about by a classmate’s racialized rejection of him. In ‘‘Of Our Spiritual Strivings,’’ the first chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois sketches his awakening to double consciousness as a kind of developmental pattern: envisioning race 31

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It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others.27

Du Bois describes a negation of the social recognition James sees as essential to the social self. Double consciousness is an effect of disidentification, in which a representative of Du Bois’s social world disavows his self-image, and that self-image is consequently wrenched apart and found lacking. What the young Du Bois newly recognizes is that he is different from others, or, rather, ‘‘like [them], mayhap, in heart and life and longing,’’ 28 but seen as different, with a peremptory glance. The discovery of racism reveals a split and divided identity construct, in which the (newly racialized) ‘‘black’’ subject is forced to see the gulf that divides self from idealized image. Racialization is the process whereby the psychological suturing effects that meld selfperception with an idealized image of wholeness dissolve. ‘‘Race,’’ or rather, ‘‘blackness,’’ as projected through the eyes of white supremacist others, forces the black subject to recognize the misperception on which ego formation is founded. Racialization ruptures the fantasy of idealized misrecognition, and this traumatic disruption induces Du Boisian double consciousness. Du Bois does not simply see a Jamesian ‘‘partial self ’’ reflected in the eyes of another, but an antiself. Indeed, in the white girl’s eyes he sees an image that he does not, and cannot, recognize in relation to himself, an image that fractures the illusion of an ideal and complete ego. This first encounter with the color line troubles the cornerstone of initial misrecognition of self as image in the mirror stage. This inverted mirror stage initiates a process of self-splitting, whereby the illusory image of wholeness is assaulted by the dividing force of the color line, cleaving the ego into two-ness. While any social encounter might trouble the ego’s idealized image of wholeness, in a social world divided by the color 32 photography on the color line

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line, race emerges as the dividing force that splits the self beyond (unconscious) suture. For the racialized subject, both the splitting and the suturing of the ego are made apparent, visible, conscious. As the ego is founded in attempts to merge the split between body and image, the ego maintains itself only by constantly attempting to reconsolidate an image of wholeness. Thus that which forces the ego to recognize the illusory nature of its wholeness is profoundly disconcerting and disruptive. In the Jim Crow United States, blackness makes one vulnerable to this vision of fundamental fracture; racialization makes apparent the illusory nature of the ego’s wholeness. For Du Bois, the problem of the (Jamesian) social self resides in the fact that ‘‘the eyes of [white supremacist] others’’ project a violently negative image of blackness aimed to obliterate the (black) self, as well as any claims to interracial social bonds. It is only whiteness—culturally, legally, socially, economically, and institutionally privileged as an unmarked racial category—that enables the ‘‘white’’ ego to remain blind to the suturing effects of its own fundamental misrecognition.29 Several decades later, and in the rather different context of French colonialism, Frantz Fanon would also powerfully describe the psychological splitting of black consciousness under a white gaze. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon muses: ‘‘I am being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed.’’ 30 As a black Antillean man, Fanon experiences a white Parisian gaze as a rupturing and dividing force, one that splits him into ‘‘a triple person.’’ ‘‘ ‘Look, a Negro!’ . . . ‘Mama, see the Negro!’ ’’ A young white boy fixes Fanon in objectivity. Fanon declares, ‘‘It was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person. . . . I was given not one but two, three places. . . . I existed triply: I occupied space. I moved toward the other . . . and the evanescent other, hostile but not opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared. Nausea.’’ 31 Seeking recognition from the white other, Fanon’s black self finds nothing. Or rather, the black self finds—‘‘ ‘Sho’ good eatin,’ ’’ 32—an inverted mirror image—an ‘‘effigy of him[self ],’’ 33 to which he is fastened as a young white boy screams, ‘‘ ‘Look at the nigger! . . . Mama, a Negro!’ ’’ 34 As Fatimah Tobing Rony has argued, the dilemma for Fanon is ‘‘what does one become when one sees that one is not fully recognized as Self by the wider society but cannot fully identify as Other?’’ 35 It is this ‘‘uncomfortable suspension,’’ 36 this ‘‘nausea,’’ that envisioning race 33

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Fanon experiences as the white boy’s call to ‘‘Look!’’ at the ‘‘Negro’’ forces him, in Du Bois’s terms, to look at himself ‘‘through the eyes of others.’’ Fanon states: ‘‘I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: ‘Sho’ good eatin.’ ’’ 37 As Diana Fuss suggests, ‘‘Forced to occupy, in a white racial phantasm, the static ontological space of the timeless ‘primitive,’ the black man is disenfranchised of his very subjectivity.’’ 38 In Fanon’s depiction of this encounter, we see how an inverted mirror functions from both sides. As the white child screams and points at ‘‘a Negro,’’ he reinforces his own ideal self-image through negative projection. This is not a simple distinction between self and other being made, but a racialized attempt to shore up a (mis)recognized (white) self by obliterating the other’s subjectivity. Here the hysterical rejection of an image of blackness enables the white subject to remain blind to his own split subjectivity and fundamental investment in self as image. The suturing of whiteness with an ideal image is enabled in part by underscoring a split between self and image only for black subjectivity, and in fervently discarding a grotesquely fashioned, negative image of blackness as antithetical to the (white) self. In the negative reinscription of a white ideal image through the rejection of a projected image of blackness that Fanon describes, the white mother plays a reinforcing role as the one who looks and affirms: ‘‘Yes. That’s not you.’’ In this exchange, Fanon becomes the anti-ideal for the young white boy, and forced to look at himself through the eyes of the child, he sees a fantastically negative construction impossible to reconcile with his own self-image. For Du Bois, African American self-consciousness is similarly marked by discordant splitting because the specters held in the minds of white others—‘‘ ‘Sho’ good eatin’ ’’—are imposed over and over again. Du Bois is thus acutely aware of the images white others ‘‘carry . . . of him in their mind,’’ images upheld and fortified by a vast social, economic, scientific, and legal machine that privileges and empowers them with ‘‘truth.’’ Those images shatter the suturing of selfperception on which the ego has been founded, forcing the ‘‘black’’ self to recognize the split through which identity is established, to see ‘‘two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals.’’ It is the refraction of two social selves divided by the color line 34 photography on the color line

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that will not allow one’s thoughts to focus in the comforting illusion of a sutured self-consciousness. Du Bois’s deployment of double consciousness racializes William James’s theory of self-recognition, drawing out the whiteness so central to James’s (and later to Lacan’s) purportedly ‘‘universal’’ psychology.39 Du Bois demonstrates how an African American social self becomes conscious of a fundamental split as it is perceived through the eyes of white others in a Jim Crow culture divided by the color line, a culture that ‘‘only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.’’ 40 Triggered by a peremptory white glance of dismissal, the moment of self-conscious social recognition that effects double consciousness is one in which Du Bois is forced to negotiate an obliterating image of self refracted through an inverted mirror. For Du Bois, double consciousness is produced when the suturing of selfperception is made visible and ruptured for the racialized subject in a racist American social sphere. Double consciousness thus enables a powerful social critique, for it is the African American condition that discloses the pathology of white supremacist America.

Race and the Gendered Gaze

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As Hazel Carby has noted, ‘‘It is significant that Du Bois claims that his first encounter with racism was the moment when his courtly, nineteenth-century advances were rejected by a young white woman.’’ 41 In Du Bois’s depiction of an inverted mirror stage in the first recognition of racism, it is a white girl who denies him his idealized self. In this second gendered scene of misrecognition, one might think of the white girl as a kind of antimother, driving a wedge between the black boy and the idealized self-image of wholeness first sanctioned by his African American mother.42 In refusing to accept the black boy’s identification with wholeness, the white girl poses lack as a conscious quotient—and racializes that lack.43 Du Bois’s social world is divided by the force of the color line—split along racial lines, but also, it would seem, in the very recognition of the color line, divided by gender.44 In Du Bois’s discussion of double consciousness, the gendered and racialized scene of an inverted mirror stage leaves the African American boy’s self-perception radically altered. If one reads that rupture envisioning race 35

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back through a revised and explicitly gendered version of Lacan’s mirror stage that includes the mother, one must wonder what might happen to the child’s perception of his mother, of she who has collaborated in constructing and maintaining the child’s ideal self-image, after the child is forced to recognize the color line and the split and suture on which identity is founded. Once the child’s self-perception has been transformed, once the suturing of a split self has been made conscious—has been seen through the process of racialization—can the child continue to trust the mother’s perception? Might he adore her for her idealized vision, or resent the way she has ‘‘protected’’ him from the trauma of the color line? And conversely, if the child fervently attempts to reinscribe psychologically his own image of ideal self-wholeness after the split self has been illuminated, does the child have to contain his mother, in his perception, within a kind of limbo before or outside of the world of the color line? Can she be (in the child’s eyes) both an adoring mother and a woman who negotiates the color line on her own terms? Such questions may subtly inform Du Bois’s celebration of the African American woman as mother, and his subtle collapsing of the category of woman into mother, in some of his early twentieth-century essays. It is the ‘‘mother-idea’’ that Du Bois heralds as the greatest gift of the ‘‘black race’’ to the world in ‘‘The Damnation of Women,’’ 45 and it is the mother-idea that dominates his celebration of his first wife in The Souls of Black Folk. He cherishes his wife as his ‘‘girl-mother,’’ ‘‘she whom now I saw unfolding like the glory of the morning—the transfigured woman,’’ on the birth of their son, and he deems her ‘‘the world’s most piteous thing—a childless mother,’’ after their son is taken away by death.46 While Du Bois is at pains to reconcile the social paradoxes facing African American women in ‘‘The Damnation of Women,’’ in The Souls of Black Folk it is as mothers that he seems to grant them his full social acceptance.47 The role of the mother in the African American boy’s initial ego construction and later double consciousness is taken up quite explicitly in James Weldon Johnson’s novel The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man (1912). In Johnson’s fictional depiction of a dawning double consciousness, an inverted mirror stage is made surprisingly literal, as a young boy runs to the mirror to see, for the first time, his own blackness. As in Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, the discovery of racism first comes at school, and a white woman again functions as the vehicle for that discovery. However, for Johnson’s narrator, the 36 photography on the color line

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initial scene of racism is doubly charged, for it is also the moment in which the child himself first learns of his African American heritage. After a white woman classifies Johnson’s narrator among the children of color in his class, he returns home to scrutinize himself in the mirror: ‘‘I rushed up into my own little room, shut the door, and went quickly to where my looking-glass hung on the wall. For an instant I was afraid to look, but when I did, I looked long and earnestly.’’ In his face, the child discovers the dark eyes and hair and lashes that frame his whiteness, the darkness that he himself finds ‘‘strangely fascinating.’’ But for Johnson’s narrator, this second mirror stage also requires the corroboration of the mother: How long I stood there gazing at my image I do not know. . . . I ran downstairs and rushed to where my mother was sitting. . . . I buried my head in her lap and blurted out: ‘‘Mother, mother, tell me, am I a nigger?’’ . . . I looked up into her face and repeated: ‘‘Tell me, mother, am I a nigger?’’ There were tears in her eyes and I could see that she was suffering for me. And then it was that I looked at her critically for the first time. I had thought of her in a childish way only as the most beautiful woman in the world; now I looked at her searching for defects.48

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In Johnson’s depiction of a dawning double consciousness, the child’s mother has clearly played a central role in the construction of his idealized self-image, and he needs her verification in order to recognize a secondary image. It is also apparent that as the child’s selfperception is transformed, his vision of his mother is also altered. As the child’s own ideal image, conceived before knowledge of the color line, is changed, so, too, is the image of she who collaborated in its construction. For the first time, the child regards his mother ‘‘through the eyes of others.’’ His self-perception and most intimate social relations transformed, Johnson’s narrator now holds an altered view of the entire world: ‘‘And so I have often lived through that hour, that day, that week, in which was wrought the miracle of my transition from one world into another; for I did indeed pass into another world. From that time I looked out through other eyes.’’ Through this inverted mirror stage, Johnson’s narrator attains a ‘‘dual personality,’’ a double consciousness.49 Much later in the novel, after the narrator’s mother has died, and after he has made his momentous decision to pass as a white man envisioning race 37

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in the white world, a white woman’s look once again becomes the arbiter of difference, the mirror in which he learns to see himself ‘‘through the eyes of others.’’ Johnson’s narrator confesses his African American ancestry to his white beloved, and relates: ‘‘When I looked up, she was gazing at me with a wild, fixed stare as though I was some object she had never seen. Under the strange light in her eyes I felt that I was growing black and thick-featured and crimp-haired.’’ 50 Johnson’s narrator is ultimately reconciled to this white woman, and marries her while passing as a white man, but the specter he once saw in her eyes continues to haunt him, and he is condemned to wonder if some slight fault might not recall this racialized reflection, might not impose the image of the inverted mirror stage. In their depictions of double consciousness, Du Bois and Johnson both pose a gendered vision, describing an African American boy’s first encounter with the color line through the vehicle of a white girl’s or woman’s gaze. For both, the scene of racialized misrecognition is gendered, and they articulate double consciousness as a masculine African American dynamic. Indeed, the figure largely missing from each of the three male-authored accounts of a dawning double (or triple) consciousness that I have discussed is that of the African American woman, or the woman of African descent, independent of a man of color, negotiating her own double consciousness vis-à-vis the color line. In the most extreme example, in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, the woman of color becomes important only in relation to the formation of black male consciousness, and, in Fanon’s eyes, only negatively, as he imagines her to reject and impede the development of an idealized image of black masculinity. It is the woman of color’s possible rejection of a black man for a white lover that particularly enrages Fanon: ‘‘Every woman in the Antilles, whether in a casual flirtation or in a serious affair, is determined to select the least black of the men. . . . I know a great number of girls from Martinique, students in France, who admitted to me with complete candor—completely white candor—that they would find it impossible to marry black men. (Get out of that and then deliberately go back to it? Thank you, no.)’’ 51 Fanon proclaims with deep sarcasm: ‘‘In a word, the race must be whitened; every woman in Martinique knows this, says it, repeats it. Whiten the race, save the race.’’ 52 As Lola Young has argued: ‘‘Fanon only refers to black women’s experiences in terms which mark her as the betrayer (tainted with white blood).’’ 53 In Fanon’s text, Du 38 photography on the color line

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Bois’s celebration of the African American woman as ideal mother is transformed into a mistrust of women of color as diluters of the race, as the anti-African mothers of white babies. The problem, as Fanon sees it, is that the woman of color who chooses a white lover refuses to recognize black manhood.54 She refuses to play the idealized role of Du Bois’s mother-idea; she will not reconfirm Fanon’s primary misidentification with an ideal self-image. For Fanon, the woman of color becomes a vehicle of the color line. Indeed, she is transformed, in Fanon’s negative fantasy, into the mother whose white child screams, ‘‘Mama, a Negro!’’ James Weldon Johnson’s narrative depicts an African American child’s relationship to a mother positioned as the woman of color Fanon condemns, namely, as the unmarried lover of a white man, a ‘‘whitener’’ of the race. As we have seen, Johnson’s narrator’s mother momentarily diminishes in the eyes of her child as she is recognized as the progenitor of African American identity, as she is newly measured by the color line. But Johnson’s narrator’s temporary wavering is distinct from Fanon’s particular racial condemnation, for the child scrutinizes the mother as bearer of blackness, rather than of whiteness. For Johnson’s narrator, this emotionally and psychologically ambiguous moment is passed through, or perhaps, retreated from, as the child redirects his confusion and anxiety toward the absent white father. He subsequently idealizes his mother once again, particularly on her death, which he deems ‘‘one of the two sacred sorrows of my life.’’ 55

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The death of his mother also makes the narrator’s subsequent decision to pass less difficult (which Fanon would also despise), as he can conceive it as a rejection of white constructions of blackness, without having to socially deny his mother—without having to forsake her, or her blackness—directly. In other words, he can suppose himself to expel white misrepresentations of blackness without scorning African Americans or African American identity per se. But once again, in Johnson’s narrative, the African American man’s identity, his selfconception, his idealized self-image—even as he chooses to cross the color line and assume a white identity—depends on containing the African American mother in a temporal place before or beyond (as in death) the color line.56 Du Bois and Johnson clearly offer a much less negative, much less obliterating image of the African American woman than does Fanon. If, for Fanon, the woman of color rejects, and thereby assaults, black envisioning race 39

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masculinity, for Du Bois and Johnson, the woman of color, as mother, confirms the African American male child’s ideal identity. But in confining the African American woman to her role as mother, as one who plays a supporting role in the male child’s drama of racial identity, Du Bois and Johnson contain the African American woman even as they celebrate her. For Du Bois and Johnson, the African American woman is the epitome of virtue—as long as she keeps her adoring gaze focused on an idealized African American masculinity.

The Veil and Second Sight As double consciousness, for Du Bois, describes the racialized subject’s forced recognition of psychic splitting, the Veil denotes such a split writ large culturally. Arnold Rampersad has suggested that the Veil connotes ‘‘the dim perception by the races of each other,’’ and further, I would argue, the Veil is that which dims perception.57 The Veil functions as a kind of cultural screen on which the collective weight of white misconceptions is fortified and made manifest. The Veil is the site at which white fantasies of a negative blackness, as well as fantasies of an idealized whiteness, are projected and maintained.58 The Veil thus shrouds African Americans in invisibility by making misrepresentations of blackness overwhelmingly visible. Just as an illuminated film screen seems to project the spectacle it reflects, relegating everything else around it to darkness, so the Veil as screen stands in for the African American subjects it sentences to invisibility. The Veil is the site at which African Americans are asked to see themselves ‘‘through the eyes of others.’’ Perhaps making literal this sense of the Veil as screen, Frantz Fanon states: ‘‘I cannot go to a film without seeing myself. I wait for me. In the interval, just before the film starts, I wait for me. The people in the theater are watching me, examining me, waiting for me. A Negro groom is going to appear. My heart makes my head spin.’’ 59 Fanon experiences double consciousness as feeling himself split by the image others take for him, the image he also is invited to greet as self onscreen. The negative image projected through the eyes of white others onto the screen of the Veil makes apparent the split on which identity is founded, the split between body and image that the psyche sutures by creating the ego. As Fanon feels other eyes on him, he feels his 40 photography on the color line

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very body transformed by and into a cultural screen, subsumed by the images of blackness white viewers anticipate. In his account of a dawning double consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois emphasizes the darkness of the Veil, describing it as a ‘‘shadow’’ that sweeps across the African American child, enclosing him within the ‘‘shades of the prison-house.’’ 60 Du Bois depicts life within the Veil as life within the dark void rendered by the spectacle of misperceptions projected on the Veil as screen. Describing the world enfolded in the shadow of the Veil as a ‘‘prison-house,’’ Du Bois evokes and transforms the metaphor William Wordsworth, the British Romantic poet, employs in his poem ‘‘Intimations of Immortality’’ to denote a child’s path from a spiritual, divine existence into the doldrums of the material world. Du Bois’s prison-house connotes an African American child’s path from unknowing innocence to a forced recognition of the color line and the assaulted self-image it proffers. What Wordsworth depicted as a natural, if regrettable, falling away from the spirit, Du Bois describes as a forced incarceration of the African American child’s psyche.61 While Wordsworth’s prison-house signifies a failure of perception, a gradual dimming of one’s capacity to see and understand one’s own divinity, Du Bois’s prison-house connotes both a failure to be perceived, an invisibility, and a heightened insight.62 Seeing the Veil also rends the Veil for Du Bois; it is a moment of transformed awareness, of enlightenment. In perceiving the Veil, Du Bois consciously recognizes that to which he has been blind, namely, the shadow of the Veil itself, the racist division of a Jim Crow social sphere and the cumulative weight of its psychic rift. Thus, as the Veil engenders double consciousness, it also produces a vision that pierces the structures of racism construed as the natural order of things. As one comes to see one’s self doubly, one also learns to see the world anew. In short, the Veil that produces double consciousness also produces a doubled, or second sight. The Veil and second sight are intricately interwoven in Du Bois’s writings; congruent in the concept of double consciousness, they even, for a moment, share the same name in Du Bois’s work. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois muses: ‘‘After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world.’’ 63 The Veil enables the racialized subject to see not envisioning race 41

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only the split through which identity is established but also the foundations of racism, the glance that dismisses, the workings of whiteness. Indeed, the Veil, as screen, is not one-sided, and second sight enables the racialized subject to see what (white) others are blinded to by their very visions, namely, the psychic projections that enable white viewers to maintain a sutured self-image of ideal wholeness.64 Du Boisian second sight enables one to see how, in Diana Fuss’s words, ‘‘ ‘white’ defines itself through a powerful and illusory fantasy of escaping the exclusionary practices of psychical identity formation.’’ 65 Second sight thus enables viewers within the Veil to see the cultural and psychological production of both blackness and whiteness. In ‘‘Criteria of Negro Art,’’ Du Bois proclaims, ‘‘We who are dark can see America in a way that white Americans can not.’’ 66 He suggests that he perceives, through the Veil, an image of whiteness that white viewers refuse. As Priscilla Wald has argued, ‘‘In the veil, white America sees reflected an (unrecognized) image of its own guilt and anxieties.’’ 67 If for African American viewers the Veil functions as an inverted mirror that forces them to see the fractured foundation of identity formation, then for white viewers the Veil functions in an opposing manner, as a screen that allows them not to see the psychic splits and suturings of self construction. Second sight is, finally, a vision split and multiplied by double consciousness, a vision that can perceive the misrepresentations projected on the Veil. It is a vision that, in part, considers self through those filters, but one that also looks out from the dark side of the screen—and sees back through the looking glass. This is a vision that ascertains the refraction of the Veil, the fissures in the illusory image of white wholeness. Veiled eyes detect the refused image of white others— images distorted and fragmented, the illusion of ideality splintered and warped. Through second sight, ‘‘the look of [white] surveillance returns as the displacing gaze of the disciplined’’; ‘‘the observer becomes the observed.’’ 68 Second sight constitutes a critical vision, a sight that enables one to recognize the constructed nature of the Veil and all of its projections, to see the fundamental splitting and suturing of all selves, both black and white. If it is through the visual culture of the color line that the racialized self is fractured in Jim Crow America, then it is through the second sight engendered by the Veil, through the powerful critical vision that is the ‘‘gift’’ of double consciousness, that a newly racialized self can begin to be reenvisioned. 42 photography on the color line

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2

The Art of Scientific Propaganda

In his 1926 essay ‘‘Criteria of Negro Art,’’ W. E. B. Du Bois muses: ‘‘Suppose the only Negro who survived some centuries hence was the Negro painted by white Americans in the novels and essays they have written. What would people in a hundred years say of black Americans?’’ 1 Du Bois argues that African American art must testify to African American identities, providing a record to challenge a long legacy of racist representation, and such testimony was, in fact, central to much African American artistic production and self-representation throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Henry Louis Gates Jr., has argued, ‘‘In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the few prominent blacks who obtained access to the middle and upper classes commissioned paintings, and later photographs, of themselves, so that they could metaphorically enshrine and quite literally perpetuate the example of their own identities.’’ 2 At the turn of the century, portraits of African Americans implicitly signified in relation to images of ‘‘the Negro painted by white Americans,’’ and by collecting hundreds of portraits of African Americans that ‘‘hardly square’’ with ‘‘typical’’ (white supremacist) ideas, Du Bois was reinscribing African American identities, using photography to represent ‘‘the human face of blackness’’ so forcefully hidden behind ‘‘representations of blackness as absence, as nothingness, as deformity and depravity.’’ 3 Du Bois’s portraits of young African American men and women in the three volumes of Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. powerfully evoke the paradox that animates all photographic por-

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traits, namely, the functional tension between identity and identification. If all portraits are posed as either authorizing or regulatory images, for African Americans this dynamic was especially charged at the turn of the century, as the archive lurking behind the African American portrait was a scientific catalogue calling on the photograph as ‘‘evidence’’ of African American inferiority. Indeed, at the turn of the century, when Du Bois identified himself foremost as a scientist and was committed to the power of ‘‘facts’’ to change racist social structures, the images of blackness he sought most fervently to challenge were not those painted by white American novelists, but those physiognomic ‘‘portraits’’ heralded by biological racialists and eugenicists as the signs of African American degeneracy. As Du Bois argues in The World and Africa, in 1900 Europe was intent on legitimizing the color line through science, inscribing assumptions about ‘‘Negro inferiority’’ onto bodies of color.4 In response, Du Bois aimed to reanimate the African American body, transposing it from the realm of (racist) science to that of class and culture.5 In ‘‘Criteria of Negro Art,’’ Du Bois proclaims, ‘‘All Art is propaganda,’’ and it is propaganda from the ‘‘other side,’’ propaganda that challenges the basis of (white supremacist) scientific ‘‘truth,’’ that he produces for the Paris Exposition.6 Du Bois’s 1900 Georgia Negro photographs present a counterarchive, one that contests the racial logics of biological racialism and eugenics, transforming the middle-class photographic portrait into a site of African American resistance.

Signifyin(g) on Science

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Du Bois’s 1900 Georgia Negro photographs present contemporary viewers with a startling visual surprise. The first thirty-eight photographs in volume 1, and ninety-six (of one hundred) photographs in volume 2 of Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A., present closely cropped, paired portraits of young men and women, one image frontal, the other in profile. While some of the photographs show subjects less rigidly posed, many pair a direct frontal position with a hard profile, resembling unmistakably the photographic archives of early race scientists, as if Du Bois’s albums are haunted by those forms. I would like to suggest that this unexpected similarity has a pointed purpose, that Du Bois’s images ‘‘signify on’’ the formal visual 44 photography on the color line

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9. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 1. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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10. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 2. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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codes of scientific photography, repeating those visual tropes ‘‘with a difference’’ in order to invert the dominant significations of those particular photographic signs.7 Du Bois’s albums first evoke the images that would fix African Americans in the lowest levels of social, economic, and evolutionary scales, reproducing the imagery of assumed scientific truth, in order finally to produce new images of the American Negro. In these ‘‘mug shots,’’ the camera has come in close to focus on the head and face (plates 1–4). Subjects are posed against a plain gray cloth that erases them from a social context; they float, unsituated in these photographic frames. Or rather, this plain backdrop locates individuals within the institutional contexts that privilege identification and documentation. Such institutional portraits suggest the viewer’s symbolic control or domination over subjects photographed because they are, by definition, made for a viewer who will study and catalogue. While any of the images individually might be taken simply as a portrait, the manner in which the photographs are paired, and the repetition of that pairing sixty-seven times, evokes instrumental archives. The doubled poses encourage viewers to scrutinize the head and face, to learn to identify the individual represented; hard profiles accentuate the shape of the nose, the strength of the jaw, the angle of the forehead, and the curve of the head. As in early anthropological studies of racial ‘‘types,’’ documentation has been standardized here, the distance between subject and camera has been maintained, and the consistency in pose and form invites comparison between subjects photographed. The frontal and profile paired photographs that introduce Du Bois’s Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A., visually recall a long-standing tradition of scientific race photography. As early as 1850, Louis Agassiz, a Harvard scientist, commissioned a series of daguerreotypes of enslaved men and women in Columbia, South Carolina.8 Agassiz hoped to use the photographs to support theories of polygenesis, which, contrary to Christian beliefs in monogenesis, proclaimed that the different races constituted distinct species, created uniquely, separately, and unequally.9 The fifteen daguerreotypes that Robert W. Gibbes secured from photographer Joseph T. Zealy on behalf of Agassiz include full-body images of men standing, completely naked, posed in direct frontal, profile, and rear postures, and half-body images of men and women sitting, naked from the waist up, 46 photography on the color line

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in direct frontal and hard-profile poses.10 The daguerreotypes demonstrate how quickly photography became harnessed to the sciences of biological racialism in efforts to provide ‘‘evidence’’ of racial difference and inferiority. They jar and disturb. The very status of these images as daguerreotypes makes their dehumanizing objectivity even more shocking, for daguerreotypes are generally regarded as keepsakes, treasured mementos that memorialize loved ones, jewel-like images on mirrored plates, framed by scalloped gold edges, and encased in small, velvet-lined leather boxes with pressed patterns and delicate hinges. In viewing a daguerreotype, one anticipates a precious image, a portrait. The nakedness and equivocal looks of these men and women viscerally disrupt such expectations; clearly, these images were not made for intimate eyes, but for the cold, hard stare of the laboratory. Zealy’s daguerreotypes of enslaved men and women exist due to extreme differences in power between photographer and subjects. No one asked these men and women for their permission to make these photographs; the scientists asked their purported masters. The men and women photographed are identified by first name, by ethnicity, and by owner and plantation. In the seated poses, rolled shirts at waistlines highlight the process of stripping, recalling the repeated scenes of stripping and beating and whipping recounted in slave narratives. Women’s testimonies, in particular, demonstrate that the public, sexual exposure of one’s breasts and body heightened the terror and denigration of whipping. (The scars on Drana’s breasts may, in fact, be traces of such violence.) The stripping documented here, then, recalls other strippings, and one cannot separate this photographic act, the scene and setting of this image, from the physical torture and sexual exposure of enslaved men and women. The power of the scientific gaze here is aligned not only with presumed intellectual mastery and control but also with the explicitly violent facts of objectification and the literal ownership of the body photographed.11

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Joseph T. Zealy’s daguerreotypes for Louis Agassiz inaugurate a history of nineteenth-century anthropometric photography. Early anthropologists, such as Thomas Henry Huxley and John Lamprey, attempted to use photography to further studies of comparative anatomy and physiognomy.12 As Elizabeth Edwards has argued, ‘‘through photography . . . the ‘type,’ the abstract essence of human variation, was perceived to be an observable reality.’’ 13 In Huxley’s art of scientific propaganda 47

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11. Daguerreotype by Joseph T. Zealy, for Louis Agassiz. Drana, front view, 1850 (N 34310). Reproduced courtesy of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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12. Daguerreotype by Joseph T. Zealy, for Louis Agassiz. Drana, profile view, 1850, (N 27798). Reproduced courtesy of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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and Lamprey’s images, one finds naked bodies of men and women photographed in paired frontal and hard-profile poses. But here one also finds measuring devices—rulers and grids—represented within the photographic frame. Each scientist was apparently intrigued by the seeming objectivity of the photograph, and yet frustrated by the actual difficulty of standardizing such images, of making them useful for comparative study. In Huxley’s photographs of Ellen, a South Australian aboriginal woman, Ellen is asked to hold an enormous ruler beside her body, so that later viewers will be able to measure her height. In Lamprey’s photographs of a Malayan man, he has posed his subject in front of a grid. The presence of such measuring devices in these photographs doubly testifies to the desire of white scientists. While the anthropologist himself is not situated within the photographic frame, these photographs are clearly representations of his imagination and scientific schema, representations of him more than of his subjects. In anthropological images, the scientific gaze is presumed to be white; such photographs are made for white European or white North and South American eyes to study and compare the bodies of men and women of color. The anthropologist is never positioned in front of the camera, except when he (or sometimes she) is photographed with ‘‘the natives,’’ white shirt and pants and hat standing in stark and strange contrast to naked or partially naked dark bodies. Indeed, in these latter photographs, this juxtaposition—of clothed and naked, ‘‘civilized’’ and ‘‘savage’’—appears to be the very point. Such photographs suppose white viewers who will enjoy with shock, horror, or wonder the ‘‘exotic’’ experiences of their white counterparts. But do we ever see scientific photographs of naked white men and women in the nineteenth century? In Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion (1887), one finds the naked white body posed in front of scientific grids. And yet it is not the body itself that is studied here; it is not the body as a type that holds any importance. In Muybridge’s archive, the white body walks, runs, jumps, crawls, works, and plays—the white body’s actions come under scrutiny, but the white body itself is simply assumed. Muybridge’s are studies of male or female figures walking, not studies of bodies of any particular height, with any special arm span, nor any specific cranial capacity. His studies of human motion take the white body as neutral, examining its actions as normative.14

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Situated within a trajectory of scientific race representation, Du art of scientific propaganda 49

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13. Photograph by John Lamprey. Frontal view of a Malayan man, c. 1868–69. Reproduced courtesy of the Royal Anthropological Institute, London.

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14. Photograph by John Lamprey. Profile view of a Malayan man, c. 1868–69. Reproduced courtesy of the Royal Anthropological Institute, London.

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15. Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, vol. 1, plate 62 (1887), Running at Full Speed (2001–13033). Collotype. Reproduced courtesy of the Photographic History Collection, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

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Bois’s photographic types resonate profoundly with the contemporary photographs Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, attempted to popularize in his 1884 The Life History Album. Indeed, the ‘‘model’’ photographs Galton provided of himself as samples for parents might also have served as models for Du Bois’s paired photographs of ‘‘Negro types,’’ as Du Bois’s mug shots replicate the visual codes of Galton’s eugenicist documents, of his paired frontal and profile headshots, down to their very oval frames. Galton designed The Life History Album to serve as a kind of scientific baby book, in which parents could record the physical, mental, and moral development of their children. He strongly believed in the scientific value of photographic records, and he encouraged parents to make paired portraits of their children, both a full-face and a profile image, every several years. With The Life History Album Galton hoped to standardize the art of scientific propaganda 51

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16. Francis Galton’s ‘‘standard photograph’’ of himself. Reproduced from Karl Pearson, The Life, Letters, and Labours of Francis Galton, vol. 2, Researches of Middle Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924).

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haphazard collection of sentimental family mementos, and thereby to open up a vast colloquial archive to scientific research.15 Galton planned to use such records in the service of his larger project, eugenics, which he deemed both a ‘‘science of heredity’’ and a ‘‘science of race.’’ He argued that races could be divided into nine unique biological types, defined by distinct sets of essential physical, moral, and intellectual characteristics. Galton was an avowed white supremacist, and he proclaimed that Anglo-Saxons represented a modern racial pinnacle to which those of African descent would never rise. The ultimate project of eugenics aimed to improve society through ‘‘controlled breeding’’ by encouraging reproduction of the so-called strong and discouraging reproduction of the so-called weak. For Galton, the ‘‘strong’’ were always white, while the ‘‘weak’’ were criminals, the feebleminded, the insane, and people of color. As he aimed always to strengthen what he deemed the superior AngloSaxon ‘‘stock,’’ Galton adamantly opposed interracial reproduction, viewing such unions as a threat to his version of white supremacy. In Galton’s eyes, a biracial individual constituted a degenerate blot on both parent groups, a biological anomaly that inevitably must die out. Indeed, Galton believed that ancient Athenian culture, which he posed as an unreachable racial height, even for nineteenth-century 52 photography on the color line

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Anglo-Saxons, deteriorated due to mixture with foreign immigrants.16 Galton’s theories of race and racial mixture held wide sway at the turn of the century, for as Du Bois notes, in 1900, ‘‘mixture of races was considered the prime cause of degradation and failure in civilization.’’ 17 In order to define and classify his sliding scale of biological types, Galton utilized photographs to create ‘‘composite portraits’’—shadowy averages of individual images layered on top of one another. Galton claimed to capture with these images ‘‘the central physiognomical type of any race or group,’’ and he argued that the composite enabled him ‘‘to obtain with mechanical precision a generalised picture; one that represents no man in particular, but portrays an imaginary figure possessing the average features of any given group of men.’’ 18 Galton’s composites were literally statistical averages. For example, to make a composite image from six standardized individual mug shots, Galton would expose each image on top of another for one-sixth of the total exposure time. Thus each individual image would be represented equally in the final photograph, constituting one-sixth of the whole.19 In Galton’s composite portraits of imagined

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17. Composite portraits by Francis Galton. ‘‘The Jewish Type.’’ Reproduced from Karl Pearson, The Life, Letters, and Labours of Francis Galton, vol. 2, Researches of Middle Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924).

art of scientific propaganda 53

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biological types, we once again find the standardized frontal and profile images of The Life History Album, and, surprisingly, of Du Bois’s Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. At the turn of the century, Du Bois saw eugenics as the ‘‘growing’’ and most troubling ‘‘assumption of the age.’’ 20 Indeed, eugenics was to influence U.S. culture profoundly in the first decades of the twentieth century, becoming important in both scientific and popular arenas. In 1910, Charles Davenport founded the Eugenics Record Office, and in 1918, he became the first president of the New York Galton Society. Writers such as Albert Edward Wiggam popularized eugenics,21 and according to Marouf Arif Hasian Jr., ‘‘Growing up in the Anglo-American world in the first few decades of the twentieth century meant being constantly bombarded with lectures on eugenics from ethical, debating, and philosophical societies.’’ 22 Eugenics infiltrated a wide variety of U.S. cultural venues: state fairs sponsored ‘‘fitter family contests’’; lobbyists drew on eugenicist arguments to campaign for the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act; and several states practiced sterilization on mental patients in the early twentieth century.23 Eugenics was called on to naturalize many forms of social oppression, suggesting that an individual’s capacity for social progress was biologically determined, rather than the effect of positive or adverse environmental conditions.24 Given Du Bois’s antipathy toward eugenics, how can one explain the repetition of scientific visual forms and eugenicist terms—the type—that one finds in Du Bois’s albums? Another archive suggests interesting answers. In The Health and Physique of the Negro American (1906), Du Bois reproduces a series of sixty-six photographs of young African American men and women.25 The initial sixteen images, lettered A through H, were taken later, but forty-eight of the following fifty numbered images were first presented in volumes 1 and 2 of the Paris Exposition albums. Apparently, Du Bois recycled the 1900 photographs for another purpose here, cropping the ovals down further into circles that focus even more tightly on the head and shoulders. In this slightly later study, Du Bois appears to have embraced photographs as transparent scientific texts; indeed, Du Bois’s ‘‘objective’’ documentation here seems disturbingly objectifying. None of the subjects are named, and the descriptions accompanying these photographs are numbered notations of physical features, moral character, and intellectual aptitude—the very categories of racial classifi54 photography on the color line

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cation outlined by Francis Galton: ‘‘# 10. Brown, mass of curled hair; short and plump; unusual mental ability, cheerful and good character’’; ‘‘#39. Light yellow, long, nearly straight hair; large and plump; slow, but willing.’’ And yet, even in this narrowly circumscribed adoption of eugenicist categories and methods—even where Du Bois explicitly documents physical attributes, moral tendencies, and intellectual capacities—he uses scientific methodology to undermine racist scientific claims. Comparing multiple, minutely designated ‘‘types,’’ Du Bois states: ‘‘Today one hears, on the one hand, that mulattos are practically all degenerates, ranking below both the parent races; and, on the other, that only the mixed blood Negroes amount to much, and this by reason of their white blood. So far as this study is concerned, neither of these theories receives any especial support.’’ Regarding ‘‘mental ability,’’ Du Bois suggests that ‘‘the evidence’’ is ‘‘contradictory’’: ‘‘The exceptional scholars include three nearly full-blooded Negroes, three Quadroons and one Octoroon. Of these, a boy (number 18), with but a slight admixture of white blood, if any, is easily first.’’ 26 Du Bois uses Galton’s scientific terms and visual forms of documentation—he replicates Galton’s methodology—to reach very different conclusions. In eugenicist scientific paradigms, the purported degeneracy of biracial individuals demonstrated the essential differences between the races, providing evidence that the races were unequal and should remain separate. The figure of the biracial individual or so-called mulatto, then, became an important site through which to challenge eugenicist claims about essential racial differences and inferiority. If one could demonstrate that there was nothing degenerate about the biracial individual, one might also suggest that the different races were not so terribly distinct. In this sense, Du Bois’s conclusions in The Health and Physique of the Negro American prove particularly important: ‘‘A word may be added as to race mixture in general and as regards white and black stocks in the future. There is, of course, in general no argument against the intermingling of the world’s races. ‘All the great peoples of the world are the result of a mixture of races.’ ’’ 27 Thus Du Bois collects his own data, reproducing the authoritative forms of race scientists to contest the dominant conclusions about race at which eugenicists arrived. As Du Bois formally emphasizes scientific methodology in The Health and Physique of the Negro American, objectifying young men and art of scientific propaganda 55

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18. Portraits of young African American men and women. Reproduced from W. E. B. Du Bois, ed., The Health and Physique of the Negro American (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1906).

women as examples, he also notes that he shares a level of intimacy with his subjects, that he knows them personally, as individuals:

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In the following pages, I have selected out of a school of about 300 young people between the ages of 12 and 20 years, 56 persons who seem to me to be fairly typical of the group of young Negroes in general. The types are only provisionally indicated here as the lines are by no means clear in my own mind. Still I think that some approximation of a workable division has been made, so far as that is possible without exact scientific measurements. Among these 56 young persons, all of whom I have known personally for periods varying from one to 56 photography on the color line

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ten years, I have sought roughly to differentiate four sets of American Negro types.28

In his most objectifying use of photographs, then, Du Bois also signals that he knows the individuals represented as subjects, thereby highlighting the transmutation whereby people are transformed into evidence and, vice versa, whereby such ‘‘evidence’’ is also always a marker of subjectivity in another register, for another viewer. The young men and women photographed for the Paris Exposition of 1900 and The Health and Physique of the Negro American were almost undoubtedly students at Atlanta University, where Du Bois lectured as a professor at the time. Yet another collection of twenty-four of these oval-framed photographs, pasted onto folding cardboard folios, remains in the Atlanta University archives. There is significant overlap among the three collections: all twenty-four of the Atlanta University images are reproduced in the 1900 Paris Exposition albums, and nine of the images are included in all three archives.29 I have definitively identified one of the young women represented in all three collections as Bazoline Estelle Usher, a student at Atlanta University from 1899 to 1906.30 According to David Levering Lewis, Usher helped with domestic chores in the Du Bois household on Saturdays during her first year at Atlanta University, and thus became rather closely acquainted with both W. E. B. and Nina Du Bois.31

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The intimacy that Du Bois alludes to in his introductory comments in The Health and Physique of the Negro American, and which necessarily also animates the forty-eight overlapping 1900 Paris Exposition photographs, is hinted at in some of the images themselves. For while the formal style of the portraits is clearly meant to be objective and scientific, many of the images belie the individuality and personality of the sitters, and perhaps recognition between photographer and subjects. The images do not always or exactly reproduce the hard profiles and straight-on head shots of the laboratory. Further, in the overlapping 1900 and 1906 photographs, students clearly have come before the camera with forethought: their neat, crisp clothes are embellished with pins, and here and there a lilac adorns a lapel. Most of these young men and women have managed to assume a serious countenance for the photographer, but some cannot contain their pleasure and amusement. The young women wearing lilacs appear universally good-humored, suppressing grins, even in profile. Indeed, the brightart of scientific propaganda 57

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19. and 20. Portraits of young African American men and women. Reproduced courtesy of Atlanta University Photographs, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta, Georgia.

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21. Bazoline Estelle Usher, Atlanta University student. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 6. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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22. Bazoline Estelle Usher, Atlanta University student. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 5. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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23. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 2, no. 197. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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eyed young woman identified as ‘‘#22’’ in The Health and Physique of the Negro American, who also graces the second page of the first volume of Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A., is ready to burst into laughter. In the 1900 albums, this young woman’s giggles suggest to viewers that the formal objectivity of Du Bois’s so-called types will be shaken rather quickly. Further, while the first images in Du Bois’s 1900 Paris Exposition albums formally recall the photographs that eugenicists and biological racialists used to codify bodies in racial terms, Du Bois’s albums as a whole dismantle the physical coherence of the imagined racial type, disengaging the images of African American men and women from the circumscription of a sliding evolutionary scale. For what is the ‘‘Negro type’’ as represented in Du Bois’s photograph albums? First, it is plural—‘‘types’’—a diverse array of individuals not bound by physical appearance, by the ‘‘hair and bone and color’’ that Du Bois rejects as singular signs of racial belonging in his 1897 essay ‘‘The Conservation of Races.’’ 32 In Du Bois’s albums, blond and pale ‘‘Negro types’’ are placed beside brunette and brown ones, a juxtaposition that challenges color codifications as markers of racial difference and the body itself as sign of racial meaning. Looking back on this period later in his life, Du Bois would declare: ‘‘I was of course art of scientific propaganda 61

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24. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 3. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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aware that all members of the Negro race were not black and that the pictures of my race which were current were not authentic nor fair portraits.’’ 33 In his 1900 Paris Exposition albums, Du Bois loosens the narrow circumscription of race as defined by Francis Galton; he unfixes the ‘‘Negro type.’’ Du Bois’s portraits of biracial individuals and white-looking African Americans contest a white supremacist racial taxonomy of identifiable difference (plates 5 and 6). The images of young African American men, women, and children who could pass for white in Du Bois’s Types of American Negroes highlight the paradoxes of racial classification in Jim Crow America. By the turn of the century, several states had laws deeming one-thirty-second African or African American ancestry the key that separated ‘‘black’’ from ‘‘white,’’ a distinction so narrow as to make blackness and whiteness indistinguishable.34 As Mary Ann Doane has argued, the individual of mixed ancestry, ‘‘whose looks and ontology do not coincide, poses a threat to . . . the very idea of racial categorization.’’ 35 People of mixed racial ancestry challenge the color codes of a racial taxonomy. Historically, at the very moment at which segregation required whites and blacks to be divided, ‘‘white’’ and ‘‘black,’’ as legally defined, could not necessarily be differentiated. With his Georgia Negro photographs, Du Bois uses visual ‘‘evidence’’ to undermine the color coding of racial identity.36 62 photography on the color line

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White hysteria over the ‘‘threat’’ of racial passing at the turn of the century both spurred an increased fervor in racial surveillance and marked the extent to which a long history of forced interracial mixing during and after slavery had blurred the boundaries of white privilege. Du Bois’s photographs of a young, blond, very pale African American child (plate 5) challenge white supremacists’ investment in separating the races by signaling an undeniable history of physical union between them.37 In Du Bois’s visual archive, these images create a space ‘‘for an exploration and expression of what was increasingly socially proscribed’’ 38 at the turn of the century, namely, social and sexual contact between the races. As Robert J. C. Young has argued, ‘‘The ideology of race . . . from the 1840s onwards necessarily worked according to a doubled logic, according to which it both enforced and policed the differences between the whites and the non-whites, but at the same time focused fetishistically upon the product of the contacts between them.’’ 39 White supremacists posed the biracial woman both as evidence of racial decline and as instigator of interracial mixing. Discourses imagining the lusts of women of color were long evoked in efforts to legitimize institutionalized rape in slavery, and to perpetuate rape and concubinage after slavery. In Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A., Du Bois reclaims the image of the biracial woman so highly regulated in racial hierarchies, re-presenting her as a woman of grace, elegance, and refinement (and, as we shall see in chapter 3, as a woman contained within the confines of a patriarchal African American family). Indeed, Galton would have hard work depicting the thin young woman, with mild countenance and wavy hair, photographed standing composed and quiet in her high-necked white dress of lace and ribbons in Du Bois’s albums (plate 7), as a bearer of the downfall of civilization. Galton’s fantasy of pure racial types must falter under the weight of Du Bois’s ‘‘white types with Negro blood.’’ 40

The Politics of Portraiture

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As the Georgia Negro photographs dismantle the scientific category of the type, what do they offer in its place? As one progresses through Du Bois’s albums, seemingly scientific photographs blend and fade into middle-class portraits. The strictly paired images with their oval frames are replaced by single photographs in full, rectangular frames, art of scientific propaganda 63

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25. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 40. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (below) 26. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 39. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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or pairs that offer markedly different views of an individual, such as a close-up and a full body. Hard profiles transform into the softer, slighter turns typical of portraiture. The camera has been placed at a greater distance, to show more of the body and surrounding accoutrements. Large feather hats, formal Victorian dresses, ornate chairs, lace curtains, plants, books, and statuettes come to fill the photographic frame. African American ‘‘types’’ turn out to be middle-class gentlemen and ladies (plates 7–10). These latter images, many of which I have identified as Thomas Askew photographs, evoke a popular cultural genealogy as clearly as the tightly cropped mug shots that precede them recall scientific and institutional archives. The images’ size and the albumen paper on which they are printed suggest that they are cabinet photographs, a form that had become standard for commercial portrait photographers by the 1870s, and one with which Thomas Askew worked, as noted in an advertisement in which ‘‘T. E. Askew, The Photographer’’ proposes a ‘‘Special Christmas Offer! 1 Doz. Cabinets for $2.75.’’ 41 The popularity of the approximately four by five-and-a-halfinch cabinet photograph was indebted to the much smaller two-anda-quarter by three-and-a-half-inch carte-de-visite, which it ultimately supplanted. Patented in 1854 by André Adolphe Disdéri of France, the carte-de-visite ‘‘began as a novel extension of the traditional calling card’’ 42 and capitalized on the new reproducibility of photography inaugurated by the wet-plate collodion-albumen, negative-positive process in 1851.43 Disdéri invented a camera that would expose multiple images on a single plate, a process greatly increasing the number of different images that could be produced in a short time. Multiple prints of varied poses became newly possible with the advent of Disdéri’s carte-de-visite, and what started as an aristocratic whim soon became a middle-class craze in France, Britain, and the United States. Throughout the late 1850s and 1860s, members of the middling classes collected Disdéri’s celebrity cartes of heads of state, artists, and writers,44 and they had their own likenesses recorded for posterity as well. As Elizabeth Anne McCauley has suggested, carte photographers provided sitters with ‘‘a ready-made ‘home,’ class, and taste’’ in their studios;45 they added atmosphere with painted backdrops, carved wooden chairs, pillars, curtains, plants, and even elaborately constructed papier-mâché props, such as little fence gates and window frames. According to Brian Coe, ‘‘To make the customer feel art of scientific propaganda 65

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relaxed, the studio often contained much of the paraphernalia of the Victorian drawing room.’’ 46 Despite the small size of the cartes, fulllength, or sometimes, three-quarter poses became typical in these images, thus visually emphasizing the stylish clothing of the sitters over their facial features and expressions.47 Men, women, and children usually wore their best street garments for nineteenth-century photographic portraits, often including hats, coats, and shawls, as incongruous as such articles might seem within an interior parlor setting. Except for actresses and entertainers, women rarely, if ever, wore their more revealing evening attire in the photography studio.48 The larger size of the cabinet photograph, in addition to a new vogue of bust poses, encouraged photographers and later viewers to focus on the appearance of an individual’s face and expression, on what identified him or her as an individual, more than the earlier cartes had done.49 Nevertheless, elaborate clothing, Victorian parlor trappings, and painted backdrops continued to be popular in portrait photography well into the early twentieth century. Daylight remained the standard source of illumination for photographic portraits throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,50 and so one can imagine Thomas Askew’s studio at 114 Summit Avenue occupying a room of the house dominated by a bank of windows and skylights. The gelatin dry-plate process, in general use by the 1880s, greatly reduced exposure times to a few seconds,51 minimizing the need for headrests and elaborate back supports and thus greatly enhancing the photographer’s ability to capture sitters in relaxed poses. As paper albumen prints had a tendency to curl, they were pasted to stiff cardboard backs (hence the name cabinet cards),52 typically bearing the photographer’s insignia and studio address. As with the earlier cartes-de-visite, collectors kept images of loved ones and celebrities organized in albums with precut window pockets made to hold the thick photo cards. In this respect, Du Bois’s albums prove quite unusual, for here the paper prints are pasted directly onto the cardboard pages of the albums themselves. This suggests that the albums were not assembled haphazardly, compiled from existing family collections (for those prints would have already been backed), but instead gathered with considerable planning and foresight, as the images must have been procured before the final step in the normal production process. This may also suggest that Thomas Askew, the only photographer I have been able to associate definitively with a number of the 66 photography on the color line

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Georgia Negro images, produced all of the photographs for Du Bois’s albums, culling negatives from his studio archive and printing them especially for the Georgia Negro albums. What are the terms by which the Georgia Negro photographs served to ‘‘metaphorically enshrine’’ (to borrow Gates’s language) the subjects they represent? What are the formal characteristics of these images? The portraits of men included in the albums generally, and those identifiable as Thomas Askew photographs specifically, tend to be rather closely cropped images of individuals posed against a plain background that reads as solid or mottled gray in the black-and-white photographs. Typically, the men are positioned at a slight angle to the camera, their shoulders filling the photographic frame; they sometimes look directly at the camera, but more often just off to the side of center, assuming the lofty gazes of contemplation that signal interiority.53 Askew’s men are formally dressed in dark three-piece suits, crisp white shirts with stiff collars, and knotted ties. Their bodies are cropped below the chest, and hands remain invisible; thus the portraits offer a rather close study of the face, sculpted and highlighted by side illumination. One of Askew’s portraits of Henry Hugh Proctor, minister of the First Congregational Church of Atlanta, provides a good example in this regard. Proctor faces the camera at a slight angle, his body clearly in the center of the frame, with ample space around his head. Strong side lighting illuminates Proctor’s high forehead, parted and peaked hairline, full cheek, nose, ear, lips, neatly trimmed moustache, and chin. Proctor’s eyes—one highlighted under a sculpted brow, the other receding further into shadow—look calmly past the photographer and viewer, focusing on an object well outside the photographic frame. His expression appears serene and quiet, thoughtful, but not overly dreamy. His dark suit is impeccable but plain, his tie simple, without pattern, and lacking the lustrous shine of silks and satins. The arms of his jacket are creased, conforming to his body, suggesting a suit in which he lives and works. The general feeling conveyed by the image is one of intimacy through proximity. In his albums, Du Bois matches this portrait of Henry Hugh Proctor with another photograph, in which Proctor turns his body a bit further away from the camera. Given this pairing, how is one to distinguish these images from the doubled mug shots discussed earlier? Such distinctions are a matter of both form and function. Askew’s paired portraits of Proctor show slightly more of the body than the art of scientific propaganda 67

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27. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. Henry Hugh Proctor, minister, First Congregational Church, Atlanta, Georgia. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 62. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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28. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. Henry Hugh Proctor, minister, First Congregational Church, Atlanta, Georgia. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 61. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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mug shots, and their rectangular framing evokes the aristocratic traditions of portrait painting. Here, the gray background suggests a formal studio setting, while in the former images, a cloth hung behind subjects in a rather makeshift manner serves as the backdrop. Neither of Proctor’s portraits is a hard profile or a direct frontal image. More important, perhaps, the pair does not form part of a series of objectifying images, but instead finds its place within a group of middleclass portraits of women and children supported by Victorian studio props. This final difference signals a distinct signifying function; it situates the photographs within a specific register of evaluation, one that is honorific, sentimental, and often familial. If Proctor’s face is to be studied in these portraits, it is to be admired as the surface sign of noble thought and feeling. Indeed, the only ‘‘type’’ to be studied here is that of a man to be emulated and revered. As situated in Du Bois’s albums, Proctor’s portraits demonstrate how important function is to photographic meaning. A photograph of a face can be used alternately for regulatory as well as laudatory purposes, and it is ultimately the combination of formal conventions and the contextual evidence of the archive, the relation of one image to other images, that determines photographic meaning. While some of Askew’s portraits of women and children are closely cropped like those of the men, his portraits of women generally include more of the body and studio surroundings. Even in the relatively stark portrait of Mamie Westmorland, a schoolteacher, the subject is given some space within the photographic frame. Posed against a plain background, Westmorland looks out at the viewer from a more distanced position than her male counterparts; over half her body is shown, including her arms and hands. She turns slightly away from the camera, resting her elbow on the arm of a chair and leaning her head on folded fingers and an extended thumb. As she supports her face on her hand, Westmorland’s wedding ring is brought up prominently to cheek level. Thus as viewers engage her direct look, they cannot help but recognize her married status. The gaze that invites intimacy also frames and contains it by marking Westmorland as a member of a discreet social unit. While Askew does not show the hands of his male subjects, in his portraits of women, the wedding ring seems to function as a symbol of women’s respectability. While the men are depicted as sufficient unto themselves, their faces represent-

art of scientific propaganda 69

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29. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. Mamie Westmorland, schoolteacher. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 79. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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ing the story of their lives, women’s narratives are subtly scripted in service of others. In some of Askew’s other portraits of women, the setting resembles more that of a parlor or a sitting room than of a studio. While the neutral background that supports the men tends both to universalize and individualize them, the women are associated more directly with the comforts of home, their identities rooted in an interior, domestic space. Askew’s portrait of a young woman in a marvelous hat proves exemplary in this regard (plate 10). In this portrait, the sitter is posed a bit off to the center of the photographic frame; she faces the camera with a slight turn, her eyes focused just to the left and above the camera. Strong side lighting illuminates three-quarters of her rounded face and smooth hands, also throwing her elegant dress into sharp detail. The lace trim of her bodice, shoulders, and sleeves picks up the pattern of Askew’s signature white lace curtain. This is not the dark, heavy tapestry one would find in many studios, such as that of Mathew Brady, but a delicate hanging, light and flowery, of the kind that often adorned the windows of Southern homes. The camera is situated at some distance from the sitter, capturing three-quarters of her body, and leaving ample space on either side. She half leans and 70 photography on the color line

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half sits on the table that supports her, with hands crossed rather formally and her enormous hat tilted stylishly on her head. The strong side lighting picks up the glint of her jewelry—a round pin at the neck, something peeking out from her waistband, and prominently displayed wedding rings. Once again, while Askew’s men are represented as self-contained, rings and props are called on to locate the individuality of Askew’s women. This sitter divides a photographic frame split nearly down the middle: To the left is the plain gray background typical of Askew’s portraits of men; to the right is the lace curtain and a touch of tapestry pinned to the table. On the one side, the woman’s individuality stands on its own; on the other, it is situated by textiles that evoke domesticity. This sitter’s half-illuminated, intimate side is anchored in the domestic, over which she casts her shadow and which doubles her form in lace, as if her very shade is one of domestic grace. Thomas Askew made some remarkably beautiful photographs of young children (plates 11–13). He must have been especially adept at putting them at ease, for these young girls and boys appear perfectly at home in their little bodies, without the awkward gangliness of youth; their expressions are soft and composed. Even tiny children, in long, white baptismal gowns that swallow their limbs, appear rather selfpossessed in their propped-up positions (plate 5). Despite their adult composure and poise, however, the children in these photographs are supported by a much larger array of props and objects than Askew’s adults. It is as if the narrative of their lives has not yet fully developed enough to stand on its own, or to be represented by their bodies, and needs some formal scripting in order to be communicated to the viewer. In a number of Askew’s portraits of young girls, the child is placed in the center of the photographic frame, seated or standing behind a table to which a patterned tapestry has been tacked. Open on the table before them are what appear to be architectural drawings or photographs. The images in the oversize folio are not fully readable, but they are clearly meant to be seen by the viewer; indeed, one of the girls holds the images at a slight angle, tipping the edge of the folio toward the viewer. The images bear shapes that suggest Grecian columns, implying the study of classical forms, masterpieces of antiquity, and of a Greek past whose racial origins were widely disputed in the nineteenth century. The girls do not look at the images, but stare off a bit to the side, as if in contemplation of the structures and art of scientific propaganda 71

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their weighty history. One girl rests her head against a fisted hand, with one long finger pointed up sharply (plate 12). The position of her hand is forceful, and her overall appearance is commanding compared to her ruffled and flounced counterparts, an effect augmented by her stiff sailor dress with its huge collar, bold stars, and white striped and looping trim. Figurines resting on the table, two small sculptures that show up again and again in Askew’s portraits of children (plates 12 and 13), closely flank the girl and the images she studies. The figures, which nearly touch her and crowd the table so that the architectural drawings curl up between them, almost appear to be assessing the images with the girl, peeking over her shoulder for a glimpse. One is a small, dark, seated figure, perhaps a bronze statuette, ornate in its detail and lustrous shine, which appears to be a warrior of Western antiquity. His tufted helmet and muscular physique, visible even in miniature, suggest physical strength and power. One arm is draped in cloth, while the other rests on what may be a sword or shield; his legs are slightly crossed at the ankles. In strange contrast to this figure, another, larger statuette sits on the opposite side of Askew’s primary subject: a chipped figure of a barefoot boy, with pants rolled up and hat cocked to the side. What probably began as a comical figure has been made more pathetic by the large white chunks of exposed plaster left by untold bangs and bumps. The boy appears to be white; he is almost elfinlike, evoking the wayward Huck Finn. The overall effect of his creased clothes and rolled-up pants is floppy and sloppy, and the figure, not very well cared for itself, seems to emblematize carefree or careless youth. The plaster child scowls and grabs his foot, as if he has been injured in a summer romp. An innocent expletive stands out in relief on the base supporting the figure—‘‘By Jingo’’—an expression of the child’s pain, surprise, or annoyance.54 Askew positions his child models between a figure of ancient nobility and one of unkempt childishness, and if the images are meant to suggest the paths that might define the future of Askew’s subjects, the impeccable grooming, crisp, clean, stylish clothes, and composed faces of these African American children clearly distinguish them from the sloppy white boy figure and align them with the classical ideals of the warrior. These children are neither frivolous nor unkempt; indeed, they are already studious, lost in contemplation of the future and the past, woven into a (contested) cultural history of classical antiquity and racial superiority. 72 photography on the color line

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30. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. Thomas E. Askew Prepares to Scold His Five Mischievous Sons, c. 1870. Reproduced courtesy of Herman ‘‘Skip’’ Mason, Isiah S. Blocker Collection, Skip Mason’s Archives, Ellenwood, Georgia.

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The seriousness with which Askew depicts his subjects in the photographs collected for Du Bois’s Paris Exposition albums is highlighted further by the humorous genre of photographs he also made of his own children. ‘‘Joke’’ carte-de-visite, stereograph, and cabinet card photographs remained a vogue throughout the nineteenth century. Large stereograph companies printed multi-image sets that developed a short narrative, often depending on gender and racial stereotypes and slurs for their ‘‘humor.’’ Portrait photographers also made a range of offbeat images, posing subjects in casual, goofy, and theatrical positions. In an early image, entitled Thomas E. Askew Prepares to Scold His Five Mischievous Sons, Askew has encouraged his five young boys to adopt performative poses ranging from nonchalance to despondency. The boys are dressed in striped, polka-dotted, and patterned shirts, short pants, and floppy felt hats, all of them a little battered and worn (with the exception of one boy who wears a straw hat pushed back jauntily on his head). All are barefoot, and their poses seem relaxed and exaggerated in their slouchiness; they have approxiart of scientific propaganda 73

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mated the attitude of the ‘‘By Jingo’’ figure that embellishes Askew’s later portraits. One boy is flopped down in the dirt, bent arm propped on bent leg. Another arches his back and rests his hand on a protruding hip. The ‘‘mischief ’’ the boys are engaged in is smoking; all but one hold cigars, and two exchange a light. The smallest, and presumably youngest, is the only one who is left out; he buries his head in his hands, flinging himself against the fence, as if distraught over not being able to partake of the older boys’ pleasures. Askew himself, in his own soft, floppy hat, peers over the fence that separates him from the boys, and divides the photographic frame from front to back and top to bottom. He brandishes a narrow switch, and his hand is blurred by the beginning of a downward stroke. In this tableau, the boys exist in their own little world, and Askew plays the comical part of the father always two steps behind the shenanigans of his children. While Askew apparently enjoyed a wide range of photographic entertainments, the image he chose to represent his family to the world at the Paris Exposition differs radically from this comically staged view. The photograph that portrays Askew’s sons (and by proxy Askew himself ) in Du Bois’s photograph albums depicts them as sophisticated young men in the Summit Avenue Ensemble (plate 14). In this later photograph, Askew’s sons are elegantly dressed in suits with boutonnieres, and each holds a classical string instrument. Here the young men represent the epitome of culture and refinement. Seated and standing closely together, they are joined by Jake Sansome, identified as a neighbor. The boys are arranged in an elegant parlor or living room, very likely the ensemble’s (and Askew’s) Summit Avenue home, outfitted with carved and polished wood furniture, lace and tapestry-draped windows, a plush, white fur rug, a framed image on the wall, ornamental vases in the window, and decorative objects on the mantel. As small children, Askew photographed his sons, at least once, as little rascals, barefoot and dressed in the floppy clothes and hats of his ‘‘By Jingo’’ statuette; as young adults, he depicts them as practitioners of Western high art, well suited in a string ensemble. If Askew imagined two paths for African American children, it is clear which one he has encouraged his sons to take. It is also apparent that Du Bois’s albums, which present a carefully crafted vision of African American elegance, sophistication, and cultural elitism, leave no room for play. As he inscribes African American children into an ennobling nar74 photography on the color line

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rative, Thomas Askew also inscribes himself into a genealogy that reaches back to a classical age, claiming a space for himself, for his African American subjects, and for photography in the realms of the ideal, of the exalted, of (Western) art.55 By marking his subjects and his very medium the stuff of art, Askew anchors photographic portraiture in the realm of subjectivity and identity, defying the purported objectivity and identification of the scientific mug shot. Askew’s portraits challenge the ‘‘evidence’’ of race science by posing counterimages, and they contest white supremacy on subtler terms as well. For while Egyptologists in the mid-nineteenth century claimed ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman culture for Caucasian history, others claimed the heights of Western culture for Africa and Africans.56 Much was at stake for biological racialists in these debates, for if they claimed ‘‘Negro inferiority’’ as biologically determined, how could they explain that the pinnacles of Western civilization Francis Galton and other eugenicists most celebrated might be Negro creations? Art was one of the artifacts commonly wielded in discussions of racial genius; white supremacists claimed that the Negro had no art, and therefore no superior culture. In ‘‘Criteria of Negro Art,’’ Du Bois proclaims, ‘‘Until the art of the black folk compels recognition they will not be rated as human.’’ 57 With his portraits, Thomas Askew commands a space for himself as an African American artist and subtly inscribes his work and his subjects within the Western cultural traditions most guarded by white supremacists, as signaled by the Greek or Roman warrior figure gracing many of his images. And lest the viewer attribute the apparent cultural superiority of Askew’s light-skinned subjects to ‘‘white blood,’’ as one of Du Bois’s antagonists might have done, Askew marks whiteness in his photographs with ‘‘By Jingo,’’ the figure of a little boy that stands as the rumpled antithesis of cultural and class refinement. Askew’s photographs perform a social and political function similar to that described by Pearl Cleage Lomax in her essay about the later African American photographer P. H. Polk, who worked in Atlanta and extensively at Tuskegee in the 1930s and 1940s. Imagining Polk’s Tuskegee subjects’ responses to his gorgeous portraits, Lomax muses:

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He would take our pictures and let us see that those who said we were invisible were lying. That those who said we were ugly were lying. That those who claimed we were less than human were lying. That those

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who said we did not love each other, and marry, and produce children, and suffer, and grow old were lying. Mr. Polk would let us bloom in the safe zone before his camera, and we saw ourselves differently through his lenses. We saw ourselves shining in all of our specificity. In all of our generalities. In all our terrible humanness. We saw ourselves just shine.58

The same might be said of Askew’s earlier portraits, but African Americans were not the only intended viewers of these images. Framed within Du Bois’s albums, made explicitly for a national and international audience, including white Americans and white Europeans, Askew’s images also encouraged white viewers to see that many of them were perpetuating a lie that would not hold up to his photographic evidence. Du Bois draws on the codes of very different photographic practices in his Paris Exposition albums, and it is in the tension between these two poles of identification and identity—one scientific and ‘‘objective,’’ one auratic and sentimental—that the albums perform much of their cultural work. Du Bois reclaims the African American image, wrenching it from the confines of the scientist’s racist archive, from those institutional sites that would define African Americans as inferior, bound to the lowest rung of an evolutionary ladder. With the artistic help of Thomas Askew, he took images of African Americans out from under the presumed mastery of an ‘‘objective’’ white supremacist gaze and resituated them within African American albums. The middle-class photographic portrait is meant for sympathetic eyes; such images are made at one’s request and circulated among one’s family and friends. The portrait presumes an audience of admirers; it addresses viewers with the unquestioned call of intimacy. If Du Bois’s initial scientific mug shots first present images of African Americans as projected ‘‘through the eyes of others,’’ his portraits ask viewers to look at images of African Americans with other eyes.

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3

‘‘Families of Undoubted Respectability’’

In ‘‘Of the Coming of John,’’ a short story in The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois examines the wide-ranging cultural anxieties that his celebration of an African American elite engaged. ‘‘Of the Coming of John’’ tells of a young African American man’s return to his small Southern town after seeking an education in the North. John comes home a teacher, ready to ‘‘uplift’’ a largely reticent rural population. His newfound knowledge alienates him from his African American family and friends, and strains the rigidly racialized class hierarchy enforced by Southern whites. In a particularly charged scene, John is ‘‘put in his place’’ by a white judge who is the father of his former playmate, a young white man whose fate becomes tragically entwined with John’s own.1 The judge proclaims: Now I like the colored people, and sympathize with all their reasonable aspirations; but you and I both know, John, that in this country the Negro must remain subordinate, and can never expect to be the equal of white men. In their place, your people can be honest and respectful; and God knows, I’ll do what I can to help them. But when they want to reverse nature, and rule white men, and marry white women, and sit in my parlor, then, by God! we’ll hold them under if we have to lynch every Nigger in the land.2

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The immediacy with which Du Bois’s fictional white judge moves from an imagined social equality in the parlor to the desire to lynch is both terrifying and telling. In Du Bois’s depiction, the middleclass African American man, the man who might ‘‘presume’’ to sit

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in a white man’s parlor, constitutes, in and of himself, a source of white rage. In the judge’s imagination, such an economically successful and culturally refined African American man—a social equal— is also one who desires to ‘‘marry white women,’’ overturn a racial hierarchy (‘‘reverse nature’’), and ‘‘rule white men.’’ This complicated nexus of white male anxiety is precisely the set of fears that fueled the rhetoric and practice of lynching in the postemancipation and postReconstruction South. As Ida B. Wells, a journalist and antilynching crusader, observed in the 1890s, lynching ultimately served as a form of economic terrorism, as a racialized class warfare translated into the terms of sexual purity and transgression.3 Wells came to this conclusion after three of her friends were lynched for the ‘‘crime’’ of operating a successful grocery store that undermined the business of a white-owned establishment in the same neighborhood. Wells saw the cry of rape of a white woman that legitimized lynching in the eyes of many as a cover enabling whites to lash out at and resist the African American progress they perceived as threatening their own economic and cultural capital. The African American man who posed a financial challenge to white business was transformed, by the lynch mob’s cry of rape, into a man who menaced the sexual purity of white women. Thus as one pillar of white patriarchy, the control of capital, was challenged, it was, in a psycho-sexual domain, displaced into a threat to another cornerstone of white patriarchy, namely, white women and their reproductive power. The rhetoric of lynching, which aimed to justify the torture and murder of African American men by calling it retribution for the crime of rape, figured black male sexuality as ‘‘savage.’’ In the scenarios construed by the white lynch mob, a white woman was posed as the pure, passive victim of black male sexual aggression. In her antilynching work, Wells questioned the purity and passivity of the white female victim, as well as the absence of African American women from the lynch mob’s outcry over the crime of rape. According to Wells and others, the rape stories so often rehearsed by a white mob worked to obscure the history of consensual relationships between white women and African American men, as well as white men’s rape of African American women, institutionalized during slavery and continuing in the postemancipation and post-Reconstruction periods. Indeed, turn-of-the-century white anxiety over interracial mix78 photography on the color line

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ing figured, in part, a return of the white patriarchy’s repressed legacy of interracial rape and reproduction. Invariably, the cause of white men’s rape of African American women was attributed to African American women themselves, represented not as victims but as the instigators of sexual ‘‘encounters’’ with white men. Thus, in the intertwined forces of rape and lynching that worked to consolidate a white patriarchy, black male and female sexuality were construed as uncivilized and criminal in order to mask the violence and aggression of white male and female sexuality. In Du Bois’s short story, his hero John is lynched for protecting his sister against the sexual violation of his white counterpart (also named John), the white judge’s son. It is within this highly charged and dangerous cultural context that Du Bois challenges the color line by forwarding class standing to trump a biologically inflected racial hierarchy in the Georgia Negro albums. Du Bois’s photographs of well-to-do African American men and women signified against the backdrop of lynching and racial terror that sought to obliterate the African American man’s economic power and class standing and deem him a criminal. In the context of such discourses of sexualized ‘‘Negro criminality,’’ which depicted African American men as depraved, Du Bois poses a vision of an African American patriarchy, of a black middle class making claims to both economic advancement and cultural privilege through the performance of gendered respectability and sexual control. Du Bois founds an African American middle class on gender differentiation and sexual discipline; ultimately, in the Georgia Negro photographs, his claims to racial equality through class stratification are figured through gender hierarchy. While Du Bois reinvests the image of the African American man posed in the white supremacist rhetoric surrounding and enabling rape and lynching, he reconfigures the image of the African American woman to a lesser extent. Indeed, Du Bois’s representational strategies concerning African American women within an African American patriarchy are complicated and problematic, particularly in his sociological texts of the turn of the century. While he celebrates the purity of African American women, protected by upstanding African American men, he does so only after denouncing their sexual ‘‘looseness,’’ which he argues must be reformed by sexual restraint and gendered submission. Du Bois first condemns the African American woman’s sexuality to then ‘‘reform’’ her, not as a victim of white (or ‘‘undoubted respectability’’ 79

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black) male aggression, but as a victim of her own sexual promiscuity. In Du Bois’s vision, the African American patriarch, by virtue of his sexual discipline, will ‘‘save’’ the sexually unbridled African American woman from herself. Du Bois’s gendered class challenge to the tenets of white supremacism thus leaves in place one of the mainstays of its founding sexual mythologies.

‘‘Darwinian Development’’ As Du Bois’s counterarchive of middle-class African Americans contested the conceits of biological racialists invested in ‘‘Negro inferiority,’’ it also challenged a popular legacy of racist caricature that singled out the black middle classes for derision. Throughout the late 1870s and early 1880s, Harper’s Weekly, the premier national weekly newspaper, ran a series of cartoons and ‘‘Blackville’’ sketches that ridiculed an African American elite. Even as it increasingly condemned the extreme white supremacism of a violent and growing Ku Klux Klan in the post-Reconstruction years, Harper’s contentedly depicted African Americans as incapable of effecting upward class mobility, as inherently unable to embody and perform class and cultural refinement.4 The white middle classes naturalized their own social positions by lampooning the ‘‘unnatural’’ aspirations of ‘‘unevolved’’ African Americans. A crude Harper’s cartoon entitled ‘‘A Step in the Darwinian Development’’ evokes the tangled connections between socalled race science and class standing that white supremacists drew on to distinguish themselves as ‘‘naturally superior.’’ A ‘‘Gentlemanly Storekeeper,’’ marked as Southern by the drawl of his ‘‘Wa’al,’’ asks a ‘‘Progressive Buyer,’’ ‘‘ ‘Wa’al, what do you want?’ ’’ The buyer, clad in dungarees and a laborer’s hat, replies, ‘‘ ‘I don’t want nuffin; dis yere Lady wants a Chignon.’ ’’ The ‘‘joke’’ is that the chignon, a knot of hair worn at the nape of the neck, cannot be purchased; it is a sign of beauty that begins with straight, European hair, and that of the woman for whom the ‘‘progressive buyer’’ inquires stands out in relief against the white background of the shop windows and walls in tufted spikes. The cartoon suggests that the African American laborers who desire the trappings of European elegance and refinement are confused and misdirected. Evoking cultural and class aspirations as an 80 photography on the color line

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31. Cartoon, ‘‘A Step in the Darwinian Development,’’ Harper’s Weekly. Reproduced courtesy of Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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‘‘evolutionary’’ step in the Darwinian development, the cartoon dismisses such desires as ridiculous and forecloses the possibility of such ‘‘improvement’’ by anchoring elegance in hair type, one of the physical features most fetishized by biological racialists as a marker of racial difference and essential racial hierarchy. The laborers are associated with physicality; the woman stands solidly with arms akimbo, and the man leans nonchalantly on the counter, his backside, with its large trap door, prominently displayed for the viewer. Their bodies are thick and corpulent compared to the white shopkeeper’s, itself a caricature of brittle thinness, sharp angles, and rigidity. Indeed, all of the physical features of the African American man and woman depicted in the cartoon are grossly distorted—huge mouths, protruding teeth, and popping eyes make them look less than human. The cartoon intimates that the ‘‘natural’’ laws of Darwinian evolution have determined that African Americans are not yet fit to survive in the middle and upper classes. Their physical types have not been whittled and rigidified by (white) discipline and training. And once again, the ‘‘undoubted respectability’’ 81

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cartoon suggests that such efforts may not avail them in any case, as hair texture and other physical features are marked as inassimilable. Biology, according to the cartoon, thwarts class ‘‘evolution.’’ Harper’s ran more subtle, and yet more extended, commentary on African American economic progress in its Blackville sketches, drawn by noted American caricaturist Sol Eytinge Jun.5 More complicated and detailed than the crude cartoon discussed above, these images ridicule the exploits of well-to-do African Americans. Eytinge consistently exaggerates facial features and expressions in his drawings— wide eyes and protruding lips are ever present—and he singles out pseudoaristocratic events, such as foxhunting and a regatta, for derision. Eytinge’s ‘‘The Coaching Season in Blackville—the Grand Start,’’ published in Harper’s Weekly on September 28, 1878, depicts horses bucking and wild, escaping the control of their black coachmen. Blackville is spelled incorrectly on the side of the coach, which reads, ‘‘Tally Hoo Blackvile.’’ This illustration, and the Blackville series as a whole, suggests that African Americans cannot handle (literally) the accoutrements of the wealthy; they have not been ‘‘bred’’ for such rarified pursuits—they cannot even control the beasts on which such pleasures depend. In Eytinge’s Blackville, genteel practices become ‘‘vile.’’ 6

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Eytinge was not alone in caricaturing an African American elite in the second half of the nineteenth century; in the early 1860s, Harper’s Weekly presented an average of sixteen ‘‘comic’’ images of African Americans each year. Thomas Nast, the best-known caricaturist in the United States, also drew racist cartoons ridiculing African American legislators, but it is Sol Eytinge Jun.’s work in this line that was most widely noted and influential. Indeed, a Harper’s Weekly article of 1876 proclaimed that Eytinge had made ‘‘negro character a special study.’’ According to Michael Harris, Eytinge’s Blackville sketches for Harper’s inspired Thomas Worth’s later Darktown Comics for the famous lithograph company Currier and Ives, and by 1884, the virulently racist Darktown Comics, numbering thirty prints, accounted for over one-third of Currier and Ives’s total production.7 Eytinge’s sketches employ mimicry to contain the aspirations of upwardly mobile African Americans. The images suggest that African American sophistication can only ever be mimicry—‘‘almost the same, but not quite,’’ ‘‘almost the same but not white.’’ 8 The images work to naturalize a racialized class hierarchy by fixing difference in ap82 photography on the color line

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proximation, by constructing African American elegance as the ‘‘not quite’’ and the ‘‘almost.’’ The sketches confirm an absent white upper class by holding it up implicitly as the measure of worth, as the longed for but unreachable mark. If Du Bois’s photographic portraits of an African American elite seek to trump a racial hierarchy by leveling it with class and cultural refinement, Eytinge’s Blackville sketches for Harper’s aim to counter such claims to class equivalence by inscribing a racial slippage whereby blackness always already makes cultivation mere mimicry. The images thus work to comfort white viewers anxious to maintain an exclusive cultural privilege, encouraging them to rest assured that despite the seeming sameness of an African American gentility, a racial difference will remain. In Eytinge’s sketches, sexuality is constructed as the inassimilable mark of blackness; sexuality functions as the ‘‘missing’’ (middle-class) link. In a series depicting the romantic conquests of two African American women, ‘‘the twins,’’ promiscuity and sexual looseness are subtly inscribed as characteristics that make African American class ambitions laughable. In ‘‘Wedding Trip of the Blackville Twins— Off for Europe,’’ which appeared in Harper’s Weekly on September 7, 1878, the twins, aboard a ship, are sent off by a large crowd of waving and cheering men and women. In the upper left corner of the frame, the two young women lean amorously on the shoulders of their newly wedded husbands. Physical contact marks their adoration; they press their bodies against the men who stand proudly erect, with legs spread, one with his enormous stomach thrust out at the crowd, the other with his leg firmly planted at a suggestive angle. Men on the dock wave their hats and strain for the elevated foursome on the boat, and two attempt to pass more flowers to the favored four. It would appear that the twins have had many suitors; some of the men, with heads thrown back and mouths wide open, appear to be wailing at their departure, and those that continue to pass flowers may assume that the twins’ marriage need not stop their courting. The twins’ apparent coyness, marked by the way they lean their heads on their husbands’ shoulders and roll their eyes up to admire them, suggests a pleasurable submission that reconfirms their husbands’ gloating, and it may also attempt to deflect and apologize for the rather too enthusiastic attention of the women’s other suitors. A slight aura of chaos pervades the crowd, and the startled expression of a white sailor looking out into the throng signals that something may be wheeling out of ‘‘undoubted respectability’’ 83

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32. Drawing by Sol Eytinge Jun., ‘‘Wedding Trip of the Twins—Off for Europe,’’ Harper’s Weekly, September 7, 1878. Reproduced courtesy of Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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control. One of the well-wishers holds a sign that reads ‘‘Bone Voage,’’ suggesting the approximation, the almost-but-not-quite mastery, of this ritualized departure, and another offers a ‘‘Cure for Sea Sickness,’’ a gesture that intimates, perhaps, that the twins have been suffering from a certain ailment before embarking on the trip. Some of the young women and men in the crowd appear to gossip among themselves, and two of the women’s backward smiles, aimed toward the viewer, indicate that they are quite happy to have the twins removed from the scene of their own courting. In a companion piece to this image, published one month later, on October 26, 1878, a sketch that represents the twins’ return— ‘‘After Doing Paris and the Rest of Europe, the Bridal Party Return to Blackville’’—the twins and their husbands parade through their rural 84 photography on the color line

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town. The twins sport tiny umbrellas, new white gloves, new hats, and new dresses; they walk with backs rigid and straight, chins thrust up, looking down their noses at their neighbors. The men also wear new coats and hats; they carry canes, and appear to swing and swivel with a little bravado in their gait. One of the men whistles, and the other, cane crooked inside the corner of his mouth, looks out at the viewer through a monocle. The couples appear to be on a self-made parade, flaunting their newfound sophistication. But they also display the babies their nurse carries in tow, infants born, apparently, on their wedding trip, and therefore quite a bit earlier than mandated by the protocols of (an elite, white) sexual propriety.9 Indeed, the babies explain the secrets and grins shared by well-wishers at the party’s send-off, as well as the exaggerated, strutting strolling of the twins’ husbands upon their return. Neighbors stare, wide-eyed and openmouthed at this spectacle, and one woman, hidden from the procession by a tree, and yet clearly displayed for the viewer, laughs hysterically, her body caught in the bend of a belly-howl. Situated outside

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33. Drawing by Sol Eytinge Jun., ‘‘After Doing Paris and the Rest of Europe, the Bridal Party Return to Blackville,’’ Harper’s Weekly, October 26, 1878. Reproduced courtesy of Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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the centrally framed image, this woman is privileged for and placed parallel to the viewer, who, presumably, is meant to share in her joke, to look back at the airs of the party and laugh. For despite their tour of Europe and their elegant clothes, the twins apparently ‘‘needed’’ to get married, and sailed for Europe to hide their progressing pregnancies. These episodes in Eytinge’s Blackville series poke fun at the pretensions of the twins, undercutting their self-proclaimed elegance by deriding their apparent laxity in regard to the (elite, white) social mores of sexual behavior. In Eytinge’s sketches, African American sexuality, construed as loose and undisciplined, is marked as a sign of racial inferiority, as a racialized trait that bars African Americans from full inclusion in the ranks of the upper crust. It is within this context, in the shadow of this racist archive, that Du Bois collected and presented his 1900 Georgia Negro photographs of an African American elite. It is these representations, in addition to the instrumental documents of biological racialists and eugenicists, that Du Bois’s images engage and contest. As Du Bois seeks to counter a racial hierarchy by evoking class, his images must negotiate the norms of gender and sexual conduct through which class is racially inscribed. Gender and sexuality thus become key issues in Du Bois’s challenge to racial hierarchies and to racialized class codes, concerns that he negotiates with considerable ambiguity. Indeed, as we shall see, Du Bois’s antiracist class arguments depend on reconsolidating a vision of gender hierarchy informed by problematic constructions of African American sexuality.

Confronting ‘‘Negro Criminality’’

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The imagined sexual conduct of African Americans became central to white battles over race and class hierarchies at the turn of the century. Indeed, sexuality figured prominently in sinister discourses showcased in Harper’s Weekly, which aimed to deter African American social and economic advancement. The debates concerning socalled Negro criminality represented African Americans as degenerate and unfit for ‘‘civilized’’ middle-class privileges. Concomitant with the rise and representation of the ‘‘New Negro’’ at the turn of the century, white supremacists construed a ‘‘new negro crime’’— that of raping white women—in order to legitimize violence on Afri86 photography on the color line

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can American bodies;10 white lynch mobs called forth an image of the black male rapist in order to justify the torture and mutilation of black men. Many white supremacists argued that African American criminal behavior had increased dramatically during the postbellum era and suggested that newly emancipated blacks were reverting to their ‘‘natural’’ state of instinctive physicality and aggressive sexuality without the guidance of their former masters. One writer for Harper’s Weekly contended: ‘‘Such outrages are sporadic indications of a lapse of the Southern negro into a state of barbarism or savagery, in which the gratification of the brutish instincts is no longer subjected to the restraints of civilization.’’ 11 Another Harper’s correspondent concurred: ‘‘In slavery negroes learned how to obey, and obedience means self-control.’’ Lamenting the purported demise of ‘‘self-control’’ after emancipation, the same writer proposed that ‘‘a substitute [for slavery] must be found’’ to ensure the ‘‘mental and moral discipline’’ of African Americans.12 In this way, white supremacists utilized discourses of Negro criminality to argue for the inherent inferiority of African Americans, and to justify increasing social surveillance, segregation, and lynching as means of controlling the African American bodies they posed as sexually unruly. Du Bois mounted a two-tiered attack on dominant and extreme white representations of Negro criminality. At the most basic level, he challenged the depiction of criminality as an innate characteristic posed by biological racialists, arguing that illicit behavior was a learned, not an inborn, effect. While he himself reiterates that crime is a ‘‘Negro problem,’’ Du Bois suggests that unlawful acts are the result of poverty and argues that African Americans are no more apt to commit offenses than other impoverished groups. As we shall see in the following section, Du Bois also deems poverty a cause of ‘‘sexual looseness,’’ but his response to the highly sexualized representations of African Americans, forwarded most viciously in the white supremacist rhetoric of lynching, is more complicated and ambiguous than his commentary on so-called Negro criminality generally. Du Bois’s assessment of crime is leveled at social and historical forces, and it thus ultimately comments on American society; his critique of so-called sexual looseness, on the other hand, is aimed at African Americans themselves, and especially at African American women. While he attributes licentiousness to historical and economic antecedents, he nevertheless condemns what he perceives as ‘‘undoubted respectability’’ 87

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the ‘‘sexual sins’’ of the African American working classes, censuring African American women in particular. The causes of sexual looseness may lie with society, but African Americans themselves must effect the cures Du Bois prescribes. For Du Bois, so-called sexual deviance must be rooted out by controlling and containing African American women’s sexual desires within the patriarchal African American family. Du Bois thus makes his own case for disciplining African Americans and the African American bodies he sexualizes in a highly gendered manner. Indirectly countering white representations of the African American man as sexually rampant in the discourses of lynching, Du Bois forwards an image of patriarchal restraint, shifting the locus of sexual aggression onto African American women. Further, Du Bois carefully consigns sexual ‘‘aberrations’’ to the lower classes, dividing and distinguishing them from his elite Talented Tenth, the mold and model of gendered sexual respectability to which he would discipline others. As white Americans constructed images of Negro criminality and sexual deviance to reinforce their claims to cultural privilege, Du Bois also distinguished his vision of an African American elite from a sexually suspect African American underclass. In his edited volume Notes on Negro Crime, Particularly in Georgia (1904), Du Bois explicitly challenges the racist tenets that ‘‘the Negro element is the most criminal in our population’’ and that ‘‘the Negro is much more criminal as a free man than he was as a slave.’’ 13 In this Atlanta University study, Du Bois argues that slavery was not, as many white supremacists proclaimed, a check on inherent criminal tendencies, but instead, an institution that encouraged illicit behavior. In other words, Du Bois makes a case for slavery as a corrupting environment, a social and economic condition, in order to dispute suggestions of innate Negro criminality. In discussing the ‘‘faults of Negroes’’ in the ‘‘causes of Negro crime,’’ Du Bois cites ‘‘loose ideas of property’’ and ‘‘sexual looseness,’’ and quotes Sidney Olivier who states, ‘‘ ‘All these faults are real and important causes of Negro crime. They are not racial traits but due to perfectly evident historic causes: slavery could not survive as an institution and teach thrift; and its great evil in the United States was its low sexual morals; emancipation meant for the Negroes poverty and a great stress of life due to sudden change. These and other considerations explain Negro crime.’ ’’ 14 In delineating the ‘‘faults of the whites’’ in producing Negro crime, Du Bois notes ‘‘a double standard of justice in the courts,’’ ‘‘enforcing a 88 photography on the color line

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34. From Alphonse Bertillon, Identification anthropométrique, instructions signalétiques, new edition (Melun, France: Imprimerie Administrative, 1893). Reproduced courtesy of Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries, Pullman.

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caste system in such a way as to humiliate Negroes and kill their selfrespect,’’ and ‘‘peonage and debt-slavery.’’ 15 Notes on Negro Crime, Particularly in Georgia demonstrates how discourses of so-called innate Negro criminality directed public attention away from the material circumstances of extreme poverty and racism under which many ‘‘free’’ African Americans struggled to survive by sharecropping in the post-Reconstruction South. Within this discursive context, Du Bois’s scientific mug shots of ‘‘Negro types,’’ compiled for the 1900 Paris Exposition, take on new meanings. Revisited through the lens of turn-of-the-century debates concerning Negro criminality, they recall the visually codified signs of the criminal mug shot. Indeed, the form of cropped and paired portraits that Du Bois’s photographs reproduce—with a difference— was utilized not only by biological racialists but also by criminologists to construct their own brand of social deviance at the turn of the century. The photographic mug shot served as a site of convergence for varied discourses claiming to describe racialized degeneracy and depravity. As the ‘‘primitive’’ racial ‘‘type’’ was likened to an evolutionary throwback (in the lesson of the native village so prominent at fairs and expositions), the criminal was also deemed ‘‘atavistic,’’ a ‘‘undoubted respectability’’ 89

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biological holdover from an earlier age. Thus racial ‘‘primitives’’ and criminals were categorically collapsed into a biological category of ‘‘undeveloped’’ inferiors. The so-called Negro type could be overlaid on the ‘‘criminal type,’’ just as a visual taxonomy of racial others could be called on to demarcate criminal others.16 As Allan Sekula has argued, the history of the criminal mug shot was also embedded in the history of the middle-class photographic portrait; the mug shot marked the boundary delimiting middle-class privilege. According to Sekula, ‘‘To the extent that bourgeois order depends upon the systematic defense of social relations based on private property, to the extent that the legal basis of the self lies in the model of property rights, in what has been termed ‘possessive individualism,’ every proper portrait has its lurking, objectifying inverse in the files of the police.’’ 17 In many ways, the Rogues’ Gallery, a showcase for criminal offenders, functioned as a public counterexample to the middle-class portrait gallery. Du Bois’s photographs for the 1900 Paris Exposition, as well as his written refutations of Negro criminality, demonstrate how the class dynamic Sekula describes was also racialized at the turn of the century, as images of Negro criminality were evoked to define the bounds of the white middle classes. As he would later state, ‘‘At that time it was the rule of most white papers never to publish a picture of a colored person except as a criminal.’’ 18 By ‘‘signifyin(g)’’ on the form of the criminal as well as the scientific mug shot, Du Bois’s initial photographs in Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. suggest that for some (white) viewers, the middle-class portrait of an African American was equivalent to the mug shot of a criminal. As Du Bois’s short story ‘‘Of the Coming of John’’ intimates, for many whites, the image of a successful African American always already constituted an image of one who had stolen cultural prerogatives from their ‘‘rightful’’ owners. In other words, when projected through the eyes of white others, the image of the African American middle-class individual often transmuted into the mug shot of an African American criminal. It is precisely this transformation of the black image in the eyes of white beholders (a transfiguration of the middle-class portrait into a criminal mug shot) that Du Bois’s Georgia Negro portraits unmask.19 Du Bois made his first foray into the complicated and politically contentious debates surrounding so-called Negro criminality in his landmark sociological study, The Philadelphia Negro, published in 90 photography on the color line

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1899. In this early work, Du Bois studies historically conditioned relationships to property and condemns what he perceives as ‘‘sexual looseness’’ among urban African Americans as causes of crime. Here, Du Bois also describes the economic conditions created by prejudice and discrimination as forces that block African American opportunity, dulling and frustrating African American ambition. He articulates an environmentalist position vis-à-vis crime in The Philadelphia Negro, arguing that crime ‘‘is a phenomenon that stands not alone, but rather as a symptom of countless wrong social conditions’’ (242). Among the environmental forces that encouraged crime in Philadelphia’s African American communities at the turn of the century Du Bois cites ‘‘stinging oppression’’ and lack of opportunity as central causes (241). In a detailed analysis, Du Bois notes that racial discrimination severely limits the kinds of opportunities open to African American men and women, their potential for advancement within those fields, the pay they receive, and their overall job security (322– 55). As Mia Bay has argued: ‘‘The facts and figures [Du Bois] gathered in Philadelphia suggested that an interwoven combination of racism, poverty, and the lingering aftereffects of slavery—such as disadvantages in employment—were at the root of black Philadelphia’s social ills.’’ 20 In many ways, Du Bois’s Georgia Negro studies for the 1900 Paris Exposition closely resemble those he prepared for The Philadelphia Negro, published just one year earlier; indeed, it seems likely that Du Bois modeled the latter study after the former. The Philadelphia Negro was the result of a fifteen-month inquiry, spanning August 1, 1896, to December 31, 1897, during which time Du Bois and his new wife, Nina Gomer Du Bois, lived in the College Settlement House of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward.21 Du Bois gathered information from some 9,000 African Americans living in this section of Philadelphia, and included in his final publication were also the results of Isabel Eaton’s investigation of domestic service. The aim of the research, according to Du Bois, was to provide ‘‘the scientific basis of further study, and of practical reform.’’ 22 Like the later American Negro Exhibit, The Philadelphia Negro was clearly aimed as a response to the ubiquitous, ‘‘half-named’’ ‘‘Negro problem,’’ and as Du Bois himself would later learn, it was supported by those who believed Philadelphia ‘‘was going to the dogs because of the crime and venality of its Negro citizens.’’ 23

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In his own later estimation of this work, Du Bois would declare: ‘‘It ‘‘undoubted respectability’’ 91

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revealed the Negro group as a symptom, not a cause; as a striving, palpitating group, and not an inert, sick body of crime; as a long historic development and not a transient occurrence.’’ 24 Although at times his argument seems conflicted, wavering between sociological paradigms in flux, as Michael B. Katz and Thomas J. Sugrue have argued, Du Bois ‘‘rooted his study in a fundamental critique of biological notions of race.’’ 25 Du Bois designed his inquiry after Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People of London (1889–1897) and Jane Addams’s Chicago Settlement House study, Hull-House Maps and Papers (1895).26 In The Philadelphia Negro, he provides a general overview of African American history in Philadelphia, investigating immigration and population patterns throughout the nineteenth century, and then focuses on the Seventh Ward, to describe the age, sex, conjugal condition, education, occupations, health, family, and organized life of African Americans living in Philadelphia in the mid-1890s. His chapter titles, ‘‘The Negro Criminal,’’ ‘‘Pauperism and Alcoholism,’’ ‘‘The Environment of the Negro,’’ ‘‘The Contact of the Races,’’ and ‘‘Negro Suffrage,’’ indicate the particular attention Du Bois paid to these subjects. In appendix B, ‘‘Legislation, etc., of Pennsylvania in Regard to the Negro,’’ he also offers a history of the Pennsylvania legal code pertaining to African Americans from 1682 to 1895, and finally, in the appendices, he reproduces the schedules, or questionnaires, used in his house-tohouse surveys, along with several instructions for interviewers. Du Bois utilized many of the categories he first deployed in The Philadelphia Negro to prepare the Georgia Negro studies for the American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition. As I noted in the introduction, in addition to the photograph albums, the Georgia Negro studies also resulted in two additional exhibits for the Paris Exposition: (1) a series of thirty-one charts and graphs displaying social and economic facts and figures; and (2) a description of the complete legal code of Georgia as pertaining to African Americans. One set of graphs and charts records and compares the African American populations of various states and then focuses on Georgia, comparing population by county. As in The Philadelphia Negro, age, conjugal condition, literacy, schooling, occupations, family budgets, and land and property ownership receive special attention. Migration, amalgamation, slavery, freedom, mortality, and crime are also studied. Further, the categories that divide the schedules Du Bois and his collabora92 photography on the color line

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tors used in collecting data for The Philadelphia Negro directly parallel the subjects emphasized in Du Bois’s 1900 Georgia Negro photographs, such as the individual, family, home, house servant, street, and institution. While it may not be obvious initially, the Georgia Negro photographs share with The Philadelphia Negro an ideological focus on environmental forces as the cause of social conditions. With their many portraits, the albums suggest that individuals stand as the foundation of social progress, but they also situate individuals within specific social settings. As I noted in the previous chapter, as one progresses through Du Bois’s photograph albums, it is as if the camera gradually backs up—to locate individuals within a specific context, or at least within a space carefully orchestrated at the level of symbolic detail. In the portraits, this is the photographic studio, with its trappings that suggest middle-class sitting rooms and parlors. Moving through the portraits, the viewer arrives at images that participate in the emerging field of social documentary photography: one finds individuals and groups situated in the social contexts of homes, businesses, streets, and neighborhoods. In the final album of photographs, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A., one sees families grouped on the steps of Victorian houses or placed in front of shaded, whitewashed homes; men and women perched in horse-drawn carriages; groups standing on the lawn in front of country churches; men in the doorways of stores and pharmacies; children in rural backyards with chickens and dogs; marching bands and smaller musical groups; individuals seated at large desks in spacious offices; men and boys at work delivering blocks of ice; and men and women at work in fields (plates 14–19, 22– 24).27 And after individuals have been situated in specific contexts, the environment itself eventually becomes the focus of the photographs. People fall out of scenes altogether; the site becomes subject. Depopulated images of city streets, country homes, and churches, and interior views of stores and parlor rooms (plates 20 and 21) work to emphasize material settings, highlighting the environment that, as we have seen, Du Bois depicted as a shaping force in determining individual and social character in his sociological writings. The Georgia Negro albums portray poverty as an environmental force, represented by run-down houses and unpaved streets much more frequently than by individuals. It would appear that Du Bois is loathe to picture a less-than-perfect African American body, or a ‘‘undoubted respectability’’ 93

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35. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 275. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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strained and struggling African American family. He will represent the conditions of deprivation, the environmental forces that may encourage crime—broken-down farm buildings and unpainted houses on unpaved urban streets—but he is reticent to represent the men and women who inhabit such spaces, those who may, or may not, have been adversely affected by such places. As a point of comparison, Du Bois’s photographs of large Victorian homes, each singled out from the surrounding neighborhood, often represent families grouped on front porches, framed by the solidity and stature of the grand houses. Conversely, his images of the urban ‘‘slums,’’ such as that depicting city tenements in Atlanta,28 offer distant views of rows of indiscriminate houses, none especially focused on for careful perusal. Such scenes remain largely unpopulated, or they display tiny figures at a distance, figures indiscernible as specific individuals, trudging up sidewalks that terminate in mud. Indeed, the thick, deep mud of unpaved streets is the subject centrally framed in these images; for Du Bois, this mud represents filth and lurking disease,29 and symbolically, 94 photography on the color line

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36. Negro city tenements, Atlanta, Georgia. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 300. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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37. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 327. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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38. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 3, no. 251. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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perhaps, a mire of poverty and destitution in which not only carriages but also people can be trapped and submerged. In contrast to the photographs of urban poverty, a number of the rural images focus in on decrepit farm buildings and houses, but once again, families remain conspicuously absent from the frames of these broken-down porches. While a couple of rural photographs show people laboring in the fields at close range (plate 19), many of these images depict agricultural spaces as deserted. Despite the fact that, by Du Bois’s own calculation, the vast majority of African Americans living in the Black Belt at the turn of the century worked as farmers, and most of them as poor tenant farmers, Du Bois visually represents African American agricultural workers as a small minority in his 1900 albums.30 The photographs of urban and rural poverty in the final volume of Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. and in Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. seem crafted to represent the environmental forces that can crush individuals, but once again, Du Bois seems reluctant to represent the people who might be strained by such pressures. It is as if he fears such representations would enable white viewers to inscribe (environmental) causes onto black bodies, to fix the root of deprivation, disease, and crime in the ‘‘innate inferiority’’ construed by race 96 photography on the color line

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scientists, to read the environment as a natural outgrowth of African American individuals, rather than the reverse, as an influencing force. The divergence in representations of the wealthy and the impoverished in Du Bois’s albums is particularly interesting when compared to other reform-oriented social documentary photographs of the period. Jacob Riis, a pioneering photographer and tenement reformer, consistently depicted large immigrant groups crammed into tiny quarters, with notably dirty children forced to work to help support the family. While Riis emphasized the unhealthy living conditions of the tenements in his photographs, he did so largely by representing the immigrant families affected by such dire environments.31 The crowding that Riis’s photographs depict constituted a central concern to Du Bois. In The Negro American Family, Du Bois condemned the overpopulated Southern urban alley and the rural oneroom cabin as sites of deprivation tantamount to the Northern urban tenements: ‘‘So far as actual sleeping space goes, the crowding of human beings together in the Black Belt is greater than in the tenement district of large cities like New York.’’ 32 Decrying the poverty of Dougherty County, Georgia, Du Bois protests: ‘‘I met one family of eleven eating and sleeping in one room, and thirty families of eight

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39. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 3, no. 237. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

‘‘undoubted respectability’’ 97

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or more. Why should there be such wretched tenements in the Black Belt?’’ (129). According to Du Bois, the packed throngs of these destitute living places resulted in ‘‘bad health, poor family life, and crime’’ (60), as well as ‘‘untold [sexual] evils’’ (53). And yet, unlike Riis, and in contrast to his own representation of the ‘‘better classes,’’ Du Bois was reticent to depict the inhabitants of such impoverished spaces. In refusing to represent indigent African Americans in his 1900 albums, Du Bois may be refusing to give (white, middle-class) viewers what they expect. Indeed, while he argues that not enough attention has been paid to the overcrowding of the Southern urban alley in social reform circles, he simultaneously suggests that overattention to the ‘‘worst and lowest type,’’ the inhabitant of the ‘‘alley hovel,’’ ‘‘has gone so far today as to obscure, almost, in the eyes of the majority of Americans, the existence of a class of intelligent American citizens of Negro blood who represent as good citizenship, as pure homes and as worthy success as any class of their fellows’’ (65). Du Bois here makes explicit his desire to recast a visual record, to transform the dominant cultural image of African Americans as seen ‘‘through the eyes of others.’’ Considering that attempt in the context of other documentary images, Du Bois may also hope to distance African Americans from the Europeans Jacob Riis depicts as ‘‘teeming immigrant masses’’ by adopting the white middle-class norms of nuclear families in distinction to the extended families and community bonds of newcomers in order to align African Americans with visions of (white) middleclass normalcy.33 In his 1900 albums, Du Bois overwhelmingly represents the ‘‘best classes,’’ those whose ‘‘pure homes,’’ sanitized in part by the very space they afford, mark the ‘‘good citizenship’’ of their occupants. In this sense, then, Du Bois forwards the ‘‘Americanness’’ of his better classes by emphasizing their conformity to white middleclass standards of economic success, once again invoking class to make claims on equality, trumping the possible (white) racial claims of poor Europeans. In differentiating his vision of the best African American families from the mass of European immigrants, Du Bois also dissociates them from the majority of African Americans. He deems the one-room home ‘‘the primitive and natural method of dwelling of all men and races at some time,’’ the less-than-civilized origin of developmental progress.34 Describing the ‘‘evolution of the Negro home’’ accord98 photography on the color line

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ing to a scale that begins with ‘‘African huts’’ and ends with large houses owned by African American professionals in The Negro American Family, he locates the ‘‘Negro city tenements’’ as an intermediary step between slave cabins and homes owned by African Americans.35 Several of the photographs he uses to illustrate this evolutionary scale were first presented in the 1900 albums, and if one remembers the racial geography of the 1900 Paris Exposition, then it would appear that Du Bois constructs his own sliding evolutionary scale, distinguishing the homes of his better classes from the African huts of the native village. And further, according to Du Bois’s measure, poor African Americans, those who live in city tenements, are construed as the less-evolved, ‘‘primitive’’ forebears of wealthy, ‘‘civilized’’ African American home owners.

A Model Patriarchy

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The American Negro Exhibit was meant to celebrate African American progress since the Civil War, and as Du Bois proclaimed in The Philadelphia Negro, he believed progress could best be determined by the standard of a black elite. In the ‘‘upper class’’ Du Bois found ‘‘the realized ideal of the group’’: ‘‘As it is true that a nation must to some extent be measured by its slums, it is also true that it can only be understood and finally judged by its upper class.’’ 36 How, then, does Du Bois represent an African American upper crust in his Georgia Negro photographs for the 1900 Paris Exposition? Beyond the props that evoke middle-class parlors and sitting rooms, beyond the clothes that signal wealth, beyond the standardized, massreproducible photographic forms, how does Du Bois distinguish a middle class in its specificity? What, in short, is Du Bois’s vision of an African American elite? First, the men and women represented in the 1900 albums are almost uniformly young. Flecks of gray hair reveal signs of maturity on an individual or two, but with the exception of a couple of portraits, the elderly remain absent from Du Bois’s albums. The viewer only rarely finds venerable grandmothers and grandfathers here, and thus almost no one appears to be old enough to have known slavery personally. Indeed, as Laura Wexler has commented on another collection of photographs presented in the American Negro Exhibit, these are ‘‘the sons and daughters of ‘freedom’s ‘‘undoubted respectability’’ 99

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first generation,’ but nothing about their appearance reveals this fact. Instead, the invisibility of the marks of slavery seems to be part of the point.’’ 37 In Du Bois’s 1900 photograph albums, the ‘‘New Negro’’ would appear to be a generation sprung from scratch; ‘‘new’’ because cut off from and entirely dissociated from the ‘‘old,’’ especially from the memory and legacy of slavery. Du Bois’s New Negroes are both youthful and light-skinned. As I noted in the previous chapter, Du Bois may have aimed to dismantle eugenicist delineations of singular racial types with representations of biracial and white-looking individuals. In line with his later study, The Health and Physique of the Negro American, he may have wished to contest eugenicist depictions of the so-called mulatto as degenerate. In these scientific registers, Du Bois’s representations of lightskinned individuals with aquiline noses and long, wavy hair perform important antiracist work. And in an era of increasingly strident laws regulating racial identities, these images contest white supremacist attempts to erase a history of forced racial mixing.38 Here, then, may be Du Bois’s representation of the legacy of slavery in his albums. However, taken in the context of debates concerning African American ‘‘color-consciousness’’ at the turn of the century, Du Bois’s selected portraits may also work to reinforce an intraracial color line of distinction for African Americans. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an African American elite increasingly faced criticism for its ‘‘blue veinism.’’ 39 The educator Nannie Burroughs proclaimed in 1904: ‘‘There is no denying it, Negroes have colorphobia.’’ 40 Condemning color elitism, Burroughs argues for social distinctions based on character, and she anchors character development in a gendered paradigm of protective gentlemanly respect and feminine sexual purity. Calling out to men, Burroughs states, ‘‘Our women need the protection and genuine respect of our men. . . . Whenever the men of any race defiantly stand for the protection of their women the women will be strengthened morally and be saved from the hands of the most vile.’’ 41 Addressing women, she admonishes: ‘‘It is the duty of Negro women to rise in the pride of their womanhood and vindicate themselves of the charge [of sexual looseness] by teaching all men that black womanhood is as sacred as white womanhood.’’ 42 For Burroughs, character, and, subsequently, class distinction, should be determined according to normative, nineteenth-century middle-class gender codes of ‘‘true’’ womanhood and protective manhood. 100 photography on the color line

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40. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 3, no. 220. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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Du Bois belies a similar adherence to antebellum models of gender protocol as the signs of moral strength and the standards of ‘‘civilized’’ middle-class ‘‘evolution’’ in The Philadelphia Negro (1899) and The Negro American Family (1908). In the earlier text, he divides the population of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward into four ‘‘grades’’: (1) the ‘‘well-to-do,’’ which includes ‘‘families of undoubted respectability’’ that adhere to patriarchal models of domesticity and housewifery; (2) the ‘‘respectable working class’’; (3) the ‘‘poor’’ but ‘‘honest’’; and (4) the ‘‘lowest class of criminals, prostitutes and loafers; the ‘submerged tenth.’ ’’ 43 In The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois’s scale of social respectability is measured by the African American patriarch’s ability to keep his wife at home, there devoted to the work of motherhood and middle-class housewifery, and such gender roles become markers of ‘‘civilization’’ in The Negro American Family. Denouncing illegitimacy in particular, Du Bois proclaims: ‘‘Without doubt the point where the Negro American is furthest behind modern civilization is in his sexual mores.’’ 44 For Du Bois, the African American woman registers her family’s moral status, asserting its place on the scale of civilization: In her most elevated role, she is a housewife supported by her husband; from there she sinks to the role of coworker who ‘‘undoubted respectability’’ 101

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must help to support the family financially; and finally, in her most degraded role as prostitute, her (sexual) work situates her outside the bounds of patriarchal familial respectability altogether. In Du Bois’s estimation of social worth, ‘‘sexual deviance’’ is sometimes collapsed into ‘‘Negro criminality,’’ as it is in the logics of lynching, but for Du Bois, sexual aggression is depicted as the ‘‘crime’’ of African American women. In Du Bois’s juxtaposition of a ‘‘talented’’ tenth to a ‘‘submerged’’ tenth, he evokes Negro criminality—‘‘the lowest class of criminals’’— in order to distinguish members of the middle and upper classes, individuals of ‘‘undoubted respectability,’’ from sexual deviants such as prostitutes. Du Bois appears to adopt a strategy parallel to the racist ones he would critique vis-à-vis discourses of Negro criminality, dismissing a portion of the African American population as inherently inferior, as debased beyond the reach of uplift. In the words of Mia Bay, Du Bois is ‘‘very much given to moralizing about lower-class manners and behavior’’ and ‘‘inclined to blame at least some area’s problems on the failings of its ‘bottom class’ denizens.’’ 45 In making a case for class over race as the standard of social distinction, Du Bois also constructs a class hierarchy within a diverse racial group, deflecting the biological arguments of race scientists and criminologists onto a portion of the African American population he is content to ‘‘submerge’’ under the expectations he rejects for himself and others of an elite class. In some ways, it would seem that Du Bois’s Talented Tenth relies on his construction of a ‘‘submerged tenth’’;46 in his own ‘‘sliding scale,’’ a middle-class portrait is figuratively contrasted to a criminal mug shot.47

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What Du Bois calls the lowest class is the site of both criminality and sexual ‘‘irregularity,’’ from which he distances an African American elite. In The Negro American Family he celebrates ‘‘the great and most patent fact [of ] differentiation: the emergence from the mass, of successive classes with higher and higher sexual morals.’’ 48 As Kevin Gaines has argued, Du Bois depicts a black urban working class as sexually promiscuous, and criminally inclined, in order to shore up the cultural distinction of a Northern black bourgeoisie. In doing so, he falls in line with racial uplift rhetoric, through which, Gaines suggests, the black middle classes represented themselves as a virtuous intellectual and cultural elite by evoking standards of Victorian sexual morality rooted in a patriarchal gender paradigm.49 In the final foot102 photography on the color line

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note to a chapter devoted to the ‘‘conjugal condition’’ in The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois condemns what he deems the lax sexual morals of the African American working classes: ‘‘Sexual looseness is to-day the prevailing sin of the mass of the Negro population.’’ 50 He ameliorates that statement with caveats pointing to the historical dissolution of and disregard for African American marriage bonds and family connections during slavery and by noting that white men continue to disrespect and dishonor African American womanhood. And yet, throughout this chapter, he appears exceptionally nervous about the numbers of men and women living together outside of wedlock in Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward. Du Bois is particularly concerned about ‘‘the unchastity of a large number of women’’—‘‘unmarried mothers’’—and suggests that ‘‘lax moral habits’’ signal grave ‘‘moral disorder.’’ 51 In Du Bois’s vision of social reform, ‘‘unmarried women,’’ and even women per se—that ‘‘large excess of young women’’ 52—need to be woven into the fold of an economically strong patriarchy.53 Addressing the (sexual) ‘‘fall’’ of ‘‘the poorly trained colored girl’’ in The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois states, ‘‘Nothing but strict home life can avail in such cases.’’ 54 For Du Bois, a middle-class, gendered family structure is the sign and salvation of good character: ‘‘The mass of the Negro people must be taught sacredly to guard the home, to make it the centre of social life and moral guardianship. This it is largely among the best class of Negroes, but it might be made even more conspicuously so than it is.’’ 55 Indeed, the patriarchal family, for Du Bois, constitutes the very mark of civilization itself. Arguing that ‘‘sexual irregularity’’ ‘‘belongs to the undifferentiated mass: some of them decent people, but behind civilization by training and instinct,’’ he proclaims: ‘‘Above these and out of these, are continually rising, however, classes who must not be confounded with them. Of the raising of the sex mores of the Negro by these classes the fact is clear and unequivocal: they have raised them and are raising them. There is more female purity, more male continence, and a healthier home life today than ever before among Negroes in America.’’ 56 Du Bois holds up his patriarchy of ‘‘undoubted respectability’’ as a disciplining and civilizing force to curb the sexual excess of the working classes, the impoverished, and the ‘‘criminal.’’ He seeks to bind African American women especially to the patriarchal structures of middle-class family norms that reproduce direct lines of inheritance. In contrast to the image of ‘‘undoubted respectability’’ 103

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the sexually aggressive black man construed in lynching discourses— those most vicious depictions of Negro criminality—Du Bois intimates that uncontrolled sexuality is not a characteristic of African American men, but a failing of African American women. Indeed, in The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois suggests that it is only the sober African American man, the middle-class patriarch, who, as father and husband, can reign in the wiles of sexually loose African American women. Du Bois thus fights the exclusive racialization of the (white) middle classes by appealing to a model of gendered class identities upheld by the figures of the ‘‘true’’ woman and the preserving patriarch. Du Bois’s preoccupation with patriarchal authority as the sign of respectable class consolidation also surfaces in his Georgia Negro photographs for the 1900 American Negro Exhibit. A series of group portraits of families posed in front of homes announces a prosperous middle class founded along patriarchal lines. In one, a rather distant view, taken as if from across the street, a man and (presumably) his family are arranged carefully in the garden approaching the house. The photograph is constructed to emphasize the expanse of property; indeed, the size of the house and the breadth of the garden veritably dwarf the family. Individual faces are just barely discernible, and they do not seem to be the point of this photograph. And yet the people are particularly placed in this image; the photograph clearly has been orchestrated to emphasize their positions, if not their individuality. A man, in suit and hat, poses at the bottom of the steps that lead up to the garden. In order to ‘‘enter’’ this space, one must move past him, up the wooden stairs, to a garden walkway that in turn leads past immaculately groomed and dressed children, to the steps of the house, where three women, one sitting, two standing, introduce the viewer to the house proper. The women are posed on the steps of the house; they are associated with the interior space that beckons from the large, shaded entry made by the frame of the porch. The man has one foot rooted in the street; he is, symbolically, the liaison between public and private realms. He is separated from his relatives by the sharp rise of the wooden stairs and the brick wall that divides his garden, house, and family from the street. This vertical rise behind him visually partitions the image into two planes; the framed and enclosed portion of the photograph, including the family, the garden, and the house, provides a kind of backdrop for the man in the foreground. The image appears to revolve primarily around his identity as a middle-class man, 104 photography on the color line

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41. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 354. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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a father and husband; the ‘‘background’’ situates him and lends him his individual and symbolic importance—the family and house provide the scale by which the viewer is meant to measure his worth as a middle-class man and a racial representative.57 A much closer view, a group portrait of six children, visually recalls the former image. The white ruffled dresses of the girls, the curly locks on one of the smallest, the boy’s straw hat held in his lap, and even the wood siding of the wall that peeks out from behind a black backdrop resemble the former family portrait closely enough to draw parallels. All these pretty children, wearing all these lovely clothes, signal the wealth of parents that can bring up so many so well. They are perfect, and yet not perfectly still; this is a lively group, neither rigid nor nervous before the camera. The smallest children do not look at the photographer; one has moved, distracted by something in his or her lap. The center child, perhaps placed too close to the camera, is out of focus, lending her a soft, almost ethereal air, as if she is but a sweet, ghostly projection of a future daughter for the ‘‘undoubted respectability’’ 105

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42. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 289. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

older girl who holds her. The boy on the left looks directly, even curiously at the camera. He has leaned in, at the direction of the photographer, perhaps, or out of his own interest in seeing the camera’s workings. His posture and look have spontaneity, and it is interesting, given the portrait of his (presumed, or at least parallel) father, that the boy is not positioned in the middle of this image; instead, the viewer’s attention is directed toward the one child who has remained perfectly still in this encounter with the camera. Of the six children, only the girl seated in the middle remains eerily quiet amid the movement of her siblings. The subsequent sharpness of her features and her steady stare give her an uncanny presence; she rivets one’s gaze. Almost buried beneath the presence of all these babies, she represents, perhaps, the future of this home life, its mother to be.58

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In another family portrait, taken by Thomas E. Askew, of a lawyer’s home in Atlanta, the camera has been placed much closer to its subjects; it is perched in the very garden itself (plate 22).59 This image, included in Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A., is dominated by the 106 photography on the color line

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house, which looms up large, spilling over the edges of the photographic frame. The family, in turn, is circumscribed by the steps that lead up to the porch, by a simple, carved wooden railing that encloses the space, and by the decorative corners of Victorian beams that recall the scalloped edges of picture frames. The three women who stand, and the single woman who sits, child in her lap, are rigidly posed in this image. They adopt the far-off looks of nobility and striving, gazing out in different directions. Their stiffness belies their performance for the camera; it is only the small children seated on the steps who appear actively engaged in the process. Two of these children look back at the camera with some uncertainty, but the girl in the middle strains and stretches her neck to look up and over at something else, perhaps a neighbor made curious by the camera and commotion. The single adult male represented in this photograph is positioned just slightly behind the women and children over whom he appears to preside. He stands with one hand on hip and another propped against the back of the large chair in which sit his wife (presumably) and child. His posture is both relaxed and commanding, and he is distinguished from the rest of the group by the relative ease of his pose (the others stand stiffly with hands at sides). And yet his position is also carefully crafted to reveal the wedding band on his left finger, to signal his status as husband and father. The angle of his gaze, and the foregrounding of his face against shadow, highlight and sharply define his cheekbones, chin, and nose, creating an individual portrait within the group photograph. Women and children sit beneath him, some literally at his feet. It is almost as if they are seated around a hearth, as if an intimate, interior family scene has been turned momentarily inside out for the gaze of the viewer. The intimacy of this imagined scene is juxtaposed to the starkness of the surroundings, the bare dirt yard and unpainted porch railing, which suggest new ownership and, perhaps, a quest for newly realized comfort and class standing. The family portrait that displays wealth most conspicuously presents a house rather removed from the viewer’s gaze, blocked to some degree by attention-grabbing horses and carriage (plate 23). It is fenced in, but hints of a tended garden peek through; plants weave and crawl their way up ornately carved, decorative woodwork, painted white. The photograph seems to project ‘‘the moral value of the well-painted house, and the fence with every paling and nail in its place,’’ which Booker T. Washington upheld as the symbol of racial ‘‘undoubted respectability’’ 107

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advance.60 The three people seated in the carriage are David Tobias Howard, an undertaker, and his mother and wife.61 The Howards all look out at the camera, self-consciously acknowledging and accepting this representation of their wealth and social standing, and they are cleverly framed within the carriage, as Mrs. Howard Sr. peeks out through the coach window. Howard himself suppresses a smile that curves his cheeks and softens his eyes, suggesting that the photograph is not meant to represent earnest striving, but instead, the selfsatisfaction of those who have already achieved economic success. At first, the family appears strangely relegated to the edge of the photographic frame. The shiny black horses that pull the carriage dominate the center of the image, as does the African American coachman, who sits high, looming over horses, carriage, and employers all. Visually, he seems placed to preside over this image. And yet his gaze, focused down, away from the viewer and fixed on the horses under his charge, demonstrates that he is not a part of this ‘‘portrait.’’ Instead, he functions as a prop, like the horses themselves, objectified prominently as one of the markers of privilege his employers boast. Thus while the portrait represents three individuals (seated in the carriage), the photograph is also very much about the black coachman, who is, nevertheless, rendered as object. The image reads as a kind of response to Sol Eytinge Jun.’s caricature, ‘‘Tally Hoo Blackvile.’’ This photograph is about polish, control, and stillness, about the relationship of master to servant to animal that structures class hierarchy. Du Bois’s photographs represent both the exterior signs of middleclass prosperity and the more intimate realms of domestic interiors. Indeed, some of the images depict the site of social entertaining, the contested space (as we have seen) of the opulent parlor. One photograph, a portrait of a man and a young woman seated at a piano, reconstructs an elegant sitting room within the studio (or at least within the darkroom) (plate 24). The young woman, with long wavy hair flowing down her back, places ivory fingers on ivory keys; she is slightly hunched forward, staring intently at the music before her eyes. A man with a wonderful mustache sits just behind her, his eyes focused on the music and the young woman who studies it. Placed on top of the piano that looms in front of the girl are two photographs in ornate frames, two vases, and a small statuette of a toga-clad figure that resembles popular representations of Liberty, Justice, or Virtue. The 108 photography on the color line

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photographs that peer down at the young woman from either side of the piano are hard to make out, but one appears to be an image of an infant, and the other a photograph of a young girl, with shoulderlength hair cascading down the sides of her face. Perhaps these are photographs of the young woman herself, images that mark various stages in her ‘‘progression’’ or ‘‘development.’’ The two images frame the girl at the piano, and they frame the small statuette, which stands in the middle, directly over the girl at the piano, as the symbol of an ideal, an abstract notion of virtue or justice embodied in an ivory white figure with long, flowing hair. The small statuette serves, perhaps, as the mark toward which this young African American woman is meant to strive, or as a symbol of ancient artistic (and racial) perfection, a symbol of an honored past to which the African American girl can lay claim and to which she can aspire. This photograph centrally displays the young woman’s hair, as both focus and disruptive sign. At the turn of the century, it was most common for middle-class women to wear their hair pinned up; indeed, containing the hair was a sign of modesty.62 Long hair released from pins and buns and braids was seen only by one’s most intimate family members, at bedtime, or perhaps after washing. Thus this presentation of hair may belie an intimacy between the young woman and man (and offer a connection between the couple and the viewer). On the other hand, it may also signal the young woman’s youth; perhaps she still enjoys a little of the freedom of girlhood and can wear her hair loose, even though her young counterparts, pictured in the Georgia Negro portraits, wear their hair tied up. Or perhaps her long, flowing hair and the whiteness of her fingers on the ivory keys function as disruptive racial signs that communicate the very point of the picture. These physical attributes, as much as the young woman’s place at the piano, may mark her elite class status. Thus the image may confirm Nannie Burroughs’s fears, namely that color and class standing were conspicuously interwoven for at least a portion of the turn-of-thecentury African American elite. More directly than the possible significations of the young woman’s hair, the piano, the undeniable center of this photograph, signals upper-class standing. Indeed, the piano seems to have held special weight as a symbolic object in Du Bois’s depiction of an African American elite at the turn of the century. In the instructions given to researchers for filling out schedules on the home in The Philadelphia ‘‘undoubted respectability’’ 109

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Negro, Du Bois notes that for question number 26, concerning furniture, the living room should be focused on, and one should especially ‘‘note the presence of the following articles: piano, organ, parlor-suit, sewing-machine, bookshelves, couch, centre-tables, rocking-chair, etc.’’ 63 In the reports of the 1900 class in sociology at Atlanta University, the class responsible for compiling much of the data for the Georgia Negro Exhibit, ‘‘the best Negro homes of Atlanta’’ are described, in part, as follows: ‘‘The parlors and some of the other rooms have tiled hearths, and there is usually a piano or organ in the home.’’ 64 In this light, and given the specific nature of the criticisms Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois launched at one another at the time, this photograph of a piano is noteworthy. In 1896, the same year Du Bois began his work for The Philadelphia Negro, Booker T. Washington held up the piano, along with French grammar, as a sign of misguided African American education and ambition. Describing a visit to a rural cabin in the South, Washington tells of a ‘‘young colored woman . . . who had recently returned from a boardingschool, where she had been studying instrumental music among other things.’’ According to Washington, ‘‘Despite the fact that her parents were living in a rented cabin, eating poorly cooked food, surrounded with poverty, and having almost none of the conveniences of life, she had persuaded them to rent a piano for four or five dollars per month.’’ 65 For Washington, the piano symbolizes a wanton disregard for African American ‘‘needs’’ and appropriate ‘‘remedies’’ to social and economic inequity. Washington evokes the piano in the rented cabin as an image of misdirected education and training, using it as the starting point from which he begins to tell the story of his own education at Hampton Institute and his subsequent work at Tuskegee. In some ways, then, the piano becomes, for Washington, the site from which he begins his critique of W. E. B. Du Bois’s scholastic program, and the point from which he narrates his own educational agenda.66 He returns to the piano as a negative counterpoint to introduce his discussion of industrial education in a 1904 essay for the Colored American Magazine:

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One of the saddest sights I ever saw was the placing of a $300 rosewood piano in a country school in the South that was located in the midst of the ‘‘Black Belt.’’ Am I arguing against the teaching of instrumental music to the Negroes in that community? Not at all; only I should 110 photography on the color line

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plate 1. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 2. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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plate 2. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 11. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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plate 3. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 12. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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plate 4. Bazoline Estelle Usher, Atlanta University student. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 5. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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plate 5. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 59. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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(above) plate 6. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 2, no. 144, and (opposite) plate 7. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 63. Both reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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plate 8. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 91. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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plate 9. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 99. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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(opposite) plate 10. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 66, and (above) plate 11. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 53. Both reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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(above) plate 12. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 3, no. 210, and (opposite) plate 13. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 42. Both reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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plate 14. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. The Summit Avenue Ensemble. Seated: Clarence Askew, Arthur Askew, Walter Askew. Standing: Norman Askew, Jake Sansome, Robert Askew. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 356. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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plate 15. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 274. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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(above) plate 16. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 350, and (opposite) plate 17. Dr. McDougald’s drug store. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 284. Both reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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plate 18. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 360. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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plate 19. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 3, no. 247. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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plate 20. Interior view of grocery store. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 3, no. 236. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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plate 21. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 286. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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plate 22. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. The home of an African American lawyer, Atlanta, Georgia. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 352. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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plate 23. David Tobias Howard, an undertaker, his mother, and wife, Atlanta, Georgia. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 283. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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plate 24. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 363. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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have deferred those music lessons about twenty-five years. There are numbers of such pianos in thousands of New England homes, but behind the piano in the New England home, there were one hundred years of toil, sacrifice and economy.67

Washington promotes an evolutionary model of slow progress, whereby industrial education is a first step toward the economic independence and power that will finally bring respect and political rights to African Americans. It is a model whereby African Americans must follow whites and in which the piano is not only a waste of limited means, but also, perhaps, a presumption. Du Bois’s ‘‘piano portrait’’ tells another story. This piano is not juxtaposed to poor surroundings; indeed, it is set in an extravagantly ornate, even cathedralesque room. And yet, on closer examination, the room in which this piano resides is, in fact, ephemeral. In looking closely, one finds that the tapestries hanging on the wall appear to be painted, perhaps retouched. And in looking again, one begins to discern a slight shadow effect around the edge of the piano and the pictures that rest on top of it, a shadow that is traced around the man sitting in his simple chair as well. In fact, it appears that this piano scene has been inserted into a painting. A mask has been cut around it, enabling the photographer to place the piano and its practitioners against a different background, within a different setting. The actual location of the piano remains a mystery. Perhaps it stood in a simple drawing room, or a teacher’s practice room. One cannot be absolutely certain that it was not housed in a small cabin. The retouching of the room in which this young woman and man sit draws attention to the constructed nature of the narrative Du Bois’s Georgia Negro photographs set forth. Like the images placed together in any albums, Du Bois’s photographs tell a particular story, and the tale Du Bois most wanted to tell at the turn of the century was one of the progress of a ‘‘civilized,’’ elite class. Describing in The Negro American Family the elegant houses first represented in his 1900 photograph albums, Du Bois states:

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Such homes as these are typical of the [educated, professional] class with which we are dealing. These are, of course, exceptional, when one considers the great mass of Negroes of Atlanta; and yet, of over a thousand homes of all types studied by Atlanta University students in

‘‘undoubted respectability’’ 111

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1900, about forty were placed in this select class. If among the Negroes of the South two per cent of the homes of freedmen have reached this type, it is a most extraordinary accomplishment for a single generation.68

With his photographs for the 1900 Paris Exposition, Du Bois worked to reinscribe a cultural screen dominated by white supremacist images, encouraging viewers to participate in new ways of looking and seeing.69 Du Bois’s piano image would seem to respond to Booker T. Washington, asking: Must an African American elite always be depicted as the unnatural, even irresponsible, child of the rural, dirt-floor cabin? Finally, the piano portrait also points to the gender relations that focus Du Bois’s vision of an elite African American patriarchy. One imagines that the young woman instructed in the refined arts of music is being trained for an anticipated role as ornament in a large and stately house. The woman whose ‘‘housewifery’’ (and lovely piano playing) signals that her husband can fully support her and sustain their home is confined to a limited sphere of domestic action, as the display of her ‘‘leisure,’’ as well as her controlled sexuality, is required to anchor her home and family within the classes of ‘‘undoubted respectability.’’ 70 As the young woman depicted in this image pursues her artistic training, striving to meet the mark of an elite femininity, her progress is measured and monitored by the African American man who watches her from behind. It would appear that her talents are perfected for his satisfaction. Crystallizing the gender dynamics that inform Du Bois’s Georgia Negro photographs, the image suggests that an African American patriarchy establishes itself by keeping African American women firmly fixed within its sights.

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4

Spectacles of Whiteness the photography of lynching

In Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940), W. E. B. Du Bois, at seventy, considers his early work as a sociologist at Atlanta University and describes the event that sundered his faith in ‘‘facts,’’ eventually compelling him to forego his academic work in 1910 to help found the naacp. According to Du Bois: At the very time when my studies were most successful, there cut across this plan which I had as a scientist, a red ray which could not be ignored. I remember when it first, as it were, startled me to my feet: a poor Negro in central Georgia, Sam Hose, had killed his landlord’s wife. I wrote out a careful and reasoned statement concerning the evident facts and started down to the Atlanta Constitution office, carrying in my pocket a letter of introduction to Joel Chandler Harris. I did not get there. On the way news met me: Sam Hose had been lynched, and they said that his knuckles were on exhibition at a grocery store farther down on Mitchell Street, along which I was walking.1

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Du Bois proclaims: ‘‘One could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved.’’ 2 ‘‘Sam Hose,’’ whose real name was Samuel Wilkes, was murdered near Atlanta, in Newnan, Georgia, on April 23, 1899, lynched in a gruesome spectacle of the kind becoming prevalent in the postReconstruction South.3 More than 6,000 white Georgians participated as witnesses in the murder, 2,000 of them traveling to the small town from Atlanta on special excursion trains reserved for the event. According to Ida B. Wells, ‘‘Many fair ladies drove out in their car-

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riages on Sunday afternoon to witness the torture and burning of a human being.’’ 4 The white crowd that killed Wilkes was unmasked and included many of the most prominent citizens of the region, such as E. D. Sharkey, superintendent of Atlanta Bagging Mills, John Haas, president of the Capitol Bank, W. A. Hemphill, president and business manager of the Atlanta Constitution, and Clark Howell, editor of the Atlanta Constitution. According to Louis P. LeVin, the white detective Ida B. Wells sent to investigate the case, such eminent citizens called for burning even before Wilkes was captured.5 The mob stripped Wilkes, tortured and mutilated him, burned him alive, and then fought over his bones and organs for souvenirs. Samuel Wilkes had been accused of killing his employer, Alfred Cranford, in a dispute over wages; he met his murderers without investigation or trial. Several white newspapers embellished the story of ‘‘Hose’s’’ alleged acts with tales of his rape of Mrs. Cranford, and a placard left hanging on a tree near the place of his execution proclaimed: ‘‘We Must Protect Our Southern Women.’’ An Atlanta newspaper upheld the ‘‘orderly and conservative,’’ ‘‘religious, homeloving and just’’ nature of the white Georgian torturers by calling out the image of ‘‘Mrs. Cranford outraged in the blood of her murdered husband.’’ Later investigations by Ida B. Wells and Louis LeVin, including interviews with Mrs. Cranford herself, revealed that the accusations of rape in the case were utterly unfounded and that Hose had acted against Alfred Cranford in self-defense.6

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In his recollection of this widely publicized lynching, Du Bois gets the facts in the case slightly jumbled; it was Cranford himself, not his wife, who was killed, purportedly in some kind of altercation with Wilkes. Indeed, Du Bois’s account of the incident is much more a story about how the lynching affected Du Bois himself than it is about the case of Samuel Wilkes. What Du Bois remembers is the swiftness of white Southern violence, and the futility of his own rational and reasoned efforts to stay the fury of the mob through evidence, logic, and argument. Further, it is the mutilated black body displayed on the street, along the very path Du Bois is walking, that shakes him to his core. For as it becomes utterly apparent to him that his words of restraint remain ineffective against the fury of a white supremacist mob, it may also become apparent to him that as an African American man, no matter how distinguished and superior his training, he is the embodied equivalent of Samuel Wilkes in the eyes of white supremacist 114 photography on the color line

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Georgians. No amount of success or distinction will dispel the ‘‘fact’’ of his ‘‘blackness’’ in the eyes of the white mob. As Louis LeVin would conclude in his report on the Cranford murder and Wilkes lynching: ‘‘A Negro’s life is a very cheap thing in Georgia.’’ 7 Walking along Mitchell street, perhaps sporting his cane and gloves,8 Du Bois may have felt that the severed knuckles of Samuel Wilkes metonymically figured the racialized social body to which Du Bois himself also belonged. The lynching of Samuel Wilkes functioned as a ‘‘rite of racial passage’’ 9 through which Du Bois experienced forcefully the contradictions of an embodied black identity in a highly codified white supremacist world.10 As Elizabeth Alexander has argued, lynching and other scenes of ‘‘violence made spectacular’’ vividly enforce a racialized power hierarchy, containing black men and women, posing them as dreadfully embodied victims.11 At the same time, however, such scenes of violence also provide grounds for a collective identification that can become a powerful ‘‘catalyst for action’’ for African American men and women, undercutting victimization with agency.12 Such scenes can generate, then, both double consciousness and second sight. Du Bois would, in fact, continue his work in sociology at Atlanta University for a decade after the day on which Samuel Wilkes was lynched, but the importance of this crime in his later recollections, the way he reconstructs it as a decisive moment, is noteworthy. As Du Bois worked to redefine and reconstitute racial identities at the turn of the century, lynching functioned to reassert white supremacy through white mob violence. According to Louis LeVin, the white perpetrators of the Samuel Wilkes lynching cited threats to Southern racial hierarchy as the ‘‘motives’’ for their crime: ‘‘Some said it was because the young ‘niggers’ did not know their places, others that they were getting too much education, while others declared that it was all due to the affluence of the Northern niggers.’’ 13 A number of scholars have begun to consider how whiteness has been consolidated vis-à-vis the racialized crime of lynching. For example, Hazel Carby has suggested that through lynching white men attempted to reassert power and control over the black male body in the postemancipation and post-Reconstruction period. Martha Hodes has argued that through lynching white men attempted to reassert control over the white female body, the imagined carrier of white racial identity. spectacles of whiteness 115

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Sandra Gunning has examined how white mob violence, especially as represented in literary texts, created racialized, cross-class alliances between white men. Grace Elizabeth Hale has argued that spectacle lynchings reconsolidated a whiteness paradoxically undermined by segregation.14 Through the spectacle of lynching, economic, social, and legal relationships technically altered by emancipation were reinscribed according to a race and gender hierarchy that privileged a white patriarchy in the post-Reconstruction era. While Du Bois was certainly well aware of the ubiquitous nature of white supremacy in the Jim Crow South, and mired in the white supremacist logics of turn-of-the-century race science, it may have been the lynching of Samuel Wilkes that decisively focused his insight on the brutal nature of white supremacist self-consolidation. It may have been this lynching that ultimately turned Du Bois’s thoughts to whiteness itself. For if Du Bois was forced to see a (white) fantasy of blackness embodied through the spectacle of lynching, he must also have seen a (white) fantasy of whiteness embodied through that same spectacle. If the severed knuckles of Samuel Wilkes figure the black body, they also figure the brutal physicality of the white supremacist body. In ‘‘The Souls of White Folk’’ (1920), an essay written ten years after his break with ‘‘calm, cool’’ science, and titled, perhaps, to serve as a kind of inverse mirror to The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois explicitly assesses whiteness as a historical construction, stating: ‘‘The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing,—a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed.’’ 15 And while crimes of war, imperialism, and racial terror are committed in the name of perpetuating the imagined goodness and rightness of the fantasy of whiteness, that whiteness is also regarded from a different point of view. Of the ‘‘modern white man,’’ Du Bois says: ‘‘We looked at him clearly, with world-old eyes, and saw simply a human thing, weak and pitiable and cruel, even as we are and were.’’ 16

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The second sight that Du Bois theorizes in The Souls of Black Folk is rearticulated as the even more discerning visual power of clairvoyance in ‘‘The Souls of White Folk.’’ Of these white souls Du Bois proclaims: ‘‘I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them. I view them from unusual points of vantage. . . . I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the working of their entrails. I know

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their thoughts and they know that I know.’’ 17 Seeing back through the Veil, Du Bois finds whiteness hideously embodied. Denying the white body the privilege of invisibility, Du Bois sees the white body uncloaked and inside out—he sees the working of its entrails. In a period in which hundreds of black bodies were literally pierced and penetrated by white lynch mobs, Du Bois reminds those white viewers who would close their eyes to these crimes that he sees what they refuse— and he sees them, in intimate, grotesque detail. If, indeed, Du Bois’s vision became focused on discerning the whiteness of the white lynch mob on the day Samuel Wilkes was murdered in Georgia in 1899, then the whiteness consolidated and conveyed through that lynching, and through lynching in general, constitutes an important political context against which to read Du Bois’s Georgia Negro photographs. Further, if Du Bois was forced to consider his own embodied equivalence to Samuel Wilkes (in the eyes of white supremacists) on the day that Wilkes was lynched, how do his photograph albums, produced just one year later, challenge the dehumanizing effects of lynching? The elegant young men and women who look back at viewers from Du Bois’s albums testify to and reinscribe their own embodied blackness, reclaiming an affirmative African American identity in the face of brutally dehumanizing forces. One might also imagine that those same men and women, looking back out at viewers, also look back out at white supremacists, bearing witness to the spectacle of whiteness conjured by lynching, scrutinizing white viewers carefully ‘‘from the back and side.’’ Produced within a year of the lynching of Samuel Wilkes, Du Bois’s albums present the dignified equivalent of Samuel Wilkes, the images that white supremacists sought to efface with the spectacles of their dehumanized victims. Du Bois’s portraits signify within and against the context of lynching, and specifically, within and against the context of lynching photographs, for like lynching itself, lynching photographs proved central to the consolidation of a white supremacist vision of whiteness at the turn of the century. According to James Allen, ‘‘the photographic art played as significant a role in the ritual [of lynching] as torture or souvenir grabbing.’’ 18 Thus, like the mug shots that perpetuated the discourses of ‘‘Negro criminality’’ central to white supremacist ‘‘justifications’’ for lynching, photographs of lynchings themselves haunt Du Bois’s Georgia Negro photographs.

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At the turn of the century, the shadow image imbedded in the white middle-class portrait was not only the criminal mug shot but also the lynching photograph.

Missives of Love and Terror In her recent study of ‘‘the black male body as spectacle,’’ Deborah McDowell has argued, ‘‘It is well known and widely conceded that black death has made good spectacle for [white] audiences who have relished it historically in every form from fatal floggings to public lynchings.’’ 19 In turn-of-the-century photographs of lynchings, black death clearly functions as a spectacle for a white audience. But unlike the media images McDowell studies, the photographs of lynchings do not simply presume a later white audience—they actually represent one, for a portion of the white audience enthralled by the spectacle of black death it has created is represented within many of these photographic frames. In this chapter, I focus on the spectacle of this white audience, refusing to forget the black bodies at the center of these images, refusing to forget the murdered African American men and women, but also refusing to repeat and reinforce the spectacle of black death.20 For as Saidiya Hartman has argued concerning written texts, too often the reproduction of tales of black agony ‘‘immure us to pain by virtue of their familiarity’’ and work to ‘‘reinforce the spectacular character of black suffering.’’ 21 Further, I would argue that Hartman’s concerns become magnified when one addresses visual texts, in which the representation and reproduction of the violated black body can function as a kind of fetish, obscuring from view the white torturers who also inhabit these images. Lynching photographs present a spectacle of whiteness; they represent a gruesome ritual of white identification that many white scholars, like myself, would, perhaps, rather not see. But if, as Richard Dyer has argued, whiteness has historically secured its representational power through invisibility, by being that which is not seen,22 then looking at whiteness, making white bodies bear the burden of the gaze, can become an important critical task. This chapter examines the spectacle of whiteness posed in lynching photographs in order to see extreme machinations of white consolidation, in order to see some of the visual workings of whiteness. 118 photography on the color line

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In pursuing this analysis, I rely on the archive of lynching photographs and postcards that James Allen has collected and reproduced in Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, a book that corresponds to and complements an important and controversial exhibit of the same name. Without Sanctuary presents ninety-eight lynching photographs, many of them postcards, ranging in date from 1870 to 1960, depicting murdered men and women, white and black, in states across the country. The vast majority of the images, however, were made in the first decade of the twentieth century, in the South (many in Georgia), and they overwhelmingly depict murdered young black men. Allen has carefully compiled notes and historical information concerning the alleged events surrounding the lynchings, their aftermath, and the photographs that document them, identifying the murdered individuals, and the dates on and places at which the murders took place.23 Without Sanctuary provides an important and extensive record of lynching in the United States, but it is also a disturbing book, not only due to the devastating nature of its images but also due to the beauty and richness of its reproduction and design. Lushly printed on glossy paper, some of the images reproduced in soft warm tones, photographs cropped to accentuate ‘‘artistic’’ compositions, the work becomes a kind of macabre coffee-table book. One wonders at the range of desires the book may play on, and following Saidiya Hartman, one is compelled to ask: ‘‘What does the exposure of the violated body yield?’’ 24 And yet, to its credit, Without Sanctuary does document the pervasiveness of lynching in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as its spectacular nature, witnessed by hundreds and thousands of white people (although in this task it certainly follows the earlier efforts of Ida B. Wells and the naacp), and it demonstrates powerfully the central role played by photography in the ritual of lynching and in the reproduction and circulation of its shock waves. Indeed, the book’s focus on photography is its major contribution. In the many articles and reviews that responded to the initial exhibitions of ‘‘Without Sanctuary’’ at the Roth Horowitz gallery (January 13–February 12, 2000) and then at the New York Historical Society (March 14–July 9, 2000) in New York City, writers and visitors remarked consistently on their surprise and shock at discovering the numbers of white people that populate these gruesome photographs. spectacles of whiteness 119

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43. Detail from photographic postcard. The lynching of Lige Daniels. August 3, 1920, Center, Texas. Reproduced courtesy of the Allen-Littlefield Collection, Special Collections Department, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

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Indeed, white men and women are present in the hundreds and thousands in these images. It would appear that they have come to witness and to participate in these spectacles of racial violence with family and friends: they are dressed for an occasion; they meet the camera unabashedly, even cheerfully. As Roberta Smith has noted: ‘‘What takes the breath away is the sight of all the white people, maskless, milling about, looking straight at the camera as if they had nothing to be ashamed of, often smiling. Sometimes they line up in an orderly fashion, as if they were at a class reunion or church picnic. Sometimes they cluster around the victim, hoisting children on their shoulders so that they can see too.’’ 25 This chapter interrogates whiteness in relation to the spectacle of lynching, and specifically, in relation to the mass reproduction and mass circulation of that spectacle through photography. As I noted earlier, Elizabeth Alexander has considered the ways in which violence against the black body, and the reproduction and circulation of that spectacle in photographs, literary texts, and mass media, have functioned as terrifying sites of racial identification for African American men and women, sites which can finally become catalysts 120 photography on the color line

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for antiracist action.26 However, given the numbers of white men and women who perpetrated and participated in these acts of violence, and who then had themselves photographed with the results of their deeds, it is apparent that lynching, and its photographic representation, have functioned not only as sites of African American identification, as Alexander argues, but also as sites of white supremacist identification. To look at whiteness in photographs of lynching, one must begin by asking, following artist Pat Ward Williams: How can such images exist? 27 As the images collected by James Allen extensively document, photographic postcards were prevalent in late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century lynching photography. As endlessly reproducible documents, photographic postcards could spread the news of lynching far and wide, claiming an ever larger crowd of witnesses—terrorizing and symbolically empowering ever greater numbers. But one might say this of all photographs of lynchings after the advent of mechanical reproduction in photography. Here it seems important that these are not just photographs, but photographic postcards. For while as photographs these images testify and provide evidence, as photographic postcards, they were conceived initially as commodities. Indeed, they bear the commercial signs of studio emblems, functioning as advertisements for photographic establishments and photographers. They are prepared with forethought—perhaps, commissioned. Cumbersome cameras, tripods, and flashes have been set up and arranged; scenes have been composed. Reporting on a lynching scene for the June 1915 Crisis, a writer notes: ‘‘Picture card photographers installed a portable printing plant at the bridge and reaped a harvest in selling postcards showing a photograph of the lynched Negro.’’ 28 Postcard photographers not only capitalized on the scene of the crime but also played a crucial role in producing and reproducing the crime itself as a ‘‘scene.’’ These photographers designed images not simply to document or depict but to memorialize; they created mementos and souvenirs for participants to share with family and friends. As items intended to be sent through the mail, postcards testify to the complicity of legal and state structures with lynching. And, of course, lynching itself could not occur without some form of legal and state sanction, as men were pulled out of jails and wrested from armed guards, as newspapers advertised lynchings, schools closed so that children could attend, and trains offered free or reduced fares to spectacles of whiteness 121

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transport crowds to the scene of the crime.29 The law, the courts, and public officials had to turn a blind eye and participate in lynchings in order for them to occur, and then the state further condoned such acts by permitting photographic postcards of lynchings to be sent through the mail (at least until 1908).30 Despite the institutionalized nature of this white supremacism, postcards also convey a terrible intimacy. In their first incarnation, these images were viewed not only publicly but also privately. In general, postcards function as memorial souvenirs by which one claims ‘‘I was there.’’ But they also serve as mementos with which individuals mark sentimental bonds with others—‘‘I was there and I thought of you while I was there.’’ The postcard presumes a return, the return of another card, of a shared sentiment; its circulation maps an imagined community of senders and receivers who share feelings for one another and, perhaps, for the scenes the postcard represents. Individuals perform community by sending postcards, and they enlarge community in the same act, for these images symbolically expand a community’s claim on time and space by connecting static individuals to distant places. Postcards function as fantasy sites of desire for distant viewers; the sender weaves family and friends at home into a larger spatial territory by sending images from afar. How, then, did photographic postcards of lynching function for a white community? What can it mean for white individuals to reconfirm sentimental bonds, to imagine communal connections, through images of white violence? The example provided by a Katy Electric Studio photographic postcard included in James Allen’s collection, one that records the lynching of Jesse Washington in Robinson, Texas, on May 16, 1916, proves especially disturbing in this regard. A note scrawled on the back of this particular postcard in large, looping hand reads: ‘‘This is the barbecue we had last night. My picture is to the left with a cross over it. Your sone Joe.’’ 31 By sending the postcard, Joe perhaps demonstrates to his mother how he participates in upholding the mythology of pure white womanhood that fueled so many lynchings; he ‘‘protects’’ white womanhood, he ‘‘defends’’ his mother. As Ashraf Rushdy has argued: ‘‘One group of white people, gathered around a burned black body, was communicating to another group in another county: they had done their part, asserted their place in the world.’’ 32 Joe looks directly out at the camera, perhaps anticipating the eyes of his mother. This particular postcard, then, with sender 122 photography on the color line

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44. and 45. Details from photographic postcard, verso side. The lynching of Jesse Washington. May 16, 1916, Robinson, Texas. Reproduced courtesy of the Allen-Littlefield Collection, Special Collections Department, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

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46. and 47. Details from photographic postcard. The lynching of Jesse Washington. May 16, 1916, Robinson, Texas. Reproduced courtesy of the Allen-Littlefield Collection, Special Collections Department, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

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looking out at projected receiver, marks directly the ways in which postcards construct community. Joe has put himself in the picture; standing in as representative of his larger community, he connects them to this scene. He is small in a visual frame dominated by the grotesque figure of Jesse Washington’s corpse, burnt almost beyond recognizable human form. As his mother looks at Joe, the corpse will hang between them. Thus, as the postcard is offered as a link between them, so, too, is the black body. The gap of space and time that separates white mother and son will be sutured over the dead body of an African American man; sentimental white familial bonds will be reinforced through black death. The image appears to be a ‘‘morning after’’ picture, in which the crowd has repositioned its corpse for the photograph (the wooden post from which the body is suspended does not show the charring from the fire that destroyed the man). The crowd has arranged itself behind and beneath its trophy. They have buttoned the top buttons of their shirts rather formally, and one man wears a tie. These white men and boys (and at least one woman) face the viewer with steady, unflinching gazes, as if daring challengers to defy them. One of the most salient aspects of this and other lynching photographs is that the white men, women, and even children represented in these images appear profoundly unafraid. Presumably, they have been witness to the sights and sounds of torture. Some have smelled burning flesh. Where are the stunned and sickened faces of shock? Why are the children not confused and overwhelmed? Why have so many people returned to the scene of their crime, or remained there for the documentation? Apparently those who were revolted (there must have been some) have left the scene, or they have struggled to compose themselves under the hard shells of smiles for the camera. Control is the fantasy of whiteness constructed here. A look of distress might reveal the cracks and pressure points in this image that so many are trying to approximate. The white men and women depicted in lynching photographs have not had to consider the ways in which these photographs provide evidence of their crimes, pointing to their complicity and collaboration in murder. As Leon Litwack has argued, ‘‘The use of the camera to memorialize lynchings testified to the openness and to the selfrighteousness that animated the participants.’’ 33 White individuals

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48. Detail from photographic postcard. The lynching of Lige Daniels. August 3, 1920, Center, Texas. Reproduced courtesy of the Allen-Littlefield Collection, Special Collections Department, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

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meet the camera boldly and directly, making explicit the ways in which the law privileges and protects them, even as they flamboyantly disregard that law to kill a man, or men, women, or youths. These spectators are confident in their white privilege, confident that their exposed faces will be sheltered by the rhetoric repeated over and over again in the newspaper accounts of these tortures and murders—that the victim perished ‘‘at the hands of persons unknown.’’ 34 As Henry McNeal Turner, an African American bishop, bitterly noted in the late nineteenth century, a newspaper account might detail ‘‘how the rope broke, how many balls entered the Negro’s body . . . how many composed the mob, the number that were masked, whether they were prominent citizens or not . . . and the whole transaction; but still the fiendish work was done by a set of ‘unknown men.’ ’’ 35 Even as sons marked their presence in images for their mothers to see, the profound privileges of whiteness also enabled them to remain ‘‘unknown’’ for other purposes of identification, recognizable but ‘‘unseen.’’ This is the paradoxical nature of white representational privilege, to be so ever present and yet so invisible; and once again, in order to begin to dismantle this privilege, one must continue to look at whiteness.36 126 photography on the color line

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Figuring Whiteness Lynching photographs capture a moment after the terrors of torture; they are taken after the fury of the mob has quelled and the victim of its wrath has expired. These images always represent mastery, never resistance. They depict a (usually) black (usually) male body violently separated from an African American community, torn from ties of family and love and respect. They also represent the decisive severing of interracial communal ties: James Cameron, who survived a lynch mob in 1930, as a sixteen-year-old, ‘‘recognized familiar faces’’ in the mob that came for him—‘‘schoolmates, and customers whose lawns he had mowed and whose shoes he had polished.’’ 37 These photographs produce whiteness through an absolute disavowal of blackness. The black corpse remains bound and circumscribed by white supremacy in these images; displayed front and center, the corpse functions as the negated other that frames, supports, and defines a white supremacist community. While lynching photographs record moments taken in the wake of mob terror, providing evidence of the mob’s wrath, many of these photographs also appear strangely controlled and composed.38 The sometimes careful arrangement of lynching photographs marks not only macabre aesthetic considerations but also strangely decorous sensibilities given that these images are made to document the aftermath of torture and murder. In some of the images, the corpse itself has been rather carefully prepared for the camera, and presumably, for later viewers. Rips and tears in the flesh of the victim, gaping holes, have been covered or edited out of the image (strange white blobs partially cover some of the bodies in the photographs in James Allen’s collection); severed fingers have been bandaged; naked hips and legs, first stripped by the mob, are covered with cloth (and sometimes with Klan robes that literally wrap the black body in a banner of white supremacy). It would seem as though the white men and women depicted in these photographs ultimately have hesitated to reveal the evidence of white savagery in its minutia. As Leon Litwack has suggested, some white Southerners feared the effects of lynching on a white social order and on white character: ‘‘ ‘The greater peril at this hour where outbreak and lawlessness are at the surface,’ a southern minister declared, ‘is not that the negro will lose his skin, but that spectacles of whiteness 127

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the Anglo-Saxon will lose his soul.’ ’’ 39 The incongruous details in some of these photographs reveal the very contradictions on which the lynch mob was founded. As Grace Elizabeth Hale and Gail Bederman have argued, lynch mobs purported to ‘‘tame’’ what they deemed ‘‘black savagery’’ with ‘‘civilized’’ white male superiority. They proclaimed the black lynch victim a depraved rapist, a racialized emblem of manhood gone mad, the counterimage of a disciplined, restrained (white) masculinity. Certainly, however, the photographs of lynching, of white people taking pleasure in torturing, mutilating, and burning, do not testify to the cerebral control and restraint on which white supremacists prided themselves.40 While white mobs attempted to uphold the rhetoric of white civilization and black barbarism, photographs of lynching provided opposing evidence of white savagery, evidence that Ida B. Wells and the naacp reappropriated in order to document white atrocities.41 The production of whiteness through lynching is the focal point of a pivotal scene in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man (1912), a novel roughly contemporary to many of the photographs this chapter studies. Johnson figures whiteness through the absolute negation of blackness as a site of racial identification in the spectacle of lynching, and it is a lynching that inspires Johnson’s biracial narrator to pass for white. In describing the crucial scene of this lynching, Johnson’s narrator asks: ‘‘Have you ever witnessed the transformation of human beings into savage beasts? Nothing can be more terrible.’’ 42 He recounts how an initially grim and strangely orderly crowd of white men is electrified by the ‘‘rebel yell’’ that excites them into burning a man alive. For Johnson’s narrator, the scene of this lynching is a ‘‘rite of racial passage’’ 43 through which he literally ‘‘passes’’ from one public racial identification to another. Even as he sees the vicious cruelty of the white mob, he is nevertheless overwhelmed by ‘‘a great wave of humiliation and shame’’ 44 at his identification with the black victim, and his decision to pass is ultimately posed as a response to ‘‘shame, unbearable shame’’—‘‘shame at being identified with a people that could with impunity be treated worse than animals.’’ 45 In this scene of a second racial identification, in which whiteness and blackness are spectacularly constructed and projected through a brutal performance of white supremacism, Johnson’s narrator sees white savagery, but he also sees the white production of a

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dehumanized black object, and it is that stark memory, of a man stupefied by terror, and then burned, that he cannot reconcile with himself, that he cannot, quite literally, incorporate. If an inverted mirror stage initially inducts him into blackness, as we saw in chapter 1, this later spectacle of racial differentiation, this subsequent white configuration of blackness, proves too much for him to comprehend, to recognize in any relation to himself. In the utter dehumanizing of the burned lynch victim, he is unable, literally, to see himself in a disintegrating other. If an inverted mirror stage forces an African American subject to recognize the psychic splitting of identity formation, lynching forces an African American subject to witness the material shattering of the black body. In other words, the psychic white rejection of fantasized blackness that consolidates an image of white wholeness writ large on the Veil is manifested in a brutally embodied manner in the ritual of lynching. Johnson’s narrator’s decision to identify as white is founded in his disavowal of lynching’s grotesque construction of blackness, and for him this rejection is not only conscious but doubly conscious. What awaits Johnson’s narrator in the white world is a white woman —‘‘white as a lily’’—‘‘the most dazzlingly white thing’’ he had ever seen.46 Once again, a white woman, she who first divides and separates, she who defines and shatters social identities in both James Weldon Johnson’s and W. E. B. Du Bois’s stories of a dawning racial consciousness, functions powerfully at the locus of racial distinction in this narrative of racial identification. For the narrator of Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man, this gendered symbol of whiteness marks the ultimate racial boundary to be passed, and it is her declaration of love that finally weaves him firmly into the white world of a white family. The figure of a white woman—that ‘‘dazzlingly white thing’’—serves as both initiator and subsequent arbiter of racial identity in Johnson’s text. The fetishized object of white patriarchal discourse is the figure through which Johnson’s narrator definitively passes into whiteness. ‘‘White womanhood’’ haunts lynching; it is this phantom that is resurrected over and over again as a symbol of white racial purity defining the limits of the white lynch mob. As noted in chapter 3, the figure of a threatened or raped white woman, evoked as the innocent victim of a ‘‘terrible crime,’’ was conjured in attempts to justify lynch-

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ing as the ‘‘understandable’’ retribution of white fathers, brothers, and lovers.47 Ida B. Wells herself claimed to have believed this ideology at one time, before her extensive research revealed the cry of rape to be largely myth.48 What Wells discovered was that white families frequently covered up consensual relationships between white women and black men with the rhetoric of rape. Further, in many lynchings, rape need not even be alluded to in order to quell public outrage, for many people simply assumed that lynchings responded to the crime most often evoked to justify them.49 White women thus figured as powerful symbols of white male dominance in the postReconstruction period. The white woman was heralded as exclusive white patriarchal property, and also as the fount of a white racial bloodline. Indeed, in The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man, Johnson’s narrator runs from the scene of a lynching into a white world that stringently polices interracial intimacies by perpetuating the terror of lynching. Thus even as he might seem, in part, to succumb to the logic of lynching by rejecting blackness, Johnson’s narrator also undermines white supremacy by marrying a white woman and thereby claiming for his own the figure upheld by lynching rhetoric as the fundamental (white) racial barrier. The postmortem photograph of Rubin Stacy, murdered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on July 19, 1935, recalls this ideological context; it represents a striking number of white women and young white girls gazing on Rubin Stacy’s dead body. According to the New York Times, as recorded in James Allen’s footnotes, Stacy, a homeless tenant farmer, had approached the home of Marion Jones to ask for food. On seeing Stacy, Jones screamed. Stacy was then arrested, and as he was being transported to a Miami jail by six deputies, a mob of over one hundred masked men seized and murdered him. Finally, Stacy’s corpse was hung in sight of Marion Jones’s home.50 It is plausible that the young white girls who regard Stacy’s hanging corpse in the photograph are the children of Marion Jones. As they look at Stacy’s lifeless body, the girls are instructed in the nature of the white patriarchal power that ‘‘protects’’ them, a power that will define their womanhood and confine it to the reproduction of white supremacy. If this is a lesson in white patriarchal protection, it is also a lesson of fatal consequences, of the wrath of white fathers and brothers, uncles and cousins roused by the sight of an African American man near a white woman’s house. As Martha Hodes has argued, 130 photography on the color line

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49. Detail from photograph, verso side. The charred torso of an African American male. 1902, Georgia. Reproduced courtesy of the Allen-Littlefield Collection, Special Collections Department, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

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‘‘Lynching not only terrorized black men and women, but it also subordinated white women.’’ 51 The image of white womanhood that pervaded so many lynchings worked to discipline and constrain the actions of white women; it necessarily exceeded the grasp of those pictured as spectators in lynching photographs. Thus when white women asserted white supremacy through lynching, they harnessed themselves to an image of white female purity, the keystone in a racialized gender hierarchy that ultimately reinforced a white patriarchy. This is not to suggest, of course, that white women were the ‘‘victims’’ of lynching, but simply to highlight the ways in which the rhetoric of white womanhood controlled and contained white women’s actions in the service of a white patriarchy. The gendered white supremacist rhetoric of lynching situated white women literally and symbolically at the nexus of white reproduction. This ‘‘elevated’’ position celebrated them, even as it disciplined them, a fact that can be measured by other photographs in James Allen’s collection. Ella Watson, an ‘‘errant’’ white woman, is represented by her portrait, taken in ‘‘happier days.’’ A note scrawled under the photograph suggests that Watson was lynched, but the announcement of this murder is made on an image she herself particispectacles of whiteness 131

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pated in crafting, an image that proclaims her identity, not an image representing her dead body.52 African American women, denigrated by the same rhetoric that revered white women, and often the victims of rapes emphatically ‘‘overlooked’’ by white men, were afforded no such delicate treatment. Indeed, the image of Laura Nelson, murdered in Okemah, Oklahoma, on May 25, 1911, with her fourteenyear-old son, for the ‘‘crime’’ of trying to protect him, proves this point all too well. As Nelson hangs from a bridge, a large party of white men, women, and children, including mothers who prop tiny children up on railings, small girls in white dresses, and women who shade themselves with parasols, regard her body from above. Perched over the remains of Nelson and her son, these white women face the camera of G. H. Farnum, who will commemorate their ‘‘visit’’ with a picture postcard. Farnum will also offer another postcard for sale— a close-up of Laura Nelson’s dead body.53 The white women on the bridge will find the cornerstone of their own social elevation in the image that records the negation of Laura Nelson’s womanhood and motherhood. In the postmortem photograph of Rubin Stacy, Stacy’s corpse is carefully positioned in the frame, posed like those of other murdered African American men between the viewers in the photograph and those who will later bear witness to them. The corpse is privileged for the camera’s view. The curious girls, with equivocal expressions, peer around the tree from which the man hangs. Foregrounded front and center, Stacy’s body appears huge—three, even four times, that of the girls’. The size of his body in the photographic frame heightens, perhaps, the sense of the imagined physical ‘‘threat’’ he was thought to pose, while at the same time his neck, broken in the fall of death, and his wrists, bound by handcuffs, suggest that his physical power has been mastered. The girls, dressed in white (their garments highlighting yet again the symbolic whiteness of the white womanhood they are cautioned to grow into, to uphold at all costs), display their unease with squinted eyes and a hand raised absentmindedly to the chin. The eldest peers around the tree to gaze at the face of the dead man. A very young girl holds her arms tightly to her body by the elbows. An even younger child, still pudgy-faced and fisted, stares back eerily from the shadows at the camera. Only one girl’s face approaches a smile, an odd, in-between expression, perhaps registering an emotion not fully under control. Her hands, strangely crossed at 132 photography on the color line

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50 and 51. Details from photograph. The lynching of Rubin Stacy. July 19, 1935, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Reproduced courtesy of the AllenLittlefield Collection, Special Collections Department, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

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52. Detail from photograph. The lynching of Rubin Stacy. July 19, 1935, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Reproduced courtesy of the Allen-Littlefield Collection, Special Collections Department, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

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the wrists, evoke the bound hands of the manacled corpse she stands behind. One hand awkwardly rumples her skirt in an evocative gesture. It is inappropriate, perhaps, to sexualize this young girl gazing at the corpse of an African American man who, even though mangled in death, appears strong, and young, and beautiful, and it is inappropriate to objectify this man further. And yet, what discourses other than those of forbidden sexuality haunt the frames of photographs of lynchings? The man asking Marion Jones for food became her ‘‘assailant’’ through the power of a discourse obsessively rehearsed, a discourse that transformed economic, social, political, and psychological anxieties and desires into the white patriarchal ‘‘sacred duty’’ of controlling the sexuality of white women and African American men. In order to participate in and benefit from this discourse, white women were encouraged to see selectively when looking at photographs of lynchings, to see the privilege of protection and their own duties in a white patriarchy, and above all else, to refuse to see their potentially transgressive desires.54

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Inverted Sentiment Photographs of lynchings circulated widely, suggesting that lynching itself was and is a reproducible act, and spreading the effects of its terror. The many different contexts in which a photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana, on August 7, 1930, has appeared and reappeared makes evident the extensive distribution of these images. This photograph portrays the chaos of a white mob at night, capturing an almost carnivalesque atmosphere, and thus stands in contrast to the strange orderliness of stern crowds posed in the light of day. Taken at night, the photograph is also, presumably, taken close to the moment of death. Some in the crowd appear excited, as if they are enjoying a rush of sadistic emotions; others observe the scene with apparent calm. Many are well dressed, as if for a dance, with hair slicked back and lips painted. Two men crane their necks up to look at the corpses hanging; one holds his pipe in contemplation. Most of the people appear interested in locating friends and acquaintances. A smiling young man grabs his girl’s free hand; in her other hand she holds a scrap of burnt clothing, a souvenir from one of the victims. Another girl, holding a similar shard, taunts someone beyond the photographic frame; she yells, perhaps, to the photographer to take her picture. A man in the crowd also seems to engage the photographer. His wide, round eyes and pointing arm, frozen in the moment of the flash, direct the gaze of later viewers toward the corpses hanging in the trees. This photograph is included twice in Without Sanctuary. According to James Allen’s notes, Lawrence Beitler, a studio photographer, made the image, and ‘‘for ten days and nights he printed thousands of copies, which sold for fifty cents apiece.’’ 55 The purchase and circulation of these prints is testified to by the display of the photograph as it was held, presumably, in someone’s private collection. Here it is framed as a memento—matted and inscribed—and presented with a lock of curly hair. The inscription—‘‘Bo Pointn to his Niga’’—suggests that the man pointing claims some relationship to one of the victims. ‘‘His’’?—employee? ‘‘His’’?—kill? The man’s gesture functions as a threat, a lesson, an address to the viewer. Pointing at the corpses, he seems to proclaim: ‘‘You see what will happen if. . . .’’ 56

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53. and 54. Details from photograph. The lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. August 7, 1930, Marion, Indiana. Reproduced courtesy of the Allen-Littlefield Collection, Special Collections Department, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

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Having heard about the ‘‘mementos’’ fought over by lynch mobs, I still was not prepared to see the hair framed with this image. In a brutally literal way, the hair signifies metonymically, as part representing the whole of the victim’s body. And yet, this hair also makes one consider further the nature of the photograph it is framed with. Is the photograph categorically distinct from this other memento? Aren’t all photographs also indexically related to the scenes they represent—printed from negatives literally touched by the moments they depict? 57 Here photography’s relationship, however constructed, to historical occurrences, is important. These photographs and photographic postcards are relics of lynchings, and as such they force a disconcerting connection, a disturbing proximity, between contemporary viewers and the mob scenes they depict. In a cruel and sick inversion, this photograph, framed with hair, recalls other photographs framed with hair—those most treasured baby pictures and lovers’ portraits, enclosed in lockets with curly snippets and silky strands. Geoffrey Batchen has suggested that such keepsakes double ‘‘that indexicality thought to be photography’s special attribute.’’ At the same time, however, such relics demonstrate that ‘‘the photograph alone is not enough to alleviate the fear of mortality’’ parents may have concerning their children.58 The lynching memento sinisterly works toward opposite ends; this hair, clipped from a battered head, reiterates the mortality of the victim whose death the photograph documents. Confronting this antithetical keepsake, I wonder about the relation between the hair stolen from a corpse and the hair this same ‘‘collector’’ might have clipped from his or her child or lover. To what extent are these two practices related? To what degree is the white supremacist’s ‘‘family album’’ supported by this terrible, inverted relic? Once again, I wonder about the bonds between white mothers and sons (and other white family members) reinforced through the spectacles of dead black bodies, reinforced through the murder of African American men. This same photograph has also been reclaimed in other contexts, for other purposes. This is the photograph that Jacquie Jones muses on in her recent essay ‘‘How Come Nobody Told Me about the Lynching?’’ It is the image that confronted Jones as a young woman, first as it was thrust on her without warning in a history class, and then, metaphorically, in myriad manifestations of racial violence. Remembering her first responses to the sight of this image, Jones asks, spectacles of whiteness 137

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‘‘Was the image, the recurrence of the image, the proliferation of the image, an inside warning or an outside threat?’’ 59 Scrutinizing the clothing of the white men and women photographed, it occurs to Jones that ‘‘these people aren’t dead yet. The man with the blur could have issued my driver’s license. That little boy could be my history teacher.’’ 60 Lynching and lynching photographs cannot be sealed away in the past. The white supremacism on which such spectacles are founded still functions; the communities they forged may still exist. These fragmented moments from the past remain connected to contemporary viewers, and the recent murder of James Byrd in Texas reminds us that these crimes continue in the present. Jones’s reflections highlight the institutionalized nature of white supremacism, the business-as-usual nature of white terrorism: The lyncher could be the state-authorized employee of the department of motor vehicles; the child-lyncher could grow into a history teacher, preserving a white-authorized national record of might and right, inflicting the image of violence on black students to threaten and control them, or inflicting it incidentally, without any particular plan. Jones’s thoughts parallel those of James Cameron, for this is the lynching that Cameron survived, this is the lynching in which he recognized neighbors, acquaintances, and employers bound and determined to kill him.61 The photograph’s metaphoric relationship to death, famously evoked by Roland Barthes’s melancholy description of lost moments, of images representing people forever gone and predicting the inevitable passing of others—his description of photographs as memorials of the living dead—takes on terribly literal meaning when one confronts the photographs of lynchings.62 These photographs also make brutally direct the theoretical premise that whiteness is predicated on the violent repression of a (black) other, an assumption now so often repeated as to make it seem almost meaningless. And yet here one sees, in photograph after photograph, the framing of white subjectivity against a black corpse—whiteness founded in the spectacle of the dead black other. Richard Dyer has argued, quite powerfully, that whiteness reproduces its power in normative terms by being diffuse, by being invisible, by being everywhere and nowhere, and by making blackness bear the burden of visibility and embodiedness.63 In general, I have

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agreed with Dyer that the black body has borne the weight of visibility and corporeality, has become the object of an invisible, disembodied white gaze. And yet, this argument cannot represent the entire cultural picture, for in the photographs of lynchings, the white bodies that are the vehicles of a devastating physical power are represented over and over again with the victims of their wrath. As white subjectivity is foregrounded against a black corpse, these photographs make very clear that the power of whiteness is not only invisible and dispersed but also particular and embodied in U.S. culture. As records of the lawless brutality of white supremacists, photographs of lynchings register a different kind of power than the mug shots discussed in the previous chapter. If the mug shot signaled a form of institutionalized power implicitly white in a culture of white privilege, the photograph of a lynched black body indicated the thoroughly embodied nature of white power. By juxtaposing the photographic mug shot to the photographs of lynchings that circulated in the same years, one finds two different manifestations of white power functioning simultaneously. Lynching represents an embodiment of power similar to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century spectacles of ritualized torture Michel Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish.64 Such scenes of torture demonstrated the unquestioned authority of a monarch over his subjects, the physical power of the state as personified by, and made visible in, one ruler. The mug shot corresponds to a later formation of power that emerged in the nineteenth century, the state of surveillance, in which institutionalized power is increasingly invisible, diffuse, disembodied, and located in the minds of subjects who discipline themselves according to a normative image. But in the coterminous juxtaposition of photographs of lynching and criminal mug shots at the turn of the century, one sees that while the instrument of power, the body that aligns itself with and enforces the bounds of normalcy and deviance, is absent from, and therefore invisible within, the photographic mug shot, those bodies that are the vehicles of a brutal physical power are made visible as they are represented over and over again with the victims of their wrath in the photographs of lynchings. In the images that display burned and mutilated black bodies set off by crowds of white spectators, one sees white supremacists attempting to harness a diffuse and dispersed power to the bounds of white bodies.65

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55. Detail from photograph. The burning corpse of William Brown. September 28, 1919, Omaha, Nebraska. Reproduced courtesy of the AllenLittlefield Collection, Special Collections Department, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

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As Martha Hodes and others have documented, the crime of lynching grew in the postemancipation and post-Reconstruction periods, a time when racial categories were largely in flux, when whiteness and blackness were being defined and differentiated in the courts, through one-drop blood laws, the most famous being the 1896 Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson.66 In this cultural context, in which the legal parsing of racial identity could make race visually indiscernible, lynching photographs work as defining images that make whiteness visible to itself. Lynching photographs consolidate a fluid signifier; a pale crowd enacts and fiercely embodies whiteness. These images function as sites through which whiteness can literally be envisioned through the representation of racialized violence. The images function as sites through which whiteness can be constituted and claimed, in which whiteness can be seen, both by those represented in the photographs and by those who will later view these images.67 Lynching photographs thus present not simply spectacles of whiteness but whiteness itself as spectacle.

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Reflecting on Whiteness, ‘‘From the Back and Side’’ The spectacle of lynching enabled members of the mob to seize whiteness, and the subsequent representation of that spectacle in lynching photographs further encouraged them to invest in whiteness as their own embodied possession. But as lynchers learned to identify with a vision of whiteness crystallized in the faces of the photographed lynch mob, others could also study the spectacle of that whiteness, ‘‘from the back and side.’’ Lynching photographs thus provided multivalenced ‘‘evidence’’ of spectacle whiteness. The dramatic increase in lynching in the late nineteenth century brought white Americans uniquely under the scrutiny of both an African American and a European gaze. By the early 1890s, Ida B. Wells had successfully taken her antilynching campaign to Europe, and in the wake of her tour, she would proclaim: ‘‘The entire American people now feel, both North and South, that they are objects in the gaze of the civilized world and that for every lynching humanity asks that America render its account to civilization and itself.’’ 68 According to Wells, the whiteness represented in lynching photographs connotes not only the men and women actually present in the photographs, the participants in lynching, but also those white Americans who hesitate to condemn lynching, thereby permitting its reign of terror. As Samuel Wilkes’s dismembered body signaled for Du Bois a racist construction of blackness under which he, too, would be conflated, the lynch mob represented for Wells (and Du Bois) a construction of whiteness into which other white Americans also collapsed. Many white Americans could be said to share the burden of the crimes of the lynch mob—for maintaining silence, for remaining mystified by the rhetoric surrounding lynching, for refusing to recognize the faces of ‘‘parties unknown.’’ Antilynching activists evoked this emphatic blindness to conjoin many white Americans under the sign of the lynch mob’s whiteness. Returning to the 1900 Paris Exposition, I would like to reconsider the position of white American visitors to the American Negro Exhibit. Specifically, I would like to imagine these visitors, themselves objects under the critical scrutiny of an African American and a European gaze, as they might have encountered the white-looking African

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American men and women in Du Bois’s photograph albums. From the vantage provided by this chapter, how can one think about the challenges such images might pose to white American viewers in this period of spectacular white consolidation? How do Du Bois’s photographs of white-looking ‘‘Negro types’’ engage the lynch mob’s spectacle of whiteness? In chapter 2 I suggested that the white-looking individuals in Du Bois’s 1900 photograph albums contest a visual racial taxonomy by undermining the distinctions between imagined signs of physical difference. In doing so, the photographs of white-looking individuals in Du Bois’s albums of ‘‘Negro types’’ also trouble the authorized, surveillant position of a white spectator; they bridge a presumed gulf of distance, suggesting that the divide between self and other often held to secure the privilege of scrutiny may be utterly indiscernible. Indeed, white Americans (and white Europeans) perusing Du Bois’s visual archive at the 1900 Paris Exposition might have been surprised by a kind of identification as they turned to face the images of whitelooking African Americans in a ‘‘Negro’’ archive. If we suppose a recognition, if only momentary, between viewer and viewed in this case, an identification bridged by visual signs of similarity, then the images of white-looking African Americans might serve not only to humanize African Americans in the eyes of white viewers 69 but also to suggest that (viewing) self and (viewed) other were very much the same.70 In order for the legally defined white viewer to identify with the image of a white-looking African American, to see a unified image of self in this photograph of the purported other, the viewer would have to confront a long history of white racial violence. At the turn of the century, a superficial identification between Euro-American and African American subjects (on the basis of common hair color or skin tone) would have been enabled primarily by the history of white violence and rape perpetuated during and after slavery. As Ida B. Wells would emphasize in her demystification of the rhetoric of white Southern chivalry: ‘‘True chivalry respects all womanhood, and no one who reads the record, as it is written in the faces of the million mulattoes in the South, will for a minute conceive that the southern white man had a very chivalrous regard for the honor due to the women of his own race or respect for the womanhood which circumstances placed in his power.’’ 71 In this sense, then, Du Bois’s photographs of biracial individuals might signal both white violence on 142 photography on the color line

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African American bodies and an undeniable white desire for the black body, one that whiteness nevertheless disavows.72 The racialized power relations of desire and violence intrinsic to slavery find a direct corollary in the lynchings this chapter has studied. The shadow lurking behind a possible moment of visual identification between individuals divided by the color line is the image of white subjectivity foregrounded against a black corpse in the photographs of lynchings. In a moment of identification, however brief, with African Americans, an authorized white viewer would have to confront the legacy of the racial divide engendered by the ‘‘new white crime’’ of lynching. Lynching photographs make absolutely apparent the fact that, as Eric Lott and Kobena Mercer have suggested, whiteness is a split identity formulated on the violent repression of the other.73 Such images represent white subjects’ vehement rejection of an inverted mirror stage for themselves by brutally transposing the fragmentation of subjectivity onto black bodies. But if whiteness and blackness are so utterly distinguished in turn-of-the-century lynching photographs, how can one understand the possibility that white American viewers may have recognized themselves in the white-looking ‘‘other’’ of Du Bois’s Georgia Negro photographs? Euro-American viewers who assume themselves to be white might experience a psychological rift in such an identification, perhaps becoming conscious of the fundamental split that establishes identity, as well as the subsequent racial violence that affirms a fantasy of white wholeness. In order to sustain a unified image of the visual signs that constitute superficial whiteness, the white viewer could not help but see self in other. But in this identification also lies the unraveling of whiteness as a boundary between self and other, for the images of these white-looking individuals are located in an archive of ‘‘Negroes.’’ 74 Indeed, Du Bois’s albums make whiteness visible as the repressed point in an archive of blackness. Conversely, if the blackness produced ‘‘through the eyes of [white] others’’ is itself a projection of whiteness, revealing more about those who produce the category than about those purportedly represented under its sign,75 then the self-identified white viewer must see in the violence and dismembering of the lynched African American body the very structures of white identity. For some at least, this recognition would produce a psychological rift, a split subjectivity imploding with the violent impact of sameness. spectacles of whiteness 143

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The shock of interracial recognition might shatter the white viewer’s self-conception of idealized wholeness sustained through the continued, emphatic rejection of (white constructions of ) blackness as other. The white viewer might be forced to admit the black subject into a dialectic of identification usually profoundly denied through the machinations of the Veil and the ritual of lynching. If the white subject maintains a sutured self-image of wholeness by obscuring the split that founds identity through a disavowal of blackness, then the recognition of the black other as selfsame might disrupt the series of blind spots that maintain an image of white ideality. In other words, the very foundations of white identity might be ruptured, or rather, recognized in their fragmentation. This then might constitute the site of an inverted mirror stage for the white viewer. In perusing Du Bois’s albums, the white viewer symbolically meets a black gaze, what Homi Bhabha calls a ‘‘counter-gaze’’ that ‘‘turns the discriminatory look . . . back on itself.’’ 76 Through the black gaze figured in Du Bois’s albums, through the eyes that look out from the Georgia Negro portraits, the white viewer might be compelled to consider him or herself ‘‘through the eyes of others.’’ And in seeing self ‘‘from the back and side’’ through the second sight of a black gaze, the white subject might perceive what the projections of the Veil obscure, namely, a vision of the fundamental split and suture that founds identity. The violence that sustains the image of white wholeness threatens always to tear it apart, so that white subjectivity remains on the verge of fragmentation, on the verge of recognizing the rupture its figurative and literal dismemberment of (black) others works to conceal. This instability can, of course, function powerfully to perpetuate and to reinforce the image of (a volatile, vulnerable) whiteness in need of ever more aggressive consolidation. An imagined white wholeness can be recuperated, out of its own fragments, by legal, economic, social, political, and cultural privilege. A dominant white culture does not force the white viewer into an identification with otherness; indeed, that culture works powerfully against such recognition. And yet, an image of ‘‘whiteness’’ that is also an image of ‘‘blackness’’ could effect a flash of cognizance in which white viewers might glimpse the fantasmatic nature of white wholeness, might recognize the split that founds identity, might perceive the Veil as a construct that maintains an image of white ideality only by making blackness bear a horrible burden of visible fragmentation, might see, in short, 144 photography on the color line

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the visual workings of whiteness. W. E. B. Du Bois’s photographs of African Americans for the 1900 Paris Exposition work toward these ends, denaturalizing the projected perfection and privilege of whiteness and suggesting that the division (between ‘‘black’’ and ‘‘white’’) by which the myth of white wholeness is maintained, through lynching and other spectacles of white supremacist violence, is itself the most entrenched of color lines.

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epilogue

The Archivist in the Archive

Du Bois became editor of the Crisis eleven years after the lynching of Samuel Wilkes sundered his faith in the force of ‘‘calm, cool’’ reason,1 and ten years after he completed work on the Georgia Negro Exhibit. As editor of the naacp’s official magazine, Du Bois conceived his work as that of antiracist propaganda, and he continued to utilize photographs prominently in his pursuit of social justice. Reinforcing his particular vision of an elite African American patriarchy, Du Bois solicited portraits of accomplished African Americans to serve as didactic models of racial uplift, and he reproduced portraits of babies and children to mark the future potential and investment of the race in familial terms. Photographic portraits adorn the ‘‘Men of the Month’’ section, as well as the smaller portion of the magazine devoted to women’s clubs. Du Bois also continued to reproduce photographs of lynchings to depict the barbarity of extreme white racism and lawlessness, turning the photographic evidence of white supremacists back on itself in order to undermine white claims to civilized, cerebral control.2 In the tension between such honorific and horrific photographs one perceives that ‘‘the crisis’’ of twentiethcentury race relations was, for Du Bois, at least in part a crisis of visual representation, a crisis of invisibility and misperception, a crisis manifest in the visual record of violently disparate photographs. Despite his sustained and varied use of photographs throughout the early twentieth century, Du Bois’s struggle to articulate and envision adequate forms of race representation has been remembered and defined largely in terms of the questions he asked of literature and posed to writers. In his discussion of Du Bois’s attempt to define a ‘‘Black Aesthetic,’’ Darwin T. Turner has focused his insights on Du Bois’s efforts ‘‘as editor of The Crisis to promote literary activity and to fos-

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ter racial pride through literature.’’ 3 In her important study of African American women artists, Lisa Gail Collins has similarly argued that regardless of Du Bois’s evocation of ‘‘the language of visual arts’’ in questioning the politics of racial representation, he nevertheless ‘‘turned solely to the world of letters for answers.’’ 4 In another examination of African American art, Henry Louis Gates Jr. has declared that in spite of the overwhelming circulation of demeaning images of African Americans in the early twentieth century, African American intellectuals chose not to fight back with ‘‘the tactics of visual representation,’’ but to ‘‘assert their self-image’’ through words.5 And yet, while Du Bois may never have named photography explicitly as a preeminent form of art-as-propaganda, that is, in fact, the way he utilized photographs and mobilized photographic evidence. As this book has demonstrated, Du Bois employed photographs in ways that directly and powerfully bear on the questions he wrestled with concerning art and propaganda, the power and limitations of representation, the politics of the ‘‘representative,’’ and the links between racialized gazes and racial identities. In short, this book has shown that one of the most prominent African American intellectuals did indeed utilize the tools of visual representation both to problematize racist propaganda and to envision a New Negro at the turn of the century.6 But this is not to say that visual tactics solved the problem of a black aesthetic for Du Bois. The very ambiguities Darwin Turner has identified in Du Bois’s struggle to delineate liberatory literary representations also inform his use of photographs, namely, the tension between his commitment to the ‘‘truth,’’ to a broad range of realistic representations of African American life, and his simultaneous call for ‘‘beauty,’’ which he consistently measured by the educated elite figures of his Talented Tenth and their class-determined mores of gender propriety and sexual restraint. Critical studies of Du Bois’s life and work have been framed prominently by such questions concerning the politics of racial representation, and the (in)capacity of one or of an elite few to be representative. As the archivist of the photograph collection this book has assessed most directly, Du Bois has been present as editor, compiler, and selective judge of the images, his aims made manifest in choices of inclusion, exclusion, and emphasis, but Du Bois himself has otherwise remained physically absent from the archive; he has not offered himself up for visual scrutiny or placed himself in visual relation to 148 photography on the color line

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others. As archivist, Du Bois has constructed an archive he would appear to stand outside of; he has exercised the power of a disembodied gaze, turning his scrutiny, and ours as viewers, on the faces of hundreds of nameless others, while he himself makes his presence felt only abstractly. At precisely this historical moment, however, an African American public was just beginning to call on Du Bois himself to be ‘‘representative’’; he was just beginning, and indeed fighting, to bear the burden of an exemplary status, both a rare privilege and an impossible restraint. Before ending my thoughts here, I would like to situate Du Bois himself within a larger visual archive, to see how his own image circulated within turn-of-the-century debates about race and representation, to see how he figured not only as representer but also as represented. Briefly, then, I would like to examine Du Bois’s image as reproduced in the Voice of the Negro, an Atlanta-based monthly magazine published from 1904–6, and thus roughly contemporary to many of the visual enterprises this book has studied. Throughout its rather short-lived run, the Voice of the Negro used photographs and sketches extensively to illustrate its covers and articles, which addressed a wide range of national and international topics, paying particular attention to the race problem and to the work of African American ‘‘doers’’ and ‘‘thinkers.’’ In the illustrated monthly, the voice of the Negro was intricately tied to the image of the Negro. At the end of its first year of publication, the Voice employed John Henry Adams, a professor of art and drawing at Morris Brown College, to design its covers, section heads, and various other images included throughout the magazine. Adams’s cover for the first issue of volume 2, published in January 1905, presents a photographic portrait of Du Bois in the guise of a floating head emerging from an orientalized vase or lantern that resembles a genie’s bottle, posing Du Bois as a kind of mythological visionary, the epitome of truth and beauty combined. The portrait, framed at the bottom by whirls of smoke emanating from the vessel, occupies a space of light surrounded by a starry night sky. The upper half of the portrait is flanked by two female figures draped in flowing robes, leaning in from their respective pillars of Humanity and Society, to lift together an orb over Du Bois’s head. Du Bois is thus presented as oracle and emblem, as guiding light for the race; the voice of the Negro thus emanates from a visual beacon, materialized and typified in Du Bois’s face. Another work Adams produced for the Voice of the Negro similarly epilogue 149

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56. Cover art by John Henry Adams, Voice of the Negro, January 1905. Reproduced courtesy of General Research Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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presented Du Bois as model race man, as an example of the best and brightest of a new generation. In a series of illustrated articles entitled ‘‘Rough Sketches,’’ Adams presents thoughts and images under the following titles (in order): ‘‘A Study of the Features of the New Negro Woman,’’ ‘‘The New Negro Man,’’ and ‘‘William Edward Burghardt DuBois, Ph. D.’’ 7 Following generic comments on the beauty of educated African American women identified only by first name, and 150 photography on the color line

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on the purpose and merit of a diverse group of professional African American men, Du Bois is singled out as the epitome of the New Negro; his achievements, and his very person, are presented as a representative model. Indeed, Du Bois’s life is declared ‘‘the kind that best serves as stimulus to the New Negro.’’ 8 If Adams’s initial sketches pose the New Negro as a type—the first in general terms, the second by a multiplicity of specific examples—the third essay presents one individual, Du Bois himself, as ideal type made manifest, as composite portrait uniquely embodied, as New Negro exemplar. Adams’s short narration of Du Bois’s life begins with a condemnation of slavery as the ‘‘dead’’ ‘‘past,’’ as a history that should be left behind, that will not serve as origin point for the New Negro (176). As it celebrates Du Bois, the essay thus subtly rejects the elder Booker T. Washington, himself born into slavery, as adequate model for a new generation. For Adams, the New Negro’s life story begins with a birth family unmarred by slavery and with the racialized character traits the child is imagined to inherit from his parents’ ancestors. In Adams’s narrative, Du Bois’s story then continues through school to marriage and professional life. Declared ‘‘the strongest evidence of the capabilities and possibilities of his people,’’ Du Bois is then described by physical appearance—his body and the imagined marks of his superior character are inscribed in a visual archive: ‘‘In appearance Du Bois is clean and neat. In height he is a little below the average, and weighs about one hundred and forty-five pounds. His body is symmetrical and well developed. A look into his face betrays the deep import of his cultivated mind. The face is oval, tapering towerd [sic] the chin, and the richness of its brown color, together with the evenness of his features makes him rather handsome and attractive’’ (178). A slight depression of height would seem to be the only flaw in this otherwise perfect emblem of ‘‘good breeding’’ and ‘‘race culture’’ (179), this physically, mentally, culturally—eugenically—perfect patriarch. In this presentation, Du Bois, it would seem, is the embodied evidence that tells the lie of the eugenicist’s racial hierarchy. The images that illustrate this short narration of Du Bois’s life include sketches Adams made after two now well-known photographs, the first of Du Bois as an infant held by his mother, Mary Silvina Burghardt Du Bois, and the second a portrait of the child Du Bois regally dressed as a young aristocrat. In this visual progression, the next two images are photographic reproductions, one showing Du Bois in his epilogue 151

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graduating high school class, the other showing him in a group of featured speakers at his Harvard commencement. Another drawing made after a photograph presents a portrait of Du Bois as a young man, and it is followed by three sketches ‘‘from life,’’ one showing Du Bois reclining in a chair, relaxed and contemplative, one a large head portrait in profile, and the last an image of Du Bois walking, ‘‘bracing a stiff breeze.’’ The biographical moments represented in the images correspond to those highlighted in the brief narration of Du Bois’s life, and also to the formative moments emphasized in Adams’s general sketch of the New Negro man. According to Adams, ‘‘to find the new Negro man,’’ one must begin in infancy, ‘‘long before he knows of the ‘Veil’ of which Mr. Du Bois speaks so touchingly in his ‘Souls of Black Folk’ ’’: ‘‘Here, drawn near the bosom of his good black mother . . . is the bouncing, laughing, little creature whose future days are as dark as his skin. . . . Look into his face and then into the mother’s face. Observe that interlacing of love and prospect and adventure as it weavens [sic] about the two, the life long singleness of heartbeats and sorrows and sufferings.’’ 9 In the photographic portrait of the baby Du Bois and Mary Silvina Burghardt Du Bois, and in Adams’s sketch after this image, the intimate relationship between mother and son is opened out to the viewer. It is a representation of Du Bois before his own recognition of the Veil, but long after his mother’s extended negotiation of that racist screen. For her, perhaps, the image constitutes a kind of intervention in the circuit of gazes that creates and maintains the Veil. The mother’s steady gaze out toward the viewer draws one into the intimate sphere of mother and child; it asks the viewer to share the regard of mother for son, or asks one simply to look at them, to see woman and child, and not the fabrications of the Veil. It is a photograph made, perhaps, to preserve some part of the infant’s first idealized self-image. Here, instead of looking into the mirror to confirm the infant’s illusory self-image of wholeness, mother and son look out into the camera, anticipating the photograph that will hold them in this relationship of loving mutual (mis)recognition and that will, perhaps, remind the child of that moment long after the Veil has racialized his sight, compelling him to see the split and suture that founds identity. In this portrait of mother and child, the photograph, and later the sketch, replaces and stands in for the mirror, capturing and recording its glimpse of psychic projection and idealized mis152 photography on the color line

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57. Sketch by John Henry Adams, Du Bois at Seventeen Months Old, and His Mother, Voice of the Negro, March 1905. Reproduced courtesy of General Research Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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recognition, mapping a tiny hold in the cultural screen that would erase and efface a vision of black ideality and wholeness.10 Read through the images in Adams’s rough sketch, the visual narrative of Du Bois’s life begins with his mother as pillar and foundation, as literal, physical ballast, as well as emotional and psychological support. As the child grows, he appears to become self-sustaining, his straight, regal back defying the soft plumpness of his still small body. As a young man, his intellect is highlighted as the force that carries him through high school and secures him a seat among the speakers at his second college graduation. In the final series of sketches, Du Bois, a man of purpose and action, is always represented alone. While the written narrative tells readers of his wife, a ‘‘domestician’’ of ‘‘excelepilogue 153

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58. Sketch by John Henry Adams, Du Bois at Six Years of Age, and below, 59. Sketch by John Henry Adams, Du Bois at Seventeen, both from Voice of the Negro, March 1905. Reproduced courtesy of General Research Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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60. Sketch by John Henry Adams, Du Bois Spending a Quiet Half Hour, Voice of the Negro, March 1905. Reproduced courtesy of General Research Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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lent form and pleasing carriage,’’ and of his ‘‘beautiful’’ baby,11 these two are not visually depicted as essential features of the adult man. The visual narrative poses the mother as the first and only support, holding him just until he can hold himself, and then the man becomes an independent force of intellect and will, his wife and child lovely asides that simply reconfirm his role as model patriarch. With its verbal and visual narratives, Adams’s sketch employs Du Bois’s image to perform the kind of work Du Bois’s Georgia Negro photographs effect on a larger scale. Du Bois’s physical features, superior intellect, and character are described to defy the circumscription of racist eugenic typing. The New Negro man emblematizes eugenic perfection; according to the very terms of the eugenicist’s archive, the New Negro man bests a racialized hierarchy with his superior mind and bearing, as well as his handsome physique. Du Bois is an elite intellectual, figured in princely attire as a child and then in scholarly robes and formal suits as a young man and an adult. He is a patriarch, providing for wife and child so that they can in turn dedicate themselves to the ‘‘proper’’ tasks of gendered domesticity. But most of all, Du Bois is devoted fully to the grave race work that epilogue 155

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confronts him. The final image of Du Bois walking, ‘‘bracing a stiff breeze,’’ recalls to mind another image of Du Bois in transit—that of him walking down Main Street in Atlanta on the day Samuel Wilkes was murdered, turning back in the instant he realized the futility of his case for justice and rational thought in the face of the white mob, turning back at the moment he recognized, perhaps, how his own cultivated and disciplined body signified in relation to the mutilated parts of Samuel Wilkes’s body in the eyes of that mob. In Adams’s sketch, Du Bois walks with determination, fortifying himself against the elements; he will not be turned back from his work. Du Bois embodies the resolve Adams calls for at the end of ‘‘The New Negro Man,’’ itself an echo of the final words of Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk: ‘‘Gird up your loins, young man, and hurry.’’ 12 Du Bois has already begun to lead the way. Situating Du Bois’s own image within a larger cultural context enables one to see the extent to which Du Bois’s photographs for the American Negro Exhibit participated in a broader project of African American archive building, a more extensive endeavor to envision a New Negro at the turn of the century. As early documents in the production of that imagery, Du Bois’s 1900 photographs helped to shape that vision, one that would in turn circumscribe the circulation of Du Bois’s own image as exemplar at the time. As Du Bois construed an archive of ‘‘typical Negro faces,’’ 13 he also created a visual record according to which his own image, as well as his capacity to serve as ‘‘representative,’’ would be measured. Designing his archive to make an incursion into the representation of blackness, Du Bois himself, posed as emblematic New Negro man, would also be called on to perform that impossible task, to embody a contested racial abstraction. A visual genealogy of Du Bois’s image demonstrates in a fundamental way that the archivist always inhabits the archive, as both a determining and a determined force. Even as the conventions of collection would seem to relegate him or her to invisibility, the archivist is always present as both producer and product of the archive, as the shaper also contained by the ideology he or she inscribes for future memory. In deeming the imagery of the New Negro a visual archive, and even in designating Du Bois’s Georgia Negro albums themselves a counterarchive throughout this book, I may seem to be expanding the defining limits of the archive beyond their signifying capacities. Scholars have generally considered the archive according to its insti156 photography on the color line

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61. Sketch by John Henry Adams, Head Picture of the Du Bois of Today at His Desk, and below, 62. Sketch by John Henry Adams, Du Bois Bracing a Stiff Breeze, both from Voice of the Negro, March 1905. Reproduced courtesy of General Research Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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tutional, authorized, state-sanctioned forms, and while I would argue that it is important to distinguish between the very different claims such diverse cultural sites can make on political, legal, and cultural meaning, to call Du Bois’s albums simply a collection of photographs, or the imagery of the New Negro simply a cultural discourse, would be to miss some of the important signifying structures and ambitions of these particular bodies of visual work. By designating seemingly amorphous cultural images an archive, as in the case of the New Negro, I aim to highlight the historical specificity of a particular kind of imagery, and to underline the unity of its purpose. The images of the New Negro authored by an African American elite intervened in a long-standing legacy of popular misrepresentations that informed a dominant white culture’s expectations about African American ambition and upward mobility. Together, they created a kind of counterarchive, a group of images that by definition occupied a contested cultural space on the margins of official archives. In the case of Du Bois’s 1900 Georgia Negro photographs, which were sanctioned for display by national and regional boards as part of the traveling American Negro Exhibit, and which were eventually housed in the Library of Congress, the collection of images is more readily deemed an archive. And yet clearly, despite its ambitions, this remains a small-scale archive. Nevertheless, it is important to consider the photographs compiled in Du Bois’s albums an archive in order to recognize counterarchives, in order to open up a space for contestatory signifying practices, in order to realize antiracist visual documents as evidence from which a different cultural history can be imagined. As Jacques Derrida has argued, ‘‘There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.’’ 14 In a cultural moment in which legal segregation and illegal rituals of racial terror violently thwarted full democratization, in which official archives worked to create and maintain a vision of African American inferiority, depravity, and criminality, one must turn to other sites for visions of antiracist resistance. One must look to emergent counterarchives for work toward full democratization. Given the contestatory nature of Du Bois’s 1900 Georgia Negro photographs as counterarchive, one cannot understand the images without reading them in relation to those other visual archives whose 158 photography on the color line

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assumptions and representations the photographs challenge. And I would argue that all photographic archives require such comparative analysis, precisely because all archives are political. Du Bois’s 1900 photograph albums and the cultural work they perform as counterarchive make apparent a more general characteristic of the photographic archive, and of our ability to decipher its meanings and ideological underpinnings. For if the full import of a counterarchive can only be understood in relation to the visual archives it contests, certainly the reverse is also true—the ‘‘official’’ archive can only be denaturalized by reading it in relation to the imaging options that challenge its authority, to the cultural sites that contest its delineations of evidence, truth, and history.15 Du Bois’s 1900 Georgia Negro photographs create visual dissonance, signifying in critical relation to the authorized scientific archives, popular commercial caricatures, and gruesome lynching spectacles that attempted to envision African American inferiority at the turn of the century. Du Bois’s archive intervenes in a legacy of violent misrepresentations to make a new claim on the future, and in this forward promise lies both its expansive, as well as its limiting, or delimiting, contribution. As Derrida has argued, every archive is futureoriented,16 and ‘‘every archive . . . is at once institutive and conservative. Revolutionary and traditional.’’ 17 What Derrida has called the archive’s promise to the future is not simply a pledge to remember the past in a time to come but a shaping of the future itself, a molding of coming events for the archive. Thus it is important to recognize not only the radical work against effacement and erasure that Du Bois’s photographs performed, the hope of a new future emblematized by the image of the New Negro, but also the strictures of any new model as it becomes measure and circumscribing device. This is the complicated cultural work that Du Bois’s 1900 Georgia Negro photographs perform. As an archive, they are both ‘‘traditional’’ and ‘‘revolutionary,’’ producing a restrictive model of patriarchy in their fight against the annihilation of African American manhood. But while the disciplinary nature of the Georgia Negro photographs’ class and gender limitations is apparent, especially today, nevertheless, as a counterarchive, the images performed radical contestatory work in the moment of their inception, work that opened up and claimed a fundamentally new signifying space. This counterarchive’s promise to the future is that of an antiracist visual epilogue 159

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culture. Both in the moment of its conception and looking forward from today, Du Bois’s counterarchive offers new tools, new evidence, for envisioning national history; it inscribes a distinct perception into cultural memory. Its promise to the future is thus also that of a transformed national record, of a transfigured national vision. This critical signifying function is what this book has endeavored to make apparent, and it is this kind of contestatory meaning that a comparative analysis of visual archives can illuminate. The work of uncovering and learning to read an otherwise obscure counterarchive brings into view an alternative visual genealogy, an alternative basis for a critical cultural vision. Du Bois’s particular counterarchive demands that one attend to the interanimation of race and visual culture, to the ways in which race has been circumscribed by images and racial identification has been figured and challenged through racialized gazes. Looking back over the previous century through the lens of Du Bois’s 1900 Georgia Negro photographs, one can literally begin to see the conundrum of race and representation—‘‘the problem of the color-line’’— anew.

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Notes

Introduction
W. E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part which Africa Has Played in World History (1946), enl. ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1965), 2.  There is surprisingly little documentation regarding Du Bois’s trip to the 1900 Paris Exposition and the work he prepared for the American Negro Exhibit. David Levering Lewis notes: ‘‘The letters written to Nina during his two months abroad have not survived, making it difficult to track his movements.’’ David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, vol. 1, Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 247. An announcement in the Bulletin of Atlanta University, October 1900, notes: ‘‘Prof. DuBois, Miss Ellis and Mrs. Hendon went abroad. All attended the Paris Exposition. . . . Prof. DuBois was absent the longest time, and at present writing has not returned to his work here, although expected soon.’’  While other photographs produced for the same exhibit, such as Frances Benjamin Johnston’s Hampton images, have been discussed rather extensively, Du Bois’s collection of photographs has remained largely unknown and unexamined. For analyses of Johnston’s Hampton photographs, see Judith Fryer Davidov, Women’s Camera Work: Self/Body/ Other in American Visual Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998); James Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Jeannene M. Przyblyski, ‘‘American Visions at the Paris Exposition, 1900: Another Look at Frances Benjamin Johnston’s Hampton Photographs,’’ Art Journal 57, 3 (1998): 60–68; Wilfred D. Samuels, ‘‘Their Own Progress and Prospect: African Americans and l’Exposition Universelle de 1900,’’ Heath Anthology of American Literature Newsletter (spring 1999): http:// college.hmco.com/english/lauter/heath/4e/instructors/newsletter/ spring99/Samuels.html; Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer-

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sity Press, 1999), 157–86; Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 15–51.  The Georgia Negro Exhibit, composed primarily of sociological studies of African Americans in Georgia, was Du Bois’s second contribution to the American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition. His first was a study of Atlanta University itself, consisting of thirty-one charts ‘‘illustrating the advance along educational lines made by the colored people of Georgia.’’ ‘‘Atlanta University Exhibit at Paris,’’ Atlanta Journal, February 22, 1900. Horace Bumstead Records, 1876–1919, box 23, folder 6, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, Atlanta, Georgia.  William Andrew Rogers, a graduate of Atlanta University in 1899, from Marietta, Georgia, worked with Du Bois on the American Negro Exhibit for the 1900 Paris Exposition. Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Atlanta University, 1899–1900 through 1906–1907 (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press), 37. Thomas J. Calloway notes that the sociological exhibit from Atlanta University that he commissioned would be prepared by ‘‘a class of colored students under a colored graduate of Harvard College [Du Bois].’’ ‘‘Negro Education and Progress Made,’’ American (Nashville, Tenn.), December 12, 1899. Bumstead Records, 1876–1919, box 23, folder 6. The Georgia Negro Exhibit was completed and sent to Paris on April 21, 1900, as was widely publicized: Announcements were carried by such prominent newspapers as the New York Sun, Tribune, and Evening Post, as well as by over thirty newspapers representing states across the country, including Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Indiana, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Colorado, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kansas, Arkansas, Florida, Texas, and Georgia. These announcements typically followed an Atlanta University press release, which described ‘‘the second Negro exhibit for the Paris exposition from Atlanta University’’ as follows: ‘‘This is an exhaustive social study of the Georgia Negro—Georgia, as having the largest Negro population of any state, being taken as a fair representative for the Negro—and is illustrated by maps, colored charts and other devices.’’ The press release pays special attention to the studies that demonstrate an increase in the African American population of Georgia, an increase in African American land ownership and taxable property, and a dramatic decrease in illiteracy since emancipation. It also notes statistics pertaining to migration and racial mixing. The press release concludes that ‘‘the facts shown are on the whole decidedly encouraging, not only in regard to the material progress of the Negro but his intellectual progress as well.’’ Sixteen of the thirty-odd newspaper articles noting the completion of the Georgia Negro studies make specific mention of the photograph albums I am 162 notes to introduction

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concerned with here, describing them as follows: ‘‘Three other volumes give pictures of 200 typical negro faces. The other two volumes show pictures of street scenes in negro life.’’ The Atlanta University Press release, as well as a large selection of newspaper clippings announcing Du Bois’s second exhibit for the 1900 Paris Exposition, can be found in Bumstead Records, 1876–1919, box 23, folder 6. See especially ‘‘Negro Exhibit for Paris,’’ Sun (New York), April 22, 1900. The wall space devoted to the Georgia Negro Exhibit was merely six by three feet. ‘‘Negro Exhibit for Paris,’’ Sun (New York), April 22, 1900. The thirty-one charts and graphs document the African American population of Georgia, African American occupations, migration patterns, degrees of racial amalgamation, and literacy and education statistics. They also outline the age and conjugal condition of African Americans as compared with whites in Georgia, and document the land and property ownership, income and expenditure of African American families. See lot 11931, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.‘‘Statistics of 150 negro families in Atlanta and some 2,000 families in country districts in south Georgia’’ were used in compiling the thirtyone charts. ‘‘Negro Exhibit for Paris,’’ Sun (New York), April 22, 1900. The charts were drawn and colored by William Andrew Rogers, a recent Atlanta University graduate. ‘‘Atlanta University Exhibit at Paris,’’ Atlanta Journal, February 22, 1900. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). There were five demographic maps included in the exhibit, as well as an unusual electric clock presented in a carved frame, showing the acres of land owned by African Americans in Georgia at different moments since 1870. Report of the Commissioner-General for the United States to the International Universal Exposition, Paris, 1900 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1901) 2:381, 408–9, 463–67. ‘‘Negro Exhibit for Paris,’’ Sun (New York), April 22, 1900. See Thomas J. Calloway to Dr. Albert Shaw, October 9, 1900, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Correspondence, 1877–1910, series 1, reel 1, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In his essay ‘‘The American Negro Exhibit at the Paris Exposition,’’ Calloway also notes that Du Bois’s sociological charts ‘‘attracted wide attention’’ at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Calloway suggests that the American Negro Exhibit as a whole ‘‘received a great amount of attention abroad,’’ for it was ‘‘something entirely new to most people.’’ In total, the American Negro Exhibit received seventeen medals from the International Jury of Awards, including a ‘‘Grand Prix.’’ According to Calloway, European economists, in particular, found the American Negro Exhibit intriguing and valuable. Calloway, ‘‘The American Negro Exhibit at the Paris Exposition,’’ Against the Odds:

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African American Artists and the Harmon Foundation, 1991, Newark Museum Archives, set 1, box 1, file 1, Newark, New Jersey, 75, 79. Many thanks to Amy Mooney for giving me a copy of this essay. According to Jeannene Przyblyski, the largely French jury for the 1900 Paris Exposition awarded the American Negro Exhibit as a whole a Grand Prize in recognition of its interest to ‘‘ ‘la grande famille humaine [the great human family],’ ’’ and its support for equality among all men ‘‘ ‘sans distinction de couleur et d’origine [without distinction of color or origin].’ ’’ Jeannene M. Przyblyski, ‘‘Visions of Race and Nation at the Paris Exposition, 1900: A French Context for the American Negro Exhibit,’’ in National Stereotypes in Perspective: Americans in France, Frenchmen in America, ed. William L. Chew III (Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001), 216– 17. Przyblyski cites Emile Worms, Rapports du jury international: Classe 110: Initiative publique ou privée en vue du bien-etre des citoyens (Paris, 1901), 99–100. The albums measure approximately seventeen and three-quarters by fourteen inches. Each album is composed of fifty stiff, cardlike pages, and each page has one or two photographs pasted onto it. Volumes 1 and 2 present one hundred images each; volume 3 contains ninety images, and volume 4 holds seventy-three images. While albums posed some hurdles at expositions, requiring physical handling and a more prolonged viewing than images displayed on walls, photograph albums were not uncommon at nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-century fairs. See Julie K. Brown, Making Culture Visible: The Public Display of Photography at Fairs, Expositions, and Exhibitions in the United States, 1847–1900 (Amsterdam: Harwood, 2001). Two hundred and twenty-two of the 363 photographs are portraits, and they are printed in the uniform size of cabinet card images, measuring approximately four by five and a half inches. The portraits fill volumes 1 and 2, as well as the first portion of volume 3. Some of these latter photographs are printed large, measuring nine and a quarter by seven and a quarter inches, and are presented individually on a page. The albums are currently housed in the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Seated are Clarence Askew, Arthur Askew, and Walter Askew. Standing are Norman Askew, Jake Sansome (a neighbor), and Robert Askew. Askew Sr. apprenticed as a printer for the white photographer Columbus W. Motes in a studio on Whitehall Street beginning in 1866, and in 1896 he opened his own studio inside his home at 114 Summit Avenue in Atlanta. Unfortunately, little else is known about Askew because his home and studio, including all of his photographic equipment and plates, were burned in Atlanta’s Great Fire of 1917, three years after Askew’s death. The best sources of information about Thomas E. Askew are

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Herman ‘‘Skip’’ Mason Jr., Hidden Treasures: African American Photographers in Atlanta, 1870–1970 (Atlanta: African American Family History Association, 1991), and Deborah Willis, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present (New York: Norton, 2000). See also Askew’s advertisement in the Voice of the Negro of December 1904, 637. Photographs by Askew can be found in the Auburn Avenue Research Center, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library, Atlanta, Georgia; the Atlanta History Center Archives, Atlanta, Georgia; and the Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta, Georgia. This image can be identified by cross-referencing with a photograph in Mason, Hidden Treasures. This image can be identified in the Matthews Collection of the Auburn Avenue Research Center, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library, Atlanta, Georgia. Henry Hugh Proctor gave the service at the funeral of W. E. B. Du Bois’s son, Burghardt. Ernestine Bell was the daughter of an Atlanta mail clerk. These photographs can be identified in the Long-Rucker-Aiken Family Photographs Collection (1859–1970s), series 2, box 2, and series 3, box 2, folder 1, respectively, Atlanta History Center Archives, Atlanta, Georgia. These images represent the homes of a minister in Decatur and a lawyer in Atlanta. They can be identified in W. E. B. Du Bois, ed., The Negro American Family (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1908). The latter image, a family portrait taken on the front steps of the house, will be discussed further in chapter 3. It closely resembles other photographs in the albums, and thus it is likely that Thomas E. Askew made many of the family portraits included in the Georgia Negro collection. The Mount Olive Baptist Church and the First Congregational Church. These photographs can be identified by cross-referencing with images in Herman ‘‘Skip’’ Mason Jr., ed., Going against the Wind: A Pictorial History of African-Americans in Atlanta (Atlanta: apex Museum, 1992), 44–46. The photograph of David Tobias Howard will be discussed further in chapter 3. This image can be identified in the Long-Rucker-Aiken Family Photographs Collection, series 1, box 1. According to the collection’s description, Henry Allen Rucker (1889 [sic; 1859?]–1924), was born a slave in Athens, Georgia. ‘‘Following the Civil War, Rucker opened a barber shop on Decatur Street in Atlanta; attended Atlanta University; was a delegate to the Republican National Convention, Chicago IL (1880); was a clerk in the internal revenue collector’s office in Atlanta (1880–5, 1889–93); and was appointed Collector of Internal Revenue for the District of Georgia (1896–1910), the only African American to receive this appointment. Rucker was active in the Niagara Movement and the naacp. Rucker and Annie Eunice Long had eight children: Henry, Jr.,

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Elizabeth (Bessie), Lucy Lorene, Jefferson, Neddie, Hazel, Alice, and Ann L. The family lived on Piedmont Avenue.’’ One of the photographs of a young girl in the Du Bois albums is very likely a portrait of Neddie Rucker, taken by Thomas Askew. This image can be identified in the Atlanta University Photographs Collection, box 13. Bazoline Estelle Usher is listed as a student in the Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Atlanta University, 1899–1900 through 1906–1907. W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘‘The Talented Tenth’’ (1903), in W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of America, 1986), 855. W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘‘The American Negro at Paris,’’ in Writings by W. E. B. Du Bois in Periodicals Edited by Others, comp. and ed. Herbert Aptheker (Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus-Thomson Organization, 1982), 1:88. The essay was first published in American Monthly Review of Reviews, November 1900, 575–77. Allan Sekula, ‘‘The Body and the Archive,’’ October 39 (1986): 56. Ibid., 7. In later chapters, I will be adapting Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s theory of ‘‘signifyin(g),’’ an African American tradition of verbal subversion, to an analysis of Du Bois’s Georgia Negro photographs. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifyin(g ) Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). bell hooks, ‘‘In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life,’’ in Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography, ed. Deborah Willis (New York: New Press, 1994), 48. Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 56–80. Du Bois’s albums might profitably be discussed in relation to the family photograph album, whose form they share to some degree. Indeed, the albums might be read as a sort of extended family album, even though some of the specific kinds of photographs they include, especially the paired portraits and documentary images, are not usually to be found in the family photograph album. Recently, scholars have begun the important work of assessing the ideological function of the family photograph album, as well as various artists’ challenge to what Marianne Hirsch has called ‘‘the familial gaze.’’ Much of that work has focused on the ways in which artists and subjects have worked to contest the confines of a normative family gaze and normative family structures. I would suggest that Du Bois’s albums take such critical strategies a step further. While Du Bois’s albums promote a particular vision of the African American family, one that is well-todo and patriarchal, as I will argue in chapter 3, the albums deploy that image of the African American family not only to challenge the white-

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ness of the dominant familial gaze but also to challenge the structures of segregation and violent racial discrimination. In other words, if Du Bois’s albums invest in a reconfigured African American familial gaze, they do so in order to use that vision as a tool in challenging racialized social structures not exclusively familial. See the essays collected in Marianne Hirsch, The Familial Gaze (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1999), especially Deborah Willis, ‘‘A Search for Self: The Photograph and Black Family Life,’’ 107–23; Elizabeth Abel, ‘‘Domestic Borders, Cultural Boundaries: Black Feminists Re-view the Family,’’ 124–52; and Laura Wexler, ‘‘Seeing Sentiment: Photography, Race, and the Innocent Eye,’’ 248–75. See also Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); Shawn Michelle Smith, ‘‘ ‘Baby’s Picture Is Always Treasured’: Eugenics and the Reproduction of Whiteness in the Family Photograph Album,’’ Yale Journal of Criticism 11, 1 (1998): 197–220; and, again, hooks, ‘‘In Our Glory.’’ Irit Rogoff, ‘‘Studying Visual Culture,’’ in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 1998), 20. According to Lisa Bloom, ‘‘the disengaged look of universal man’’ has been ‘‘a continuing cultural investment in traditional art historical narratives.’’ Lisa Bloom, ed., With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 5. Walter Benjamin noted this with some chagrin in his famous essay on art and mechanical reproduction. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’ in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 217–52. Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 80–82. Booker T. Washington gave his famous ‘‘Atlanta Compromise’’ speech at the 1895 Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition. Report of the Commissioner-General for the United States, 2:381. Thomas J. Calloway graduated from Fisk University in 1889, and from the law school at Howard University in 1893. He served as assistant professor of a high school in Evansville, Indiana, a clerk in the War Department in Washington, D.C., a manager of the Colored Teachers’ Agency, the president of Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College in West Side, Mississippi, a spokesperson for Tuskegee, and a president of a normal school in Helena, Arkansas. ‘‘Paris Exposition Edition,’’ New York Age, January 4, 1900, 1. Apparently, no American Negro exhibit nor Negro department was created for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, due in part to the U.S. Commission’s discrimination, and in part to African American resistance to being segregated in a U.S. exposition. Accord-

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ing to Emmett J. Scott, some African Americans argued: ‘‘Wasn’t this to be a National, an International Exposition? Were we not citizens of the United States? Why should the Negro people have a separate department? Why should we be segregated?’’ Emmett J. Scott, ‘‘The Louisiana Purchase Exposition,’’ Voice of the Negro 1, 8 (1904): 310. Critiquing this position, Scott notes, ‘‘As at Chicago where the African Dahomey Village, with its exquisite inhabitants, was the sole representation of the Negro people, so at St. Louis, a ‘Pike’ concession, ‘A Southern Plantation,’ showing Negro life before the War of the Rebellion, is all there is to let the world know we are in existence, aside from a small exhibit from a Mississippi College, and one or two other exhibits of no very particular moment’’ (310).  See Thomas J. Calloway to Dr. Albert Shaw, October 9, 1900.  According to Thomas J. Calloway, the American Negro Exhibit was displayed at the Paris Exposition from April 15 to November 11, 1900, at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, from May 1 to November 1, 1901, and at the South Carolina Interstate and West Indian Exposition in Charleston, South Carolina, from December 1, 1901, to May 31, 1902. Calloway, ‘‘The American Negro Exhibit,’’ Against the Odds: African American Artists and the Harmon Foundation, 1991, Newark Museum Archives, set 1, box 1, file 1, Newark, New Jersey. I am grateful to Amy Mooney for giving me a copy of this essay as well. See also James A. Ross, ‘‘Buffalo and the Pan-American Exposition,’’ Colored American Magazine, March 1901, 324; ‘‘The South Carolina Interstate and West Indian Exposition,’’ Colored American Magazine, September 1901, 333, 378 (image); William D. Crum, ‘‘The Negro at the Charleston Exposition,’’ Voice of the Negro 1, 8 (1904): 333; Thomas J. Calloway to W. E. B. Du Bois, January 18, 1909, Du Bois Papers, Correspondence, 1877–1910, series 1, reel 1.  According to the Harper’s Guide to Paris, the Palace of Social Economy resembled ‘‘an elegant and distinguished palace of the eighteenth century.’’ The structure was built entirely by workmen’s associations. ‘‘The dimensions are 328 feet by 110 feet; the height being 69 feet above the level of the quay and 85 feet above the level of the Seine. The Palace is divided into two parts: on the ground floor are rooms in which the Social Economy exhibits are placed; the first floor is entirely reserved for the congresses. The building contains an enormous hall, 328 feet long and 39 feet wide, which precedes the meeting rooms, and which has its entire facade on the Seine. There are five halls for the congresses, one holding 800 persons, two smaller ones accommodating 250 each, and two others having a seating capacity of 150 persons.’’ Harper’s Guide to Paris and the Exposition of 1900 (New York: Harper, 1900), 163. The Palace of Social Economy was located next to the Palace of Horticulture. A map showing the layout of the buildings of the 1900 Paris Exposition can be 168 notes to introduction

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found in Barrett Eastman, Paris . . . 1900: The American Guide to City and Exposition (New York: Baldwin and Eastman, 1900). Morris Lewis (attaché to the U.S. Commission to the Paris Exposition), ‘‘Paris and the International Exposition,’’ Colored American Magazine, October 1900, 295. Report of the Commissioner-General, 381, 408–9, 463–67; and Robert W. Rydell, ‘‘Gateway to the ‘American Century’: The American Representation at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900,’’ in Paris, 1900: The ‘‘American School’’ at the Universal Exposition, ed. Diane P. Fischer (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 141–42. Du Bois, ‘‘The American Negro at Paris,’’ 575. Ibid. Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (1976; New York: Schocken, 1990), 27. Ibid., 23. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; New York: Library of America, 1990), 12. Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions, and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 82. See also Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, and Eric Breitbart, A World on Display: Photographs from the St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997). Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, 82. Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 36–43. See Thomas J. Schlereth, ‘‘The Material Universe of the American World Expositions, 1876–1915,’’ in Cultural History and Material Culture: Everyday Life, Landscapes, Museums (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 284–85, and Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 64–65. Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, 84. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 101. According to Fatimah Tobing Rony, such temporal dislocation is the defining structure of the ethnographic gaze. Rony, The Third Eye. See also Joseph Masco, ‘‘Competitive Displays: Negotiating Genealogical Rights to the Potlatch at the American Museum of Natural History,’’ American Anthropologist 98, 4 (1996): 837–52. On the evolutionary narrative of progress that informed nineteenth-century exhibitions as well as museum displays, see Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), especially chapter 7, ‘‘Museums and Progress: Narrative, Ideology, Performance,’’ 177–208. The second chapter in Du Bois’s The World and Africa is entitled ‘‘The White Masters of the World.’’ Jeannene Przyblyski suggests an alternative reading of the possible function and effect of the native village exhibits, in which the exhibits

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also exemplify ‘‘the threat’’ whereby ‘‘the carefully constructed hierarchy of civilized and ‘not yet arrived’ meant to produce the compliant colonized subject might collapse into babel.’’ Przyblyski, ‘‘Visions of Race and Nation at the Paris Exposition,’’ 219–20. This figure is cited in John Allwood, The Great Exhibitions (London: Studio Vista, 1977), 182. Eastman, Paris . . . 1900, 55–56. Richard D. Mandell, Paris 1900: The Great World’s Fair (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), 66. Jean Schopfer, ‘‘Amusements of the Paris Exposition, 2: Theaters, Panoramas, and other Spectacles,’’ Century Magazine, September 1900, 651. For further discussion of the Dahomeyan native village exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition, see Przyblyski, ‘‘Visions of Race and Nation at the Paris Exposition.’’ Frederick Douglass, introduction to The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition (1892), by Douglass and Ida B. Wells, in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: International Publishers, 1955), 4:475. Frederick Douglass, ‘‘Why Is the Negro Lynched?,’’ in The Lesson of the Hour (1894), in Foner, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, 4:508. Timothy Mitchell examines the objectification of Middle Easterners in the so-called native exhibits at the 1889 Paris Exposition as a salient example of nineteenth-century Europeans’ propensity to engage the ‘‘world-as-exhibition.’’ According to Mitchell, such visual objectification proves fundamental to a European colonial worldview. Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), and Timothy Mitchell, ‘‘Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order,’’ in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 289–317. According to Tony Bennett, the ‘‘exhibitionary complex’’ of world’s fairs (and museums) ‘‘perfected a self-monitoring system of looks in which the subject and object positions can be exchanged,’’ in which the viewer is also viewed and as part of a crowd becomes a spectacle under self-surveillance. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 69. Rydell, ‘‘Gateway to the ‘American Century,’ ’’ 141. Booker T. Washington reproduced his 1895 Atlanta Exposition address in Up From Slavery. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (1901; New York: Penguin, 1986). Rydell, ‘‘Gateway to the ‘American Century,’ ’’ 141. ‘‘The Negro Exhibit: Mr. Calloway, in Charge of Its Preparation, Talks,’’ Star (Washington, D.C.), December 14, 1899. Bumstead Records, 1876– 1919, box 23, folder 6. Thomas J. Calloway quoted in ibid. Thomas J. Calloway quoted in ibid. Filipino soldiers distributed leaflets to African American soldiers, citing the lynching of Sam Hose and ask-

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ing how they could fight a war of imperialism against other men of color when their own country lynched them. The links between the American Negro Exhibit and U.S. imperialism are varied. The Hampton Institute, Booker T. Washington’s alma mater, hired Frances Benjamin Johnston to produce photographs of the industrial school for the 1900 Paris Exposition soon after Johnston made herself famous photographing Admiral Dewey, hero of the Philippine War, aboard the flagship Olympia. See Laura Wexler’s important analysis of Frances Benjamin Johnston’s work in Tender Violence, 15–51. Rydell, ‘‘Gateway to the ‘American Century,’ ’’ 124. Indeed, what Jeannene Przyblyski has said of Frances Benjamin Johnston’s Hampton photographs, displayed in the American Negro Exhibit, might be said of the exhibit as a whole, namely, that it was meant, at least in part, ‘‘to reassure an international community that the United States had its ‘Negro problem’ firmly in hand.’’ Przyblyski, ‘‘American Visions at the Paris Exposition,’’ 68. Thomas J. Calloway quoted in ‘‘The Negro Exhibit.’’ Calloway offers a different, and much more progressive, African American–oriented vision of the value of the American Negro Exhibit in his essay entitled ‘‘The American Negro Exhibit at the Paris Exposition’’: ‘‘Whatever other message the exhibit may convey the one which seems to me most important is that we should avail ourselves of every opportunity to put before the public statistics and other evidences of our progress. This effort is demanded, not so much to afford larger opportunities for adva[n]cement, but to render more certain the courage and faith of our young men and women to fully make use of the opportunities open to them to get an education, property and a basic character. By occasional exhibits of what the Negro under difficulties has accomplished up to the present will tend [sic] to overcome that sordid pessimism which sees no hope for racial assimilation or adjustment.’’ Calloway, ‘‘The American Negro Exhibit at the Paris Exposition,’’ 79–80. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 9. Rydell, ‘‘Gateway to the ‘American Century,’ ’’ 142–44. Du Bois, The World and Africa, 20. See chart 1, lot 11931, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, Biography of a Race, 251. According to Du Bois, the 1900 Pan-African Congress in London was the conference that ‘‘put the word ‘Pan-African’ in the dictionaries for the first time.’’ Du Bois, The World and Africa, 7. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 3. Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999), 3–4; Rogoff, ‘‘Studying Visual Culture,’’ 20. In his response to October’s ‘‘Visual Culture Questionnaire,’’ Jonathan

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Crary states that in his work he has ‘‘tried to show how vision is never separable from the larger historical questions about the construction of subjectivity.’’ Crary, response to the ‘‘Visual Culture Questionnaire,’’ October 77 (1996): 33. See also Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), and Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999).  In addition to the work of bell hooks, I have found that of Laura Wexler, Fatimah Tobing Rony, and Elizabeth Edwards particularly useful for thinking along these lines. See especially hooks, ‘‘In Our Glory’’; bell hooks, ‘‘The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,’’ in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End, 1992), 115–31; bell hooks, ‘‘Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination,’’ in Black Looks, 165–78; Wexler, Tender Violence; Rony, The Third Eye; Elizabeth Edwards, ed., Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1920 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992); and Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology, and Museums (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

1. Envisioning Race

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W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; New York: Library of America, 1990), 8; emphasis added. Du Bois first discussed double consciousness in ‘‘Strivings of the Negro People,’’ published in the Atlantic Monthly in August 1897. The essay would be renamed ‘‘Of Our Spiritual Strivings’’ as it became the first chapter in the 1903 The Souls of Black Folk.  Ibid.  bell hooks, ‘‘In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life,’’ in Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography, ed. Deborah Willis (New York: New Press, 1994), 50.  David Marriott, Maurice O. Wallace, and Gwen Bergner have recently begun to theorize gendered racial representations as particularly visual constructs. While the images and figures these scholars assess in their fascinating works range across a wide historical spectrum, the authors they draw on in order to articulate the links between racial identification and visual culture are primarily mid- to late-twentieth-century writers, such as Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Homi Bhabha, and Frantz Fanon. In this chapter, I argue that Du Bois was positing the interanimation of race and visual culture, of race and representation, of racial identification and racialized gazes, in powerful terms almost half a century earlier than the thinkers Marriott, Wallace, and Bergner evoke to theorize such connections. See David Marriott, On Black Men (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); 172 notes to chapter one

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Maurice O. Wallace, Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775–1995 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002); and Gwen Bergner, ‘‘Who Is That Masked Woman? Or, The Role of Gender in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks,’’ pmla 110, 1 (1995): 75–88. Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993) offers a salient example. Dickson D. Bruce finds predecessors to Du Bois’s later, and distinctively racialized, evocation of double consciousness in the nineteenth-century discourses of European Romanticism, American Transcendentalism, and the emerging field of psychology. Following Arnold Rampersad, Bruce has suggested that William James may have introduced Du Bois to psychological understandings of the term. See Dickson D. Bruce Jr., ‘‘W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness,’’ American Literature 64, 2 (1992): 299–309; and Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (1976; New York: Schocken, 1990). Bernard W. Bell has deemed double consciousness ‘‘a dynamic epistemological mode of critical inquiry for African Americans.’’ Bernard W. Bell, ‘‘Genealogical Shifts in Du Bois’s Discourse on Double Consciousness as the Sign of African American Difference,’’ in W. E. B. Du Bois on Race and Culture: Philosophy, Politics, and Poetics, ed. Bell, Emily R. Grosholz, and James B. Stewart (New York: Routledge, 1996), 96. In his provocative explanation of Du Boisian double consciousness, Adolph Reed rejects a lineage of ideas stemming from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalist notions to William James to Du Bois, arguing that Du Bois’s use of the term resonates with Lamarckian concepts prevalent in turn-of-the-century sociological discourses. In this sense, Du Boisian double consciousness would appear as the struggle between an ‘‘evolved’’ and a ‘‘primitive’’ self. Given Du Bois’s explicit work to dismantle an essentialized racial hierarchy at the turn of the century, I find Reed’s thesis, while well-argued, ultimately untenable. Adolph L. Reed Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 91–125. Fatimah Tobing Rony briefly notes the visual nature of Du Bois’s description of double consciousness in The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 4. Shamoon Zamir, Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888–1903 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 117, 160. Ibid., 114. Ibid., 118. Zamir notes that Du Bois owned James’s Principles of Psychology and kept it in his library (249 n. 10). Zamir also explicitly concedes that ‘‘what James’s psychology does provide (in terms of ideas useful to Du Bois’s psychology) is . . . an idea of the self as it is formed through

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its being in the eyes of others’’ (153). If, as Zamir posits, Du Bois reworks Hegel’s ‘‘master-and-slave dialectic in terms of a quotidian drama of seeing and being seen’’ (136), then, I would argue, Du Bois is adapting and transforming both Hegel and James. For surely James’s rejection of Hegel need not have secured Du Bois’s complete dismissal of James for Hegel. Certainly, Du Bois was capable of adapting Hegel via James, integrating and transforming the theories of two philosophers in his own unique thought. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, vol. 1, Biography of a Race, 1868– 1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 96. Priscilla Wald, Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 172–236. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 8. James himself does not use the term double consciousness in his text, but in discussing the case of Félida X., he cites Dr. Azam’s 1887 book, entitled Hypnotisme, double conscience, et altérations de la personnalité (Paris, 1887). While he does not give the full citation, he also notes a May 1860 Harper’s essay in his discussion of Mary Reynolds, which was entitled, as noted by Dickson D. Bruce, ‘‘Mary Reynolds: A Case of Double Consciousness.’’ See William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), notes on 1:380 and 1:381. See also Bruce, ‘‘W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness,’’ 308 n. 9, and William S. Plumer, ‘‘Mary Reynolds: A Case of Double Consciousness,’’ Harper’s, May 1860, 807–12, cited in Bruce. James, The Principles of Psychology, 1:379–80. Ibid., 1:381–84. Ibid., 1:399. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 9. William James, Psychology: The Briefer Course (1892), ed. Gordon Allport (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), 43. As Priscilla Wald has argued, Du Bois’s ‘‘analysis extends the sociological and psychological theories that held that any ‘self ’ knows itself at least partly as the object of perception, in relation to—through the eyes of— others.’’ Wald, Constituting Americans, 177. Through an insightful reading of The Souls of Black Folk, Wald suggests that Du Bois invents new narrative strategies to tell an ‘‘untold story.’’ I am especially interested in the new visual tactics Du Bois employs to show an unseen image. Jacques Lacan, ‘‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,’’ in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 1–7. I have found Jane Gallop’s reading of Lacan’s mirror stage particularly useful. See Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 74–92. As Homi Bhabha, through a reading of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, has argued, ‘‘For identification, identity

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is never an a priori, nor a finished product; it is only ever the problematic process of access to an image of totality.’’ Homi K. Bhabha, ‘‘Interrogating Identity: Frantz Fanon and the Postcolonial Prerogative,’’ in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 51. Lacan, ‘‘The Mirror Stage,’’ 1, 2. Ibid., 1. Ibid., 2. As Jacqueline Rose has argued, the child’s ‘‘first sense of a coherent identity in which it can recognise itself,’’ the effect of the mirror stage, ‘‘only has meaning in relation to the presence and the look of the mother who guarantees its reality for the child.’’ Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986), 53. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 7–8. Ibid., 8. As Diana Fuss has argued in her reading of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, ‘‘Claiming for itself the exalted position of transcendental signifier, ‘white’ is never a ‘not black.’ As a self-identical, selfreproducing term, white draws its ideological power from its proclaimed transparency, from its self-elevation over the very category of ‘race.’ ’’ Diana Fuss, ‘‘Interior Colonies: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Identification,’’ in Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995), 144. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967), 116. Ibid., 112. As Gwen Bergner has argued, ‘‘The white man’s gaze produces a psychic splitting that shatters the black man’s experience of bodily integrity.’’ Bergner, ‘‘Who Is That Masked Woman,’’ 78. Paul Gilroy discusses Du Bois’s double consciousness as a triple phenomenon: ‘‘Double consciousness emerges from the unhappy symbiosis between three modes of thinking, being, and seeing. The first is racially particularistic, the second nationalistic in that it derives from the nation state in which the ex-slaves but not-yet-citizens find themselves, rather than from their aspiration towards a nation state of their own. The third is diasporic or hemispheric, sometimes global and occasionally universalist.’’ Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 127. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 112. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 113. Rony, The Third Eye, 6. Ibid., 17. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 112. According to Fatimah Tobing Rony, ‘‘The predicament described by Frantz Fanon’’ is one ‘‘of the viewer who, recognizing that he or she is racially aligned with the ethnographic Other yet unable to identify fully with the image, is left in uncomfortable suspension.’’ Rony, The Third Eye, 17. Kaja Silverman similarly suggests that

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Fanon poses ‘‘the psychic dilemma faced by the subject when obliged to identify with an image which provides neither idealization nor pleasure, and which is inimical to the formation of a ‘coherent’ identity.’’ Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), 27. Fuss, ‘‘Interior Colonies,’’ 143. As David Marriott has stated it, the problem for Fanon is phrased thus: ‘‘What do you do with an unconscious which appears to hate you?’’ According to Marriott, ‘‘For Fanon, blackness is already intruded upon, displaced by, an invasive whiteness which, as it were, gets there first’’; and, ‘‘to be black is to be already interfered with, violated by, a whiteness which comes from the inside out.’’ Marriott, On Black Men, 90, 79. According to Stuart Hall, Frantz Fanon similarly appropriates and racializes Lacan in his long footnote on the mirror stage. Stuart Hall, ‘‘The After-life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin White Masks?,’’ in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan Read (Seattle: Bay, 1996), 26. See also Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 161 n. 25. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 8. Hazel V. Carby, Race Men (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 32–33. Carby suggests that Du Bois’s subsequent articulation of double consciousness is gendered masculine, as is Du Bois’s vision of healing that psychological rift through self-conscious manhood. Carby argues that ‘‘for Du Bois, the gaining of the ‘true self-consciousness’ of a racialized and national subject position is dependent upon first gaining a gendered self-consciousness’’ (37). Claudia Tate reads Du Bois’s description of this scene in a very similar manner. According to Tate, the white girl’s rejection of the young Du Bois’s visiting card is ‘‘a traumatic event that disrupts his admirable selfimage . . . because it contests the perfect image of himself his mother seems to have reflected for him.’’ Claudia Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 185–86. As the white girl rejects an idealized image of blackness, she also reinforces her own fantasy of white wholeness. It might prove interesting to compare the roles of the white girl and black boy (Du Bois himself ) in Du Bois’s gendered racial episode to that of the white women and black men in the racial fantasies of ‘‘masculinized’’ white women that Jean Walton studies in her reading of Joan Riviere’s 1929 essay ‘‘Womanliness as a Masquerade,’’ J. H. W. van Ophuijsen’s 1917 ‘‘Contributions to the Masculinity Complex in Women,’’ and Melanie Klein’s 1929 ‘‘Infantile Anxiety-Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse.’’ In discussing the racial fantasy of Riviere’s white female patient, Walton explains, ‘‘As a

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white woman, her appearing to have the phallus is culturally permitted when it is a question of her relation to a black man.’’ Returning to Du Bois’s scene of gendered racial trauma, we might suppose that part of the shock for the young Du Bois lies in recognizing, through the rejection of the white girl (racially empowered in relation to him, despite her gendered position), the disavowal of his gender privilege as a black male in a white patriarchal world. Jean Walton, Fair Sex, Savage Dreams: Race, Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 22. See also her whole chapter entitled ‘‘Masquerade and Reparation: (White) Womanliness in Riviere and Klein,’’ 17–40. W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘‘The Damnation of Women’’ (1920), in W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of America, 1986), 954. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 150, 152. Du Bois seeks to dismantle the ‘‘unendurable paradox’’ that determines that ‘‘only at the sacrifice of intelligence and the chance to do their best work can the majority of modern women bear children.’’ His solution to this paradox is to celebrate ‘‘woman’s freedom and married motherhood inextricably wed.’’ Ultimately, then, it is only through ‘‘married motherhood’’ that Du Bois fully sanctions ‘‘woman’s [intellectual and economic] freedom.’’ Du Bois, ‘‘The Damnation of Women,’’ 952, 953, 967. Nellie McKay offers a more positive reading of Du Bois’s representations of women, and in discussing his fictional female characters suggests that ‘‘it is the gift of clarity of vision that Du Bois gives to his imagined women.’’ Nellie McKay, ‘‘W. E. B. Du Bois: The Black Women in His Writings—Selected Fictional and Autobiographical Portraits,’’ in Critical Essays on W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. William L. Andrews (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985), 249. James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man (1912), ed. William L. Andrews (New York: Penguin, 1990), 11–12. Ibid., 14. The echoes of Du Bois that one finds in these passages of The Autobiography are not surprising given that Johnson’s narrator singles out The Souls of Black Folk as a ‘‘remarkable book,’’ and a forerunner in African American literature, at a later point in the text (123). See also Robert B. Stepto, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative, 2d ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 95–127. Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man, 149. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 47–48. Ibid., 47. Lola Young, ‘‘Missing Persons: Fantasising Black Women in Black Skin, White Masks,’’ in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan Read (Seattle: Bay, 1996), 92. Gwen Bergner similarly reads Fanon’s ‘‘scathing condemnation of black women’s desire’’ as expressing Fanon’s ‘‘own desire to circumscribe

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black women’s sexuality and economic autonomy in order to ensure the patriarchal authority of black men.’’ Bergner, ‘‘Who Is That Masked Woman?,’’ 81. Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man, 34. Further work remains to be done reading Lacan through the lens of Du Bois’s racial categories. One might productively map the child’s emergence into the Lacanian symbolic (from the semiotic) as not only an entrance into the realm of the phallus but also an entrance into the realm of the color line. Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois, 89. Manning Marable suggests that ‘‘the veil of racial segregation made blacks virtually invisible to white America.’’ Manning Marable, W. E. B. DuBois: Black Radical Democrat (Boston: Twayne, 1986), 48. The Veil is the site of what Maurice O. Wallace has called ‘‘spectragraphia,’’ ‘‘a chronic syndrome of inscripted misrepresentation,’’ in which ‘‘the spectragraphic gaze’’ serves a ‘‘willful blindness.’’ Wallace, Constructing the Black Masculine, 30–31. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 140. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 7–8. My analysis of Du Bois’s adaptation of Wordsworth’s prison-house to describe the Veil accords with Dickson Bruce’s argument that Du Bois drew on British Romantic and American Transcendental ideas to theorize double consciousness. See Dickson D. Bruce, ‘‘W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness.’’ In the final chapters of The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois has ‘‘left the world of the white man,’’ and ‘‘stepped deeper within the Veil.’’ He has fulfilled his initial promise to raise the Veil, so that readers ‘‘may view faintly its deeper recesses,—the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls.’’ As Houston Baker has argued, ‘‘One of the most important aspects of The Souls of Black Folk, . . . is its delineation of the black man of culture (Du Bois himself ) as mediator between opposing sides of the American veil.’’ Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 3. Houston A. Baker Jr., ‘‘The Black Man of Culture: W. E. B. Du Bois and The Souls of Black Folk,’’ in Critical Essays on W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. William L. Andrews (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985), 132. The Veil section of The Souls of Black Folk also enabled African American readers to study an image of African American life and culture as seen by an African American, an image not projected through the eyes of white others. According to Arnold Rampersad, therein lies the power of the text: ‘‘Du Bois held up to Afro-America a portrait of the people drawn by one of their own.’’ Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois, 88–89. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 8; emphasis added. Even in its most blinding capacity as a white screen, the Veil can also function as a black mask, as an array of false images to be manipu-

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lated strategically. Charles Chesnutt provides one outstanding example in ‘‘The Passing of Grandison’’ (1899), in which Grandison, an enslaved man, so successfully manipulates the ‘‘happy darky’’ image his master wants to see, so utterly downplays his own desires and intellect, and so adeptly passes as a ‘‘carefree’’ slave, that his master unwittingly enables him to walk away free. In The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man, James Weldon Johnson also discusses the masking of African American men ‘‘under cover of broad grins and minstrel antics . . . in the presence of white men.’’ Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man, 14. Fuss, ‘‘Interior Colonies,’’ 146. W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘‘Criteria of Negro Art’’ (1926), in W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of America, 1986), 993. In The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man, Johnson’s narrator similarly states, ‘‘I believe it to be a fact that the colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them.’’ Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man, 14–15. Wald, Constituting Americans, 184. Wald is actually referring to Thomas Jefferson’s discussion of the veil in Notes on the State of Virginia here, but her assessment also applies to her treatment of the Du Boisian Veil. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,’’ in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 89.

2. Art of Scientific Propaganda

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W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘‘Criteria of Negro Art’’ (1926), in W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of America, 1986), 999.  Henry Louis Gates Jr., ‘‘The Face and Voice of Blackness,’’ in Facing History: The Black Image in American Art, 1710–1940, by Guy C. McElroy (San Francisco: Bedford Arts, 1990), xxix.  Ibid. In a fascinating essay, Daylanne English notes that Du Bois’s call for representative images in ‘‘Criteria of Negro Art’’ appeared in the October 1926 ‘‘Children’s Number’’ of the Crisis, the same issue in which Du Bois decried the failure of an African American elite to reproduce. According to English, ‘‘In DuBois’s uplift project of the 1920s, cultural production and reproduction could not be linked more clearly.’’ For English, Du Bois’s anxiety about racial reproduction is part of what she calls the ‘‘increasingly intraracial and eugenic’’ model of Du Bois’s uplift ideology of the 1920s and 1930s, marking the transformation of his 1903 vision of a culturally elite Talented Tenth into a claim on ‘‘explicitly biological superiority.’’ Daylanne English, ‘‘W. E. B. DuBois’s Family Crisis,’’ American Literature 72, 2 (2000): 311, 308, 297. Du Bois’s

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conjoined anxieties concerning representation and reproduction in 1926 provide an interesting vantage from which to look back on his earlier photographs for the 1900 Paris Exposition, for here we also find Du Bois’s interest in African American representation intertwined with the logics of eugenicist racial science. But if, as English argues, Du Bois increasingly adopted a form of ‘‘positive’’ eugenics to encourage the careful breeding of a ‘‘fit’’ African American elite in the 1920s and 1930s (297), in 1900, his visual tactics are focused on countering the negative eugenics of white supremacists, on responding to and supplanting a scientific image of ‘‘Negro inferiority.’’ In other words, in 1900, Du Bois seems most concerned with reproducing representation itself. Indeed, in 1900, Du Bois’s work was still very much informed by the logic of his 1897 essay ‘‘The Talented Tenth,’’ in which his exceptional men are ‘‘college-bred’’ (856). The Talented Tenth is culturally molded by education, not biologically created through controlled reproduction. For Du Bois, the Talented Tenth proves ‘‘the capability of Negro blood’’ in general (847), not only for those of its own class, and its role is to proffer men and women who will be ‘‘leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people’’ (861). W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘‘The Talented Tenth’’ (1903), in W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of America, 1986).  W. E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part which Africa Has Played in World History (1946), enl. ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1965), 20.  While clearly a forerunner in developing cultural definitions of race to combat the sciences of biological racialism, Du Bois was not alone in this pursuit. For an examination of the important similarities and crosspollination of ideas between Du Bois’s turn-of-the-century antiracist thought and that of the American anthropologist Franz Boas, see Julia E. Liss, ‘‘Diasporic Identities: The Science and Politics of Race in the Work of Franz Boas and W. E. B. Du Bois, 1894–1919,’’ Cultural Anthropology 13, 2 (1998): 127–66. In her unpublished manuscript, ‘‘Cultures Relative and Plural: Folklore as a Unifying Force in the Development of Cultural Pluralism,’’ Kimberly J. Lau discusses the work of several early twentieth-century Africanist and African Americanist anthropologists who trained with Franz Boas and, like him, argued for ‘‘cultural pluralism’’ to contest the claims of biological racialists. These scholars include Melville Herskovits, Elsie Clews Parsons, and Zora Neale Hurston. Lau also notes an exchange of ideas between Boas and Alain Locke, philosopher of the Harlem Renaissance. Attempts to de-essentialize race can be found as early as the mid-nineteenth century. According to Carla Peterson, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, editor of the Canadian newspaper the Provincial Freeman from 1853 to 1855, ‘‘insisted that racial difference must be viewed not as a fundamental biological difference that separates 180 notes to chapter two

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peoples hierarchically but simply as a superficial difference of complexion.’’ Carla L. Peterson, ‘‘Doers of the Word’’: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830–1880) (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 99. Du Bois, ‘‘Criteria of Negro Art,’’ 1000. See Keith Byerman’s reading of Du Bois’s use of ‘‘propaganda’’ in ‘‘Criteria of Negro Art.’’ According to Byerman, in Du Bois’s view, ‘‘black art, if it tells the truth and raises ethical questions based on that truth, will consistently be seen by readers from the dominant culture as propaganda, since it will be a repudiation of the racial ideology of that culture.’’ Keith E. Byerman, Seizing the Word: History, Art, and Self in the Work of W. E. B. Du Bois (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 105. Ross Posnock argues that Du Bois’s ‘‘Criteria of Negro Art’’ ‘‘turns the aesthetic into a militant part of a political, economic, and cultural movement.’’ While I agree with this statement, I find less convincing Posnock’s larger claims, namely, that as a cosmopolitan intellectual seeking to be recognized as a ‘‘co-worker in the kingdom of culture,’’ Du Bois was invested in a conception of culture that transcended racial particularities. I would argue that Du Bois evokes culture as an antiracist political tool. He continues to celebrate as distinct the cultural ‘‘gifts’’ of African Americans. Ross Posnock, Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 144. Repetition with a difference and direction by indirection are two of the important ways that ‘‘signifyin(g)’’ works, according to Gates. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), esp. 51, 63–68, 74–79, 81, 85–86. Coco Fusco has also used the concept of ‘‘signifyin(g)’’ in her discussion of Lorna Simpson’s photographic art in ‘‘Uncanny Dissonance: The Work of Lorna Simpson,’’ in English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (New York: New Press, 1995), 97–102. For analyses of these images, see Lisa Gail Collins, ‘‘Historic Retrievals: Confronting Visual Evidence and the Documentation of Truth,’’ Chicago Art Journal 8, 1 (1998): 5–17, and Brian Wallis, ‘‘Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes,’’ American Art 9 (summer 1995): 39–61. As Collins suggests, Agassiz was intellectual heir to a European scientific tradition particularly interested in objectifying and mapping the black female body as a visible sign of racial difference and inferiority. Agassiz was the prodigy of French comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier, who commissioned illustrations of Saartjie Baartman, fully nude, and then, after her death, dissected and studied her genitalia. Collins, ‘‘Historic Retrievals,’’ 5–7. Wallis, ‘‘Black Bodies, White Science,’’ 40. Wallis also suggests that in a more general sense, Agassiz may have been responding to ‘‘calls in

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contemporary European scientific journals for the creation of a photographic archive of human specimens, or types’’ (45). Ibid., 45–46. Lisa Gail Collins ends her discussion of these daguerreotypes by assessing the work of contemporary African American photographers Carla Williams, Carrie Mae Weems, and Lorna Simpson (as well as the work of conceptual artist Renée Green). Collins argues that these artists reclaim and recontextualize the black body, both exposing and challenging the ways in which scientists historically have utilized photography to provide visual ‘‘evidence’’ of racial difference and inferiority. Collins, ‘‘Historic Retrievals,’’ 10–16. See Frank Spencer, ‘‘Some Notes on the Attempt to Apply Photography to Anthropometry during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,’’ in Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1920, ed. Elizabeth Edwards (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 99–107. Elizabeth Edwards, introduction to Anthropology and Photography, 1860– 1920, ed. Edwards (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 7. See also Elizabeth Edwards, ‘‘ ‘Photographic Types’: The Pursuit of Method,’’ Visual Anthropology 3 (1992): 235–58. Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion, intro. Robert Taft (New York: Dover, 1955). This volume contains a selection of plates from Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion, originally published in 1878. Francis Galton, The Life History Album (London: Macmillan, 1884). Francis Galton, ‘‘The Comparative Worth of Different Races,’’ in Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (London: Macmillan, 1892), 392–404. Du Bois, The World and Africa, 20. Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, 2d ed. (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1907), 10, 222. In the 1880s, Galton’s composite photography was adopted at the U.S. Army Medical Museum in Washington, D.C., by the craniologist John S. Billing, who created composite photographs of skulls. Spencer, ‘‘Some Notes,’’ 106. According to Paul Gilroy, at the turn of the century Du Bois increasingly sought to challenge ‘‘the logic of racial eugenics,’’ which he ‘‘identified as ‘the silent growing assumption of the age.’ ’’ Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 130. Gilroy is quoting W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; New York: Library of America, 1990), 188. Albert Edward Wiggam, The Fruit of the Family Tree (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1924). Marouf Arif Hasian Jr., The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 37. Ibid., 43–44; Kenneth M. Ludmerer, Genetics and American Society: A

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Historical Appraisal (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 90–113. For studies of the impact of eugenics on U.S. culture, see Elazar Barkin, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Mark Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963); Hasian, The Rhetoric of Eugenics; Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1944); Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985); Ludmerer, Genetics and American Society; Donald K. Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968); Philip R. Reilly, The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); and Nicole Hahn Rafter, White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies, 1877–1919 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988). Evelynn M. Hammonds also assesses these images in ‘‘New Technologies of Race,’’ in Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life, ed. Jennifer Terry and Melodie Calvert (New York: Routledge, 1997), esp. 109–11. W. E. B. Du Bois, ed., The Health and Physique of the Negro American (1906), in The Atlanta University Publications (New York: Arno and The New York Times, 1968), 36, 37. Ibid., 37. Du Bois is quoting Jas Bryce, The Relations of the Advanced and Backward Races of Mankind (Oxford, 1892). Du Bois, The Health and Physique of the Negro American, 30–31. Du Bois divides these four types as follows: Negro types, mulatto types, quadroon types, and white types with Negro blood. There is further overlap in that four pairs of images included in the 1900 Paris Exposition albums are split, with one reproduced in the Atlanta University collection, the other in The Health and Physique of the Negro American. Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Photographs Collection, box 13; Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Atlanta University, 1899–1900 through 1906–1907 (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press). In 1906, Usher graduated second in her class. David Levering Lewis notes her academic accomplishments in W. E. B. Du Bois, vol. 1, Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 211. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 211. W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘‘The Conservation of Races’’ (1897), in A W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, ed. Andrew G. Paschal (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 19–31. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward the Autobiography of a

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Race Concept (1940), in W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of America, 1986), 627. According to Arnold Rampersad, in discussing his own racial identity and ancestry, Du Bois ‘‘would not accept the white racist convention that denied the truth of his mixed genealogy.’’ Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (1976; New York: Schocken, 1990), 17. According to Susan Gillman, ‘‘the legal fraction defining blackness was still one thirty-second ‘Negro blood’ ’’ as late as 1970 in Louisiana. Susan Gillman, ‘‘ ‘Sure Identifiers’: Race, Science, and the Law in Twain’s Puddn’head Wilson,’’ South Atlantic Quarterly 87, 2 (1988): 205. Barbara Fields has argued that ‘‘the very diversity and arbitrariness of the physical rules governing racial classification prove that the physical emblems which symbolize race are not the foundation upon which race arises as a category of social thought.’’ Barbara J. Fields, ‘‘Ideology and Race in American History,’’ in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 151. Mary Anne Doane, ‘‘Dark Continents: Epistemologies of Racial and Sexual Difference in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema,’’ in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991), 235. In her work on passing, Samira Kawash describes ‘‘the color line’’ as ‘‘a social system of classification and identification that insisted on absolute difference between white and black, even as it warily acknowledged the existence of certain bodies that seemed to violate the very possibility of distinction.’’ Samira Kawash, Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity, and Singularity in African-American Narrative (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 124. In her analysis of the photographs in The Health and Physique of the Negro American, Evelynn Hammonds similarly argues, ‘‘Along with sociological data Du Bois used the then new technology, photography, to make visible the evidence of race mixing that white society denied. Du Bois’ photographic evidence, rendered in the style of turn-of-the-century ethnographic studies of race, was deployed to show that race mixing was a fact of American life and that the dependence upon visual evidence to determine who was ‘black’ or ‘white’ was specious at best.’’ Hammonds, ‘‘New Technologies of Race,’’ 110. Susan Gubar has argued that ‘‘the secret the biracial infant holds’’ is ‘‘the lie commingled bloodlines put to the historical accounts of a segregated culture.’’ Susan Gubar, ‘‘What Will the Mixed Child Deliver? Conceiving Color without Race,’’ in Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 207. Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the AfroAmerican Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 89. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (New York: Routledge, 1995), 180–81.

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 This is the fourth ‘‘Negro type’’ as defined by Du Bois in The Health and Physique of the Negro American. It is interesting to note that Du Bois refuses to pose whiteness as a monolithic racial category, without internal distinctions, instead distinguishing four different ‘‘white types’’: Latin, Celtic, English, and Germanic (31). See also Amy M. Mooney’s discussion of the painter Archibald J. Motley Jr.’s manipulations of a racial typology in ‘‘Representing Race: Disjunctions in the Work of Archibald J. Motley, Jr.,’’ The Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 24, 2 (1999): 162– 265. 
See Herman ‘‘Skip’’ Mason Jr., Hidden Treasures: African American Photographers in Atlanta, 1870–1970 (Atlanta: African American Family History Association, 1991). Also see Askew’s advertisement in the Voice of the Negro of December 1904.  Elizabeth Anne McCauley, A. A. E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 30.  According to Brian Coe, the wet collodion process was invented in 1851 by Frederick Scott Archer. Brian Coe, ‘‘Techniques of Victorian Studio Photography,’’ in Victorian Studio Photographs: From the Collections of Studio Bassano and Elliot and Fry, London, by Bevis Hillier (Boston: David R. Godine, 1976), 25.  McCauley, A. A. E. Disdéri, 82.  Ibid., 149.  Coe, ‘‘Techniques of Victorian Studio Photography,’’ 26.  McCauley, A. A. E. Disdéri, 137–38.  Ibid., 149.  Ibid., 137–38.  Coe, ‘‘Techniques of Victorian Studio Photography,’’ 26. 
According to Brian Coe, the gelatin dry-plate process was first described by Dr. R. L. Maddox in 1871, but did not come into general use until 1880. Ibid.  Bruce W. Chambers, ‘‘American Identities: Cabinet Card Portraits, 1870–1910,’’ in American Identities: Cabinet Card Portraits 1870–1910: From the Doan Family Collection (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Art Museum, 1985), 6.  See Alan Trachtenberg’s discussion of posing ‘‘illustrious Americans’’ in Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 46–48.  According to the American Heritage Dictionary, deluxe edition, 1994, by jingo is an interjection ‘‘used for emphasis or to express surprise.’’ It is originally from ‘‘the refrain of a bellicose 19th-century English musichall song, from alteration of jesus.’’  According to Kobena Mercer, such reinscription of African American bodies within the traditions of classical Western art can be seen as a ‘‘deconstructive strategy’’ that ‘‘throws the spectator into uncer-

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tainty and unfixity’’ by disrupting the viewer’s ‘‘normative expectations’’ and thereby ‘‘reveal[ing] the political unconscious of white ethnicity’’ whereby whiteness is constituted as an identity only through processes of othering. Mercer makes this argument in his discussion of Robert Mapplethorpe’s African American male nudes. Kobena Mercer, ‘‘Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe,’’ in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), 199, 201.  Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire, 126–33; Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 59–60. See also my discussion of Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood; Or, the Hidden Self (1902–3) in Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 187–205. In ‘‘The Negro in Literature and Art,’’ Du Bois states: ‘‘The Negro blood which flowed in the veins of many of the mightiest of the Pharaohs accounts for much Egyptian art, and indeed, Egyptian civilization owes much of its origins to the development of the large strain of Negro blood which manifested itself in every grade of Egyptian society.’’ W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘‘The Negro in Literature and Art’’ (1913), in W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of America, 1986), 862.  Du Bois, ‘‘Criteria of Negro Art,’’ 1002.  Pearl Cleage Lomax, ‘‘. . . Take My Picture, Mr. Polk . . . ,’’ in P. H. Polk: Photographs (Atlanta: Nexus, 1980), 107.

3. ‘‘Undoubted Respectability’’

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W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘‘Of the Coming of John,’’ in The Souls of Black Folk (1903; New York: Library of America, 1990), 165–79.  Ibid., 175.  Ida B. Wells’s antilynching work is documented in Crusade for Justice, A Red Record, and Southern Horrors. A Red Record (1895) and Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892) have been collected in Ida B. Wells, Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, comp. Trudier Harris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 138–252, 14–45, and in Ida B. WellsBarnett, On Lynchings (New York: Arno, 1969). Vron Ware, Hazel Carby, and Paula Giddings follow Ida B. Wells in assessing lynching as a form of economic terrorism. Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History (New York: Verso, 1992), 167–224; Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Morrow, 1984), 26; Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 115; and Hazel V. Carby, ‘‘ ‘On the Threshold of Woman’s Era’: Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist 186 notes to chapter three

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Theory,’’ in ‘‘Race,’’ Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 301–16. For additional analyses of Ida B. Wells’s radical work, see Gail Bederman, ‘‘ ‘Civilization,’ the Decline of Middle-Class Manliness, and Ida B. Wells’s Antilynching Campaign (1892–94),’’ Radical History Review 52 (1992): 5–30; Sandra Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890–1912 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). For a broader examination of lynching and representations of lynching, as well as more extensive citations, see chapter 4 of this book. Harper’s Weekly provides a good measure of white America’s resistance to African American social, economic, and cultural gains, as it was a moderate, and very popular, national newspaper (claiming a subscription of 300,000 in 1871) and was purportedly devoted to social reforms of various kinds, including black civil rights, throughout the late nineteenth century. Sol Eytinge Jun. was a prominent contributor of illustrations to Harper’s, as well as to Scribner’s and Vanity Fair (1860–63), and he also served as illustrator for a number of books, including Gilbert A. Pierce’s The Dickens Dictionary (1872). He seems to have specialized particularly in caricatures of African Americans. In Caricature and Other Comic Art: In all Times and Many Lands (New York: Harper, 1878), James Parton describes Eytinge, among others, as one of ‘‘the old favorites of the public,’’ and reproduces one of his racist caricatures in the book. Despite Parton’s appraisal, Eytinge’s popularity was not universal. In a January 1878 editorial review of Parton’s book for The Atlantic Monthly, one writer declares: ‘‘We resent the intrusion of even one of the revolting vulgarities of Mr. Sol Eytinge.’’ See also Cornell University’s ‘‘Making of America’’ Web site for further information on Sol Eytinge Jun.: http://cdl.library. cornell.edu/moa. The following illustrations are all by Sol Eytinge Jun., and all were published in Harper’s Weekly: ‘‘The ‘Fourth’ in Blackville—‘Hold on to Sumfen, She’s Goin’ off Dis Time’ ’’ (July 14, 1877); ‘‘The Great Blackville Regatta—Grand Spurt at the Finish’’ (August 1877); ‘‘The Coaching Season in Blackville—the Grand Start’’ (September 28, 1878); ‘‘FoxHunting in Blackville’’ (May 24, 1879); ‘‘The Blackville Billiard Club’’ (March 31, 1883); and ‘‘A Blackville Serenade’’ (June 16, 1883). Michael D. Harris, Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 55–65. In compiling this important historical information, Harris quotes ‘‘ ’76,’’ Harper’s Weekly, July 15, 1876, 574, as well as Karen C. C. Dalton, ‘‘Currier and Ives’s Darktown Comics: Ridicule and Race,’’ paper presented at the ‘‘Democratic Vistas: The Prints of Currier and Ives’’ symposium, Museum of the City of New York, May 2, 1992. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colo-

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nial Discourse,’’ in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 86, 89. I’d like to thank Carolyn Adenaike and Beth Freeman for suggesting this interpretation. Editorials and letters to the editor published in Harper’s Weekly in the first years of the twentieth century deem the rape of white women a ‘‘new negro crime.’’ In an editorial entitled ‘‘The Negro Problem and the New Negro Crime,’’ for the June 20, 1903 issue of Harper’s Weekly, a writer discusses ‘‘the so-called ‘new’ negro crime, by which is meant the crime against white women’’ (1050). Similarly, in ‘‘Some Fresh Suggestions about the New Negro Crime,’’ in the Harper’s Weekly of January 23, 1904, the editor proclaims, ‘‘The assault of white women by colored men may fairly be described as the ‘new’ negro crime’’ (120). See also letters to the editor from George B. Winton and Mrs. W. H. Felton. George B. Winton, ‘‘The Negro Criminal,’’ Harper’s Weekly, August 29, 1903, 1414; Mrs. W. H. Felton, ‘‘From a Southern Woman,’’ Harper’s Weekly, November 14, 1903, 1830. ‘‘The Negro Problem and the New Negro Crime,’’ 1050. In her important work on lynching and white supremacism, Sandra Gunning notes the 1889 work of historian Philip A. Bruce, The Plantation Negro as Freeman, in which Bruce ‘‘alleged a dangerous moral (and by later implications, physical) regression among postemancipation African Americans, evidenced in what he saw as a sharp increase in the number of white women raped by black men.’’ Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching, 21. Winton, ‘‘The Negro Criminal.’’ According to Jeannene Przyblyski, turn-of-the-century French newspapers also perpetuated the myth of African American men as the rapists of white women, African American celebrations of French ‘‘color blindness’’ notwithstanding. Thus as Du Bois’s antiracist work in the Georgia Negro Exhibit challenged representations of the African American man as savage in U.S. lynching discourses, it also contested the proliferation of such representations in Europe, and particularly in France, the first country in which the exhibit was displayed for an international audience. Jeannene M. Przyblyski, ‘‘Visions of Race and Nation at the Paris Exposition, 1900: A French Context for the American Negro Exhibit,’’ in National Stereotypes in Perspective: Americans in France, Frenchmen in America, ed. William L. Chew III (Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001), 211–12. W. E. B. Du Bois, ed., Notes on Negro Crime, Particularly in Georgia (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1904), 9. Ibid., 55–56. Apparently Olivier made these comments first in the British Friend of December 1904. Du Bois, Notes on Negro Crime, 56–57. For a more extensive analysis along these lines, see Shawn Michelle Smith, ‘‘ ‘Looking at One’s Self through the Eyes of Others’: W. E. B.

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Du Bois’s Photographs for the 1900 Paris Exposition,’’ African American Review 34, 4 (2000): 581–99. Allan Sekula, ‘‘The Body and the Archive,’’ October 39 (1986): 7. W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘‘Editing The Crisis’’ (1951), in The Crisis Reader: Stories, Poetry, and Essays from the n.a.a.c.p’s ‘‘Crisis’’ Magazine, ed. Sondra Kathryn Wilson (New York: Modern Library, 1999), xxix. In The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois states: ‘‘Nothing more exasperates the better class of Negroes than this tendency to ignore utterly their existence. The law-abiding hard-working inhabitants of the Thirtieth Ward are aroused to righteous indignation when they see that the word Negro carries most Philadelphians’ minds to the alleys of the Fifth Ward or the police courts.’’ W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 310. Mia Bay, ‘‘ ‘The World Was Thinking Wrong about Race’: The Philadelphia Negro and Nineteenth-Century Science,’’ in W. E. B. DuBois, Race, and the City: The Philadelphia Negro and Its Legacy, ed. Michael B. Katz and Thomas J. Sugrue (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 52. David Levering Lewis similarly suggests that The Philadelphia Negro study was founded on ‘‘the novel triad of race-class-economics.’’ David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, vol. 1, Biography of a Race, 1868– 1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 208. Having completed his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1895, and having taught for two years at Wilberforce University, Du Bois was then hired by the University of Pennsylvania as an assistant in sociology to complete a study of Philadelphia’s growing African American population. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 4. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward the Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940), in W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of America, 1986), 596. Ibid. Michael B. Katz and Thomas J. Sugrue, ‘‘Introduction: The Context of The Philadelphia Negro: The City, the Settlement House Movement, and the Rise of the Social Sciences,’’ in W. E. B. DuBois, Race, and the City: The Philadelphia Negro and Its Legacy, ed. Katz and Sugrue (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 24. In her compelling reading of The Philadelphia Negro as an antiracist sociological study struggling to find methodological form, Mia Bay argues that Du Bois, like other African American intellectuals of the late-nineteenth century, had to craft his own version of ethnology, rejecting the tenets of Social Darwinism that placed blacks at the primitive end of an evolutionary scale threatened by the encroachments of ‘‘fitter,’’ stronger races. According to Bay, ‘‘the Darwinian laws governing race development heralded nothing short of the extinction of American blacks, a prediction not uncommon in 1890s social science.’’ In order to challenge an essentialized rendition of

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the Negro’s ‘‘primitive’’ status, African American intellectuals throughout the nineteenth century often turned to Christian theories of monogenesis, which upheld the creation of all mankind from a single genesis, in order to counter racialist views of polygenesis, which argued for the separate creation of the races. To account for racial distinctions, the proponents of monogenesis turned to environmental influence, as opposed to racialists, who claimed that such differences were biologically determined, innate, and immutable. How then, could the scientifically minded Du Bois simultaneously challenge biological racialism without resorting to the religious arguments of many of his African American colleagues? According to Bay, ‘‘DuBois’s empiricism in The Philadelphia Negro shows him opposing both the biblically based ethnology of his African American contemporaries and the ‘fantastic theories’ of his white colleagues.’’ His empiricism also situated Du Bois at the forefront of new sociological study. Bay, ‘‘ ‘The World Was Thinking Wrong about Race.’ ’’ 45, 44, 48. Bay, ‘‘ ‘The World Was Thinking Wrong about Race,’ ’’ 49; and Katz and Sugrue, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 13. Following from the instructions Du Bois includes in appendix A of The Philadelphia Negro, in which he advises researchers that the category for institutions ‘‘includes all institutions conducted by Negroes wholly or partially, or wholly or partially in the interest of the Negroes; as e.g., churches, missions, clubs, shops, stands, stores, agencies, societies, associations, halls, newspapers, etc.,’’ one can surmise that in his slightly later study, all such institutions are similarly African American–owned and operated. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 410. This photograph can be identified by cross-referencing it with number 13 in The Negro American Family. In that text, it is attributed to A. J. Williams and dated 1909. The photograph is identical to number 300 in Du Bois’s 1900 album, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A., and thus I am fairly certain that it has been misdated in the later text. This leaves the photographer somewhat in question, but it would appear that A. J. Williams also took at least two of the photographs included in the 1900 albums. Number 332 in Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. is identified as number 11, depicting Negro city tenements in Atlanta, in The Negro American Family, and it is also attributed to A. J. Williams and dated 1909. W. E. B. Du Bois, ed., The Negro American Family (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1908). In The Negro American Family, Du Bois notes, ‘‘The poor drainage of many of the hollows between the hills where these alleys lie gives rise to much stagnant water, pools and the like, and the unfinished sewer system often leaves masses of filthy sediment near these homes.’’ Ibid., 59. See chapters 7 and 8, ‘‘Of the Black Belt’’ and ‘‘Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece’’ in Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 83–99, 100–18. See also Du Bois, The Negro American Family. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (New York: Dover, 1971). Lewis

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Hine, a later photographer working for labor reform, also depicted children ‘‘ruined’’ by the strains of industrial labor. Du Bois, The Negro American Family, 53. Du Bois again makes the comparison explicit: ‘‘Attention has lately been directed to the tenementhouse abominations, but little has been said of the equally pestilential and dangerous alley’’ (58). Thanks to Beth Freeman, whose insightful comments helped point my thoughts in this direction. Du Bois, The Negro American Family, 52. Ibid., 80–81. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 7. Du Bois would reiterate these sentiments, almost verbatim, in The Negro American Family. Describing members of a wealthy elite, Du Bois states: ‘‘As representing the best, there is good argument for calling these at least as characteristic of the race, as the alley hovels. A race has a right to be judged by its best.’’ Du Bois, The Negro American Family, 65. Laura Wexler, ‘‘Black and White and Color: American Photographs at the Turn of the Century,’’ Prospects 13 (winter 1988): 369. Joel Williamson studies these laws in New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York: Free Press, 1980). See especially chapter 2, ‘‘Changeover, 1850–1915,’’ 61–109. See Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite 1880–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), esp. 149–181. Nannie H. Burroughs, ‘‘Not Color but Character,’’ Voice of the Negro 1, 6 (1904): 277. Citing Howard Rabinowitz’s study of the late nineteenth century, Joel Williamson states: ‘‘In Nashville there was a formally organized ‘Blue Vein Society’ whose members were required to be light enough to make visible the blueness of the veins beneath their skins.’’ Williamson, New People, 82. Burroughs, ‘‘Not Color but Character,’’ 279. Ibid. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 310–11. Du Bois, The Negro American Family, 37. Du Bois proclaims: ‘‘The truth remains: sexual immorality is probably the greatest single plague spot among Negro Americans, and its greatest cause is slavery and the present utter disregard of a black woman’s virtue and self-respect, both in law court and custom in the South’’ (41). Bay, ‘‘ ‘The World Was Thinking Wrong about Race,’ ’’ 52. As Mia Bay has suggested of The Philadelphia Negro, ‘‘Some of the book’s most striking internal contradictions arise from its author’s unsuccessful struggle to blend his study’s empirical results with his own Victorian outlook and elitism.’’ Ibid., 53. Making utterly apparent his familiarity with the Rogues’ Gallery of criminal mug shots, Du Bois suggests of ‘‘grade four’’: ‘‘Their nucleus

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consists of a class of professional criminals, who do not work, figure in the rogues’ galleries of a half-dozen cities, and migrate here and there.’’ Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 312. Du Bois, The Negro American Family, 37. Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 72 n. 5. Ibid., 67–71, 72 n. 5. Ibid., 70. In The Negro American Family, Du Bois quotes Kelly Miller’s discussion of the disproportionate number of African American women to men in the cities as a factor leading to sexual immorality. Du Bois, The Negro American Family, 36–37. As Kevin Gaines has said of Du Bois’s early work, his image of a black middle class is fundamentally patriarchal: ‘‘Patriarchal authority remained the crucial criterion of black bourgeois stability.’’ Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 169. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 72 n. 5. Ibid., 195–96. Du Bois, The Negro American Family, 38. In her analysis of Du Bois’s use of photographs in the Crisis, Daylanne English suggests that the middle-class African American man functioned for Du Bois as ‘‘visual confirmation’’ of racial uplift, an ideology that, English argues, was increasingly inflected by the logics of positive eugenics in the 1920s and 1930s. Daylanne English, ‘‘W. E. B. DuBois’s Family Crisis,’’ American Literature 72, 2 (2000): 303–4, 297, 308. In A Voice from the South (1892), Anna Julia Cooper would proclaim: ‘‘The atmosphere of homes is not rarer and purer and sweeter than are the mothers in those homes. A race is but a total of families. The nation is the aggregate of its homes.’’ Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (1892; New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 29. The photograph can be identified by comparing it to a slightly different view of the family and home in The Negro American Family. Here the photograph is identified as ‘‘No. 37—Residence of a Negro lawyer, Atlanta (photo. by Askew).’’ The photograph of a house identified as ‘‘No. 36—Residence of a Negro minister, Decatur (photo. by Askew)’’ in The Negro American Family is also included in Du Bois’s Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. As several other photographs in Du Bois’s 1900 collection closely resemble these two images, I think it is quite likely that Askew made many of the photographs of well-to-do homes and families included in the 1900 albums. Du Bois, The Negro American Family, 80. Booker T. Washington, ‘‘The Awakening of the Negro,’’ Atlantic Monthly, September 1896, 328.

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This photograph can be identified by cross-referencing with an image in Herman ‘‘Skip’’ Mason Jr., ed., Going against the Wind: A Pictorial History of African-Americans in Atlanta (Atlanta: apex Museum, 1992).  According to Carol Mavor, ‘‘For the Victorians, who saw to it that a woman restrained the sexuality of her hair through chignons and other elaborate (pinned-up) styles of the period, the brushing out of a woman’s hair meant letting her sexuality out.’’ Carol Mavor, Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 109. While Mavor argues that hair was ‘‘an overdetermined sign in the Victorian sexual imagination’’ (57), one might also add that hair similarly functioned as an overdetermined sign in Victorian racial taxonomies, and hair continues to be a political sign in contemporary acts of identification and identity. To briefly note one example, see Lorna Simpson’s contemporary photographic works with braids, and Deborah Willis’s discussion of those pieces, in Deborah Willis, Untitled 54: Lorna Simpson (San Francisco: Friends of Photography, 1992).  Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 406.  Du Bois, The Negro American Family, 65. In the detailed descriptions of three such homes that follow this general categorization, it is noted that each of the homes has a piano in the parlor (65–66).  Washington, ‘‘The Awakening of the Negro,’’ 322.  In ‘‘The Talented Tenth,’’ Du Bois counters that Washington has at his ‘‘right hand helping him in a noble work’’ many college-trained men and women who are not ‘‘studying French grammars in the midst of weeds, or buying pianos for dirty cabins.’’ W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘‘The Talented Tenth’’ (1903), in W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of America, 1986), 860.  Booker T. Washington, ‘‘Industrial Education; Will It Solve the Negro Problem (Answered Each Month by the Greatest Thinkers of the Black Race),’’ Colored American Magazine, February 1904, 87–88.  Du Bois, The Negro American Family, 66.  As I noted in chapter 1, Kaja Silverman discusses the racially and culturally laden contexts of the ‘‘screen’’ in Jacques Lacan’s rendition of the visual. Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996). See especially chapter 6, ‘‘The Screen,’’ 195–227.  Even as the so-called New Woman emerged as a figure marking white women’s newfound independence outside the bounds of marriage, family, and home, Du Bois held up for the ‘‘New Negro Woman’’ the patriarchal sphere of domesticity as the acme of success. Carroll SmithRosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 245–96. While Du Bois was not alone in challenging racial hierarchies by reinscribing antebellum, class-based gender norms at the turn of the century—Anna Julia

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Cooper and Pauline Hopkins pursued similar antiracist political strategies—African American women writers did not celebrate the ‘‘purity’’ of the ‘‘New [‘‘true’’] Negro’’ woman by first denigrating her sexuality and then harnessing it to African American patriarchal discipline. Cooper, A Voice from the South; Pauline Hopkins, The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). For assessments of the political work of these writers, see Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, and Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). See also my discussion of Anna Julia Cooper and Pauline Hopkins in Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 142– 44, 150–56, 187–205.

4. Spectacles of Whiteness
W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward the Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940), in W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of America, 1986), 602–3.  Ibid., 603.  According to Grace Elizabeth Hale, the lynching of Sam Hose consolidated ‘‘a new and horrifying pattern’’ of modern lynching as public spectacle. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon, 1998), 209.  Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900), reprinted in Ida B. Wells-Barnett, On Lynchings: ‘‘Southern Horrors,’’ ‘‘A Red Record,’’ ‘‘Mob Rule in New Orleans’’ (New York: Arno, 1969), 45.  Louis P. LeVin, ‘‘The Detective’s Report,’’ Richmond Planet, October 14, 1899, 1.  This account of the lynching of Samuel Wilkes is taken from Leon F. Litwack, ‘‘Hellhounds,’’ in Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, by James Allen et al. (Santa Fe, N.M.: Twin Palms, 2000), 10. The lynching of Samuel Wilkes was widely publicized. Filipino independence fighters evoked it as an emblem of U.S. racism. According to the Richmond Planet, ‘‘A placard written in Spanish, was discovered nailed to a tree a few miles north of Angeles, Philippine Islands. The placard was sent by Colonel Smith to Major General MacArthur, and the following is a literal translation of it: ‘To the Colored American Soldier: It is without honour that you are spilling your costly blood. Your masters have thrown you in the most iniquitous fight with double purposes. In order to be you the instrument of their ambition. And also your hard work will make soon the extinction of your race. Your friends the Filipinos give you this good warning. You must consider your situation and 194 notes to chapter four

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your history. And take charge that the blood of your brothers Sam Hose and Gray proclaim vengeance.’ ’’ Richmond Planet, November 1899, 8. LeVin, ‘‘The Detective’s Report.’’ According to Clarence Bacote, Du Bois ‘‘was held in awe by students [at Atlanta University] because of his cane and gloves, which he had acquired the habit of using during his student days in Germany.’’ Clarence A. Bacote, The Story of Atlanta University: A Century of Service, 1865– 1965 (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1969), 132. Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998), 12. The lynching of Samuel Wilkes functions, for Du Bois, as an exponential magnification of the discord of black embodiment under a white supremacist gaze that he first felt as the object of a young white girl’s scornful glance. Elizabeth Alexander, ‘‘ ‘Can You Be black and Look at This?’: Reading the Rodney King Video(s),’’ in Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, ed. Thelma Golden (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), 105–6. Ibid. LeVin, ‘‘The Detective’s Report.’’ Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the AfroAmerican Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 112; Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the NineteenthCentury South (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 200– 202; Sandra Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890–1912 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 26, 38–39; Hale, Making Whiteness, 199–239. W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘‘The Souls of White Folk’’ (1920), in W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of America, 1986), 923. Ibid., 927. Ibid., 923. James Allen, afterword to Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, by Allen et al. (Santa Fe, N.M.: Twin Palms, 2000), 204. Deborah E. McDowell, ‘‘Viewing the Remains: A Polemic on Death, Spectacle, and the [Black] Family,’’ in The Familial Gaze, ed. Marianne Hirsch (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1999), 154, 168. In this chapter, I will not attempt to offer a complete analysis of lynching or of antilynching crusades; indeed, I can undertake this investigation only because other necessary and important studies have examined and are examining the historical rise of lynching, its social and economic effects, its psychological consequences, and African American resistance to its reign of terror.

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Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century reports and essays on lynching include Ida B. Wells, Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, comp. Trudier Harris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), which includes Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892), The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893), and A Red Record (1895); Wells-Barnett, On Lynchings, which includes Southern Horrors (1892), A Red Record (1895), and Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900); Jane Addams and Ida B. Wells, Lynching and Rape: An Exchange of Views, ed. Bettina Aptheker (New York: American Institute for Marxist Studies, 1977); Frederick Douglass, ‘‘Why Is the Negro Lynched?,’’ in The Lesson of the Hour (1894), in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: International Publishers, 1955), 4:491–523; and Henry McNeal Turner, ‘‘An Emigration Convention’’ (1893), in Respect Black: The Writings and Speeches of Henry McNeal Turner, comp. and ed. Edwin S. Redkey (New York: Arno, 1971), 145–60. Recent analyses of lynching, antilynching campaigns, representations of lynching, and gender and lynching include Alexander, ‘‘ ‘Can You Be black and Look at This?’ ’’; James Allen et al., Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, N.M.: Twin Palms, 2000); Gail Bederman, ‘‘ ‘Civilization,’ the Decline of Middle-Class Manliness, and Ida B. Wells’s Antilynching Campaign (1892–94),’’ Radical History Review 52 (1992): 5–30; Hazel V. Carby, ‘‘ ‘On the Threshold of Woman’s Era’: Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory,’’ in ‘‘Race,’’ Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 301–16; Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood; Donald L. Grant, The Anti-lynching Movement, 1883–1932 (San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1975); Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching; Hale, Making Whiteness; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign against Lynching, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); Hodes, White Women, Black Men; Litwack, ‘‘Hellhounds’’; Litwack, Trouble in Mind; Ashraf Rushdy, ‘‘Exquisite Corpse,’’ Transition 83 (2000): 70–77; Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History (New York: Verso, 1992); Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), esp. 81–113; and Robert L. Zangrando, The naacp Crusade against Lynching, 1909–1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980). 
Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3.  Richard Dyer, ‘‘White,’’ Screen 29, 4 (1988): 44–64. 196 notes to chapter four

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 Allen et al., Without Sanctuary.  Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 3. Rushdy suggests that it is, in fact, important to represent the violated black body. Disturbed by the absence of photographs in the reporting on the recent lynching of James Byrd in Texas, Rushdy cites the powerful effects produced by the published images of Emmet Till’s mutilated body in 1955, arguing: ‘‘The past teaches us that images of terror—used responsibly—can foster a climate in which terror is no longer tolerated.’’ Rushdy, ‘‘Exquisite Corpse,’’ 77.  Roberta Smith, ‘‘An Ugly Legacy Lives On, Its Glare Unsoftened by Age,’’ New York Times, January 13, 2000, 8.  Alexander, ‘‘ ‘Can You Be black and Look at This?’ ’’  See Pat Ward Williams’s photographic work Accused/Blowtorch/Padlock (1987), reproduced in Lucy R. Lippard, Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 37.  Crisis 10, 2 (1915): 71. The Crisis cites Bishop Gailor, writing in a Memphis, Tennessee, newspaper. See also Litwack, ‘‘Hellhounds,’’ 11.  According to Grace Elizabeth Hale, such ‘‘blatantly public, actively promoted lynching’’ defined a new era of ‘‘spectacle lynching’’ in the United States from 1890 to 1940. Hale, Making Whiteness, 206–7.  Lynching postcards fell under section 3893 of the Revised Statutes which forbid ‘‘lewd, obscene, and lascivious’’ materials to be sent through the mail. 
According to James Allen’s notes for Without Sanctuary, Joe Meyers was an oiler at the Bellmead car department and a resident of Waco, Texas. Allen et al., Without Sanctuary, 174 n. 25.  Rushdy, ‘‘Exquisite Corpse,’’ 70.  Litwack, ‘‘Hellhounds,’’ 10–11.  Hodes, White Women, Black Men, 177.  Henry McNeal Turner, ‘‘An Emigration Convention,’’ 153. See also Hodes, White Women, Black Men, 177.  The privilege of the gaze, of looking and seeing, was a highly regulated racial privilege, one heightened by gender; eye contact with a white woman could be enough to evoke the fury of a lynch mob against an African American man. See Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 36.  James Cameron, A Time of Terror: A Survivor’s Story (Black Classic Press, 1994), quoted in Allen et al., Without Sanctuary, 176 n. 31.  As James Allen has said, ‘‘I believe the photographer was more than a perceptive spectator at lynchings. Too often they compulsively composed silvery tableaux (natures mortes) positioning and lighting corpses as if they were game birds shot on the wing.’’ Allen et al., Without Sanctuary, 204.  John E. White, ‘‘The Need of a Southern Program on the Negro,’’ South Atlantic Quarterly 6 (1907): 184–85, quoted in Litwack, ‘‘Hellhounds,’’ 22.

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 As Grace Elizabeth Hale has recently argued, in lynchings and representations of lynchings ‘‘civilization became savagery to defeat savages’’: ‘‘In the process of giving its readers the sensationalized details of the spectacle, the papers blurred if not obliterated the fine distinction between a ritual of civilization taming savagery and actual savagery itself.’’ Hale, Making Whiteness, 230, 214. See also Bederman, ‘‘ ‘Civilization.’ ’’ 
Ida B. Wells reproduced a lynching postcard, made by W. R. Martin, ‘‘Traveling Photographer,’’ front and back, depicting a lynching in Clanton, Alabama, August 1891, in A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892–1893–1894 (1895), reprinted in Wells-Barnett, On Lynchings, 55–56. In an article that presents portions of an address on lynching given by John Haynes Holmes, the Crisis also reproduced a postcard of a lynching in Alabama sent to Holmes as a threat. In his speech, Holmes describes yet another photograph of a lynching: ‘‘Take the Oklahoma lynching. The only thing that I could think of as I glanced at this picture was a photograph I had seen of huntsmen returning with the animal which had been shot, proud of the achievement of their marksmenship. I believe that the same spirit which makes possible the photograph of the men gathered around the moose or the deer which has been shot makes possible the photograph of the Negro shot to death in Oklahoma. In both cases the huntsmen are proud that they have shot an animal, and therefore they stand before the camera in order that the evidence of the story may be sure. In other words, this is another expression of the lawlessness of the American people.’’ ‘‘Holmes on Lynching,’’ Crisis 3, 3 (1912): 109; postcard reproduced on 110.  James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man (1912), ed. William L. Andrews (New York: Penguin, 1990), 136.  I am borrowing this term from Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 12.  Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man, 137.  Ibid., 139.  Ibid., 144.  As Ida B. Wells and others after her have demonstrated, however, a white woman need not be anywhere present for the specter of white womanhood to function powerfully to incite mob fury against an African American man, to haunt the spectacle of racial violence.  Wells, Crusade for Justice.  Wells, Southern Horrors, 14, in Selected Works, 30. Carby, ‘‘ ‘On the Threshold of Woman’s Era,’ ’’ 308; Hale, Making Whiteness, 234; Hodes, White Women, Black Men, 205.  Allen et al., Without Sanctuary, 185 n. 57. 
Hodes, White Women, Black Men, 200.  See figures 89 and 90 in Allen et al., Without Sanctuary.  Ibid., 178–79 n.37, 179–80 n.38. 198 notes to chapter four

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 See Laura Wexler’s fascinating analysis of the white woman’s ‘‘innocent eye,’’ a culturally encoded ‘‘averted gaze’’ through which white middleclass women at the turn of the century could reenvision scenes of violence, imperialism, and white supremacy through a lens of white middleclass domestic sentiment. Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).  Allen et al., Without Sanctuary, 176 n. 31.  ‘‘Bo,’’ or the image’s bearer, was apparently a member of the kkk, for the inscription also reads, ‘‘Klan 4th, Joplin, Mo. 33.’’  I am thinking of Roland Barthes’s evocative statements about the nature of photography in Camera Lucida: ‘‘The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here.’’ Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 80.  Geoffrey Batchen, ‘‘Vernacular Photographies,’’ History of Photography 24, 2 (2000): 6.  Jacquie Jones, ‘‘How Come Nobody Told Me about the Lynching?’’ in Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography, ed. Deborah Willis (New York: New Press, 1994), 156.  Ibid., 154. 
Once again, see Cameron, A Time of Terror, quoted in Allen et al., Without Sanctuary, 176 n. 31. David Marriott also discusses this photograph, as well as James Cameron’s experience of this lynching, in On Black Men. David Marriott, On Black Men (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 1–6.  Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96.  Dyer, ‘‘White,’’ 44–46.  Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979).  For a compelling reading of the convergence of ‘‘specular’’ and ‘‘panoptic’’ power in both antebellum slavery and postbellum lynching, see Wiegman, American Anatomies, 35–42. One refinement I would make to Wiegman’s fascinating analysis is simply to note that in most of the photographs of lynch mobs and their victims, white spectators are, remarkably, not veiled or masked. Thus I would suggest that it was not only a ‘‘homogenized, known-but-never-individuated’’ form of white power that lynching reproduced (Wiegman, American Anatomies, 39) but also an explicitly embodied form of white power that marked white men and women as the particular bearers of an otherwise diffuse power.  Hodes, White Women, Black Men, 176–208.  David Marriott has similarly argued that lynching photographs provide

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both ‘‘a consolidation of racist community and a posture of whiteness.’’ Marriott, On Black Men, 6. Wells-Barnett, A Red Record, in On Lynchings, 72. According to literary scholar Ann duCille, the image of a biracial individual could enable an author ‘‘to insinuate into the consciousness of white readers the humanity of a people they otherwise constructed as subhuman—beyond the pale of white comprehension.’’ Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 7–8. The album form itself may encourage such identification, especially if the viewer reads the Du Bois albums as (extended) family albums. As Ann Burlein has argued, ‘‘The family album and the power of the conventions that shape family photography engender an affiliative look,’’ a look that encourages ‘‘identification,’’ and even identification with an ‘‘ideological point of view,’’ regardless of whether or not the viewer’s own ‘‘family arrangements really do look like this family.’’ Ann Burlein, ‘‘Focusing on the Family: Family Pictures and the Politics of the Religious Right,’’ in The Familial Gaze, ed. Marianne Hirsch (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1999), 316. Wells-Barnett, A Red Record, in On Lynchings, 13. As Robert Young describes it, colonial desire is constructed precisely around the dynamic of the colonist’s simultaneous repulsion from and attraction to the other. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (New York: Routledge, 1995), 149–52. Eric Lott, ‘‘Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy,’’ Representations 39 (summer 1992): 36–37. According to Kobena Mercer, whiteness is ‘‘a culturally constructed ethnic identity historically contingent upon the violent denial and disavowal of ‘difference.’ ’’ Kobena Mercer, ‘‘Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe,’’ in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), 215. This dynamic resembles the ‘‘shock effect’’ described by Kobena Mercer: ‘‘The affective displacement of the fixed boundaries that necessarily anchor ego in ideology.’’ Mercer, ‘‘Reading Racial Fetishism,’’ 200–201. This is how Hortense Spillers describes the function of racist categories and expletives. See Hortense J. Spillers, ‘‘Notes on an Alternative Model —Neither/Nor,’’ in The Difference Within: Feminism and Critical Theory, ed. Elizabeth Meese and Alice Parker (Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1989), 166–67. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘‘Interrogating Identity: Frantz Fanon and the Postcolonial Prerogative,’’ in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 47.

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Epilogue: The Archivist in the Archive
W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward the Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940), in W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of America, 1986), 603.  As noted previously, in the January 1912 issue of the Crisis, Du Bois reproduced a photographic lynching postcard with part of an essay by John Haynes Holmes on lynching. The photograph shows a large group of white men, carefully arranged in a semicircle, some seated, but most standing around an African American man’s corpse stretched across the ground at their feet. The white men look directly out into the camera, some leaning into the semicircle slightly to make their faces visible. The verso side of the card is stamped and postmarked, and addressed to ‘‘Rev. John H. Holmes, Pastor Unitarian Church, New York City.’’ The typed message reads: ‘‘This is the way we do them down here. The last lynching has not been put on card yet. Will put you on our regular mailing list. Expect one a month on the average.’’ According to Holmes, the initial recipient of this threatening envoy, the photographic lynching postcard demonstrates white America’s continued incapacity to see the African American man as a man. See ‘‘Holmes on Lynching,’’ Crisis 3, 3 (1912): 109–12.  Darwin T. Turner, ‘‘W. E. B. Du Bois and the Theory of a Black Aesthetic,’’ in The Harlem Renaissance Re-examined, ed. Victor A. Kramer (New York: ams, 1987), 11.  Lisa Gail Collins, The Art of History: African American Women Artists Engage the Past (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 3–4.  Henry Louis Gates Jr., ‘‘The Face and Voice of Blackness,’’ in Facing History: The Black Image in American Art, 1710–1940, by Guy C. McElroy (San Francisco: Bedford Arts, 1990), xliv. Another important strand of scholarship emphasizes music and sound as Du Bois’s chosen tools of African American self-articulation. See Houston A. Baker Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), and Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1993).  Du Bois himself says as much in Dusk of Dawn. Looking back over his years as editor of the Crisis, he states, ‘‘I sought to encourage the graphic arts not only by magazine covers with Negro themes and faces, but as often as I could afford, I portrayed the faces and features of colored folk. One cannot realize today how rare that was in 1910. The colored papers carried few or no illustrations; the white papers none. In many great periodicals, it was the standing rule that no Negro portrait was to appear and that rule still holds in some American periodicals. Through our ‘Men of

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the Month,’ our children’s edition and our education edition, we published large numbers of most interesting and intriguing portraits’’ (752). John Henry Adams, ‘‘Rough Sketches: A Study of the Features of the New Negro Woman,’’ Voice of the Negro 1, 8 (1904): 323–41; John Henry Adams, ‘‘Rough Sketches: ‘The New Negro Man,’ ’’ Voice of the Negro 1, 10 (1904): 447–52; and John Henry Adams, ‘‘Rough Sketches: William Edward Burghardt DuBois, Ph. D.,’’ Voice of the Negro 2, 3 (1905): 176–81. Adams, ‘‘Rough Sketches: William Edward Burghardt DuBois, Ph. D.,’’ 176. Adams, ‘‘Rough Sketches: ‘The New Negro Man,’ ’’ 447, 448. See also Claudia Tate’s provocative reading of this photograph in her conclusion, ‘‘Plenitude in Black Textuality,’’ to Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 186–88. Adams, ‘‘Rough Sketches: William Edward Burghardt DuBois, Ph. D.,’’ 179. Adams, ‘‘Rough Sketches: ‘The New Negro Man,’ ’’ 452. W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘‘The American Negro at Paris’’ (1900), in Writings by W. E. B. Du Bois in Periodicals Edited by Others, comp. and ed. Herbert Aptheker (Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus-Thomson Organization, 1982), 1:88. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 4 n. 1. Elizabeth Edwards suggests that we also look for images that resist a unifying narrative within institutional archives themselves. See her ‘‘Observations from the Coal-Face,’’ in Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology, and Museums (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1–23. Derrida, Archive Fever, 16–17, 18, 36. Tony Bennett has also argued that ‘‘more than history is at stake in how the past is represented. The shape of the thinkable future depends on how the past is portrayed and on how its relations to the present are depicted.’’ Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 162. Derrida, Archive Fever, 7.

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Index

Adams, John Henry, 149–57. See also Voice of the Negro Addams, Jane: Chicago Settlement House, 92; Hull-House Maps and Papers, 92 African American elite: See African American middle class; Talented Tenth African American gentleman, 17–18 African American manhood, 23, 38– 40, 78–79, 100, 104–12, 151, 155, 159; and New Negro, 86, 151, 155. See also African American patriarchy; Lynching African American Medal of Honor men, 13 African American middle class, 9, 77, 80; as caricatured, 80–86; and discourses of Negro criminality, 9, 86, 102; and piano, 108–12; and sexuality, 23, 79, 83, 87. See also African American patriarchy; Talented Tenth African American patriarchy, 23, 103– 4, 112, 147, 155, 159; and African American women, 79–80, 100–101, 103, 112; and middle class, 79, 100, 104; and sexual restraint, 80, 86–88, 100 African American womanhood, 38, 78–80, 100, 103–4, 132, 142; and African American patriarchy, 79– 80, 100; and motherhood, 36–37,

39–40; and sexuality, 23, 63, 79, 82–87, 100–102, 104, 112 African American working class, 80, 99, 103; and criminality, 87–88, 102; and sexuality, 79, 88, 102–3 Agassiz, Louis, 46–48, 181 n.8, 181 n.9 Alexander, Elizabeth, 115, 120–21 Allen, James, 117, 119, 121–22, 127, 130–31, 135, 197 n.31, 197 n.38. See also Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America American Negro Exhibit, 1, 2, 6, 7, 11–14, 16, 18–21, 91, 92, 99, 104, 141– 42, 156, 158, 162 n.4, 162 n.5, 163 n.9, 168 n.38, 171 n.64, 171 n.68. See also Georgia Negro Exhibit; Paris Exposition of 1900 Animal Locomotion (Muybridge), 49, 51 Antiracist archive, 2. See also Counterarchive Archive: and claims on the future, 159; and comparative analysis, 7, 23–24, 159–60; and criminology, 9; institutional, 6, 8, 10–12, 65, 76; instrumental, 11, 46; and photographic meaning, 2, 7, 9–11, 69; as political, 7, 159; and race science, 6, 8–9, 76, 86, 155, 159; as resistant, 8, 23, 156, 158; as revolutionary, 156, 159; as traditional, 8, 22, 158–59. See also Counterarchive

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Archivist, 147, 149; in the archive, 24, 148–49, 156 Art, 43; as evidence of racial superiority, 75; as propaganda, 43–44, 148. See also ‘‘Criteria of Negro Art’’; ‘‘The Negro in Literature and Art’’ Askew, Thomas E., 4–5, 7, 65–76, 106, 164 n.14 Atlanta Constitution, 113–14 Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition (1895), 12, 19, 21, 167 n.34; Booker T. Washington, 167 n.35 Atlanta University, 3, 6, 13, 57, 88, 110–11, 113, 115, 162 n.4, 162 n.5, 195 n.8 The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man, 36–39, 128–30, 179 n.64, 179 n.66

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Bacote, Clarence A., 195 n.8 Baker, Houston, 178 n.62 Barthes, Roland, 138, 199 n.57 Batchen, Geoffrey, 10, 137 Bay, Mia, 91, 102, 189 n.25 Bederman, Gail, 128, 187 n.3 Beitler, Lawrence, 135 Bell, Bernard, 173 n.6 Bell, Ernestine, 4, 165 n.17 Benjamin, Walter, 167 n.33 Bennett, Tony, 169 n.53, 170 n.59, 202 n.16 Bergner, Gwen, 172 n.4, 175 n.31, 177 n.54 Bertillon, Alphonse, 89 Bhabha, Homi, 144, 174 n.22 Billing, John S., 182 n.19 Biological racialism, 16, 27, 44, 47, 190 n.25 Biological racialists, 10, 17, 23, 44, 61, 75, 80–81, 86–87, 89, 102 Biracial individual, 52, 55, 62, 100, 128, 142, 200 n.69. See also Whitelooking African Americans Black aesthetic, 147–48 Black Belt, 96–98, 110

218 index

Blackness, 33, 39, 42; as embodied, 115; and inverted mirror stage, 34, 37 Black Skin, White Masks, 33, 38, 174 n.22, 175 n.29, 176 n.39 Bloom, Lisa, 167 n.32 Boas, Franz, 108 n.5 Booth, Charles: Life and Labour of the People of London, 92 Brady, Mathew, 70 Bruce, B. K., 13 Bruce, Dickson D., 173 n.6, 178 n.61 Burlein, Ann, 200 n.70 Burroughs, Nannie, 100, 109 Byerman, Keith, 181 n.6 Byrd, James, 138, 197 n.24 Calloway, Thomas J., 12, 19–21, 162 n.5, 163 n.9, 167 n.36, 171 n.68. See also American Negro Exhibit Cameron, James, 127, 138, 199 n.61 Carby, Hazel, 35, 115, 186 n.3 Caricature, 8, 80–86, 108, 159 Chesnutt, Charles, 178 n.64 Chicago Columbian World’s Exposition (1893), 12, 14, 16, 18; and Colored People’s Day, 17 Coe, Brian, 65, 185 n.43, 185 n.51 College Settlement House of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward, 91 Collins, Lisa Gail, 148, 181 n.8, 182 n.11 Colonialism, 2, 21, 25, 33 Colored American Magazine, 110, 168 n.38 Color line, 1–2, 10–11, 21–22, 24–25, 28–29, 31–32, 34–39, 41, 44, 79, 143, 145, 160, 184 n.36; as visual culture, 1, 22, 25, 42 ‘‘The Conservation of Races,’’ 61 Cooper, Anna Julia, 193 n.70; A Voice from the South, 192 n.58 Counterarchive, 2, 7, 9, 11–12, 44, 80, 86, 156, 158, 159, 160. See also Archive; Georgia Negro photographs Counter-gaze, 144 Cranford, Alfred, 114–15 Crary, Jonathan, 171 n.76

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Criminologists, 89, 102 Crisis, 121, 147, 192 n.57, 201 n.6 ‘‘Criteria of Negro Art,’’ 42–44, 75 Currier and Ives, 82; Darktown Comics, 82, 187 n.7 Dahomeyan village, 15–17, 168 n.36 ‘‘The Damnation of Women,’’ 36 Daniels, Lige, 120, 126 Davenport, Charles, 54 Derrida, Jacques: on the archive, 158–59 Discipline and Punish, 139 Disdéri, André Adolphe, 65 Doane, Mary Ann, 62 Double consciousness, 3, 23–25, 41–42, 115; and African American mother, 36, 39–40; and Frantz Fanon, 34, 40; and inverted mirror stage, 31, 34–38, 129; and James Weldon Johnson, 36–40, 129; and misrecognition, 31, 32, 38; as visual culture, 3, 23, 26; and white women, 35, 38; and William James, 26–30, 32, 35; and women of color, 40. See also Second sight; Veil Douglass, Frederick, 13, 16–18 Drana, 47–48 Du Bois, Mary Silvina Burghardt, 151–53 Du Bois, Nina Gomer, 57, 91 Du Bois, W. E. B.: as archivist, 2, 7, 147–48, 156; and Booker T. Washington, 110–12, 151; ‘‘The Conservation of Races,’’ 61; ‘‘Criteria of Negro Art,’’ 42–44, 75, 181 n.6; ‘‘The Damnation of Women,’’ 36; Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward the Autobiography of a Race Concept, 113; as editor of Crisis, 147; and Georgia Negro albums, 2, 4, 6, 9, 54, 61– 63, 66–67, 73–74, 76, 79, 92–93, 99, 109, 141–44, 156, 159; and Georgia Negro photographs, 2, 7, 11, 44, 79, 86, 90, 93, 99, 100, 104, 111–12, 117, 143, 155, 158–60; and Georgia Negro studies, 4, 91–92; The Health

and Physique of the Negro American, 54–57, 61, 100, 184 n.36, 185 n.40; and lynching, 113–17, 141, 147; The Negro American Family, 97, 99, 101– 2, 111; Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A., 3, 93–96, 105–6; ‘‘The Negro in Literature and Art,’’ 186 n.56; Notes on Negro Crime, Particularly in Georgia, 88–89; ‘‘Of the Coming of John,’’ 77, 79, 90; ‘‘Of Our Spiritual Strivings,’’ 31–32; at Paris Exposition of 1900, 1, 12, 14, 18–19, 161 n.2; The Philadelphia Negro, 3, 90– 93, 99, 101, 103–4, 109, 189 n.19, 190 n.27; as propagandist, 51, 147, 159; as race theorist, 1–2, 8, 21, 23, 27–28, 32, 87, 116, 129, 179 n.3; as representative, 18, 21, 24, 149, 156; as represented, 24, 26, 149–57; as sociologist, 1, 14, 113–14, 189 n.25; The Souls of Black Folk, 22, 24, 26, 31, 36, 41, 77, 116, 152, 156; ‘‘The Souls of White Folk,’’ 35, 226; Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A., 3, 43–46, 54, 60–64, 90, 96–97, 101; as visual theorist, 1–3, 11, 24– 25, 27, 147, 159–60; The World and Africa, 44 duCille, Ann, 200 n.69 Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward the Autobiography of a Race Concept, 113 Dyer, Richard, 118, 138–39 Eaton, Isabel, 91 Edwards, Elizabeth, 47, 172 n.77, 202 n.15 Ellen (Australian aboriginal woman), 49 English, Daylanne, 179 n.3, 192 n.57 Eugenicists, 10, 16–17, 23, 44, 61, 75, 86, 151, 155 Eugenics, 16, 27, 44, 51–52, 54–55, 180 n.3; and fitter family contests, 54; and Immigration Restriction Act (1924), 54; and sterilization, 54 Eugenics Record Office, 54

index 219

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Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Paris, 1900: See Paris Exposition of 1900 Eytinge, Sol, Jun., 82–86, 108, 187 n.5, 187 n.6. See also Harper’s Weekly: Blackville sketches Family photography album, 10, 166 n.30, 200 n.70 Fanon, Frantz, 33–34, 38, 39, 40; Black Skin, White Masks, 33, 38, 174 n.22, 175 n.29, 176 n.39; on women of color, 38–39 Farnum, G. H., 132 Fields, Barbara J., 184 n.34 First Congregational Church of Atlanta, 4, 67–68 Foucault, Michel: Discipline and Punish, 139 Fusco, Coco, 181 n.7 Fuss, Diana, 34, 42, 175 n.29

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Gaines, Kevin, 102, 192 n.53 Gallop, Jane, 174 n.22 Galton, Francis, 51–53, 55, 62–63, 75; The Life History Album, 51, 54. See also Eugenics Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 43, 67, 148; and signifyin(g), 166 n.27, 181 n.7 Gaze, 2, 10–11, 22, 25, 69, 106–7, 149, 152; familial, 166 n.30; as gendered, 35, 197 n.36; of mother, 31, 34, 152; as racialized, 3, 11, 33, 118, 141, 144, 148, 160, 197 n.36; scientific, 47, 49; white supremacist, 2, 25, 33, 76, 139 Georgia Negro albums, 2, 4, 6, 9, 23, 54, 61–63, 66–67, 73–74, 76, 79, 92– 93, 99, 109, 141–44, 156, 159. See also Georgia Negro photographs Georgia Negro Exhibit, 3–4, 147, 162 n.4, 162 n.5. See also American Negro Exhibit; Georgia Negro photographs; Georgia Negro studies Georgia Negro photographs, 4, 6, 7, 10–11, 22, 24, 44, 90, 93, 99, 104,

220 index

111–12, 145, 155, 158, 160; and African American patriarchy, 79, 86, 104, 159; as challenge to white viewers, 6, 141–43; as counterarchive, 12, 44, 86, 112, 159–60; and New Negro, 24, 100, 155; and whitelooking African Americans, 141–43. See also Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A.; Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. Georgia Negro studies, 4, 21–22, 91–92. See also Georgia Negro photographs Georgia state laws, 4, 92 Gibbes, Robert W., 46 Gillman, Susan, 184 n.34 Gilroy, Paul, 173 n.5, 175 n.31, 182 n.20 Greenhalgh, Paul, 15 Gubar, Susan, 184 n.37 Gunning, Sandra, 116, 187 n.3, 188 n.11 Haas, John, 114 Hale, Grace Elizabeth, 116, 128, 194 n.3, 197 n.29, 198 n.40 Hall, Stuart, 176 n.39 Hammonds, Evelynn, 183 n.25, 184 n.36 Hampton Institute, 13, 110, 171 n.64 Harper’s Weekly, 80–87, 187 n.4, 188, n.10; and Blackville sketches, 80– 86, 108, 187 n.6 Harris, Michael, 187 n.7 Hartman, Saidiya, 118, 119 Hasian, Marouf Arif, Jr., 54 The Health and Physique of the Negro American, 54–57, 61, 100, 184 n.36, 185 n.40 Hegel, G. W. F.: The Phenomenology of Mind, 26 Hemphill, W. A., 114 Hirsch, Marianne, 166 n.30 Hodes, Martha, 115, 130, 140 Holmes, John Haynes, 198 n.41, 201 n.2 hooks, bell, 10, 22, 167 n.30 Hose, Sam: See Wilkes, Samuel Howard, David Tobias, 6, 107–8

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‘‘How Come Nobody Told Me about the Lynching?’’ (Jones), 137–38 Howell, Clark, 114 Hull-House Maps and Papers (Addams), 92 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 47, 49 Identity: racialized, 3, 6, 25, 32, 34, 40, 62, 76, 100, 115, 140, 148, 152, 160; as split, 34, 36, 42, 144, 152; as sutured, 30, 31, 33–34, 36, 40, 42, 144, 152. See also Inverted mirror stage; Mirror stage Imperialism, 2, 15, 20, 21, 25, 116, 170 n.64 Industrial education, 110–11 Interracial reproduction, 63–78 ‘‘Intimations of Immortality’’ (Wordsworth), 41 Inverted mirror stage, 32–38, 129, 143– 44. See also Double consciousness James, William: and double consciousness, 26–29, 173 n.6; The Principles of Psychology, 26–28; Psychology: The Briefer Course, 29; and social self, 28–33, 35 Johnson, James Weldon, 36–40, 129; The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man, 36–39, 128, 129, 130, 179 n.64, 179 n.66; and inverted mirror stage, 37–38; and lynching, 128. See also Lynching Johnston, Frances Benjamin, 161 n.3, 171 n.64 Jones, Jacquie: ‘‘How Come Nobody Told Me about the Lynching?,’’ 137–38 Jones, Marion, 130, 134 Katz, Michael B., 92 Kawash, Samira, 184 n.36

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Lacan, Jacques, 30, 31, 35; mirror stage, 36. See also Mirror stage Lamprey, John, 47, 49

Lau, Kimberly J., 180 n.5 LeVin, Louis P., 114–15 Lewis, David Levering, 27, 57, 161 n.2, 189 n.20 Library of Congress, 12, 158 The Life History Album (Galton), 51, 54 Life and Labour of the People of London (Booth), 92 Liss, Julia E., 180 n.5 Litwack, Leon, 125, 127 Lomax, Pearl Cleage, 75 Lott, Eric, 143 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis (1904), 167 n.36 Lynching: and African American identification, 129; and antilynching activism, 78, 113–14, 119, 128, 130, 141, 195 n.20; and blackness as embodied, 23–24, 115–16, 138; as context for Georgia Negro photographs, 6, 79, 117; and discourses of Negro criminality, 78–79, 86– 87, 102, 104; and discourses of white womanhood, 78, 122–32; as economic terrorism, 78; and interracial sex, 134; and negation of blackness, 34, 40, 115, 128; and rape of African American women, 78, 79, 132; and rape of white women, 78, 128, 129; and representations of black female sexuality, 79; and representations of black male sexuality, 79, 87, 104, 134; as a rite of racial passage, 115, 128; as spectacle, 113, 116, 118–20, 128, 132, 138, 141, 159, 197 n.29; and white consolidation, 115–17, 138, 142; and whiteness as embodied, 117, 138–39, 143; and white patriarchy, 77–79, 116, 128, 134, 139, 141; and white savagery, 19, 79, 198 n.40; and white supremacist identification, 24, 115, 121, 131, 138– 39; and white supremacy, 87, 145; and white womanhood, 78, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 134. See also Lynching photographs; Lynching postcards

index 221

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Lynching photographs: and African American scrutiny, 120, 137, 141; and circulation of terror, 120, 135; composition of, 121, 127, 132; and disavowal of blackness, 117–18, 127; and European scrutiny, 141; and interracial sex, 134; as mementos, 121, 135, 137; and spectacle of whiteness, 24, 118, 132, 140, 147; and white consolidation, 117–18, 126, 138, 142; and white crowds, 119–20, 125–26, 132, 135, 139–40; and white defiance, 125–26; and white invisibility, 126, 138–40; and whiteness as embodied, 121, 138–41; and white savagery, 125, 127–28, 139, 147; and white supremacist identification, 24, 117–18, 121, 127–28, 131, 138, 147; ‘‘Without Sanctuary’’ (exhibit), 119; Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, 119, 121–22, 127, 130–31, 197 n.31, 197 n.38 Lynching postcards, 119; as commodities, 121; and intimacy, 122; as souvenirs, 121–22, 198 n.41; and white community, 121–22, 125. See also Lynching photographs Lyons, Judson W., 13

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Malayan man (as photographed), 49–50 Manhood: See African American manhood; White manhood Marable, Manning, 178 n.57 Marriott, David, 172 n.4, 176 n.38, 199 n.61, 199 n.67 Mason, Herman ‘‘Skip,’’ Jr., 164 n.14, 165 n.15, 165 n.20, 185 n.41, 193 n.61 Mavor, Carol, 193 n.62 McCauley, Elizabeth Anne, 65 McDowell, Deborah, 118 McKay, Nellie, 177 n.47 Mercer, Kobena, 143, 185 n.55, 200 n.73, 200 n.74 Methodology, 3, 24. See also Archive: and comparative analysis

222 index

Mimicry, 82–83 Mirror stage, 30–32; and James Weldon Johnson, 37; and mother, 31, 35–36. See also Inverted mirror stage Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 22 Miscegenation: See: Interracial reproduction Misrecognition, 25, 30–31; and gender, 35, 38; and mother’s role, 31, 152; and race, 32–34, 38, 152. See also Double consciousness; Mirror stage Mitchell, Timothy, 170 n.59 Monogenesis, 46, 190 n.25 Mooney, Amy, 185 n.40 Mulatto: See Biracial individual Murray, Daniel, 13 Muybridge, Eadweard: Animal Locomotion, 49, 51 naacp, 113, 119, 128, 147 Nast, Thomas, 82 Native village exhibits, 14–16, 18, 20, 89, 99, 169 n.53; Dahomey, 15–17, 168 n.36 The Negro American Family, 97, 99, 101–2, 111 Negro criminality, discourses of, 7, 86–90; and class, 86, 88; as environmental effect, 87–88, 91, 96; as innate, 87, 89; in Notes on Negro Crime, Particularly in Georgia, 88; in The Philadelphia Negro, 90, 91; and sexuality, 78–79, 87–88, 102, 104. See also Lynching Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A., 3, 93– 96, 105–6 ‘‘The Negro in Literature and Art,’’ 186 n.56 Negro problem, 14, 21, 87, 91 Nelson, Laura, 132 New Negro, 24, 86, 100, 151–52, 156, 188 n.10; images as visual archive, 24, 100, 148, 156, 158, 159; as response to eugenics, 100, 155 New Woman, 193 n.70

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New York Galton Society, 54 Notes on Negro Crime, Particularly in Georgia, 88–89 ‘‘Of the Coming of John,’’ 77, 79, 90 Olivier, Sidney, 88 One-drop blood laws, 140 Palace of Social Economy, 12–14, 168 n.39. See also American Negro Exhibit; Paris Exposition of 1900 Pan-African Congress (1900), 22, 171 n.73 Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo (1901), 12 Paris Exposition of 1900, 1–3, 7, 11– 12, 14–15, 18–22, 44, 57, 89, 90–92, 99, 141–42, 145, 161 n.2, 162 n.4, 162 n.5; and native village exhibits, 14–16, 20, 99, 168 n.36, 169 n.53. See also American Negro Exhibit; Georgia Negro studies Patriarchy: See African American patriarchy; White patriarchy Peck, Ferdinand W., 12 Peterson, Carla, 180 n.5 Philadelphia: Seventh Ward, 91–92, 101, 103 The Philadelphia Negro, 3, 90–93, 99, 101, 103–4, 109, 189 n.19, 190 n.27 Photograph albums, 10; family, 10, 166 n.30, 200 n.70. See also Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A.; Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. Photographic meaning, 7, 10, 69, 137; and function, 69. See also Archive Photographic portraits, 4; of children, 71–72; composite, 53; and identification, 44; and identity, 43–44; of men, 67, 69–71; middleclass, 7, 9, 11, 44, 63, 65–66, 69, 76, 82, 90, 93, 102, 118, 147; of women, 69–71 Photographs: as art, 75; cabinet cards, 65–66, 73; cartes-de-visite, 65– 66, 73; criminological mug shots,

6–7, 9–10, 89–90, 102, 117–18, 139; daguerreotypes, 46–48; and death, 137–38; family, 104–5, 137; humorous, 73, 74; scientific mug shots, 7, 10, 44, 51, 53, 65, 75–76, 89–90; snapshots, 10. See also Archive; Lynching photographs; Photographic portraits; Social documentary photography Plessy v. Ferguson, 140 Polk, P. H., 75 Polygenesis, 46, 190 n.25 Posnock, Ross, 181 n.6 The Principles of Psychology, 26–28 Proctor, Henry Hugh, 4, 67–69, 165 n.16 Przyblyski, Jeannene M., 161 n.3, 164 n.9, 169 n.53, 171 n.66, 188 n.12 Psychology: The Briefer Course, 29 Race, 1, 3, 8–10, 23–25, 33; and racialized gazes, 11, 129, 172 n.4; and visual culture, 1, 22–25. See also Race science; Racial identification; Racialization Race science, 2, 6, 44, 49, 54–55, 75–76, 80, 96, 100, 116. See also Biological racialism; Eugenics Racial identification, 1, 11, 25, 28, 36, 40, 115, 120, 128–29, 131, 140, 160; and racialized gazes, 11, 129, 172 n.4 Racialization, 2, 25, 28, 32–33, 35–36, 38, 42. See also Double consciousness; Inverted mirror stage Racial passing, 37, 63, 128 Racial uplift, 102, 147, 192 n.57. See also African American middle class; Talented Tenth Rampersad, Arnold, 40, 173 n.6, 178 n.62, 183 n.33 Rape: of African American women, 63, 78–79, 132, 142; of white women, 78, 86, 128–29, 189 n.10. See also Lynching Reed, Adolph, 173 n.6 Riis, Jacob, 97–98

index 223

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Rogers, William A., 162 n.5 Rogoff, Irit, 22 Rogues’ Gallery, 90, 191 n.47 Rony, Fatimah Tobing, 33, 169 n.53, 172 n.77, 173 n.7, 175 n.37 Rose, Jacqueline, 175 n.26 Rucker, Henry A., 5–6, 165 n.21 Rushdy, Ashraf, 122, 197 n.24 Rydell, Robert, 15, 20–21 Santayana, George, 26 Scott, Emmett J., 167 n.36 Second sight, 3, 23–25, 40–42, 115–16; and double consciousness, 23–25, 41–42, 115; and Veil, 23–25, 40–42 Segregation, 1, 6, 15, 18–19, 22, 62, 87, 158, 167 n.36 Sekula, Allan, 8–9, 90 Sharkey, E. D., 114 Shipp, Thomas, 135–36 Signifyin(g), 11, 44, 69, 90, 166 n.27, 181 n.7 Silverman, Kaja, 175 n.37, 193 n.69 Simpson, Lorna, 181 n.7, 182 n.11, 193, n.62 Slavery, 1, 22, 87–88, 99–100, 151; and crime, 63, 88; and rape, 63, 78, 143; and sexuality, 63, 78, 91, 103 Slave trade, 21, 25 Smith, Abram, 135–36 Smith, Roberta, 120 Snapshot, 10. See also Photographs Social documentary photography, 93, 97; and environment, 93–99; and rural poverty, 93–99; and urban poverty, 93–99 The Souls of Black Folk, 22, 24, 26, 31, 36, 41, 77, 116, 152, 156 ‘‘The Souls of White Folk,’’ 24, 116 South Carolina Interstate and West Indian Exposition, Charleston (1901–2), 12 Stacy, Rubin, 130, 132–34 Submerged tenth, 101–2 Sugrue, Thomas J., 92 Summit Avenue Ensemble, 4, 74 Surveillance, 9, 12, 42, 63, 87, 139

224 index

Talented Tenth, 6, 21, 88, 102, 148, 180 n.3. See also African American middle class Tate, Claudia, 176 n.42, 202 n.10 Taxonomy: racial, 2, 62, 90, 142. See also Race science; Typology: racial Tennessee Centennial Exposition (1897), 12 Till, Emmett, 197 n.24 Trachtenberg, Alan, 185 n.53 Trocadéro gardens, 15–16. See also Paris Exposition of 1900 True Womanhood, 100 Turner, Darwin T., 147–48 Turner, Henry McNeal, 126 Tuskegee Institute, 13, 75, 110 Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A., 3, 43–46, 54, 60–64, 90, 96–97, 101 Typology 8, 47; racial, 8, 23, 46–47, 54–55, 61, 89–90, 100, 142, 155. See also Race science Usher, Bazoline Estelle, 6, 57, 60, 166 n.22 Veil, 3, 23–25, 40, 117, 129, 152; as screen, 40–42; as shadow, 41; and white projections, 40, 42, 117, 144. See also Double consciousness; Second sight Vernacular photography, 10, 12. See also Snapshot Visual culture, 1, 3, 6, 10, 22–26, 42; and race, 23–24, 42, 159, 160, 172 n.4 Visual culture studies, 22 Voice of the Negro, 149–57 A Voice from the South, 192 n.58 Wald, Priscilla, 27, 42, 174 n.20 Wallace, Maurice, 172 n.4, 178 n.58 Wallis, Brian, 181 n.8, 181 n.9 Walton, Jean, 176 n.44 Washington, Booker T., 12–13, 19, 21, 107, 110–12, 151; and piano, 110–12; and W. E. B. Du Bois, 110–12, 151 Washington, Jesse, 122–25

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Watson, Ella, 131 Wells, Ida B., 78, 113–14, 119, 128, 130, 141–42, 186 n.3, 198 n.47. See also Lynching Westmorland, Mamie, 4, 69–70 Wexler, Laura, 99, 167 n.30, 171 n.64, 172 n.77, 199 n.54 White-looking African Americans, 62, 63, 141–43 White manhood, 78, 103, 116, 128. See also White patriarchy Whiteness: and black death, 115, 118, 125, 127, 137; as embodied, 116, 141; and fantasy of wholeness, 33, 35, 40, 42, 142–44; and invisibility, 33, 40, 42, 117, 138–40; and negation of blackness, 34, 40, 115, 128. See also Lynching; Lynching photographs; Lynching postcards White patriarchy, 77–79, 116, 129–30, 132, 134. See also Lynching White supremacism, 18, 21–22, 25, 29, 33, 35, 44, 63, 76, 79–80, 86, 112, 114–15, 122, 128, 137–38 White supremacy, 14, 75, 115–16, 130 White womanhood, 36, 38, 78, 100, 115, 122, 129, 130–32, 142, 198 n.47. See also Lynching

Wiegman, Robyn, 199 n.65 Wiggam, Albert Edward, 54 Wilkes, Samuel, 113–17, 141, 147, 156, 170 n.64, 194 n.3, 194 n.6, 195 n.10. See also Lynching Williams, Pat Ward, 121 Williamson, Joel, 191 n.40 Willis, Deborah, 165 n.14, 167 n.30, 193 n.62 ‘‘Without Sanctuary’’ (exhibit), 119 Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, 119, 121–22, 127, 130–31, 197 n.31, 197 n.38. See also Lynching photographs Womanhood: See African American womanhood; White womanhood Wordsworth, William: ‘‘Intimations of Immortality,’’ 41; and prisonhouse, 41 The World and Africa, 44 World’s Fair Puck, 17–18 Worth, Thomas, 82 Young, Lola, 38 Young, Robert J. C., 63, 200 n.72 Zamir, Shamoon, 26–27 Zealy, Joseph T., 46–48

index 225

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shawn michelle smith is an associate professor of American Studies at Saint Louis University. She is the author of American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (1999).

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Smith, Shawn Michelle. Photography on the color line : W. E. B. Du Bois, race, and visual culture / Shawn Michelle Smith. p. cm. ‘‘A John Hope Franklin Center Book.’’ Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8223-3331-7 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 0-8223-3343-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Photography—United States—History. 2. Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868–1963—Views on race. 3. African Americans—Race identity. 4. United States—Race relations. 5. Du Bois W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868–1963. Du Bois albums of photographs of African

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Americans in Georgia exhibited at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900. 6. Exposition universelle internationale de 1900 (Paris, France). I. Title. tr23.s63 2004 770'.8996'073—dc22 2003027589