The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism 9781503630932

Citation preview

The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism

Darda-BK.indd i

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Loren Glass and Kate Marshall, Editors Post•45 Group, Editorial Committee

Darda-BK.indd ii

12/1/21 9:21 PM

The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism Joseph Darda

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Darda-BK.indd iii

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Sta n for d U n i v ersit y Pr ess Stanford, California © 2022 Joseph Darda. All rights reserved. Portions of chapter 1 appeared as “Antiracism as War” in Representations, no. 156, © 2021, University of California Press. Reprinted with permission. Portions of chapter 3 appeared as “The Race Novel: An Education” in MELUS 45, no. 3, © 2020 Oxford University Press. Reprinted with permission. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Darda, Joseph, author. Title: The strange career of racial liberalism / Joseph Darda. Other titles: Post 45. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2022. | Series: Post 45 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021025881 (print) | LCCN 2021025882 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503630345 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503630925 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503630932 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Anti-racism—United States—History—20th century. | Liberalism—United States—History—20th century. | Racism—United States—History—20th century. | United States—Race relations—History—20th century. Classification: LCC E184.A1 D268 2022 (print) | LCC E184.A1 (ebook) | DDC 305.800973/0904— dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021025881 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021025882 Cover design and illustration, by Rob Ehle, mimmicks the original book jacket of C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Typeset by Motto Publishing Services in 10/15 Minion Pro

Darda-BK.indd iv

12/1/21 9:21 PM

For Cathy Schlund-Vials

Darda-BK.indd v

12/1/21 9:21 PM

This page intentionally left blank

Derrick Bell: Racism is permanent. Charlie Rose: And so what’s the cure? —Charlie Rose, August 17, 1992

Darda-BK.indd vii

12/1/21 9:21 PM

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

INTRODUCTION

The Bend of the Arc

1

Antiracism as War 23

2

Antiracism as Civil Rights

3

Antiracism as Education 89

4

Antiracism as Integration

5

Antiracism as Color Blindness EPILOGUE

Time Now

Acknowledgments

Darda-BK.indd ix

Notes

209

Index

263

1

56

121 152

188

207

12/1/21 9:21 PM

This page intentionally left blank

The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism

Darda-BK.indd xi

12/1/21 9:21 PM

This page intentionally left blank

INTRODUCTION

The Bend of the Arc

The historian had traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, to witness the culmination of the march from Selma to the marble stairs of the state capitol, from which Martin Luther King asked twenty-five thousand demonstrators, including Woodward, “How long?”1 Woodward, a Sterling Professor at Yale, stood with a small band of distinguished academics that included John Hope Franklin, John Higham, Richard Hofstadter, and William Leuchtenburg. Higham carried a closed umbrella to which he had attached a makeshift cardboard sign. It read, in big block letters, “U.S. HISTORIANS.” King gave Higham reason to hold the umbrella a little higher. “Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War,” the minister, standing behind a wall of microphones, stated. “And as noted historian C. Vann Woodward, in his book The Strange Career of Jim Crow, clearly points out, the segregation of the races was really a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land.”2 King devoted almost five minutes to glossing The Strange Career of Jim Crow, the slender 1955 volume in which Woodward identified segregation as not an age-old regional tradition but a result of white elite machinations after the Civil War to undermine Reconstruction. The Bourbon Democrats—the conservative, laissez-faire southerners who wielded states’ rights to undercut the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments—had assembled the Jim Crow regime, Woodward observed, inviting King and his other readers to infer that it could be disassembled. That strange career couldn’t last forever. In his memoir, Woodward recalled hearing King describe his book as “the historical bible of the civil rights movement”—an endorsement that other scholars, including his former students, would recite and that would grace the C . VA N N W O O D WA R D H E A R D H I S N A M E .

1

Darda-BK.indd 1

12/1/21 9:21 PM

2

Introduction

cover of future editions of The Strange Career of Jim Crow.3 The civil rights leader might have said it, but the historian had no one to cite but himself.4 The book that King commended in Alabama originated in the wake of the Warren court’s unanimous 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Woodward had, at the invitation of Thurgood Marshall, contributed to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s November 1953 brief in the case. Although the court, as Woodward himself later admitted, seemed “more impressed by sociological evidence than by historical arguments,” Marshall and the LDF cited him and his research in the brief and before the court.5 When Woodward delivered the Richard Lectures at the University of Virginia that fall, he built on the work he had done for the NAACP, choosing as his title “The Strange Career of Jim Crow.” The historian, a native of Arkansas and a descendant of slaveholders, addressed a multiracial but segregated audience and dedicated the resulting book to “Charlottesville and the hills that look down upon her, Monticello.” Using the forceful, straightforward language that had made him an asset in the courtroom, Woodward argued that Jim Crow had shallow roots. “The policies of proscription, segregation, and disenfranchisement that are often described as the immutable ‘folkways’ of the South, impervious alike to legislative reform and armed intervention, are of a more recent origin,” he told the Virginia audience. “And the belief that they are immutable and unchangeable is not supported by history.”6 Marshall and the LDF had declared segregation unconstitutional and un-American. The white historian, then teaching at Johns Hopkins, declared it un-southern. The older Woodward wanted his book remembered as the historical bible of the civil rights movement, but the “suggested reading” list at the back of the first edition suggested something else. It included Harry Ashmore’s The Negro and the Schools, Kenneth Clark’s “Desegregation: An Appraisal of the Evidence” (an “able” assessment of “recent developments in desegregation”), E.  Franklin Frazier’s The Negro in the United States, Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (a “most helpful synthesis of modern scholarship in the field”), and Lee Nichols’s The Breakthrough on the Color Front—classics of racial liberal thought during and after World War II. Woodward didn’t write the historical bible of the civil rights movement. He wrote the historical bible of racial liberalism. Racial liberalism, which dominated racial thought from the onset of the Second World War to the Brown decision, arose as an answer to the crisis

Darda-BK.indd 2

12/1/21 9:21 PM

The Bend of the Arc

3

of late colonialism that the war had accelerated. Anticolonial and antiracist movements surged. Colonial governments fell. Segregation in the United States came under fire as Black soldiers and marines fought for freedom in the Ardennes and on Luzon and returned to conditions of unfreedom in Georgia and Texas. The Soviet Union, armed with stories of the horrors of the American South, cultivated allies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, limiting the West’s access to the natural resources and markets of the decolonizing world. Racial liberals knew that something had to give and, fending off hardline segregationists on the right and materialist antiracists on the left, refashioned the United States as a liberal antiracist nation with a “theory, if not a consistent practice, of freedom and equality for all.”7 The nation faced, they believed, a difficult but achievable task: to align behavior with belief, conduct with creed, to reform the minds of good but sometimes misinformed white people, to eradicate “race prejudice,” not to redistribute resources or reckon with white racial dominance, including the theft of Indigenous lands and Black lives. More than a few scholars have said this before, revealing how a moderate, reformist antiracism ensured not the downfall but the endurance of white racial rule.8 “Race,” the historian Nikhil Singh writes, “is a modality of group domination and oppression” that “requires a story (whether biological, sociological, anthropological, or historical) explaining how and why such practices persist and can be justified.”9 This book is about the stable structure of the stories we tell about race in the United States. Racial liberalism furnished new stories about why Black and Indigenous people and people of color continued to have less, to live shorter lives, and to face greater violence after World War II but also something more enduring: the narrative structure, the time measure, of a whole assemblage of stories. The first state antiracism in the United States, racial liberalism urged trust in time, setting the nation’s racial gaze forever on the near future. The racial liberal’s faith in the clock—in progress, in the moral arc of the universe—thwarted materialist antiracisms and undercut future movements with the insistence that racism constituted a time-limited crisis to be addressed with time-limited remedies. That narrative structure surfaces in the language of racial liberalism, which taught the nation to see racism (and often race itself) as time-bound and external to the United States. The idea of racism as something to defeat (antiracism as war), to right (antiracism as reform), to enlighten (antiracism as education), or to cure (antiracism as integration) and race as a fiction to

Darda-BK.indd 3

12/1/21 9:21 PM

4

Introduction

dismantle (antiracism as color blindness) suggested that it had, as a deviation from an otherwise democratic national tradition, an imminent end date, militating against lasting change. Woodward and his cohort offered the nation a scaffolding for stories of the fulfi llment of the American creed on an indefinite tomorrow, of scientific solutionism and humanist enlightenment, of color-blind children. Or perhaps their children’s children. Most historians attribute the shortcomings of the civil rights era to a conservative backlash or to a “long segregationist movement” or to the fracturing of the liberal establishment in the late 1960s, but the civil rights movements also met resistance from a liberal “frontlash,” from antiredistributive allies who all along constrained what the movement could demand and how it could demand it.10 This frontlash did not arrive out of nowhere in 1945, but, amid the dramatic worldwide fallout from the world war, liberalism had to do heavier lifting than ever before. From Locke to Mill, liberalism had masked the continuous, violent division of the human—into colonies, through enslavement and genocide—with the idea of linear time. Other civilizations, Western thinkers believed, had not advanced as far as theirs and deserved less until they did, under the West’s tutelage, somewhere off in an ever-deferred future. Liberalism, as David Theo Goldberg, Saidiya Hartman, Lisa Lowe, Charles Mills, and other scholars argue, has never not been a racial liberalism.11 But the liberalism of the 1940s and 1950s, with colonialism in crisis and the Cold War escalating, accelerated that assurance, vowing to end racism in a single generation with some of the same liberal instruments of science and government that had long sustained it. Liberal scientists, officials, novelists, and jurists thought they could see a just national future on the horizon, and when that future didn’t arrive—when enlightenment didn’t come and the cure didn’t take—they rushed ahead to color blindness, imagining that they had reached the end of racial time, the last bend in the arc. The end of World War II, sometimes described as a “racial break,” triggered a shift in Western racial regimes from hierarchical theories of difference to normative theories, from avowed state racism to avowed state antiracism.12 While that transformation brought about affirming material change for some, hierarchies and norms share a stratified structure that liberalism, then and now, disguises with a linear arc. The arc got shorter in the United States of the 1940s and 1950s, and that, far from freeing, made it all the longer.

Darda-BK.indd 4

12/1/21 9:21 PM

The Bend of the Arc

5

Woodward, the consummate racial liberal, trusted in time. The 1955 Oxford University Press edition of The Strange Career of Jim Crow did not reach a wide audience at first. Sales remained modest until 1957, when President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard to integrate Little Rock Central High School and OUP issued a revised trade edition with a new chapter, “‘Deliberate Speed’ vs. ‘Majestic Instancy,’” in which Woodward addressed the events since the 1954 Brown decision. Most of his readers, including King, would have bought and read that revised and enlarged edition. Eight months after Woodward delivered his Richard Lectures at Virginia, Chief Justice Earl Warren had handed down the court’s infamous second ruling in Brown that the defendant school districts desegregate “with all deliberate speed”—an ornate formulation credited to Justice Felix Frankfurter, who credited it to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who credited it to the English Chancery, which never used it. Most legal scholars at the time instead traced it to Francis Thompson’s 1893 poem “The Hound of Heaven,” in which a lost soul, chasing hedonic gratification and human love, flees God, and God follows “With unperturbèd pace, / Deliberate speed, majestic instancy.”13 Woodward, alluding to Thompson’s poem and advancing a Reconstruction-as-overreach argument, defended the court’s gradualist decision. “Those who prefer the more heroic and poetic construction of the court’s ruling would do well to ponder the unhappy history of ‘majestic instancy’ in the First Reconstruction,” he wrote. “However deliberate and halting its speed, the Second Reconstruction would seem to promise more enduring results.”14 Woodward later balked at the suggestion that he had cast segregation as an institution that would bend to a few “right-thinking reformers,” but he did think that time— social advancement, the evolution of the nation—would bring an end to white racial rule, as radicals had not, he thought, allowed it to after the Civil War.15 The historian believed in the near but not too near future. Woodward’s own career after Selma tells the tale of racial liberalism’s decline and bearing on future racial ideologies. In the 1966 second revised edition, he hailed 1965 as a moment of “historical importance in the record of American race relations,” after which formal segregation could “at last be pronounced virtually a thing of the past.”16 The historian then entered what one former student later described as his “Tory period.”17 He refused to endorse the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Faculty Fund after Stokely

Darda-BK.indd 5

12/1/21 9:21 PM

6

Introduction

Carmichael took over as committee chairman. At the 1969 meeting of the American Historical Association, Woodward, then heading the AHA, fought off a challenge from the Radical Historians’ Caucus, later bragging in a letter to his daughter-in-law that “all’s well with establishment pigs.”18 When Yale students sought to bring Marxist historian Herbert Aptheker to New Haven for a semester, he worked behind the scenes to block the invitation.19 In the 1974 third revised edition of The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Woodward rewrote 1965 as the moment at which “a historic movement reached a peak of achievement and optimism and immediately confronted the beginning of challenge and reaction that called in question some of its greatest hopes and most important assumptions.”20 Most assumed that the man had changed. Others argued that the times had changed around him.21 But so had Woodward and other racial liberals’ sense of time. The near future that they had imagined came and went, and it left them scrambling to invent an end to racial time either in color blindness (Woodward’s choice) or a nonredistributive multiculturalism. Racial liberalism faded after 1965, but racial liberal time lived on in and structured the two dominant racial ideologies that succeeded it. The time of racial liberalism can be distilled into one sentence, which Woodward heard that day in Montgomery standing beside his fellow historians: “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”22 Woodward might have found a different meaning in that sentence, which King borrowed from the abolitionist minister Theodore Parker, than the civil rights leader. King first used it in a 1956 mass meeting at the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, then in a 1957 address to the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, then at the 1959 NAACP convention in New York. Although he sometimes couched it in the liberal language of the nation’s “evolutionary growth” and “full realization” in the “not too distant future,” King imbued the statement with a double meaning: gradualist and messianic, looking to the future and to a different, cosmic order of time.23 When he declared that the arc of the moral universe bent toward a transcendent freedom for all at the end of the march from Selma, King launched into a recitation of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” inviting listeners to hear either a nationalist anthem (justice on Earth) or a divine subversion of that red, white, and blue assurance of overcoming (justice in death, in the afterlife). The Black churchgoer, Hortense Spillers, the cultural theorist, writes, “hears double” and “in excess” of a sermon’s words, linking the “contrastive narrative energies” of accommodation

Darda-BK.indd 6

12/1/21 9:21 PM

The Bend of the Arc

7

and insurgence.24 The young minister, with the nation watching, invited that doubling. On March 31, 1968, at the National Cathedral in Washington, King envisioned the bend of the arc for the last time, but not before debunking the nation’s faith in inevitable forward movement. “Time is neutral,” he said. “Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God.” We cannot, he added, “wait on time.”25 This book is about how Americans learned to wait on time for racial change, the enduring harm of that trust in the clock, and alternative theories of time and transformation, including King’s, that don’t count on the bend of the arc. Racial liberalism did not end Jim Crow. It reformed it. Then things got strange. A Stranger Career World War II set the terms for the new racial liberalism. On November 12, 1941, Pearl S. Buck, winner of the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature, read an editorial in the New York Times that attributed a Harlem “crime wave” to state and local government’s lack of investment in the neighborhood. (The murder of a white teenager in Central Park had set off what the Amsterdam News described as a media “blitzkrieg on Harlem.”)26 The editorial called for “increased employment opportunities; higher wages; vocational training; more and better facilities for child care; [and] more, cheaper and better housing.”27 Buck disagreed enough to write a letter to the editor four times the length of the original Times editorial. Harlem’s struggles did not stem from economic disinvestment, she argued, but from white New Yorkers’ ill will toward the neighborhood’s Black residents. “The reason why colored Americans are compelled to live in ghettos, where they are helpless against high rents and miserable housing, is the segregation to which race prejudice compels them,” she wrote. “Race prejudice and race prejudice alone is the root of the plight of people in greater and lesser Harlems all over our country.”28 Buck, the child of missionaries and the author of the best-selling novel The Good Earth, identified racism as a divergence from a democratic inheritance that could doom the United States and the free world for which it, in her mind, stood. In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, she observed, “the colored peoples are asking each other if they must forever endure the arrogant ruling white

Darda-BK.indd 7

12/1/21 9:21 PM

8

Introduction

race,” and they looked to the multiracial United States to gauge the future.29 Another world war and stirring anticolonial and antiracist movements led her and others to articulate the tenets of an emerging racial liberalism: racist attitudes led to racist social structures, and changing the former would change the latter; racism contradicted a founding egalitarian creed that the United States now struggled to fulfill; and the rest of the world looked to it as a model for reform and multiracial governance. Buck’s 1942 book American Unity and Asia led with her letter to the Times. The horrors of the Holocaust, the decline of colonial regimes, and the rise of a communist Eastern Bloc forced an about-face in liberal thought. Liberalism had all along been a racial liberalism that rendered some societies legitimate and modern and others illegitimate and backward, some bodies valuable and endowed with inalienable rights and others valueless and rightless. Western liberal thinkers had naturalized and obscured the racial divisions that colonialism, enslavement, and genocide created but maintained that race had little bearing on liberalism. That changed after World War II. American liberals now addressed race as the central concern of liberal thought. Scientists, officials, novelists, and jurists declared liberalism a racial liberalism. Historians of race, including Mark Anderson, Daniel HoSang, Jodi Melamed, Naomi Murakawa, and Chandan Reddy, have identified how liberal antiracism allowed the United States to contain radical antiracisms and maintain control of what counted as rational racial knowledge, whether through the unacknowledged Americanism of anthropology (Anderson), a constraining white “gaze on politics” (HoSang), the dissemination of “official antiracisms” through literatures of difference (Melamed), a distinction between racist violence as erratic and biased and carceral violence as methodical and deserved (Murakawa), or the rerouting of demands for freedom and liberation through instruments of state violence (Reddy).30 “No longer was it the mesmerizing narratives of the white man’s burden,” Melamed writes, “but those of liberal antiracisms—of reform, of color blindness, of diversity in a postracial world—that explained (away) the inequalities of a still-racialized capitalism.”31 Racial liberalism inaugurated an age of antiracism in which all condemned racism while little changed in the fortunes of Black and brown people in the United States. This nonsensical “racism without racists” wouldn’t have held together long if not for a shift in racial liberal time from the distant to the near future, from the “far off ” of the white man’s burden to the “not long” of the white man’s solution.

Darda-BK.indd 8

12/1/21 9:21 PM

The Bend of the Arc

9

Liberal foundations and other NGOs led that transition. “The war,” the Julius Rosenwald Fund announced in 1945, “has stimulated new efforts in the field of group relations on the part of old organizations, and has prompted the creation of many new ones.”32 More than two hundred new agencies, it found, had formed in the final eighteen months of the war. A 1948 head count discovered eight hundred more.33 But the largest of them did not regard their good works as ends in themselves but as models for government action. The measure of success for a foundation, as Edwin Embree, the head of the Rosenwald Fund, liked to say, should be whether “the work is taken up by the state.”34 Embree and other liberal elites recognized the state, which had grown stronger through the emergencies of the Depression and another world war, as the vehicle for a rising racial liberalism and sought to direct the coming age of reform. The wartime swing toward stronger government and weaker civil liberties wouldn’t seem like an ideal environment for civil rights reform, but President Franklin Roosevelt, though unwilling to desegregate the armed forces, did use executive orders to answer some demands from Black soldiers, workers, and organizers. Carey McWilliams, the California leftist and future editor of the Nation, called on Roosevelt to use the wartime strength of his office to enact antiracist reforms, stressing, in his 1943 Brothers under the Skin, “the opportunity to use wartime emergency controls to develop a new pattern of relationships [among racial and ethnic communities].” McWilliams came to see, as did Embree and other liberal reformers, the war-strengthened state as the first and last audience for arguments about racial change. “The problem of colored minorities in the United States is merely a reproduction on a miniature scale of a set of similar problems which will be faced by whatever federation of powers or international organization emerges from this war,” McWilliams argued, as if writing a letter to the president, who had issued the Atlantic Charter, the forerunner to the United Nations Charter, in 1941. “By taking the initiative here, we might be in a position to assert real world leadership in relation to these same problems after the war.”35 The government’s embrace of liberal antiracism in the 1940s and 1950s, while often attributed to Cold War self-interest (“Cold War civil rights”), originated during World War II, when liberals like Embree and leftists like McWilliams looked to the wartime executive as the ultimate horizon of antiracist struggle.36 Foundations, endowed with the eternal wealth of industrial fortunes, did not see redistribution but education as the answer to what ailed the United

Darda-BK.indd 9

12/1/21 9:21 PM

10

Introduction

States, and they modeled that agenda for the government. An American Dilemma, the 1944 urtext of racial liberalism, which the Carnegie Corporation first commissioned in 1937, recommended an “educational offensive against racial intolerance” and celebrated the Office of War Information’s messaging on race and Black service in the army, marines, navy, and defense industries. “When now, in the war emergency, the Negro is increasingly given sympathetic publicity by newspapers, periodicals, and the radio, and by administrators and public personalities of all kinds,” Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish sociologist and lead author, wrote, “one result is that the white Northerner is gradually waking up and seeing what he is doing to the Negro and is seeing also the consequences of his democratic Creed for his relations with Negroes.”37 The Carnegie Corporation, the Rosenwald Fund, and other foundations encouraged the nation to read for change, distributing book lists for white liberals with titles like Basic Readings for Americans Concerned about Race Relations and A Selected List of Readings on Racial and Cultural Minorities in the United States, with Special Emphasis on Negroes. When the President’s Committee on Civil Rights issued, at the Truman administration’s behest, recommendations for reform, it concluded with a call for a “long term campaign of public education to inform the people of the civil rights to which they are entitled and which they owe to one another.”38 The turn to education as a low-cost solution to centuries of stolen land, lives, and labor made literature, as Melamed shows, a leading instrument of nonredistributive antiracism through which white readers could “get to know difference” while reinforcing their claims to the wages of whiteness.39 Although some scholars maintain that the “affective work” of literature can counteract the violence of racial theft—that racial liberalism does not have to be the soft glove of white wealth accumulation—affective engagement has often stood in for material change, further elevating the status of white liberal elites and offloading blame onto Black and brown communities or members of the white working class, whom they assume not to have received an education in antiracist feeling.40 The racial liberalism of Buck, Embree, and An American Dilemma reached a far wider audience than decision makers in Washington and readers of Lillian Smith and Richard Wright. In 1948, the UN Social and Economic Council directed UNESCO (the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) to recommend a “programme of dissemination of scientific facts

Darda-BK.indd 10

12/1/21 9:21 PM

The Bend of the Arc

11

designed to bring about the disappearance of that which is commonly called race prejudice.” UNESCO assembled a committee of anthropologists and sociologists to draft a statement. Although the committee members hailed from seven different countries, the United States had the most voices in the room, including the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier and the British American anthropologist Ashley Montagu, who served as lead author. The final statement, “The Race Question,” reflected the American racial doctrine to which Frazier, a silent coauthor of An American Dilemma, and Montagu had contributed. “The problem of race,” it established, “has its roots in ‘the minds of men’” as a “belief in the innate and absolute superiority of an arbitrarily defined human group over equally arbitrarily defined groups” that “threatens the essential moral values.”41 Through intergovernmental organizations, war, and business, the United States transmitted racial liberalism to the world, circulating the idea that racism constituted a wrongheaded belief that could be remedied with scientific facts and a moral education. That idea minimized the enduring legacies of colonialism, enslavement, and genocide, as we know, but it also gave cover to the future theft of land and labor in the decolonizing world. The settlement of Western armies and multinationals in Africa and Asia had nothing to do with race, UNESCO maintained, as long as they thought and said the right things. In forecasting the end of racism in an undefi ned near future, racial liberals renewed it as a material regime. Racial liberalism derived coherence from Jim Crow. Adherents regarded it as the antithesis of segregation, a construction that shut out race radicalisms and bred a host of other binaries—exclusion versus inclusion, biological racism versus cultural difference, racial essentialism versus environmental “root causes”—that made reform look like the revolution radicals had foreseen. “The old world is dying, but a new world is being born,” Carlos Bulosan, the novelist, remembers his brother telling him amid the California labor movement of the 1930s. “The old world will die so that the new world will be born with less sacrifice and agony on the living.”42 A new world did arrive, but much of the old world lived on in it. Inclusion, it turned out, could be as violent as exclusion. Cultural and environmental ideas about race could sustain the same hierarchies that biological arguments had. That does not mean that racial liberalism constituted a “new” Jim Crow. But racial liberalism did use Jim Crow to foreclose more radical alternatives that could have brought about the world that Bulosan dreamed might come.

Darda-BK.indd 11

12/1/21 9:21 PM

12

Introduction

Bulosan and other Asians in the United States found themselves caught between two racial binaries in the age of racial liberalism. Heeding the social science of the time, racial liberals built a wall between racial and ethnic difference, obscuring their interconnectedness, biologizing Blackness (often under the guise of culture), and imagining the nation as a drama in Black and white—or, in the words of the anthropologist Franz Boas and his students, “Negroid” and “Caucasoid.” (Their third, catchall racial division, “Mongoloid,” surfaced as, at most, an afterthought in mainstream thought and then vanished into ethnic murkiness.) Asian, Indigenous, Latinx, and other nonBlack communities of color faced either erasure or recruitment to a liberal anti-Blackness through the coordinated binaries of white/nonwhite and Black/ non-Black.43 Pauli Murray, the civil rights and women’s rights activist, noted in the introduction to States’ Laws on Race and Color, her 1951 guide to state segregation laws, a critical resource for Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, that state houses also targeted “Indians, Chinese, Japanese and other Orientals” with restrictive legislation but admitted that she didn’t know what to do with that information.44 It didn’t conform to the dominant language of the time. Activists have been struggling ever since to find a coalitional language that doesn’t elide anti-Blackness, that doesn’t traffic in what one scholar describes as “people-of-color-blindness.”45 Racial liberalism did not invent white racial dominance or anti-Blackness, of course, but it did, while insisting that we shall overcome, limit the tools with which a rising generation, the civil rights generation, could combat them. Setting themselves against segregationists, through whom they defined racism as exclusion, racial liberals declared themselves the bearers of antiracism. The term racism did not come into wide usage until the 1940s—most credit the anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s 1940 Race: Science and Politics—and that established segregated water fountains as an enduring icon of racism and integrated classrooms as a signifier of antiracism. This iconic racism and antiracism obscures the fact that, as the historian Manning Marable once observed, Black people have been “‘integrated’ all too well,” that “capitalist development has occurred not in spite of the exclusion of Blacks, but because of the brutal exploitation of Blacks as workers and consumers.”46 A constraining discourse, racial liberalism did not account for that kind of integration or for Bulosan’s Marxist antiracism. When C. Vann Woodward sat down to write The Strange Career of Jim Crow a few months after the Warren court

Darda-BK.indd 12

12/1/21 9:21 PM

The Bend of the Arc

13

overturned Plessy, he thought he would chronicle the rise and fall of segregation in the South. He didn’t know that he would also chart the ideological conditions for the rise and fall of the civil rights movement. Metaphors We Die By Antiracism as war, as reform, education, and integration. Antiracism as color blindness. The time of racial liberalism registers in the figurative language most Americans, including conservatives and radicals, use to address race. That language can be difficult to do without. Some of the best arguments against a dematerialized racial liberalism have been made in the racial liberal terms of crisis and solution, encouraging activists to, for example, “treat the disease and not just its symptoms.”47 The cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in their fieldmaking Metaphors We Live By, argue that “human thought processes are largely metaphorical,” that figurative language, far from mere ornamentation, structures how humans conceive of and act on their environment. If one culture understands argument as war and another as dance, that will, they suggest, structure differences in how the societies debate. (It may also structure differences in whether and how often they go to war.) “In allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept,” Lakoff and Johnson write, “a metaphorical concept can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor.”48 When a culture understands argument as war, it may lose sight of how argument can be collaborative. When a culture conceives of racism as a disease on a nation, it may overlook how racism constituted that nation and how antiracism might take forms not limited to cureseeking. We live by metaphors, as Lakoff and Johnson argue, but we also die by them—some with less and some with more, some sooner and some later. The figurative language of race tends to reflect dominant material racial interests. That language in the age of racial liberalism sustained the misdistribution of resources and life chances with a subtle but constant command: look to the state, wait on time. Linear time, the time of racial liberalism, often goes unnoticed because it feels natural. We struggle to think outside it. “Try to represent what the notion of time would be without the processes by which we divide it,” Émile Durkheim wrote in 1912, “a time which is not a succession of years, months, weeks, days and hours! This is something nearly unthinkable.”49 The historian Lynn

Darda-BK.indd 13

12/1/21 9:21 PM

14

Introduction

Hunt, echoing Durkheim some one hundred years later, observes, “Time feels like an essential and defining feature of human life, yet, when pressed to define it, we inevitably fall back upon duration, change, and ultimately, the tenses of our languages, past, present, and future.”50 Language itself acts as a barrier to investigating linear time not as a transcendent fact but as something social and contingent. The anthropologist Carol Greenhouse traces the dominance of linear time in the West to the arrival of Abrahamic religions and their eschatological belief that time originated with creation and will end with a resurrection of the dead and final judgment. The secular idea of linear time descends, Greenhouse suggests, from that messianic time, which came to overshadow other, recurrent forms of time (day/night, summer/winter) because it better served emerging states and markets. But linear time has also carried forward that religious germ. “Even in secular contexts,” she writes, “the linearity of time reproduces both the cry for redemption and the form of redemption in its basic proposition that the individual, though fundamentally alone, can find completion by participating—and only by participating—in a cosmic order through social institutions that serve the end(s) of time.”51 Racial liberalism built on that linear scaffolding, constructing the demand (inclusion, fulfi llment of a constitutional ideal) and furnishing an institutional answer (declarative legislation) for racial change in the United States. When King asked Woodward and his twenty-five thousand fellow demonstrators, “How long?” and answered, “Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” he addressed the time of racial liberalism but also retrieved the messianic origins of linear time in which the bend of the arc breaks and the near future transforms into now.52 Racial liberal time runs on a national clock. Benedict Anderson, the political scientist and historian, argued that modern nations embraced linear time because it allowed fellow nationals, most of whom would never meet face to face, to imagine themselves as living under the same flag. All moved through clock and calendrical time together. Most French people would remain strangers to one another, but they would set their clocks and turn their calendars together, creating a sense of belonging in moving through “French time” as one.53 Anderson built his famous claim on Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in which the German Jewish philosopher, in exile from the Third Reich, described modern national time as “homogeneous” and

Darda-BK.indd 14

12/1/21 9:21 PM

The Bend of the Arc

15

“empty”—uniform, turned toward the future, and without historical content. Benjamin, looking instead to a messianic “time of the now,” argued that the historian must arrest time in a social “configuration” that transcends clock and calendar rather than continue to record it into an ever-unfolding, blank future. The struggle of the working class would, he believed, be “nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.”54 No revolution would ever come from a faith in progress and a gaze on a distant or near future. Neither Anderson nor Benjamin acknowledged, as Neda Atanasoski, Hartman, Lowe, and other scholars have since, that the homogeneous time of the modern nation arose from and secured colonialism and the slave trade, locating white Western men within what Anderson called the national “meanwhile” and colonized and enslaved people and their descendants at some distance behind it.55 The novel and the newspaper, the media of the emerging nation, taught European men that they belonged in national time and delivered to others a narrative of gradual advancement—of future inclusion within that time, of liberated grandchildren.56 Racial liberalism took that guarantee and accelerated it: one more offensive, a last reform, a final cure. The shortened horizon led not to liberation but, after a generation of declarations and assurances, to an imagined ending. Where nonlinear forms of racial time (recurrent, accumulative, transcendent) emerged, liberals used gender to contain them, anointing a Black Moses on whom it fell to deliver the Black masses to freedom and forgive the white masses of their sins. This “charismatic scenario,” as literature scholar Erica Edwards observes, reduced a heterogeneous struggle to the words and actions of one man and, in the hands of racial liberals, transformed what might have been a radical break in modern national time into a march through it, over the Red Sea and into the future.57 Most Black women found themselves cut out of racial liberal thought because it tended to subordinate them to charismatic Black men while elevating white women like Ruth Benedict, Grace Halsell, and Lillian Smith to the status of “race women.” (Most liberal white men continued to think of themselves in universal terms, as embodiments of Man, not as race men.) The anthropologist Margaret Mead, catering to that racial-gender calculus, refused to write a book on race unless she could do it with a Black man because, she said, white women and Black men “carried the

Darda-BK.indd 15

12/1/21 9:21 PM

16

Introduction

burden” of antiracism in the United States.58 She recruited James Baldwin, with whom she recorded a seven-and-a half-hour conversation, releasing it as a formless, tossed-off, but still best-selling book. Black women could see the writing on the wall long before King’s arc. In the late 1940s, Claudia Jones observed that the Black church “tended to confirm the man’s authority in the family” and argued for a socialist movement coalescing instead around the Black woman, “who combines in her status the worker, the Negro, and the woman.”59 Octavia Hawkins, a Chicago welder and labor leader, thought activists, including some radicals, erred in romanticizing resistance. “Everything I do is absolutely necessary for my own existence,” she told an interviewer in 1951. “The history of my race, the history of my economic class, my personal experiences as a woman give me but one choice.”60 Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Childress took a critical look at the Moses model of Black struggle in their fiction—Hurston in her third novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, and Childress in Gold through the Trees, which the Committee for the Negro in the Arts staged at Harlem’s Club Baron in 1952. In two acts that take the audience from ancient Ur to the trial of the Martinsville Seven, Childress introduces “a Moses named Tubman” washing clothes at a northern hotel with two other Black women to raise funds for the underground railroad. When the fictional Harriet Tubman urges the others on, one answers, “I guess it’s easy to talk like that when you’re ‘Moses.’ It’s easy to kill yourself for something when thousands of people are cheerin’.” She, an unknown woman in the struggle, could die and “nobody’d know or care!”61 Childress thought that the Black Moses narrative, whether gendered male or female, obscured more than it illuminated, disguising a mass movement with individual heroics and imagining death as an occasion for overcoming, a sacrifice made to move the clock another tick toward freedom.62 The FBI, which tracked Childress’s movements from 1951 to 1957, made it difficult for her and other race radicals to tell stories that didn’t bend toward justice. The language of racial liberalism made it difficult for the rest of the nation to hear them.63 The first figurative framework of racial liberalism—antiracism as war— consolidated the racial state. Benedict urged scientists to serve on the “race front.”64 Her colleague Montagu, the lead author of the UNESCO race statement, called them to “combat.”65 The Pittsburgh Courier demanded a “Double V,” envisioning “victory at home against prejudice and discrimination as well as victory abroad against the enemies of democracy.”66 The framework

Darda-BK.indd 16

12/1/21 9:21 PM

The Bend of the Arc

17

that arose from that statist crusade—antiracism as civil rights—routed activism to Washington. The President’s Committee on Civil Rights reassured Americans in 1947 that, in assembling recommendations for the Truman White House, the members had “seen nothing to shake our conviction that the civil rights of the American people—all of them—can be strengthened quickly and effectively by the normal processes of democratic, constitutional government.”67 The consecutive emergencies of the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War strengthened the federal government, which, seeing rising anticolonial and antiracist movements as emergencies of a different kind, declared itself a civil rights state. (A member of President Truman’s staff later claimed that, in forming the PCCR, the administration had coined the term civil rights.)68 The wartime rhetoric of liberal social scientists and Double Vers furnished the framework with which Truman federalized civil rights, authorizing his and future administrations to intervene in obstinate southern states but also undercutting a surging Black human rights movement that had turned not to Washington but to the new United Nations, the Pan-African Congress, and other international organizations. When the National Negro Congress, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Civil Rights Congress took their demands to the world, the state countered with civil rights. It would defeat racism. It would right it. When the historian and Washington insider Arthur Schlesinger articulated his liberal individualist “vital center” as a refuge from the extremes of the Right and the Left, he situated the good liberal between the fascist and the communist but also between the southern segregationist and the antiracist Black internationalist. He urged an “unrelenting attack on all forms of racial discrimination” and a “battle against racism” and insisted that legitimate antiracism emanated from the White House.69 The civil rights state should not redistribute resources, Schlesinger argued—that would be too close to communism for comfort—but educate the nation about the evils of racist attitudes through law. “While we may not be able to repeal prejudice by law,” he wrote, “law is an essential part of the enterprise of education which alone can end prejudice.”70 Law did not work overnight but could educate a nation over time. Books could also serve that cause, Schlesinger thought, including his own. The racial liberal framework to which he subscribed—antiracism as education—taught Americans to read

Darda-BK.indd 17

12/1/21 9:21 PM

18

Introduction

for change. The state would fight and right racism. It fell to Americans to read it into oblivion. One Los Angeles educator described reading right-minded books about race as “an indirect but extremely effective way of lessening race prejudice.”71 A sociologist of communication called it the “most important” movement to “mitigate group prejudices.”72 Schlesinger advised reading Sinclair Lewis’s Kingsblood Royal. A young James Baldwin related a conversation with a liberal friend who felt confident that as long as Americans continued to read race novels “everything will be all right.”73 From the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, racial liberal education shifted from the adult to the child, from antiracism as education to another figurative frame—antiracism as integration—that invited fantasies of color blindness. The 1950 White House Conference on Children and Youth connected the integration of schools to the integration of a future “American personality.”74 The sociologist R. M. MacIver remarked that Black and white children raised in an integrated environment “tend to forget, if they ever knew, any barrier between them.”75 Gordon Allport, a founder of personality psychology, observed that “what vanishes in an integrated personality are the racial bogies and traditional scapegoats who have nothing, really, to do with life’s woes.”76 He and his colleagues in the emerging field encouraged jurists to have faith in the innocent minds of the nation’s children, leading a transition from antiracism as race-conscious adult education to antiracism as color-blind child education, from the novelist’s crusade to change white minds to the scientist’s effort to form them. The Warren court’s 1955 ruling that the defendant school districts in Brown v. Board must desegregate “at the earliest practicable date” and “with all deliberate speed” signaled not a crisis of racial liberalism, as some argued then, but a culmination of the racial liberal’s faith in the national future, which couldn’t, after all, have a date.77 Racial liberalism established the state as the arbiter of antiracism and heralded a change in racial consciousness as the solution. Liberal antiracism, whether as war, civil rights, education, or integration, called for short-term action that would terminate in a not-too-distant future. When that future didn’t come, racial liberals changed course, turning to a final, bad-faith frame— antiracism as color blindness—that led the nation to see race as a fiction to dismantle. “How does one journey away from untruths,” Grace Halsell asked herself in 1968, “the old myths that are not spoken but are rather a part of the atmosphere and accepted like the sunlight and the earth beneath you?”78

Darda-BK.indd 18

12/1/21 9:21 PM

The Bend of the Arc

19

Halsell, a white woman, decided to do what Ray Sprigle and John Howard Griffin had done before her and cross the color line. Her six months as “Black Grace Halsell” came as a revelation, a kind of religious conversion that left her, at the height of Black Power and race radicalism, advising her millions of readers to see through race. From Sprigle in the late 1940s to Griffin in the late 1950s to Halsell in the late 1960s, the strange career of the modern white minstrel mirrored that of racial liberalism itself, as white liberals donned blackface first in the name of progress and then in a bid for deliverance. Calls to defeat, reform, educate, or cure racism faded in the late civil rights era. Now the racial liberal would disassemble race. The movements of the 1950s and 1960s threatened to decenter white liberal elites, who, along with the Black middle class, had been the chief beneficiaries of racial liberalism. Color blindness and multiculturalism (color blindness with a twist) allowed them to resecure their racial status. Racial time had come to an end. Or should, they said, if we could surrender our illusions. The Liberal Frontlash James Baldwin had a different vision of the end of racial time. In 1973, Robert Chrisman, a founding editor of the Black Scholar, visited the writer at his home in Southern France. He wanted to ask him about the civil rights movement, for which Baldwin had served as a reluctant spokesman, and Black Power. Baldwin, then forty-nine, caught the younger man off guard with his answers. He believed, he told Chrisman, that the civil rights movement had been “doomed to political failure” but that the results of the movement had “nothing to do with civil rights.” It had revealed the United States and the modern West for what they were: anomalies doomed to destruction. “I really begin to look on the 2,000 year reign of this system, which is coming to its end, as a long aberration in the history of mankind, which will leave very little behind it except those people who have created an opposition to it,” he said, sketching the outlines of a world in which “there are new metaphors, there are new sounds, there are new relations.”79 Baldwin, who had once looked to “the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks” to “achieve our country,” now looked to the abolition of that consciousness.80 But he didn’t look forward to a better version of 1973 but backward through two thousand years of Christian time to imagine the forgotten

Darda-BK.indd 19

12/1/21 9:21 PM

20

Introduction

alternatives—different language, different music, different forms of being and belonging (to “those people who have created an opposition to” the reigning order). Although Baldwin did take a shot at President Richard Nixon, describing his administration as the “Fourth Reich,” he attributed Nixon’s rise not to a conservative backlash to Black civil rights but to a generation of white allies who had trusted in time and now rushed to the end of it.81 Time may not move forward at all, Baldwin mused. Emergent social formations may not arise out of the future but out of the residual, unarticulated worlds that had come before and remained, in the now, hidden beneath liberal consciousness. Few scholars now subscribe to the backlash thesis, which blames the limitations of the racial reforms of the 1960s on an aggrieved white working class that abandoned the New Deal Left for a dog-whistling new Right in 1968 and never went back. Most attribute the shortcomings of the civil rights era to a long white resistance movement or to internal divisions within a heterogeneous liberal coalition or, as HoSang, Melamed, Murakawa, and Reddy do, to white racial liberals who constructed a racial discourse that constrained a rising antiracist tide. HoSang names that discourse “political whiteness,” Melamed a “formally antiracist, liberal-capitalist modernity,” Murakawa “liberal law-and-order,” Reddy a “freedom with violence.”82 An accelerated liberal time measure structured that discourse, whatever we call it and in all the various forms it takes, regulating what could be demanded but also when it could be demanded and for how long. The political scientist Vesla Weaver uses the term frontlash to describe how the same conservative elites who lost the struggle to maintain segregation and Black disenfranchisement in the early to mid-1960s restaged that conflict through crime in the late 1960s (and won).83 But that conservative message—if we want to call it that; liberals also criminalized Blackness—would not have found the footing that it did if not for an earlier liberal frontlash that dematerialized, nationalized, and set a time limit on antiracism. The liberal frontlash furnished the hegemonic time that created a desire for and reinforced a white entitlement to a bad-faith color blindness and a wishful multiculturalism, two imagined endings to racial time. That is not to let racial conservatives off the hook or to ascribe unlimited influence to racial liberals but to suggest that they shared more common ground than either let on; their agendas benefited from being set against one another in a two-sided conflict that screened out other actors and movements.

Darda-BK.indd 20

12/1/21 9:21 PM

The Bend of the Arc

21

When Chrisman asked him what “closing words” he might offer “brothers and sisters engaged in active struggle,” Baldwin admitted that he didn’t know if he had the language. He felt a “resurgence of consciousness,” he said, but couldn’t say why. He told Chrisman about his godchildren in California— the three sons of the actor David Moses—and then meditated on the end of the modern world. Baldwin did not, as most liberals would, see in children an ever-brighter American future but rather the defiant, often forgotten histories of “those people who have created an opposition” to that future and who reveal it as contingent.84 Hartman describes a similar nonlinear concurrence as “the time of slavery,” which troubles the belief in time as a linear march around the clock and through the calendar, out of bondage and into freedom. “The stories we tell about what happened then, the correspondences we discern between today and times past, and the ethical and political stakes of these stories redound in the present,” she writes.85 Time doesn’t move forward in a continuous, unbroken run. It accumulates. Then societies configure it into narratives that affirm some and forget others, making the world that is seem like the world that had to be. Benjamin, for all the messianic flights of “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” had a secular historical argument to make. His ideal historical materialist does not construct a linear chain of events as if working through “the beads of a rosary” but identifies the “constellation” that the historical materialist’s moment forms with other, earlier moments.86 Racial liberals believed that they would ride the tailwind of progress into the future and that racial conservatives, seeing it as a headwind, would be carried along. Baldwin, looking back on the age of racial liberalism and the movement it had enabled and constrained, could see destruction ahead and looked elsewhere, neither forward nor backward but alongside, to a different constellation of time. “We are,” Hartman writes, “coeval with the dead.”87 Racial liberalism, though declining after Martin Luther King acknowledged C. Vann Woodward after a long walk from Selma, has resurged at times of racial crisis ever since, offering the reassurance of a chimeric national creed. A deradicalized King has often served as the icon of that creed—the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice, children being judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Conservatives speak fluent racial liberalism. So do radicals, who, if they don’t translate their demands into the language and time of racial liberalism, will find themselves either ignored or translated against their will. Take the legal scholar Derrick Bell,

Darda-BK.indd 21

12/1/21 9:21 PM

22

Introduction

who, in his best-selling Faces at the Bottom of the Well, argued that the belief in a better, brighter racial tomorrow did more harm than good and made a case for unwavering struggle rather than silver-bullet solutionism. The Los Angeles Times wondered why he couldn’t, like King, “preach to the unconverted.”88 Charlie Rose asked him, at the end of a long interview, “And so what’s the cure?”89 The strange career of racial liberalism endures in the language and time through which we encounter and engage in antiracism. Sometimes we have no other choice but to struggle through it, as we build, in Baldwin’s words, “new metaphors” and “new relations.”90 For now we can at least do with racial liberalism what Woodward thought he might with Jim Crow. When a “theory ceases to account for the observed facts of common experience,” he said in Charlottesville, “it would seem to be time to discard the theory. In lieu of another to offer in its place, we can at least try to understand what has happened.”91

Darda-BK.indd 22

12/1/21 9:21 PM

1

Antiracism as War

on the race front. In 1943, she and her colleague Gene Weltfish, with whom she shared a mentor in Franz Boas, declared in an illustrated pamphlet, The Races of Mankind, that Uncle Sam needed them. The government turned to scientists when it needed new fuels, substitutes for rubber, and lighter metals, the Columbia anthropologists observed, and “we need the scientist just as much on the race front.”1 The Public Affairs Committee, which published the pamphlet, convinced the army to assign it to officers as “background material to help counteract the Nazi theory of a super-race.”2 Time hailed it as an intellectual shield “designed to fit a serviceman’s pocket and to fight Nazi racial doctrines.”3 The pamphlet distilled the lessons of Benedict’s 1940 book Race: Science and Politics, in which she had introduced the modern use of the term racism as “an unproved assumption of biological and perpetual superiority of one group over another.”4 She wrote the book, she said then, witnessing from afar the rise of the Third Reich, as a “citizen scientist.”5 She and Weltfish announced The Races of Mankind as something more ambitious: a first shot in a war on racism. The United States could not win the war, could not defeat the Axis, if it did not defeat racism, the anthropologists argued, including, most of all, racism among Americans. Looking ahead to the formation of the United Nations, Benedict and Weltfish called on the United States to “clean its own house.” It had to reassure the nations of Africa and Asia that “victory in this war will be in the name, not of one race or another, but of the universal Human Race.”6 The government needed a different kind of scientific offensive, and the Boasians, the intellectual circle that formed around the German American anthropologist, volunteered their services. Benedict and Weltfish encouraged readers to see social science as an instrument of war and denazification, but they did not, as some now remember

RUTH BENEDICT LED A CHARGE

23

Darda-BK.indd 23

12/1/21 9:21 PM

24

Chapter 1

the Boasian school, abandon the science of race. Borrowing from their mentor, who had died that winter, Benedict and Weltfish sorted humans into three broad racial categories but insisted that differences in skin color and hair texture did not determine culture. “One race is not ‘born’ equipped to build skyscrapers and put plumbing in their houses and another to run up flimsy shelters and carry their water from the river,” they wrote. “All these things are ‘learned behavior.’”7 The anthropologists defined race as a biological fact— their Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid races constituting distinct human “stocks”—but warned against ideologies that assumed a stable relation between bodies and hierarchies of intelligence and achievement.8 Benedict had given that belief the name, new then, racism. Though a hit in liberal circles, The Races of Mankind incited a backlash in Washington. The head of the United Service Organizations, declaring the ten-cent pamphlet “controversial,” refused to allow it in USO reading rooms.9 Congressman Andrew May of Kentucky, the chairman of the Military Affairs Committee, threatening to “expose the motive behind” the pamphlet, blocked the army from distributing it.10 (The congressman, a Democrat, didn’t like that it showed that Black northerners had scored higher on intelligence tests than white southerners.) Others came to the authors’ defense. Harold Sloan, the economist and executive director of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, condemned May and the Military Affairs Committee for withholding “from our armed forces the simple facts of science that completely refute the enemy’s contention of a superrace.”11 Constance Warren, the president of Sarah Lawrence College, asked in a letter to the New York Times, “Are we going to let Representative May and his colleagues keep our men who are fighting for democracy in ignorance of the fact that modern research proves Jefferson right when he said ‘All men are created equal’?”12 The debate over the pamphlet set racial conservatives against a rising contingent of racial liberals, who embraced the language of wartime nationalism to imagine antiracism as a grand American tradition, a tradition dating back, they claimed, to the slaveholding founding fathers. The liberals won. Close to a million Americans read The Races of Mankind. The Public Affairs Committee had it translated into seven languages. Hundreds of school districts taught it. The suburban Detroit Cranbrook Institute of Science modeled an exhibit after it that later traveled to cities throughout the United States.13

Darda-BK.indd 24

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as War

25

The pamphlet foreshadowed the success of Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal’s then-forthcoming An American Dilemma, which it advertised in a “further reading” section. An American Dilemma established the tenets of a new racial liberalism, most of which Benedict and Weltfish had articulated in a more concentrated form in The Races of Mankind: racial bias caused discrimination and could be remedied with education and integration; segregation and other forms of racism violated the founding ideals of the United States and damaged the government’s interests in decolonizing Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Historians regard An American Dilemma as the unofficial charter of the racial liberal thought that arose after World War II and culminated in the Warren court’s 1954 ruling that segregation in schools violated the Constitution.14 A generation of white liberal officials read it and consulted it for guidance on how to answer a growing civil rights movement, and scholars have looked to it ever since in constructing genealogies of Cold War liberal antiracism. But wartime shortages limited the book’s initial run, and the length and cost (fifteen hundred pages, including ten appendices and almost three hundred pages of notes; $7.50 for two volumes) deterred casual readers, making it a significant text among liberal elites but reaching a narrower audience than some histories suggest. Selling for a dime, The Races of Mankind reached ten times more readers than An American Dilemma, without counting the fi lm, children’s book, and traveling exhibit versions, and it brings some more subtle, often overlooked dimensions of the big book of racial liberalism to the surface. The Swede and his team of American social scientists also, echoing Benedict and Weltfish, who themselves contributed literature reviews to the massive investigation, wrote An American Dilemma with World War II on their minds, describing antiracism as a war, a war that the United States would, in the course of time, win. “The Negro problem in America represents a moral lag in the development of the nation,” Myrdal, then on leave from Stockholm University, wrote in the introduction.15 The nation’s better angels would, he reassured his American readers, deliver it to a moral future. He agreed with Benedict that the United States had two wars to fight: the first against Hitler, the second against the waning racial doctrine he embodied. The Swede and the American encouraged their readers to look to the near horizon, to the end of wartime and an analogous racial time.

Darda-BK.indd 25

12/1/21 9:21 PM

26

Chapter 1

Benedict did not invent the race front. She borrowed it from a movement. In the first months of the war, with Black soldiers and marines serving in segregated units and Black defense workers facing discrimination and violence, the editors of the Pittsburgh Courier had called for a two-front assault on fascism abroad and racism at home. Others enlisted in the fight, transforming the newspaper’s demand into a flash movement, the Double V. Chester Himes, then drafting his first novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go, wondered, “To us Negro Americans, is not victory abroad without victory at home a sham, empty, with no meaning, leaving us no more free than before?” The United States had a “greater war” to fight, Himes argued, a war for “the freedom of all the people of all the world” from colonialism and white racial dominance.16 The Roosevelt and Truman administrations would win the first front but leave the greater war uncontested. The white racial liberals who read and taught Benedict and Weltfish’s pamphlet answered the call for material racial change—“for equal participation in government and equal benefit from national resources,” in Himes’s words—with silence.17 But they did, through The Races of Mankind and An American Dilemma, embrace the martial rhetoric of the Double V, the idea of antiracism as war. Armed with the new social science of race, liberals waged a war to transform not the life chances of Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color but the feelings of white folks, not social structures but miseducated minds. For the Courier and Himes, a war on racism meant challenging the state. For the readers of Benedict and Weltfish, it meant affirming it. For the editors and novelist, it meant an urgent, allout offensive. For the anthropologists, it meant a discrete event, a short-term crisis. Scholars argue that the end of World War II marked a sea change in Western racial regimes. Howard Winant identifies it as a “racial break,” when the contradictions of and resistance to colonialism and segregation forced the United States and other Western governments to undertake racial reforms.18 Jodi Melamed further accentuates the racial break, writing that the end of World War II launched not an age of “racial dualism,” as Winant contends, but a whole new “formally antiracist, liberal-capitalist modernity” in which the United States cast itself as the arbiter of an official, antiredistributive antiracism.19 But the racial liberalism that Winant, Melamed, and others associate with the late 1940s and the 1950s took root during World War II and inherited from it an enduring figurative frame: racism as world-historical event, the

Darda-BK.indd 26

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as War

27

struggle against it a war. From World War II, liberals learned to think of antiracism as war, leading them to route antiracist struggle through the state and to encourage faith in a near-future overcoming. That frame had the effect of undercutting nonstatist and radical antiracisms (states wage war) and militating against enduring change (wars shouldn’t last forever). The ascent of fascist regimes on the Continent motivated liberal social scientists to theorize racism. Benedict, Melville Herskovits, Otto Klineberg, Ashley Montagu, and other Boasians took on hierarchical theories of human difference with World War II raging. The war made their research all the more urgent, but it also encouraged them and their readers to conceive of racism as something to defeat, a retrograde social formation that would soon, with state and nation mobilized against it, die out. Although some, including Benedict, advocated broad redistributive change, acknowledging white racial dominance as a material regime, their strategic use of wartime nationalism instilled the idea of racism as a discrete crisis and antiracism as the immediate solution. When social scientists declared a war on racism, they invited their readers to believe that it would end in the near future, in their lifetimes, setting the stage for the eventual rise of two imagined endings: color blindness and multiculturalism. World War II might have fueled the civil rights movement, but it also limited it, binding antiracism to the state and to the narrative arc of war. That association alarmed a young Ralph Ellison, who, in an unpublished 1944 review of An American Dilemma, worried that antiracism conceived as state violence would, when no longer directed overseas, land back on Black people’s heads—“an instrument of an American tragedy.”20 The nationalist environment of the world war furnished the writing of Benedict and other liberal social scientists with a confused narrative structure: racism as an unnatural, time-bound event and as a natural, almost inevitable result of human difference. Race science, though receding, didn’t vanish overnight but endured long enough to guide a rising liberal antiracism. Anthropologists and sociologists continued to subscribe to a waning racial biologism (Caucasoid, Negroid, Mongoloid) and bind it to an ascendant racial social science (learned behavior, cultural difference). Though often described as a hard turn from race as hierarchical biological difference to race as normative cultural difference, World War II marked not a transition from a hard-edged scientific racism to a more subtle cultural racism but the moment at which anthropologists biologized culture—not a racial break but a racial

Darda-BK.indd 27

12/1/21 9:21 PM

28

Chapter 1

bridge. Liberal social scientists reformed and sustained the hierarchical race science they thought themselves to be dismantling while declaring a war on racism that invited white fantasies of an end to racism and sometimes racial consciousness itself—as an obstacle overcome, a right conferred, an enlightenment attained, a cure administered, a fiction dismantled. Liberals won the war but not in the way they thought. The Anthropology of Racism On the afternoon of December 29, 1938, three hundred members of the American Anthropological Association, including Benedict and Boas, gathered at the Commodore Hotel in midtown Manhattan to condemn Nazi race science. “Anthropology in many countries is being conscripted and its data distorted and misinterpreted to serve the cause of an unscientific racialism,” the association, which Boas had founded in 1902, declared in a statement. “Anthropology provides no scientific basis for discrimination against any people on the ground of racial inferiority, religious affi liation or linguistic heritage.”21 The statement made the AAA the first national academic association to denounce fascism, for which it had Boas to thank. Since founding the association in his forties, three years into his tenure at Columbia, the German émigré had argued, against the rising tide of the eugenics movement, that skin color and hair texture had no bearing on behavior. Humans inherited skin color and learned behavior. Scientists who claimed that race revealed character confused correlation with causation and overlooked the confounding variable of social location or “culture.” In 1925, Boas contributed an article to the Nation titled “What Is Race?,” in which he argued, not for the first time, that “the behavior of an individual is determined not by his racial affi liation, but by the character of his ancestry and his cultural environment. We may judge of the mental characteristics of families and individuals, but not of races.”22 He continued to beat that drum as World War II escalated. “We may not infer how high may be the correlation between bodily build and mental characteristics unless this is determined by an investigation which does not take into consideration position,” he wrote in 1940.23 Neither Boas nor the association he founded dismissed race science. Anthropologists had not erred in contributing to the formation of modern race science, the AAA maintained in the 1938 statement. Racists had misused their findings. It wanted to correct the record, to clear the association’s name. Boas,

Darda-BK.indd 28

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as War

29

the model liberal of his time, condemned scientific racism but not race science, believing, in fact, that the latter could be used to combat the former.24 Some who otherwise admired Boas disagreed with his lingering allegiance to race science. Alain Locke first encountered the anthropologist at the 1911 Races Congress in London, where Boas delivered research on “The Instability of Human Types” that caught the attention of the twenty-five-year-old philosopher, who later delivered a series of lectures at Howard University in which he took the anthropologist’s social constructionism further. Race had “no meaning at all beyond that sense of kind, that sense of kith and ken,” Locke determined. It constituted a “social inheritance” disguised as a “biological or anthropological inheritance.” It could not be written off and should not, he thought, be eradicated (detached from domination, it offered a source of belonging), but it had to be reframed as something handed down one generation to the next and “projected” onto others, not some innate endowment.25 Boas sought to distinguish biological race from racial culture. Locke argued that the idea of the former arose from the latter, that dominating societies had invented race science to vindicate their theft of land and lives.26 Some in Boas’s inner circle shared Locke’s concern but found that they had to go outside the sciences to voice it. Zora Neale Hurston, a Columbia graduate student in the 1930s and the rare Black scientist among Boas’s otherwise white following, often struggled to meet his demand for biological data. When she secured a contract for her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Hurston wrote Benedict from her home in Sanford, Florida, to ask if she might contribute a blurb. She mentioned that she’d love for Boas to blurb the novel as well but, knowing that he found much of her folklore research unscientific and considered her fiction writing a mere distraction, worried that he might “massacre my person.” She asked Benedict if she could send her some “head-measuring instruments” with which she could gather the kind of Black southern cranial data that would get her back in her adviser’s good graces.27 Hurston wrote three more novels and never finished her PhD. Boas didn’t hesitate to throw his weight behind Benedict’s first book, the 1934 classic Patterns of Culture, in which she reviewed her and others’ fieldwork on three Indigenous cultures—the Pueblo of New Mexico, the Dobu of Melanesia, and the Kwakiutl of the Pacific Northwest—to argue that all cultures exhibit a kind of internal logic that distinguishes them from others. A culture’s organization does not “evolve” from ancient to modern, Benedict concluded.

Darda-BK.indd 29

12/1/21 9:21 PM

30

Chapter 1

The outside observer must confront it as it exists in nonhierarchical relation to other cultures. Margaret Mead, her student, colleague, friend, lover, and later executor, described Benedict’s treatment of culture as “personality writ large.”28 Boas, in an introduction to the first edition, called it “the genius of the culture.”29 Benedict argued that the global dissemination of Western culture had allowed the United States and other industrial societies to see their own beliefs and behaviors as universal, the inevitable outcome of human cultural evolution, and to dismiss non-Western cultures as relics of an earlier, less enlightened time. “This world-wide cultural diff usion has protected us as man had never been protected before from having to take seriously the civilizations of other peoples,” she wrote of the modern West. “It has given our culture a massive universality that we have long ceased to account for historically, and which we read off rather as necessary and inevitable.”30 Benedict knew that her cultural relativism wouldn’t go over well in some corners. It violated the American faith in social advancement and self-making individualism, suggesting that all cultures defined and limited how individuals encountered the world around them. Some, she acknowledged in the final sentences of that first book, would greet it as a “doctrine of despair.”31 But Benedict wanted her readers to see it as liberating. If humans didn’t inherit culture and it didn’t evolve in an inevitable direction, then that left it to societies, including her own, to build more humane cultures. After the AAA condemned Nazi race science, Benedict, at Boas’s urging, devoted a semester-long sabbatical to writing a short volume on what she described as “the ‘ism’ of the modern world.” In Race: Science and Politics, she defined racism as a modern invention, not an inevitable source of human division and conflict but a new riff on an old theme: “It is a new way of separating the sheep from the goats.”32 Benedict believed that race had, in a secular age, succeeded religion as the dominant rationale for divesting others of their land and freedom. Benedict hammered on the distinction between race and racism throughout the book, which she divided into two halves, the first dedicated to race and the second to racism. She didn’t want her readers confusing “the facts of race” with “the claims of racism.”33 For all that historians credit Benedict with giving the term racism “popular currency” and adding it to the “national vocabulary,” few remember that she coined it not to renounce race science but to distinguish good race science from bad, to defend race science as a science.34 She forged the scientific

Darda-BK.indd 30

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as War

31

foundation of racial liberalism not on the renunciation of biological theories of race but on a biological account of racial culture, in which Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid “stocks,” “whose anatomical specializations are old and were clearly marked at the dawn of history,” get identified with broad cultural divisions.35 When liberal social scientists inherited that account of culture as the structure of knowledge to which they contributed, they failed to reckon with it as a biologized cultural turn—not a disavowal but a continuation of studies of “Ulotrichy” hair texture, the “Leptorrhine” nose, and the “Mesocephalic” cranium, all of which Benedict detailed in the “science” section of her book.36 Benedict did not declare a war on racism in Race: Science and Politics. She wouldn’t call scientists to the race front until 1943 with her and Weltfish’s The Races of Mankind. But she did frame her argument in nationalist terms. She reasoned, as civil rights leaders would later argue, that racism hurt the racist as much as it hurt the victim. “In persecuting victims, the Nazis were themselves victimized,” degrading themselves and lowering their own standard of living, she wrote. “Our Founding Fathers believed that a nation could be administered without creating victims. It is for us to prove that they were not mistaken.”37 Benedict insisted, to her credit, that education and the cultivation of national fellow feeling would not be enough. Racism thrived under social conditions that benefited some and left others without the resources to live. Combating it called for more than antiracist education. It called for redistribution, for which Benedict looked to the state and the American creed that, she believed, guided it.38 Other Boasians enlisted in the struggle against fascist race science. Melville Herskovits, another former Boas student, reversing his own earlier thought, challenged the idea that Black Americans had no culture of their own, that Black communities in the United States had retained nothing of their African heritage because “Africanisms” could never survive contact with dominant Western cultures. In his 1941 The Myth of the Negro Past, Herskovits argued that enslavement had not robbed Black people of their African roots but that enslaved Africans and their descendants had assumed the “outer form” of Western customs while retaining the “inner values” of African cultures.39 He borrowed his model from Locke, who had argued in the introduction to a 1925 issue of Survey Graphic, a first draft of his movement-defining The New Negro, that the Black American balanced an “outer life” of “the ideals of American

Darda-BK.indd 31

12/1/21 9:21 PM

32

Chapter 1

institutions” with an “inner life” constituted of a “deep feeling of race” that formed “the mainspring of Negro life.”40 Herskovits, then twenty-nine and fresh out of grad school, had contributed an article to the issue in which he recounted visiting Harlem and finding “not a trace” of African culture among the neighborhood’s residents and declared Black communities all but identical to and ever more like their white neighbors—“the same pattern, only a different shade!” Locke loathed the article and, when Herskovits refused to revise it, added an editorial note below the title asking, “Does democracy require uniformity?”41 In time, Locke, sharing with Herskovits a constant stream of articles and research findings about the distinct contributions of Black culture to the United States, to the West, and to the world, brought him around to his side. But the anthropologist continued to see Black culture, what he conceived as the inner Africanisms of Black life in the United States, as a means to a white national end.42 The son of immigrants, Herskovits believed that valuing Black Americans’ African heritage would facilitate their integration into a diverse United States: “To give the Negro an appreciation of his past is to endow him with the confidence in his own position in this country and in the world which he must have, and which he can best attain when he has available a foundation of scientific fact concerning the ancestral cultures of Africa and the survivals of Africanisms in the New World.”43 He offered white immigrant communities (his own) as a model, believing that their allegiance to ancestral cultures did not obstruct but eased their national integration. Herskovits, who later founded the first African studies program in the United States, believed that a loss of cultural heritage rather than an intractable color line had relegated Black Americans to the bottom of the well. Ashley Montagu, who studied under Benedict at Columbia, reached the best-seller list in 1942 with Man’s Most Dangerous Myth, in which he described race as “the tragic myth of our tragic era” and argued that the term should be retired. But Montagu did not, as his title suggests, renounce race science. He identified four human “divisions”: Caucasoid, Negroid, Mongoloid, and, his own addition to the Boasian model, Australoid. (Montagu had written a dissertation about Indigenous Australians.) His four divisions included subdivisions or “ethnicities,” which he classified as social rather than biological formations. “It is alleged that something called ‘race’ is the prime determiner of all the important traits of body and soul, of character and personality,” he

Darda-BK.indd 32

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as War

33

Illustration from Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish’s 1943 pamphlet The Races of Mankind.

wrote. “Such a conception of ‘race’ has no basis in scientific fact.”44 Montagu conformed to the emerging consensus on race, taking issue not with race science but with the wrong kind of race science (not race but “race”). Benedict, Herskovits, and Montagu wanted to defeat racism, but they carried forward and naturalized the categories of a receding racial biologism. Often credited with leading the intellectual transition from “race as science” to “race as social construct,” the Boasians did not instigate the racial break but formed a forgotten bridge. The racial break never broke. The illustrations for Benedict and Weltfish’s The Races of Mankind reveal the biological substructure of the cultural turn in race science. Against their argument that race does not determine culture, the eleven line drawings suture African and Asian bodies to what Western readers imagined as static African and Asian cultural forms. In an illustration of tall and short members of Benedict’s Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid races, the white figures wear suits while the Africans and Asians wear loincloths. Intended to show that “there are tall ones and short ones in all races,” the illustration instead suggests that the anthropologists’ three human races inhabit three isolated cultures, one of business suits and tall buildings and the others of bare feet and huts.45 Benedict and Weltfish wanted to denaturalize the relation between race and culture, but the illustrations worked against that argument, racializing

Darda-BK.indd 33

12/1/21 9:21 PM

34

Chapter 1

(and biologizing) culture. The Boasians, as the historian Matthew Jacobson argues, consolidated modern whiteness, drawing together Irish, Italians, Jews, and WASPs with the “full authority of modern science” while differentiating them, in skin color and culture, from Black and Asian communities.46 In 1946, the United Auto Workers, seeking to ease racial tensions after desegregating local unions in the South, commissioned an animated fi lm version of The Races of Mankind, the ten-minute Brotherhood of Man.47 Benedict and Weltfish then used illustrations from the fi lm to assemble a children’s book, In Henry’s Backyard, which they released not long before Benedict’s death, from a heart attack, in 1948. In the fi lm and children’s book, a white man wakes in his bed and looks out the window to discover that the “whole world” has moved into “his own backyard.” Though thrilled at first to find Arab, Asian, Black, and Mexican families in his neighborhood—the Asians wear rice hats, the Mexicans sombreros—he feels an “ugly sort of tug” in the back of his mind: his “Green Devil,” a small green man who lives inside him, a manifestation of his racial bias.48 The rest of the fi lm and children’s book describe the man’s struggle to rid himself of his Green Devil and embrace his new neighbors. Brotherhood of Man and In Henry’s Backyard, which reached a much wider audience than Benedict’s academic books or the more celebrated An American Dilemma, defined the struggle against racism as a struggle between white men and their wrongheaded feelings, the Green Devil in their minds. When the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization chose Montagu to lead the writing of a statement on race in 1950, the Boasian model of “race as culture” had achieved dominance among liberal intellectuals and officials. That statement, “The Race Question,” renewed the idea of a war on racism that Benedict and Weltfish had introduced in 1943. Circumstances had called UNESCO to “combat,” Montagu and his coauthors declared. “For, like war, the problem of race which directly affects millions of human lives and causes countless conflicts has its roots ‘in the minds of men.’”49 The statement, to which social scientists from seven countries contributed, including the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, showed the Boasians’ influence. “The biological fact of race and the myth of ‘race’ should be distinguished,” it asserted.50 The three human divisions (or four, in Montagu’s writing) constituted that “biological fact.” The belief that they governed behavior constituted the “myth of ‘race.’” Montagu built his argument on a contradiction. He and UNESCO grounded their effort to dismantle racism in the race

Darda-BK.indd 34

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as War

35

Illustration from Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish’s 1948 children’s book In Henry’s Backyard.

science that had long facilitated it. The statement did not mark a shift from scientific racism to a more subtle but also insidious cultural racism but from one form of scientific racism to another, now tucked behind a thin veil of culture difference. But UNESCO’s call for antiracist “fighters” to enlist in their “crusade,” a crusade that Ruth Benedict launched during World War II, resonated with

Darda-BK.indd 35

12/1/21 9:21 PM

36

Chapter 1

racial liberals, who had learned to look to the near horizon for the end of racial time.51 That crusade, that war on racism, consolidated the racial state, securing Washington’s standing as the ultimate arbiter of antiracist struggle (the vehicle for waging war), and framed racism as a short-term crisis, militating against lasting structural change. The Boasian war on racism derived moral force from wartime nationalism and a Black movement against American fascism. The War against American Fascism The historian John Hope Franklin, teaching at St. Augustine’s College, the HBCU in Raleigh, North Carolina, felt on edge. President Franklin Roosevelt had signed the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, mandating that all men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-six register with their local draft boards, and Franklin, then twenty-five, knew he could be drafted. But his uneasiness didn’t stem from the draft. He didn’t feel troubled as a draft-age man but as a historian. “I was painfully aware that, going back to the American Revolution, black participation in America’s wars had never brought African Americans any meaningful change in their status as second-class citizens,” he remembered. “Nothing suggested this war would be any different.”52 After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Franklin organized a committee of teachers at St. Augustine’s to inform students about the war and what it could mean for young Black Americans like himself and them. Their commitment would be double, he told them. He and his students would be “fighting not only tyranny abroad but racism at home as well.”53 Their war would have two fronts. With a low draft number and a declaration of war on President Roosevelt’s desk, Franklin walked over to the navy recruitment office to volunteer. He would, he decided, model an ethic of service and sacrifice for his students. Black leaders shared the young historian’s hesitation and willingness to serve. In 1940, the Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, demanded that the Roosevelt administration desegregate the army, marines, and navy, declaring, “This is no fight merely to wear a uniform. This is a struggle for status, a struggle to take democracy off parchment and give it life.”54 The Baltimore Afro-American reminded readers, “We’ve been fighting our country’s wars since 1775, always getting a slap on the back when the fighting begins and a kick in the pants when it’s over. One hundred and sixty-five years is a long time, long enough to win a square deal.”55 In 1941, before the United States

Darda-BK.indd 36

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as War

37

entered the war, A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, called for a march on Washington to “demand the right to work and fight for our country” in the defense industries and the armed forces.56 He believed that his March on Washington Movement could attract ten thousand demonstrators to Washington and invited Roosevelt to address them.57 Black newspapers advertised the MOWM, and Randolph found himself with commitments from a hundred thousand marchers.58 The president, fearing a large-scale demonstration at his door, issued Executive Order 8802, which established the Fair Employment Practices Commission, and, although it didn’t desegregate the armed forces as Randolph had demanded, the labor leader called off the march. In 1942, the Pittsburgh Courier, with a nod to the MOWM, introduced the Double V movement. A twenty-six-year-old man from Wichita, Kansas, asked in a letter to the editors, “Would it be demanding too much to demand full citizenship rights in exchange for the sacrificing of my life?” He thought not, and, countering the government’s new “V for Victory” ads, called for a Double V: “The first V for victory over our enemies from without, the second V for victories over our enemies within. For surely those who perpetuate these ugly prejudices here are seeking to destroy our democratic form of government just as surely as the Axis forces.”59 The young man tied the war against Nazi fascism to the struggle against anti-Black racism in the United States. The Courier received a flood of letters endorsing his message, running some in the next issue under the banner headline “Nation Lauds Courier’s ‘Double V’ Campaign.” The musicians J. C. Johnson and Andy Razaf collaborated on an official Double V song titled “Yankee Doodle Tan,” and for months the newspaper shared images of young men and women flashing the Double V sign and sold Double V merchandise, including window stickers (two cents), service emblems for “OUR boys” (ten cents), and Johnson and Razaf’s record (thirty cents).60 Other Black newspapers embraced the movement, and some officials, including a few white senators and congressmen, backed it. The Double V had, as the Courier declared that March, seized the nation and introduced the language—antiracism as war—through which Benedict and the Boasians would articulate their own scientific offensive. “The 15,000,000 colored people in this country,” Frank Bolden of the Courier wrote, “have proven that they love America because they have given unselfishly of their ‘blood, sweat and tears’ in every national endeavor from the Revolutionary War down to the

Darda-BK.indd 37

12/1/21 9:21 PM

38

Chapter 1

present World Conflict, even though they were discriminated against by some who did not understand the American creed.”61 The movement did not raise doubts about the American creed but embodied it, Bolden insisted, as a war on racism, the antithesis of that creed.62 Not all Black men embraced the nationalist demand for a Double V. Some resisted the draft, as the historian Robin D. G. Kelley observes, whether in refusing to register—Black men constituted more than a third of nonregistrants—or through more subtle forms of refusal.63 Malcolm X, knowing that army intelligence officers often hung around his neighborhood, announced to all that would listen that he was “frantic to join . . . the Japanese Army” and arrived at his induction examination “costumed like an actor” in a zoot suit and yellow knob-toed shoes.64 Dizzy Gillespie told his army interviewers that, if drafted, he might confuse white American soldiers for Germans and shoot them instead. “Well, look, at this time, at this stage in my life here in the United States whose foot has been in my ass? The white man’s foot has been in my ass hole buried up to his knee in my ass hole!” the musician said. “You’re telling me the German is the enemy. At this point, I can never even remember having met a German. So if you put me out there with a gun in my hand and tell me to shoot at the enemy, I’m liable to create a case of ‘mistaken identity.’”65 X and Gillespie, though no nationalists, agreed with the Double Vers in refusing to risk their lives in the name of freedom overseas when they had never known it in the United States. The small-time racketeer and the musician received 4-F status and walked. The movement didn’t last long. With the Roosevelt administration refusing to budge on integration and most Black soldiers and marines consigned to labor battalions, the headlines soon changed, growing ever dimmer on the war. The Courier, while still advertising Double V merchandise, ran stories of Black soldiers refused service at restaurants in Walla Walla, Washington, and in other northern states, and of a Black sergeant’s death at the hands of white police officers in Little Rock, Arkansas. “The War Department has given Negroes token representation,” the editors wrote, and “placed a preponderance of Negro selectees in quartermaster, engineering and service units.”66 Randolph also lost faith. In 1944, abandoning the nationalism of the MOWM, he mounted a more radical attack on the Roosevelt administration. “This is not a war for freedom,” he declared. “It is a war between the imperialism of Fascism and Nazism and the imperialism of monopoly capitalistic democracy. Under

Darda-BK.indd 38

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as War

39

neither are the colored peoples free.”67 Randolph and others no longer believed that the first V aligned with the second. The state had found a new second front, a front not of racial redistribution but of greater, world-consuming racial theft. James Baldwin felt the change in his Harlem neighborhood. A teenager when the war broke out, he noticed a “strange, bitter shadow” on the faces of the men and women on his block, who gathered in “the strangest combinations”— young with old, Adventists with Methodists, conservatives with radical “race men”—to discuss what they had heard from their sons and brothers in the army. “Racial tensions throughout the country were exacerbated during the early years of the war,” Baldwin recalled, “partly because the labor market brought together hundreds of thousands of ill-prepared people and partly because Negro soldiers, regardless of where they were born, received their military training in the south. What happened in defense plants and army camps had repercussions, naturally, in every Negro ghetto.”68 In 1942, Baldwin moved to Montgomery, New Jersey, to work in the town’s defense factories and for the first time, having never lived outside of Harlem, found himself denied service at diners and bars. The war brought him into contact with what he believed had killed his Louisiana-born father: “the weight of white people in the world.”69 A few hours after his father’s funeral, in the summer of 1943, a white NYPD officer shot a Black soldier at the Braddock Hotel, triggering a rebellion. The unrealized ambitions of the Double V movement also drove a wedge between the Black Left and white labor. White-led trade unions worried that backing the movement could undermine the war effort. The Daily Worker, the Communist Party USA newspaper, condemned it, insisting that “the foes of ‘Negro rights’ in the country should be considered as secondary [enemies to the Axis].”70 The communist snubbing didn’t sit well with Chester Himes, a fellow traveler who came to see white trade unionists and the CPUSA as obstacles rather than allies in the struggle for Black freedom. He declared his allegiance to the Double V movement, calling, in a National Urban League journal, for the nation to “open a second front for freedom” against “our powerful native fascists.”71 It didn’t, and near the end of the war, a frustrated Himes asked, “Are we seeking the defeat of our ‘Aryan’ enemies, or the winning of them?” and wondered whether a communist revolution, as Marx and Engels had conceived it, would serve Black America at all.72 The novelist determined that war had been the wrong figurative language for antiracist struggle not

Darda-BK.indd 39

12/1/21 9:21 PM

40

Chapter 1

because wartime didn’t, as most believed, end—constituting, in the historian Mary Dudziak’s words, an “enduring condition,” “the only kind of time we have”—but because white leaders committed the nation to wars that served white racial interests.73 The war on racism that he had once cheered might, he thought, boomerang on him and other Black people. Himes’s 1945 novel If He Hollers Let Him Go signaled his disillusionment with the Double V movement and with white trade unionists at the end of the war. The novel follows a Black defense worker in wartime Los Angeles as he goes from newborn nationalist to frustrated doubter of all that white America, Right and Left, said it believed in. “I felt the size of it, the immensity of the production,” Bob Jones, the protagonist, remarks of seeing the docks on which he works. He had never “given a damn” about the war, he admits, but now, looking out at the cranes, he got “that filled-up feeling of my country; I felt included in it all; I had never felt included before.”74 The feeling is fleeting. After a white woman refuses to work with him and they exchange insults, Bob receives a demotion. His union steward declines to defend him, suggesting that it could aggravate racial tensions among union members and hurt the war effort: “In order to beat fascism we got to have unity.” Bob fires back, “What the hell do I care about unity, or the war either, for that matter, as long as I’m kicked around by every white person who comes along?”75 Bob and Himes himself had lost the “fi lled-up feeling” of the Double V, recognizing that war and nationalism didn’t serve their interests. In North Carolina, John Hope Franklin discovered what the novelist had. At the navy recruitment office, he reeled off his credentials, which included a Harvard PhD, for his interviewer, a young white lieutenant. The lieutenant told him that he couldn’t offer him a commission because he lacked “one important qualification, and that was color.”76 Undeterred, Franklin wrote to the War Department, where some of his former Harvard classmates, including some who hadn’t finished their degrees, had obtained assignments as historians. Although he enclosed a letter of recommendation from the president of the neighboring University of North Carolina, the War Department never wrote back. When the army drafted his brother, a college graduate and a high school principal, and assigned him to the kitchen brigade, where he faced abuse from his white staff sergeant, Franklin decided that he’d had enough and dedicated himself to avoiding the draft. “We pledged ourselves to a ‘Double V,’” he later wrote, “and no one more devoutly hoped for success

Darda-BK.indd 40

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as War

41

on both fronts than myself. With these twin goals in mind, I was as patriotic as any American. There is, however, a point beyond which even the most patient, long-suffering loyalist will not go.”77 The Roosevelt administration had flouted the demands for a Double V, and Franklin had lost faith in a red, white, and blue war on racism. In the last months of the war, the Chicago Defender admitted, “Dixie still prefers Nazis to Negroes.”78 But the Boasians and the War Department embraced the rhetoric of the 1942 movement, declaring their own war on racism, a war that also looked to the state for answers but that fostered a more enduring faith in time. Onward Black Soldiers The navy didn’t want Franklin’s blood either. In late November 1941, the Baltimore Afro-American heard from readers that the local Red Cross had refused their donations. It investigated and discovered that the nation’s largest collector and distributor of blood had, after meeting with officials from the service branches, agreed to restrict their collections to white donors. “We have thousands of Southern whites in our forces,” the director of the Washington blood drive, a doctor and lecturer at Johns Hopkins, said in an interview, “and they are absolutely against having the blood of colored donors let into their system.”79 The board of governors, while recognizing no scientific difference between Black and white blood, he said, felt obliged to accommodate the white southerners’ wishes. Black leaders accused the American Red Cross of bending to “the cult and curse of Hitler and Hitlerism.”80 The editor of the Crisis observed that the Red Cross had launched a fundraiser that year, asking for tens of millions of dollars, and, while it wouldn’t take their blood, it didn’t, as far as he could see, “refuse any Negro money.”81 The national director of the blood drive defended the decision as a stand for individual freedom. “It seems,” he wrote in a letter, “that the feelings and perhaps even the prejudices of individuals to whom transfusions are given should be respected as a symbol of democracy.”82 The director of the New York drive, a Black doctor, agreed, admitting that while “there is no scientific basis for the separation of the blood from different races,” there is “a definite social problem which cannot be overlooked.”83 That winter, the Red Cross took a different tack, announcing that it would receive donations from Black donors but, in a move that the Chicago Defender described as an “odious” arrangement, segregate them so that soldiers,

Darda-BK.indd 41

12/1/21 9:21 PM

42

Chapter 1

marines, and sailors could receive transfusions using “blood from their own race.”84 Facing increased demands after the United States entered the war, it needed their blood after all. (The organization continued to maintain separate blood banks into the first months of the Korean War.)85 The Red Cross carried out the Boasian balancing act, defending dubious biological racial differences on cultural rather than scientific grounds. White southerners made a biological racist argument against an integrated blood bank, and the leaders of the Red Cross defended it as a valid cultural choice. The board of governors neither defended nor condemned race science, reframing blood transfusions as a cultural issue—and biologizing culture as it did. The segregated army needed Black soldiers as much as the segregated Red Cross needed Black blood. Although the Office of War Information never acknowledged the Double V movement, it did, like Benedict and Weltfish, borrow the movement’s language. In 1943, the OWI issued a pamphlet titled Negroes and the War, a revised and illustrated version of Chandler Owen’s 1942 article “What Will Happen to the Negro If Hitler Wins!,” which the Office of Facts and Figures, the forerunner to the OWI, had commissioned before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Owen, a one-time radical socialist who had drifted rightward in middle age, defined the future of Black people in the United States as a choice, a war, between ever-greater freedom under American democratic rule and enslavement under Nazism. “Some Negro Americans say that it makes no difference who wins this war,” he wrote. “These are the people who emphasize liabilities; they never appraise their assets. They magnify the bad. They minimize the good.”86 Owen instead magnified the good, cataloging all that Black people had achieved in the United States, and minimized the bad, including segregation and abuse in the army in which they now served. He argued that the government had committed itself to waging war on racism— Nazi racism, which, he insisted, constituted the real threat to Black Americans. His original title said it all. He didn’t ask “What Will Happen to the Negro If Hitler Wins!” He declared it. Owen, a Black man whose image the OWI, as if to confirm his Blackness, included on the first page of the pamphlet, scolded his readers as if they had all sworn allegiance to the Axis: “What would Hitler have done?”; “Can you imagine Hitler doing that?”; “There, men and women of color, is your social security under Hitler.” He claimed that if Hitler won the war, Black people would find themselves “turned into slaves or turned into the street” or incarcerated

Darda-BK.indd 42

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as War

43

in segregated cell blocks—all without acknowledging that so much of what he warned against seemed to describe three hundred years of Black life in North America.87 The OWI, after the initial enthusiasm of the Double V had waned, seized the movement’s martial rhetoric, redirecting that war on racism outward, overseas, against someone else. Black leaders did not welcome the OWI’s scolding. Lester Granger, the head of the National Urban League, compared the pamphlet’s message to “kicking a man who is down, and congratulating him because he is not yet dead.”88 The OWI heard his and others’ criticism and, ignoring it, distributed Negroes and the War to some two million readers. The office set out, it declared, to “place one copy in the hands of each Negro family in the United States.” National news media ran excerpts of the pamphlet, marking the first time some had ever, as the New York Times observed, “published a picture of a Negro except on the sports page.”89 The Times and other national media admired most of all the OWI’s celebration of Black advancement in the United States. The images included Black law students, surgeons, police officers, dressmakers, chemists, and coastguardsmen. The pamphlet described a people on the rise: more doctors, more scientists, more teachers and students, more ministers and churches. “We have come a long way in the last fift y years, if slowly. There is still a long way to go before equality is attained, but the pace is faster, and never faster than now,” Owen wrote. “Progress? Yes. Too slow? Yes; but progress.”90 He and the OWI encouraged the growing liberal faith in racial time, the belief that the United States marched forward, and never backward, toward a future of ever more Black doctors and ever greater freedom. Progress? Yes, of course. The OWI dedicated the final page of Negroes and the War to an image of Joe Louis, which it had used to aid recruitment and sell war bonds in Black communities since the boxer’s enlistment in the army in the first weeks of the war. Louis had defeated the German fighter Max Schmeling in Yankee Stadium in 1938, making him an ideal messenger for the Office of War Information. The image showed Louis dressed in an outdated uniform, bearing a rifle, and declaring, “We’ll win ’cause we’re on God’s side.”91 His willingness to throw his name behind the war effort also earned him a minor role in the highest-grossing fi lm of 1943, the musical revue This Is the Army, in which he and a chorus of uniformed Black men entertain a white theater audience with the song-and-dance number “What the Well-Dressed Man in Harlem

Darda-BK.indd 43

12/1/21 9:21 PM

44

Chapter 1

Will Wear.” The chorus sings of a “change in fashion” on Lenox Avenue in which slick Harlemites have traded in their zoot suits for tucked-in, buttoneddown army uniforms. “Mr. Dude has disappeared with his flashy tie,” the men announce. “Top hat, white tie and tails no more.” Now, they sing, the “welldressed man in Harlem” desires an “olive drab color scheme” and a “tin hat for overseas.”92 The number ends with Louis and his Black comrades saluting the white theatergoers. The song’s not-so-subtle message is that the army straightens out rebellious young Black men, men donning long-tailed zoot suits in violation of wartime fabric rationing.93 The fi lm, though segregated in form (Black and white actors don’t share scenes or songs), does not mention the status of Black men in the army. The OWI issued guidelines instructing studios that “fi lms in which there is reference to racial minorities should avoid showing segregation wherever possible, and not deal too lengthily with sharp contrasts between the conditions of majority and minority peoples.”94 The blockbuster musical more than met the government’s standards, suggesting that racism would end as soon as Black men retired their zoots and flew straight and that the segregated army could teach them how. Negroes and the War offloaded American racism onto Hitler. This Is the Army blamed Black people themselves. The government’s wartime racial messaging culminated in 1944 with The Negro Soldier, Frank Capra’s “Negro war effort” fi lm, a kind of coda to his Why We Fight series.95 The fi lmmaker, after a few false starts, hired Carlton Moss, a Black theater director, as his screenwriter in late 1942. The theater man and first-time screenwriter had his work cut out for him. “Moss wore his blackness as conspicuously as a bandaged head,” Capra later wrote in his score-settling 1971 memoir. “Time and again, he would write a scene, then I’d rewrite it, eliminating the angry fervor. He’d object and I’d explain that when something’s red-hot, the blow torch of passion only louses up its glow. We must persuade and convince, not by rage but by reason.”96 Capra’s conservativism and the army’s restrictions led Moss to, as he described the final version, “ignore what’s wrong with the army and tell what’s right with my people.”97 In that final version, a young Black minister (Moss himself) delivers a sermon to a Black congregation that includes soldiers, marines, and sailors, and their beaming mothers and fathers. The minister, gesturing to a service flag hanging from the rafters, informs the churchgoers that he will be setting aside the sermon he had written for the occasion. He has something on his mind.

Darda-BK.indd 44

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as War

45

A minister (Carlton Moss) warns a Black congregation about Nazism in Frank Capra’s 1944 propaganda fi lm The Negro Soldier.

He recounts seeing Louis defeat Schmeling in 1938. “An American fist won a victory, but it wasn’t the final victory. Now those two men that were matched in the ring that night are matched again,” he tells the congregation, as footage of Louis fighting Schmeling blurs into footage of Louis leading American soldiers through an obstacle course and Schmeling training in the Nazi army. “This time it’s a fight not between man and man, but between nation and nation.”98 The fi lm folded the Double V movement’s war on fascism abroad and racism at home into a single, nationalist struggle: Louis versus Schmeling, Black America versus the Third Reich. The minister, echoing Owen, reminds his congregants that Hitler considered Black people “half ape” and had vowed to enslave and hang them. While southern segregationists, as the historian Jason Ward writes, formed their own Double V movement against the Axis abroad and “federal encroachment and black insurgency” at home, white liberal officials merged the Black movement’s two Vs into one, ascribing racism to Hitler and the Axis governments and antiracism to Washington.99 The defeat of Nazism, they suggested, in pamphlets and movies, meant the defeat of racism. The first V guaranteed the second.

Darda-BK.indd 45

12/1/21 9:21 PM

46

Chapter 1

Black critics didn’t condemn The Negro Soldier as they had Negroes and the War and This Is the Army. Richard Wright, assuming the worst, made a list of “stereotyped roles frequently accorded the Negro in the cinema” when he arrived at the theater and left an hour later without having seen one. “It was a pleasant surprise,” the novelist told the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.100 Langston Hughes declared the fi lm “distinctly and thrillingly worthwhile.”101 The New York Amsterdam News called it “the greatest step Uncle Sam has taken in presenting the Negro’s true position in the defense of our country.”102 Some of the same writers who had denounced Chandler Owen for lecturing Black Americans about the dangers of Nazism commended Carlton Moss for sermonizing them about it. Where Owen scolded, Moss galvanized. Where Owen worried about the worst case, Moss assumed the best. The film ends with the church choir singing a soaring rendition of “Onward Christian Soldier” that brings the congregants to their feet. When the army screened it for Black soldiers, they stood and saluted.103 Hortense Spillers identifies the Black sermon as a “ground for hermeneutical play” and a “paradigm of the structure of ambivalence that constitutes the black person’s relationship to American culture and apprenticeship in it.”104 The Black minister, the cultural theorist argues, masters the form and subverts it, accommodates the dominant culture and transforms it, ordaining a movement of struggle rather than inevitable overcoming. For all the accommodations that Moss had to make, traces of that structure of ambivalence remain in his sermon. But the marriage of faith and nation—the service flag in the rafters, the Christian soldiers in army green—signaled that the state alone could liberate Black people in a war for the American creed. The War for the American Creed The New Deal suffered a debilitating setback in the 1942 midterm elections. After the GOP gained forty-six seats in the House and nine in the Senate, Congress defunded the Farm Security Administration and abolished the Works Progress Administration. The elections revealed cracks in the New Deal coalition, and liberal internationalists turned to wartime nationalism to chart a new consensus course for the United States. In 1943, Vice President Henry Wallace, addressing a labor meeting in Detroit, called for a new internationalism, for a “century of the common man.”105 That common man’s internationalism could not be achieved unless the United States led, and the United States

Darda-BK.indd 46

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as War

47

could not lead, Wallace declared, unless it modeled the values it urged on others. “We cannot fight to crush Nazi brutality abroad and condone race riots at home,” he told the meeting, alluding to that summer’s riots and rebellions in Detroit and elsewhere. “We cannot plead for equality of opportunity for peoples every where and overlook the denial of the right to vote for millions of our own people.”106 Wendell Willkie, who had run against the Roosevelt-Wallace ticket in 1940, agreed, scoring a massive best seller in 1943 with One World, in which he chronicled his two-month, thirty-one-thousand-mile world tour, from the Middle East to the Soviet Union to China. Willkie discovered, he wrote, a “gigantic reservoir of good will toward us, the American people.”107 Iranians, Soviets, and Chinese—all, he said, looked to the United States to deliver on the unrealized ambition of the League of Nations. But first it had to rid itself of “race imperialism” at home. “The attitude of the white citizens of this country toward the Negroes,” Willkie determined, “has undeniably had some of the unlovely characteristics of an alien imperialism—a smug racial superiority, a willingness to exploit an unprotected people.”108 Wallace, Willkie, and other liberal internationalists knew that the United States could not make inroads in the decolonizing world if it didn’t address southern segregation, news of which, Willkie noted, had reached Asia and the Middle East and concerned the officials with whom he met there. (Some in Lebanon, for example, asked him how the “maladjustments of race in America” might figure into the state’s “relations with Vichy.”)109 Black communities had grown frustrated with the government’s hollow assurances, and, after Adam Clayton Powell Jr. won a seat in Congress vowing to “represent the Negro people first” and “after that all the other American people,” white liberals worried that it could lead to a militant turn among Black leaders.110 In 1944, Wallace lost his slot on the Roosevelt ticket to Harry Truman. Willkie died of heart failure that fall at fift y-two. Although they wouldn’t benefit from it themselves, the two men had drafted the world-facing racial liberalism, an internationalist American creed, that would animate the Cold War state. Their ideas received the backing of science in Benedict and Weltfish’s The Races of Mankind and in An American Dilemma, which Frederick Keppel, the president of the Carnegie Corporation, had commissioned in 1937, recruiting Gunnar Myrdal, then thirty-eight, to direct “a comprehensive study of the Negro in the United States.”111 Keppel decided to “import” a director,

Darda-BK.indd 47

12/1/21 9:21 PM

48

Chapter 1

overlooking Black scholars, including W. E. B. Du Bois, then seeking funding for his never-finished “Encyclopedia of the Negro,” because he wanted someone “with a fresh mind, uninfluenced by traditional attitudes or by earlier conclusions.” The director must, he said, come from a nation with “high intellectual and scholarly standards but with no background or traditions of imperialism” so that Black readers might trust the findings.112 He looked to Sweden and settled on the young sociologist then teaching at Stockholm University. A foreign intellectual’s endorsement of an American creed could not have come at a better time. “When the Trustees of the Carnegie Corporation asked for the preparation of this report in 1937, no one (except possibly Adolf Hitler) could have foreseen that it would be made public at a day when the place of the Negro in our American life would be the subject of greatly heightened interest,” Keppel wrote in his foreword to the book, “when the eyes of men of all races the world over are turned upon us to see how the people of the most powerful of the United Nations are dealing at home with a major problem of race relations.”113 The war had made that anti-Black racism visible to the world, but it also, he believed, offered a solution: a renewed faith in the nation’s liberal creed and an emerging conviction, at least among white liberal elites, that it could be won. An American Dilemma, though more subtle in how it wielded martial language and biologized categories of cultural difference, carried on the Boasians’ war on racism and their faith in a near-future overcoming. Myrdal embraced his assigned role as an outside observer, introducing himself as “a stranger to the problem” without “all the familiar and conventional moorings of viewpoints and valuations.”114 With a budget of $250,000, he recruited a star-studded team of American collaborators, including the political scientist Ralph Bunche, the sociologists E. Franklin Frazier and Charles Johnson, the philosopher Locke, and Boas and his former students Benedict, Herskovits, and Montagu, from whom he gathered literature reviews or “memoranda.” One historian describes the book as “a battleground in miniature,” a distillation of the social scientific struggle to chart the future of Black America, with a white Swede, of all people, setting the rules.115 The sociologist didn’t sit down to write An American Dilemma until March 1941, after returning from a war-torn Scandinavia. He considered it his contribution to the war effort. “I thought about all the youngsters, all my friends in Europe, who were either in prison or killed in war,” Myrdal remembered of drafting the book in a borrowed Princeton office. “It became my war work.

Darda-BK.indd 48

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as War

49

And I think this meant much for what the book came to be.”116 The war also framed how he thought about race in the United States. “The War is crucial for the future of the Negro, and the Negro problem is crucial in the War,” he wrote, imagining the titular American dilemma as an “ever-raging conflict” between national values and national behavior in which the former would, in time, overwhelm the latter.117 Nikhil Singh, the historian of race, argues that An American Dilemma established an enduring liberal faith in racial reform as “something that is paradoxically already accomplished and never quite complete.”118 But the book also framed the American dilemma as a war, inviting readers to see racism as a time-limited crisis, an antagonist to be turned back, defeated for good like an army of old men toting Civil War muskets. An American Dilemma located the battle for the national creed not in the halls of Congress, not in courtrooms, neighborhoods, schools, or businesses, but in the minds of white men. “The ordinary white man,” Myrdal wrote, subscribed to a moralism and rationalism that constituted “the glory of the nation, its youthful strength, perhaps the salvation of mankind” but that also clashed with the nation’s treatment of Black people. That conflict created a “moral struggle” that unfolded not between people but within them, within the other wise moral minds of white men. “There are no homogeneous ‘attitudes,’” he determined, “but a mesh of struggling inclinations, interests, and ideals, some held conscious and some suppressed for long intervals but all active in bending behavior in their direction.”119 The white American mind contained the whole of the dilemma: the racist attitudes that marred the national creed and the moralism and rationalism that would reform them. White men stood as the villains and as the heroes-to-be of the war for the American creed, a creed that, when won, might save the world. “America feels itself to be humanity in miniature,” Myrdal wrote in the final pages of An American Dilemma. “When in this crucial time the international leadership passes to America, the great reason for hope is that this country has a national experience of uniting racial and cultural diversities and a national theory, if not a consistent practice, of freedom and equality for all.”120 If the conflicted white American mind contained the nation’s moral struggle and the nation contained the world, then the future of the world, he suggested, came down to how white Americans confronted that sometimes conflicting mesh of inclinations, interests, and ideals. An American Dilemma shed the outward racial biologism that still lingered at the surface of Benedict’s Race: Science and Politics and Montagu’s

Darda-BK.indd 49

12/1/21 9:21 PM

50

Chapter 1

Man’s Most Dangerous Myth. The “Negro race” is “a social and conventional, not a biological concept,” Myrdal wrote, citing state and regional differences in the legal definition of race. “In modern biological and ethnological research ‘race’ as a scientific concept has lost sharpness of meaning, and the term is disappearing in sober writings.”121 Although he continued to distinguish between a Caucasoid and a Negroid race, he insisted that the future of race science would not be biological but sociological, not race as nature but race as social construct. (The Mongoloid race all but disappeared, receiving one mention in an endnote. An American Dilemma sketched racial liberalism in Black and white.) While subscribing to the Boasian claim that cultures could be differentiated but not ranked, Myrdal defined Black culture as “a distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American culture.” White culture could not be described as better “in an absolute sense,” he stressed, before adding that cultural relativism did not “gainsay our assumption that here, in America, American culture is ‘highest’ in the pragmatic sense that adherence to it is practical for any individual or group which is not strong enough to change it.”122 An American Dilemma might have discarded some of the biological exterior of the Boasians’ research, but it carried forward their biologized theories of racial culture. The Swedish sociologist could define Black and white national cultures as coherent, isolated, nonintersecting entities, lending themselves to hierarchical ordering, because Benedict and her colleagues had laid racial biologism as the foundation on which they introduced the idea of race as culture. An American Dilemma, Myrdal’s “war work,” his contribution to the race front, blurred the line between a war on white racism and an emerging war on a biologized Black culture.123 The liberal scientific war on Black culture found an audience with liberal elites, including some Black liberals, who disseminated the claims of An American Dilemma. (Although wartime shortages limited the initial run of the fifteen-hundred-page book, the Carnegie Corporation got it into the hands of some five hundred leaders and intellectuals, including Eleanor Roosevelt. About a hundred thousand readers bought it after the war—a lot but nowhere close to the sales figures for The Races of Mankind.)124 In a commencement address at Fisk University, Ralph Bunche, who had contributed more than a thousand pages of memoranda to An American Dilemma (and whom some at the time believed to be the real author), celebrated an American

Darda-BK.indd 50

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as War

51

creed “writ large in our Constitution, in our traditions.” Bunche urged the graduates to discard their Black identities. “Negroes,” he stated, “are better Americans than they are Negroes. They are Negroes primarily in a negative sense—they reject that sort of treatment that deprives them of their birthright as Americans.” Without the “un-American handicap of race,” he added, “their identification as Negroes in the American society would become meaningless—at least as meaningless as it is to be of English, or French, or German, or Italian ancestry.”125 Bunche, who would win the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating an end to the First Arab-Israeli War, suggested that white racism had inflicted something called “Negro culture” on Black people and advised the Fisk grads to abandon that culture, to shed their Blackness and embrace a white cultural nationalism. He told the young Black men and women seated before him to wage their own war, not an external war on white racial dominance but an internal war on Blackness. The wars that the Boasians and the Double Vers had declared at the outset of the world war raged on, but, with the war among white Western governments over, the race front had moved, settling back along the color line. The War on Blackness “Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma is not an easy book for an American Negro to review,” a thirty-year-old Ralph Ellison wrote in 1944. Ellison, whose review never ran in the small magazine that had commissioned it, the Antioch Review, worried that, for all the book’s merits, it contained “a strong charge of anti-democratic elements” that could be turned against Black people.126 An American Dilemma assumed that Black communities had nothing to offer the larger nation, that they had no distinct culture of their own, other than a damaged form of white culture. Ellison did not consider Blackness “distorted” or “pathological” and did not see much to desire in whiteness, not that white people would ever share that identification with Black people. An American Dilemma failed to see that Black culture might offer “counter values” to white national culture, that the United States could not be democratic until it allowed Black people the freedom, he wrote, borrowing a favorite line from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “to take [their own culture] and create of it ‘the uncreated consciousness of their race.’”127 Paul Bixler, an editor at Antioch, had solicited the review in the fall of 1944, after a chorus of critics, white and Black, had hailed An American Dilemma

Darda-BK.indd 51

12/1/21 9:21 PM

52

Chapter 1

as “a book which nobody who tries to face the Negro problem with any honesty can afford to miss” and “the most penetrating and important book on our contemporary American civilization that has ever been written.”128 When Ellison mailed him his “rather brash review,” as he later described it, Bixler, finding it “a little too hot” for Antioch, killed it.129 The Germans launched an offensive on the Ardennes that winter, and Ellison, a merchant marine, sailed to France. He didn’t revisit his review until 1964, when he included it in Shadow and Act with a few words tacked on to the end: “—Unpublished. Written in 1944 for The Antioch Review.” Ellison later looked back on the review as a moment that marked for him “a break with sociology as a guide to understanding my own life and background of experience.”130 He didn’t believe that social science had the answers he sought and dedicated himself to seeing if a novel might. When Ellison sat down to review An American Dilemma, he knew that the war wouldn’t last much longer. He didn’t find that reassuring because he didn’t believe that, with the Axis defeated, the United States would wage the war on racism that the Boasians, Himes, and the Double V movement had called for. He worried that it would instead declare war on Black Americans, with liberals leading the charge. “The military phase of the war will not last forever,” Ellison observed. “It is then that [An American Dilemma] might be used for less democratic purposes.” He concluded his review with an urgent warning: “This is the cue for liberal intellectuals to get busy to see that An American Dilemma does not become an instrument of an American tragedy.”131 Ellison recognized the ease with which a war on racism could slide into a war on Blackness waged in the name of antiracism. Liberal science had hardened the color line (Caucasoid, Negroid) while seeming to dismantle it (social construct), licensing white liberals to direct their war-honed martial rhetoric at Black people while shielding themselves with the claim that Blackness didn’t exist at all, other than as a kind of negative reflection of whiteness. Ellison, reading between the lines of An American Dilemma, didn’t see much to distinguish the new race science from the old. The effort to eradicate racist feelings from white minds looked a lot like an effort to eradicate Black culture, now imagined as a manifestation of white racist feelings, from Black communities. “Are American Negroes simply the creation of white men,” Ellison asked, “or have they at least helped to create themselves out of what they found around them? Men have made a way of

Darda-BK.indd 52

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as War

53

life in caves and upon cliffs, why cannot Negroes have made a life upon the horns of the white man’s dilemma?” And how, he wondered, could the horns of the white man’s dilemma be the solution to that dilemma? The end of World War II led Ellison to ask what Frederick Douglass had wondered in 1875, at the end of Reconstruction: “If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to  the blacks, what will peace among the whites bring?”132 Ellison had a hunch. The violence that the state had meted out during the war had to go somewhere. The social scientific war on racism consolidated the racial state, routing activism to Washington and encouraging time-limited solutionism, but it also, the aspiring novelist observed, tied liberal antiracism to state violence. Black people tended to be on the receiving end of that violence, and Ellison didn’t see how it would be otherwise after the world war. (The coming wars on drugs and crime would bear out his unpublished warning, the American tragedy he had feared.) Ellison had struggled with the social science of race since he first encountered it as a student at the Tuskegee Institute in the mid-1930s. He recalled the “humiliation” he felt when a teacher, sharing the wisdom of the Chicago school sociologist Robert Park, described Black people as the “lady of the races” without, Ellison remarked, “even bothering to wash his hands, much less his teeth.” His three years at Tuskegee taught him, he later wrote, that “nothing could go unchallenged, especially that feverish industry dedicated to telling Negroes who and what they are, and which can usually be counted upon to deprive both humanity and culture of their complexity.”133 In his review of An American Dilemma, Ellison didn’t limit his criticism to that “feverish industry” to which it belonged. He also condemned the Left and New Dealers for how they “went about solving the Negro problem without defining the nature of the problem beyond its economic and narrowly political aspects.”134 The Left and the Roosevelt administration had failed to account for the vibrant world of Black culture, he thought, while liberal sociologists had failed to account for the material interests that sustained a white national culture. Ellison, who had begun to distance himself from communism but had not yet cut ties with it—he wouldn’t create the character of Brother Jack for a few more years—identified a gulf between a deracinated economism and a dematerialized scientism. That gulf, he wrote, “where Marx cries out for Freud and Freud for Marx, but where approaching, both grow wary and shout insults lest

Darda-BK.indd 53

12/1/21 9:21 PM

54

Chapter 1

they actually meet, has taken the form of the Negro problem.”135 The intellectual momentum had, Ellison realized, swung again, from Marx to Freud, from the old Left to the new liberalism. The war had hollowed out the New Deal and nationalized the Black freedom struggle, framing it not as a movement for resources and enfranchisement but as a battle for a more liberal whiteness and a less Black Blackness. Ellison and Myrdal met in 1967 at an event at the University of Michigan. Ellison, addressing thousands of students at Ann Arbor’s Hill Auditorium, and with the Swedish sociologist looking on, argued that “in treating people as abstractions rather than individuals, sociology has ignored the complexity of human life and gotten us further away from realities.” He worried that An American Dilemma and the age of racial liberalism it inaugurated had “created young black Negroes who believe the sociological definitions of themselves” and described a Black thirteen-year-old who, after the Newark rebellion, bemoaned, at least in Ellison’s telling, that “women dominate our families and I’m culturally deprived.”136 Amid the first stirrings of what some would later describe as a white conservative backlash to Black civil rights, the novelist looked instead to the 1940s, blaming a liberal frontlash of officials and jurists and the social scientists who advised them, including the man standing beside him. Myrdal admitted that “sometimes in failing to grasp the complexity of life, we [sociologists] do gloss over important problems” while defending the sociologist’s role in offering “rational information” on which to build.137 He then, out of nowhere, condemned anthropologists for disseminating statistics that he found dubious. Neither man could see how anthropologists—Ruth Benedict, Gene Weltfish, Franz Boas, Melville Herskovits, Ashley Montagu—had formed the biological substructure of the racial liberalism to which An American Dilemma had contributed, wedding race science to cultural difference, the Caucasoid and Negroid races to the social construct, wartime to racial time. The literature scholar Kenneth Warren argues that Jim Crow defined Ellison’s career and made it difficult for him to write another novel after Invisible Man. Ellison’s artistic moment had, he suggests, vanished around him as antiracist movements brought down that regime, unlocking more immediate avenues for Black struggle than literature and culture.138 Warren considers most scholars of African American literature bad historicists for failing to see the writing of Ellison’s time as “prospective,” looking ahead not to canonical status but

Darda-BK.indd 54

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as War

55

“its own wished-for obsolescence.”139 (Having, in Warren’s mind, achieved that obsolescence, “African American literature” ceased to exist as more than an instrument with which Black and non-Black elites have maintained their class status and distracted from economic stratification, including among Black people.)140 He sees the end of segregation as a hard historical break, a moment when strategies should have but didn’t change. Others, his bad historicists, see it as a soft break, an instance of one racial regime mutating into another. But we’re all historicists now, and perhaps we shouldn’t be. Perhaps racial liberalism has us stuck in time, measuring the distance between race science and cultural difference, 1941 and 1954, a solution achieved or denied, when we should be wondering what it means that one generation after another has gazed out on the near horizon from an ever-shifting race front, convinced that time would soon come. Perhaps a solution was never the solution. The war on racism won civil rights, but it also, in setting a time limit on antiracist struggle and establishing the federal government as the site of that struggle, lost something more—a radical remaking of what rights could mean.

Darda-BK.indd 55

12/1/21 9:21 PM

2

Antiracism as Civil Rights

H A R RY T R U M A N F E A R E D

a Black human rights movement. A civil rights

movement he could live with. On June 29, 1947, the thirty-third president of the United States, standing before the Lincoln Memorial, addressed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a first for his office. Truman, fresh from securing $400 million from Congress to fend off communist insurgencies in Greece and Turkey, set his hands on the lectern, looked out at the audience of ten thousand seated before him, and redefined civil rights. “The extension of civil rights today means, not protection of the people against the Government, but protection of the people by the Government,” the president declared. “We must make the Federal Government a friendly, vigilant defender of the rights and equalities of all Americans.”1 Truman wanted the members of the NAACP to know that it could bring their demands to him, that the rising Black freedom struggle should be fought not against but through his government. With NAACP head Walter White and former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt seated behind him, the president vowed action. He reminded the audience that he had created the President’s Committee on Civil Rights that winter, directing it to research and recommend “more effective means and procedures for the protection of the civil rights of the people of the United States.”2 He looked forward, Truman said, to enacting a “sensible and vigorous program for action.”3 The day before, he had made corrections to a draft of his remarks, adding lines in which he underscored Black national belonging: “When I say all Americans, I mean all Americans”; “and again I mean all Americans”— lines that he lingered over, drawing cheers from the audience gathered on the National Mall.4 His insistence on the NAACP’s Americanness might have seemed welcoming—Black newspapers, often skeptical of Franklin Roosevelt’s successor, commended him for it—but it also carried a subtle threat.5 56

Darda-BK.indd 56

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Civil Rights

57

Truman had good reason to be standing there, in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, telling Black leaders that he and his government could be counted on to secure their rights. W. E. B. Du Bois, a cofounder of the NAACP, then seventy-nine and serving as the association’s director of special research, had drafted a petition to the United Nations detailing how the United States had denied Black people their human rights and calling on the UN to intervene. In An Appeal to the World! A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress, Du Bois, never one to cut corners on titles, reaffirmed his long-standing commitment to anticolonialism. “Peoples of the World,” Du Bois wrote, in a draft he shared with White and Roosevelt, “we American Negros appeal to you; our treatment in America is not merely an internal question of the United States. It is a basic problem of humanity; of democracy; of discrimination because of race and color; and as such it demands your attention and action.”6 Du Bois had returned to the NAACP in 1944, ten years after resigning over the board’s absolutist stance on integration (he accused it of discouraging Black institution building), and set about internationalizing the organization’s mandate, writing two books about colonialism—Color and Democracy and The World and Africa—and attending the fift h Pan-African Congress in Manchester, England. He faced resistance from some of his colleagues, including chief counsel Thurgood Marshall, who thought that the organization’s resources should be first directed to combating segregation, and Roosevelt, an NAACP board member also heading the UN Commission on Human Rights.7 Du Bois wanted a human rights movement. He wanted to bind the struggle against white racial rule in the United States to the surging anticolonial movements in Africa and Asia. Marshall and Roosevelt wanted to knock down legal barriers at home. The rest of the world would have to wait. Then the president, taking a sudden interest in civil rights after ascending to the office, decided to address the NAACP. Six minutes into his address on the National Mall, Truman made an abrupt transition. He introduced, out of nowhere, the mounting Cold War with the Soviet Union. “The support of desperate populations of battle-ravaged countries must be won for the free way of life,” Truman stated. “We must have them as allies in our continuing struggle for the peaceful solution of the world’s problems.” He then turned to “Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt” and thanked her

Darda-BK.indd 57

12/1/21 9:21 PM

58

Chapter 2

for her contribution to the Commission on Human Rights and the forthcoming Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which, he added, “will be a great landmark in man’s long search for freedom.”8 Roosevelt, unmistakable in a tall flowered hat, nodded. She would have admired the balancing act. President Truman needed the NAACP’s endorsement on the world stage. He counted on it and other Black organizations to back his administration as it cultivated anticommunist allies in the “battle-ravaged” countries of Africa and Asia. But he also wanted to insulate them from that stage, for Black leaders to swear their allegiance to his government and refrain from forming anticolonial alliances with Black, brown, and Asian people elsewhere in the world. Truman’s awkward transition showed him straining to maintain that balance, acknowledging the global stakes of the NAACP’s decisions while redirecting it to the domestic arena, to his own government. He reframed the Black movement as a struggle not against white racial rule the world over but between racist southern states and a liberal antiracist federal government: “We cannot, any longer, await the growth of a will to action in the slowest state or the most backward community. Our national government must show the way.”9 Truman, himself a near-southerner and the grandchild of slaveholders, cast the South as the source of a crisis and offered his own administration as the solution. Du Bois wanted a revolution. Truman offered reform. Du Bois and other Black leaders announced themselves as anticolonialists. Truman, for the first time, declared them Americans, launching an era of official antiracism, in which the federal government would all but invite a civil rights movement to contain a far more threatening struggle for Black human rights. The president found a friend in White. The NAACP executive secretary had authorized the initial draft ing of Du Bois’s petition, but, not wanting to alienate Roosevelt and discerning new channels to the White House, he hedged his bets and gave Truman a generous introduction at the NAACP convention. “We are gathered together because of our deep concern for human rights,” White began. “In a government of laws the chief bulwark of freedom for the oppressed is the courts.” The NAACP leader, never acknowledging the ninety-four-page UN petition sitting on his desk, affirmed that Black human rights could be secured in American courtrooms. The NAACP had won twenty-two cases before the Supreme Court, White reminded the audience, and it would win more. “We confess to our shame that ours is not yet a perfect democracy,” he admitted, but, anticipating Truman’s remarks, insisted that

Darda-BK.indd 58

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Civil Rights

59

“progress has been made” and hailed the president’s and former first lady’s attendance as further evidence that “a determined and incessant attack is being made upon our national shortcomings.”10 White then welcomed Truman to the lectern to close out the thirty-eighth annual meeting of the NAACP. Du Bois did not attend the president’s address and would not have thought much of White’s introduction. He later accused the executive secretary of obstructing his petition and loading the NAACP onto the “Truman bandwagon,” where it served as a cover for the administration’s “reactionary, warmongering colonial imperialism.”11 Du Bois would find himself forced out of the organization, for a second time, in 1948. His Appeal to the World created a stir, then vanished from the headlines, never reaching the UN General Assembly. White would continue to lead the NAACP until his death, from a heart attack, in 1955, often advising officials in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. That summer day at the Lincoln Memorial, with White welcoming the president of the United States to the NAACP convention, marked a turn in the Black freedom struggle: the end of a short human rights movement and the beginning of a long civil rights movement. The figurative frame of a war on racism—of a “race front,” of an “everraging conflict”—that emerged from World War II taught the nation to confront white racial dominance as a short-term crisis, something that it could, with the state mobilized against it, defeat.12 It also consolidated official antiracism in Washington. The language of war, whether a war against the Axis or a “war on drugs,” strengthens the federal government, authorizing the chief executive to override state and local government. “Because the sovereign power of the president is essentially grounded in the emergency linked to a state of war,” Giorgio Agamben, the Italian philosopher, observes, “over the course of the twentieth century the metaphor of war becomes an integral part of the presidential political vocabulary whenever decisions of vital importance are being imposed.”13 In his first inaugural address, Franklin Roosevelt, for example, asked for “broad executive power to wage war” against the Depression.14 FDR’s successor and former running mate borrowed the trick when he assured the NAACP that it could look to his office as a “vigilant defender” of Black civil rights against obstructionist southern states.15 The figurative war on racism that Truman inherited from liberal anthropologists and sociologists framed segregation as a federal issue, inviting—and, it sometimes seemed, forcing—his administration to act on civil rights. He formed his

Darda-BK.indd 59

12/1/21 9:21 PM

60

Chapter 2

Committee on Civil Rights with an executive order and then, on the committee’s recommendation, mandated, with another executive order, “equality of treatment and opportunity” in the armed forces and other federal agencies.16 The social scientists’ war on racism licensed the Truman administration to reframe antiracism as reform—to domesticate it, to urge the nation to trust in state-guided progress. Du Bois and others weren’t sold. “No president has spoken fairer on race discrimination than President Truman and few presidents have done less to implement their sayings,” Du Bois wrote.17 He didn’t think civil rights would ever be enough for Black people in the United States—anti-Black racism being too entrenched to address with reform—and insisted on human rights. The lead author of An Appeal to the World! wasn’t alone in going over Truman’s head and taking his demands to the United Nations. In 1946, the National Negro Congress submitted one of the first petitions to the new UN Economic and Social Council, alleging “political, economic and social discrimination against Negroes in the United States of America.”18 That winter, as if in answer, the Truman administration established the President’s Committee on Civil Rights. In 1947, Du Bois delivered the NAACP petition. That fall, the PCCR, teaming with the Government Printing Office and Simon and Schuster, circulated its findings and recommendations as a book to millions of readers in and outside the United States. In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress delivered a third petition to the United Nations, charging the United States with anti-Black genocide. That year, the US Information Service circulated a pamphlet titled The Negro in American Life in the decolonizing world and among UN member countries in the West. “The average Negro,” it announced, “has made tremendous progress on every front—social, economic, educational—at a tremendous pace.”19 Whenever Black radicals demanded human rights, the White House dangled civil rights. Whenever they brought an appeal to the world, the Truman administration made a counterappeal.20 Historians insist that the civil rights movement did not begin with the Brown v. Board decision and end with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, tracing instead a long movement, stretching from the New Deal era to Black Power and Black feminism, a multiracial and transregional movement, a revolution not limited to the courts or to demands for formal desegregation and enfranchisement.21 The canonized “short” civil rights movement that came to

Darda-BK.indd 60

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Civil Rights

61

overshadow and obscure that longer struggle also concealed a Black human rights movement that looked not to the United States, not to civil law, but to new intergovernmental and nonstate organizations as arbiters of Black rights. Most attribute the failure of that fight for Black human rights to Cold War anticommunism, which elevated “black activists and intellectuals who gravitated toward an identification with the U.S. state” and undercut Black internationalism, relegating anticolonialists like Du Bois and Paul Robeson to the margins of the movement and then into exile.22 The historian Carol Anderson, challenging that stance (and her own earlier writing), argues that the “bourgeois radicals” of the NAACP maintained unacknowledged anticolonial commitments through associated organizations like the American Committee on Africa and, seeking a “third way,” did not assume that abandoning communism meant abandoning anticolonialism.23 The terms of a rising racial liberalism—a racial liberalism that segregated the civil from the human—illuminates how racial anticommunism and bourgeois radicalism could coexist. Some NAACP members did resist colonialism at the height of the Cold War, but they had to mount that resistance under a separate organizational banner, not through analogies to their own struggle or as a second front in a unified Double V movement. The Truman administration contained the Black human rights struggle with anticommunist intimidation but also with the assurances of a new official, government-administered antiracism, of civil rights without human rights. If liberal social scientists imagined racism as a thing to defeat, as a war, then liberal officials addressed it as a lack of state-conferred rights that they could “secure” with federal legislation, forecasting the end of the short civil rights movement before it had ever begun. Trusting in the extension of formal rights and the limited amount of time it would take for them to set in, they formed not a conservative backlash but a liberal frontlash to a revolution that would never come. The racial liberal framework of antiracism as reform offered existing state mechanisms— legislation, the courts, an ever-widening circle of inclusion and enfranchisement, these self-evident truths—as the solution to the generations of racial theft that they had so often authorized. The liberal state had done right by white people. Why, reformers asked, couldn’t it also work for Black people? As liberal internationalists committed to broadening the government’s horizons after World War II, they fought to narrow Black America’s.

Darda-BK.indd 61

12/1/21 9:21 PM

62

Chapter 2

Civil Rights without Human Rights In 1946, as Du Bois drafted his Appeal, Malcolm X entered Charlestown State Prison in Boston after his arrest and conviction for burglarizing suburban homes. In Charlestown, where he received the nickname “Satan” for his “antireligious attitudes,” X, then Malcolm Little, embarked on a self-directed education.24 With the encouragement of an older inmate, John Elton “Bimbi” Bembry, a magnetic autodidact, the twenty-year-old X enrolled in extension courses in English, German, and Latin and read whatever he could get his hands on, including histories of British colonialism in India and the transatlantic slave trade. His reading, as he later recalled in his Autobiography, led him to second-guess white liberal officials’ and bourgeois Black leaders’ commitment to civil rights. “What makes the black man think of himself as only an internal United States issue is just a catch-phrase, two words, ‘civil rights,’” he wrote. “How is the black man going to get ‘civil rights’ before first he wins his human rights? If the American black man will start thinking about his human rights, and then start thinking of himself as part of one of the world’s great peoples, he will see he has a case for the United Nations.”25 X arrived at a conclusion to which he would return later in his career: civil rights did not guarantee human rights; human rights constituted a condition for civil rights, and the United States had shown little interest in recognizing Black human rights. Black people would have to take their struggle elsewhere, he thought—to Africa and Asia, to the new United Nations, to the world. In 1950, X attracted the attention of the FBI when he wrote a letter to Truman condemning his administration’s decision to, with UN authorization, escalate the war in Korea.26 The bureau tracked him for the rest of his life. When his sentence ended in 1952, he encountered a burgeoning Black movement that had turned from the human to the civil, from anticolonial internationalism to anticommunist Americanism. The state had externalized human rights and internalized Black civil rights. The future minister’s determination that human rights functioned as a condition for civil rights reversed Hannah Arendt’s famous argument in The Origins of Totalitarianism that human rights meant little without a government to guarantee them. “The Rights of Man,” the German American political philosopher wrote in 1951, “had been defined as ‘inalienable’ because they were supposed to be independent of all governments; but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back on

Darda-BK.indd 62

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Civil Rights

63

their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them.”27 That included, she added, the United Nations, which couldn’t offer refugees more than the “mere gesture” of rights.28 Arendt knew of what she wrote. She had fled the Nazi regime in 1933 and lived as a stateless refugee in France and then the United States for much of her adult life. She and other war refugees discovered that without a government, without “some kind of political community” to which they could turn, they lacked a “right to have rights.” Until they could claim belonging as citizens of a state, they had no means of asserting the most basic right: the right to make demands on someone or something, a mechanism through which to assert their humanness and the rights assumed to come with it. Arendt went so far as to suggest that “even slaves,” unlike refugees, “belonged to some sort of human community” because “their labor was needed, used, and exploited, and this kept them within the pale of humanity.” Of all the calamities that could befall someone, she argued, “only the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity.”29 But X wasn’t so sure that civil rights would ever mean much for him and other Black folks as long as the United States clung to a normative idea of what it meant to be human—the right to have human rights. He wondered if Black people could secure their civil rights and still live outside that human “universal,” where, Arendt argued, they had never lived. Could someone, he asked, have civil rights without human rights? Of course, the intergovernmental organization to which X looked had American DNA. President Franklin Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill created a rough draft for the United Nations when they met off the coast of Newfoundland in 1941 and signed a coauthored declaration affirming “certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world.” The United States had not yet entered the war, but Roosevelt had signed the LendLease Act that spring, allowing it to circumvent the Neutrality Acts and offer material aid to the Allies. His government would be at war soon enough, Roosevelt knew, and he wanted to define what kind of world it would be fighting for. The Atlantic Charter, a telegram of fewer than four-hundred words, which Roosevelt and Churchill issued on August 14, didn’t look like a grand declaration. But it did sound it. It sounded, well, Churchillian. The Charter announced the two men’s shared commitment to self-determination, democratic

Darda-BK.indd 63

12/1/21 9:21 PM

64

Chapter 2

government, free trade, demilitarization, and, most memorable of all, a future “which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.”30 The Atlantic Charter, “a New Deal for the world,” enshrined modern AngloAmerican liberalism—individual freedoms, free markets, rule of law—as the foundation of intergovernmental human rights, limiting who could be included in the “human” of human rights.31 “In the very claim to define humanity, as a species or as a condition,” the cultural theorist Lisa Lowe writes, liberal universalism’s “gestures of definition divide the human and the nonhuman.”32 The liberalization of human rights restricted not which humans deserved rights but which people counted as human—and which nonhuman communities and the lands they inhabited could be looted to guarantee that human class’s rights. But the meaning of human rights remained uncertain in the first years after the war, as Du Bois and others could see. He, the NAACP, and a young inmate at Charlestown State Prison could still imagine a radical rather than liberal human rights and an autonomous intergovernmental organization with a warrant to intervene on their behalf. Du Bois imagined a racial break, a total remaking of human being and belonging. He instead got a racial bridge. When the United Nations unveiled the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, it echoed the nonbinding ambitions of the Atlantic Charter. The declaration, which the UN General Assembly agreed to in Paris on December 10, asserted that the “barbarous acts” of World War II had “outraged the conscience of mankind” and motivated “the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people.”33 Some American officials worried, for obvious reasons, that the declaration could be turned against the United States. George Kennan, an architect of the Truman Doctrine, then directing the Policy Planning Staff, wrote in a memo to a colleague that his staff had “great misgivings as to the wisdom of the Executive branch negotiating declarations of this nature setting forth ideals and principles which we are not today able to observe in our own country, which we cannot be sure of being able to observe in the future, and which are in any case of dubious universal validity.”34 Eleanor Roosevelt, the chair of the Commission on Human Rights, hearing the critics in her own government, fought to block the inclusion of antidiscrimination articles and the introduction of instruments with which the United

Darda-BK.indd 64

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Civil Rights

65

Nations could hold violators accountable. Her commission delivered a soaring, vague, and toothless declaration to the General Assembly. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, while containing hints of radicalism, internationalized an emerging racial liberalism, committed to incremental change, dematerialized freedoms, and anti-anticolonial moderation.35 The “trinity of constitutional guarantees, judicial decisions and administrative support,” an internal state investigation determined, would never be enough to raise Black Americans’ standard of living to that of white Americans, and yet officials fought to ensure that they would have nowhere else to turn.36 The Universal Declaration’s liberalism and lack of enforcement mechanism allowed Truman and his successors to wield human rights as an alibi for war, first in Korea and then in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Central America, and elsewhere. The United States could make a humanitarian case for intervening wherever a government did not conform to the Anglo-American liberalism of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which turned out to be most countries that weren’t white, Western, secular Christian liberal democracies. The rise of international human rights after World War II triggered what historian Neda Atanasoski terms a “racial reorientation” in which a new racialization of beliefs and behaviors (communism, authoritarianism, Islam) overlaid the centuries-old racialization of bodies and continents (Asian, African, Arab). That reorientation allowed the United States to wage wars against Black, brown, and Asian countries and communities in the name of freedom, human rights, and antiracism. “Within the structures of liberal citizenship, the human rights regime, and humanitarian law,” Atanasoski writes, “certain nations, such as the United States, are vested with the moral authority to recognize those spaces in need of emancipation.”37 And they vested themselves with that moral right and insulated themselves from humanitarian law by weaving their own norms and values into the structure of the United Nations and other intergovernmental and nonstate organizations. Du Bois watched, with alarm, as the counterrevolution unfolded. In 1951, under indictment for his work with the antinuclear (and, the government alleged, Soviet front) Peace Information Center, he delivered an address at the Community Church in Boston in which he accused American business and the state of “desperately trying to maintain and restore where possible the essentials of colonialism under the name of Free Enterprise and Western Democracy”—of reframing market-driven war as a humanitarian cause.38 He

Darda-BK.indd 65

12/1/21 9:21 PM

66

Chapter 2

had believed that the United Nations could end colonialism. It had instead restored it. He had believed that human rights could end war. It had instead institutionalized it. Truman, whom Du Bois accused of leading the nation into a “third and final world war,” directed his human rights message inward, to Black Americans, as well as outward, to a watchful world.39 Before addressing the NAACP for the first time, he delivered a radio message to the nation commemorating the signing of the Charter of the United Nations, reaffirming his government’s commitment to the “fundamental human rights and freedoms,” and lauding the UN for tackling some “highly controversial political issues.”40 On the National Mall, with White and Roosevelt looking on, Truman returned to the issue of human rights but directed the audience not to the United Nations but to the White House. “We must and shall guarantee the civil rights of all our citizens,” he told them. “We can reach the goal. When past difficulties faced our nation we met the challenge with inspiring charters of human rights— the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Emancipation Proclamation.”41 While some in other countries might have to look to intergovernmental organizations to guarantee their civil rights, Black people in the United States did not, the president suggested, because they lived in the cradle of human rights, a nation that had authored the greatest declarations of human rights, the model for the United Nations. Black Americans did not need to concern themselves with human rights; they lived in the United States, and in the United States civil rights stood as the highest order of human rights. Truman, mindful of the National Negro Congress’s UN petition and perhaps the NAACP’s forthcoming Appeal, conflated civil rights with human rights and then sought to segregate them, domesticating the Black freedom struggle and internationalizing human rights abuses elsewhere. The liberalization of human rights foreclosed other, more radical directions for the United Nations and for the civil rights movement, which still could, it seemed in 1947, have become something more than civil. Du Bois at least thought it could.42 W. E. B. Du Bois’s Appeal to the World! “It is with an expression of profound regret,” the National Negro Congress wrote to the first secretary general of the United Nations, Trygve Lie, on June 6, 1946, “that we, a section of the Negro people, having failed to find relief

Darda-BK.indd 66

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Civil Rights

67

from oppression through constitutional appeal, find ourselves forced to bring this vital issue—which we have sought for almost a century since emancipation to solve within the boundary of our country—to the attention of this historic body.”43 The NNC enclosed A Petition to the United Nations on Behalf of 13 Million Oppressed Negro Citizens of the United States of America, which a thousand delegates had agreed to earlier that month at the congress’s annual meeting in Detroit. It accused the government of violating the terms of the UN Charter by maintaining a structure of “political, economic, and social discrimination” against Black people. Herbert Aptheker, the white Marxist historian, contributed an eight-page document titled “The Oppression of the American Negro: The Facts,” in which he cataloged, using the government’s own data, anti-Black discrimination in labor, housing, education, and medical care and violence “so common, especially in the South, as to be institutionalized.” Max Yergan, the president of the NNC, mailed the petition to Truman with a note denouncing his government for having “reversed the democratic programs” of the Roosevelt administration.44 The NAACP and some locals of the Congress of Industrial Organizations wrote to the Commission on Human Rights to back the NNC.45 Black newspapers also threw their weight behind the petition. “The appeal to the United Nations represents the internationalization of the Negro people,” the Chicago Defender declared. “It links the Negro people with the colonials of the world.”46 Eleven months after the signing of the UN Charter and five months after the first meeting of the General Assembly, where, at the urging of Truman administration officials, it agreed to locate the United Nations in New York, the NNC had stirred the White House’s worst fear. The Commission on Human Rights never considered the National Negro Congress’s demands. It couldn’t receive petitions from nongovernmental organizations, it said, nor did it, citing the “domestic jurisdiction” clause of the UN Charter, have license to intervene in the internal affairs of a member state.47 The NNC, with organized labor distancing itself over concerns about the congress’s communist ties and criticisms of the government, dissolved in 1947. But it suggested to other organizations and to President Truman, who never acknowledged Yergan’s letter, what a message to the world could achieve. The NNC’s indictment of the Truman administration caught the attention of Du Bois, who, in his role as the NAACP’s director of special research,

Darda-BK.indd 67

12/1/21 9:21 PM

68

Chapter 2

had been encouraging a hesitant White, the executive secretary, to internationalize the association. “It was not enough to ask simply for civil rights,” he wrote in a letter to a young Black steelworker at the time. The NAACP needed to align itself “with those who are asking for peace and for the economic reconstruction of the world.”48 Du Bois argued in Color and Democracy, his first book since returning to the NAACP, that the decision of international leaders at the Dumbarton Oaks and Bretton Woods conferences to “leave practically untouched the present imperial ownership of disenfranchised colonies” would lead to more war. All modern wars, including the two world wars, he suggested, could be traced back to “rivalry for power and prestige, race dominance, and income arising from the ownership of men, land, and materials”—to colonialism, enslavement, and the struggle for the undue wealth they created.49 The United States, host to the conferences from which the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund originated, had no interest in abolishing colonialism because it also relied on the colonial belief in inferior races, cultures, and faiths to rationalize the extraction of wealth from land and bodies. If the United Nations wanted to guard against another world war, as it said it did, Du Bois argued, then it first needed to condemn and address colonialism and anti-Blackness. The United States and other white Western states feared colonial revolts, as they should, he wrote. But they should also fear conflicts over “the distribution of profit among dominant nations which has already caused two world wars in our time.”50 Color and Democracy arrived a month into the 1945 United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco, which Du Bois and White attended as NAACP delegates. The elder statesman of the Black movement made his case to members of the American delegation and left San Francisco disappointed.51 On August 1, 1946, Du Bois wrote to the National Negro Congress. “Will you kindly send me by return mail five (5) copies of the petition to the United Nations which was adopted at your last meeting?” he asked, enclosing twentyfive cents.52 He then wrote to White recommending that they make their own case to the United Nations. He considered the NNC petition “too short and not sufficiently documented” and thought that the NAACP, with more resources and close to half a million members, could deliver a more “impressive and definitive effort.”53 The executive secretary agreed, declaring it of “the highest importance.”54 Du Bois assembled a research team and got to work.

Darda-BK.indd 68

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Civil Rights

69

An Appeal to the World!—six chapters and ninety-four pages of legal arguments, charts, and statistics—insisted that the greatest threat to the world came not from the Soviet Union but from within the borders of the selfdeclared leader of the free world, “not from Stalin and Molotov but from [white supremacist Mississippi politicians Theodore] Bilbo and [John] Rankin.” Du Bois, introducing the petition, argued that because the United States hosted the General Assembly and fashioned itself as a model for other nations, antiBlack racism in the United States could not be dismissed as a domestic issue. “It is therefore,” he determined, “fitting and proper that the thirteen million American citizens of Negro descent should appeal to the United Nations and ask that organization in the proper way to take cognizance of a situation which deprives this group of their rights as men and citizens, and by so doing makes the functioning of the United Nations more difficult, if not in many cases impossible.” The United Nations should not forget, he added, that Black America constituted “in size one of the considerable nations of the world.”55 Learning the lessons of the NNC’s cold-shouldering, Du Bois headed off the technical dismissal he knew he would face from the United Nations, arguing that it could not afford to kick the NAACP’s case back to Washington. Though not a government, the NAACP did, as the largest Black organization in the United States, he suggested, serve as a kind of unofficial agent for thirteen million people, a nation within a nation. Du Bois also enlisted the historian Rayford Logan, a former member of FDR’s “Black cabinet,” to contribute a chapter refuting the domestic jurisdiction clause that had doomed the NNC petition. The UN Charter did not, Logan stressed, “leave it to the individual nations to decide for themselves whether they accepted the obligation to protect human and minority rights.”56 Would the United Nations defend the human rights it had declared sacred? the NAACP asked. Then it offered a test case. An Appeal to the World!, though an embarrassment for Truman, also, at times, embraced his nationalist, future-facing racial liberalism. Du Bois described the United States as “the leading democracy in the world,” which, “has never wholly attained her ideal, but slowly she has approached it.” His introduction sometimes echoed the thesis of the racial liberal urtext An American Dilemma, tracing an ever-raging conflict between the government’s “high and noble words” and “the treatment of the American Negro for three hundred and twenty-eight years” while suggesting an inevitable movement toward the

Darda-BK.indd 69

12/1/21 9:21 PM

70

Chapter 2

realization of the former.57 Some of what he wrote, in fact, seemed to undercut his argument for UN intervention, making a liberal case to Washington rather than a radical demand to the world. That liberal nationalism might not have been all Du Bois’s, though. NAACP executives reviewed a draft of An Appeal to the World! and recommended numerous changes. Du Bois, agreeing to some of their suggestions, toned down his introduction, an early draft of which dwelled on the “three-fift hs” clause of the Constitution—“the word ‘slave’ is carefully avoided,” he noted, “but ‘other persons’ means Negro slaves”—and declared American anti-Black racism “far more dangerous to mankind than the atom bomb.”58 The draft introduction assailed the Constitution as a document authorizing white racial theft, including the theft of Indigenous lands and Black lives. The final version hailed the United States as a flawed but right-minded democratic world leader. Neither, to Du Bois’s frustration, reflected the anticolonialism that he had wanted to instill in the NAACP when he returned to the organization at the end of the war. His Appeal, he admitted in a memo to White in November 1946, had “nothing to do with Africa or African problems,” and, the NAACP had, he reminded the executive secretary, “taken no stand nor laid down any program with respect to Africa.”59 Du Bois could sense the NAACP drifting toward the anticommunist center, toward the liberal president, and growing more cautious about criticizing his administration.60 Du Bois had intended to deliver his demands to the United Nations before the General Assembly convened in Queens in October 1946. He would have to wait an entire year. Thurgood Marshall thought Du Bois should take more time.61 White wouldn’t answer his telegrams. Lie, the secretary general of the United Nations, refused to receive An Appeal to the World!, citing a lack of “machinery” available to bring it before either the Commission on Human Rights or the General Assembly.62 Frustrated after a year of getting slowwalked, Du Bois leaked it to a friend at the New York Times, whose headline announced on October 11, 1947, without mentioning Lie’s refusal, “Negroes to Bring Cause before U.N.”63 The secretary general relented. On October 23, UN officials received Du Bois and White in Lake Success, New York, where Du Bois submitted what he described as a “frank and earnest appeal to all the world for elemental justice against the treatment which the United States has visited upon us for three centuries.” He reminded the receiving official that the NAACP had not written it for “confidential concealment in your archives.”64

Darda-BK.indd 70

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Civil Rights

71

The New York Herald Tribune, the Times, the Nation, and other national news media covered the NAACP’s demands. Black newspapers hailed it as a “searing indictment of our country’s failure to practice what it preaches,” a “historic landmark,” and “one of the most important documents of our times.”65 White, after dragging his feet for months, celebrated it as an “international sensation,” which had left his office “flooded with requests for copies of the documents.”66 Attorney General Tom Clark admitted to the National Association of Attorneys General, “I was humiliated, as I know you must have been, to realize that in our America there could be the slightest foundation for such a petition.”67 Du Bois, overcoming internal and external resistance, had at last delivered his appeal to the world. But the petition didn’t remain in the headlines for long. On October 29, the week after Du Bois and White visited the UN offices in Lake Success, the President’s Committee on Civil Rights delivered its findings and recommendations, the book-length To Secure These Rights, to Truman. The White House had the report distributed through the Government Printing Office and a commercial arrangement with Simon and Schuster. Newspapers, including Black papers, serialized it. The timing of the PCCR report, as Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis notes, made the NAACP petition seem “crankily obsolete.”68 An Appeal to the World! wouldn’t arrive in book form until 1948, long after To Secure These Rights, because, as Du Bois later learned, White had held it back to add his own introduction. A furious Du Bois accused the NAACP head of waiting “so long that the President’s Civil Rights report appeared, got wide circulation and comment and made our prior effort almost forgotten.”69 In a memo to the NAACP board of directors, which he then leaked to his friend at the Times, Du Bois accused the executive secretary of withholding it for his own gain and to benefit the Truman administration.70 (Du Bois had endorsed the president’s left-wing challenger and former Roosevelt VP Henry Wallace, which White considered a violation of his contract with the NAACP.) Du Bois also lamented that White continued to dodge the issue of colonialism. “Just as the United States has become international in its action, so the NAACP is called upon to take a stand concerning Africa, Asia, and the islands of the Pacific and Caribbean, not to mention the colonial problem of all colored and oppressed peoples,” Du Bois wrote. “We have had nothing of the sort.”71 The board, siding with White, informed Du Bois that it would not be

Darda-BK.indd 71

12/1/21 9:21 PM

72

Chapter 2

renewing his contract.72 White soon distanced himself and the NAACP from the petition and from his earlier anticolonial statements. He would later condemn Paul Robeson for aligning Black people in the United States with colonial Africans and Asians, declaring that “Negroes are Americans.”73 Du Bois didn’t wait for his contract to end. He resigned from the NAACP. Another, louder appeal had drowned his out. Harry Truman’s Appeal to the World! Jonathan Daniels landed in Switzerland looking for a fight. The Truman administration had delegated Daniels, a southern liberal and former White House official, to serve on the Subcommission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities at the three-week meeting of the Commission on Human Rights in late 1947. He knew that the Soviet delegate on his subcommission, Alexander Borisov, would use the NAACP petition to undercut him and his delegation. An Appeal to the World!, he admitted to an adviser to Eleanor Roosevelt, had revealed the United States to be harboring “all the evils with which the sub-commission was set up to deal” while lacking the will to “do anything effective about it.” Daniels had an idea. In the first minutes of the subcommission meeting, he would, he told the Roosevelt adviser, throw the report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights on the table “before anybody else brings up [the NAACP petition] or the discriminations with which it deals.”74 In Geneva, Daniels made his move, reminding the other delegates of the PCCR and arguing that it embodied his government’s commitment to enacting “measures to improve [the] situation.” When Borisov introduced the NAACP’s accusations against the United States and argued for giving it a hearing before the General Assembly, the American delegate fired back. “He was aware of the problem of the Negroes in the United States,” he told Borisov, and President Truman himself had “authorized a comprehensive investigation of this problem.”75 The NAACP petition never made it out of the subcommission. Daniels and the government he served had killed it with their own declaration to the world. C. Vann Woodward, the white liberal historian, remarked in The Strange Career of Jim Crow that the establishment of the United Nations and the decision to locate it in the United States “suddenly threw open to the outside world a large window on American race practices.” Then came “the uncompromising report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights.”76 The United Nations

Darda-BK.indd 72

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Civil Rights

73

brought the world to that window, and Truman, with a vague assurance of civil rights for Black Americans in the near future—of forward movement, of progress—closed it. President Truman created his fifteen-member Committee on Civil Rights on December 5, 1946, when he issued Executive Order 9808, directing it to research how federal and state law enforcement could be “strengthened and improved to safeguard the civil rights of the people.”77 He acted on the advice of Walter White, White’s fellow NAACP executive Channing Tobias, and other members of the National Emergency Committee against Mob Violence, which formed that August to address a wave of anti-Black violence, including numerous assaults on Black combat veterans. “My God!” Truman exclaimed after White, acting as the committee’s spokesman, recounted the attacks. “I had no idea it was as terrible as that! We’ve got to do something!”78 The president assembled a diverse but moderate committee that earned the nickname “Noah’s Ark” for including “two corporation heads and two labor representatives; two Jews, two Catholics, and two Protestants (in each case one clergyman and one prominent layman); two college presidents; and two Negroes” as well as “the odd man in the group,” Franklin Roosevelt Jr.79 John Dickey, the president of Dartmouth College and at one time a candidate to chair the PCCR, described it as “not very far out on the edges,” a “typically Truman kind of committee.”80 The president also, in a nod to the NAACP, named Tobias to the committee. White and Tobias found themselves backing two statements that the Truman administration would soon set against one another, using To Secure These Rights, which carried Tobias’s name, to counter An Appeal to the World!, which carried White’s. When White later welcomed the committee’s report in his Herald Tribune column as “the most uncompromising and specific pronouncement” the government had ever made on race, he gave the president and his advisers ammunition they would use against his own association’s statement to the United Nations.81 The President’s Committee on Civil Rights, which convened ten times in 1947, seemed to foresee the situation Daniels faced in Geneva. The twohundred-page report reads as if the PCCR wrote it not for Truman or American readers but for an incredulous international audience—for the members of the Commission on Human Rights whom Borisov sought to win over in introducing the NAACP’s allegations for debate—describing, as if to an

Darda-BK.indd 73

12/1/21 9:21 PM

74

Chapter 2

outsider, the nation’s culture and values. “We have a great heritage of freedom and equality for all men, sometimes called ‘the American way,’” the committee wrote. Truman had directed it to assess “the bad side of our record,” it clarified in the first pages. “If our task were to evaluate the level of achievement in our civil rights record, mention would have to be made of many significant developments in our history as a nation,” which it then went on to enumerate at length. The committee offered itself as evidence of the great freedoms available in the United States, arguing that the “greatest hope for the future is the increasing awareness by more and more Americans of the gulf between our civil rights principles and our practices” and that “only a free people can continually question and appraise the adequacy of our institutions.”82 The United States would, the PCCR suggested, close the gulf between what it said and what it did because Americans, unlike Soviets, had the freedom to criticize and demand more from their government, including the fifteen Americans whom the president had assigned to evaluate his administration. To Secure These Rights did mention the United Nations and the “international implications” of segregation and anti-Black racism in the United States, but it stressed that this necessitated that the struggle for Black rights be federalized, not internationalized—moved from state houses to Washington, not from state houses to Geneva. “We have seen nothing,” the committee concluded, “to shake our conviction that the civil rights of the American people— all of them—can be strengthened quickly and effectively by the normal processes of democratic, constitutional government.” The title itself, borrowed from the Declaration of Independence (to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men) carried the subtle argument that American institutions could secure the rights of Black Americans, without the interference of the United Nations or some other intergovernmental or nonstate organization. “Government’s Responsibility: Securing the Rights,” the title of one section announced.83 Thanks for your concern, world, but no thanks. We’ve got this. When Truman created his President’s Committee on Civil Rights, the meaning of that term—civil rights—remained unsettled. It did not yet define a movement. The president himself often conflated civil rights with civil liberties, including in the directions he issued to the PCCR in December 1946. The special assistant to the president for minority problems, Philleo Nash, later claimed that he and other members of the president’s staff invented the term’s

Darda-BK.indd 74

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Civil Rights

75

modern usage when they named the taskforce. “We thought it advisable to find a term that was slightly fresh, and the word ‘civil rights’ was not used for this function at that time,” he recalled in an interview years later, but “as soon as we created the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, it acquired its own meaning.”84 Nash and Truman’s other advisers had good reason to introduce the term, to define Black rights as civil rights, as the Cold War escalated and the National Negro Congress and the Du Bois wing of the NAACP looked to the United Nations and anticolonial movements rather than Washington to secure their rights. The term, whether Nash realized it or not, severed a surging Black freedom movement from the emerging international discourse of human rights. The PCCR defined civil rights as “statements of aspirations, of demands which we make on ourselves and our society,” as something that the United States strove for and demanded of itself but not a realistic standard to which it should be held accountable.85 Almost all of the committee’s thirty-five recommendations called for state building at the federal level, and most involved law enforcement and carceral solutions to individual acts of discrimination and violence, recommendations that would ricochet back on Black communities and, as the political scientist Naomi Murakawa argues, lead to the construction of a liberal “civil rights carceral state.”86 The President’s Committee on Civil Rights defined the Black freedom struggle as fanciful demands on government to be answered with federalized law enforcement, a civil rights movement in which Washington set itself against Little Rock so it wouldn’t have to face the United Nations. Truman released To Secure These Rights as soon as he received it, on October 29, 1947, with Du Bois’s visit to Lake Success still in the headlines. He issued a statement in which he described it as an “American charter of human freedom in our time,” a construction he managed to use three times in less than three hundred words. “For us here in America,” he said, “a new charter of human freedom will be a guide for action; and in the eyes of the world, it will be a declaration of our renewed faith in the American goal—the integrity of the individual human being, sustained by the moral consensus of the whole nation, protected by a government based on equal freedom under just laws.”87 Du Bois and the NAACP’s claim dwelled on the UN Charter, making a thorough case for why Article 2.7, the domestic jurisdiction clause, should not forbid the United Nations from intervening on behalf of Black people in the

Darda-BK.indd 75

12/1/21 9:21 PM

76

Chapter 2

United States. Truman’s decision to describe the PCCR report as a charter—a charter with which his government would regulate itself—seemed calculated. The White House distributed To Secure These Rights far and wide. The Government Printing Office circulated it. Simon and Schuster rushed out a one-dollar edition. The Chicago Defender and the Baltimore Afro-American serialized it, delivering it to the homes and hands of a combined five hundred thousand readers. The American Jewish Congress handed out more than two hundred thousand summaries of the report. ABC and CBS radio devoted whole shows to it. The American Council on Race Relations issued a fift y-ninepage pamphlet on how the United States could enact the changes the PCCR recommended. The book club of the Methodist Women’s Society of Christian Service read it. So did members of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Anti-Defamation League.88 The Washington Post described To Secure These Rights as “monumental,” a “reaffirmation of ideals that are inalienably and indisputably American.”89 The Times recommended it as a Christmas gift.90 The NAACP also endorsed it. White called it “courageous” and a “perfect yardstick” with which to measure “the gap between what Americans say they believe and what they do.”91 Few, including the NAACP executive secretary, mentioned or seemed to remember the organization’s own Appeal. Truman, contending with challenges from the Right and the Left in the 1948 election, clung to the PCCR report, tucking it under his arm, convenient evidence of his administration’s antiracism, at rallies.92 His White House counsel had advised him that November that he should, at the risk of alienating southern Democrats, “go as far as he possibly feels he could go in recommending measures to protect the rights of minority groups.”93 The Black vote could determine the outcome of the election. Truman took the advice to heart, referencing To Secure These Rights in his State of the Union address and using it to frame a special message to Congress in which he vowed to “correct the remaining imperfections in our practice of democracy.”94 Du Bois remained unconvinced. After the State of the Union, he remarked that, while Truman’s words left “nothing to be desired,” the president had “said this before, and it is going to cost him nothing to say it again.”95 Truman failed to enact most of what his Committee on Civil Rights recommended, but his rhetorical embrace of the PCCR’s conclusions—of a liberal antiracist federal government committed to securing the rights of Black folks—invited the formation of a southern civil rights movement and encouraged it to look to the

Darda-BK.indd 76

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Civil Rights

77

state for solutions. The NAACP, now without Du Bois, toed the Truman line. Roy Wilkins, who would succeed White after the executive secretary’s death, later described To Secure These Rights as “almost a duplication of the program of the Association” and a “blueprint that we used for the next two decades.”96 Truman won the election and, as Du Bois warned, sank the United States into an anti-anticolonial war. The NAACP, facing escalating attacks from conservative anticommunists, stuck with him, subscribing—whether out of agreement or under duress—to the idea of racism as something to right, to reform. Then came a charge of genocide. American Genocide In 1952, the Truman administration recruited the historian J. Saunders Redding, the first Black scholar to teach at Brown University, to tour India as a cultural ambassador. State officials asked him to “help to interpret American life to the Indian people.”97 Indians, he discovered, didn’t need it. For three months, audiences asked him about anti-Black racism in the United States and the Korean War, which they never failed, Redding noted, to refer to as the “American war in Korea.” Most of the Indians he met, he wrote in the American Scholar, believed that “America is prejudiced against non-whites and that that prejudice, long documented in the disabilities under which Negroes suffer in the United States, is now expressed in American world policy.” The United States did not send technical assistance and economic aid to India and other Asian countries as benevolent gifts, they told him, but as “methods of buying influence.”98 Indian intellectuals asked him why his government included so few Black people, why it had blacklisted Paul Robeson and barred W. E. B. Du Bois from traveling abroad. The American found himself on the defensive. Redding discovered that his Indian hosts had learned much of what they knew from an American pamphlet, We Charge Genocide, which the Civil Rights Congress had submitted to the United Nations in 1951. In Bangalore, a man in the audience stood and read from the pamphlet, which accused the United States of anti-Black genocide. “Is this true?” he asked. “I tried,” Redding remembered, “to give a general account of race relations in America. When I was finished I was told: ‘What you say does not convince us in face of this!’ He held up the pamphlet.”99 Redding dismissed the charges as “distorted” and “hysterically titled,” but months earlier he had contributed an

Darda-BK.indd 77

12/1/21 9:21 PM

78

Chapter 2

admiring review of We Charge Genocide to the Baltimore Afro-American, in which he declared it “controlled,” “dignified,” and “irrefutable.” “This book is true,” he concluded then.100 In the American Scholar, looking back on his three months in South Asia, Redding wrote about a different kind of truth, encouraging the Information Service to circulate more “representative fi lms, illustrated books and magazines” to India’s “indecisive mass.” The incredulous audiences he encountered in India could be won, he insisted, but “we must bombard them with the truth.”101 Of course, he couldn’t share that other truth, the truth of the CRC pamphlet, with his Indian hosts, because his government had sent him, a high-achieving Black scholar, to India as the embodiment of an argument against the charge of genocide. The first page of the book-length petition Redding heard so much about in India recited, word for word, the second and third articles of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which the United Nations had signed four years earlier, on December 9, 1948, a day before it ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The convention, recalling that the General Assembly had declared genocide a crime under international law, defined it as one of five acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group,” including “killing members of the group” and “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.” The CRC listed all five acts and all five categories of genocidal crime, from outright genocide to “complicity in genocide,” on the first page of the pamphlet.102 The American delegation to the United Nations signed the Genocide Convention, but Congress, fearing that Jim Crow laws violated the convention and could invite UN intervention, wouldn’t consent to ratification (and didn’t until 1988). William Patterson, the executive secretary of the Civil Rights Congress, followed the congressional hearings and, listening to the arguments of alarmed southern senators, decided to take the case to the United Nations himself, using the arguments that the senators had used to block ratification to charge the United States with genocide. “It is important to note,” he later wrote, “that virtually all of those who opposed ratification of the Genocide Convention before the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations did so precisely because the Genocide Convention specifically applies to the crimes being committed against the Negro people in the United States.”103 The senators had made his argument for him, Patterson observed. He had their confessions.

Darda-BK.indd 78

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Civil Rights

79

Patterson assembled a team of researchers that included the blacklisted novelist Howard Fast, and they consulted the records from the Census Bureau, the President’s Commission on Civil Rights, the NAACP, and other civic organizations to catalog acts of state (or state-enabled) violence against Black Americans between 1945 and 1951. The Civil Rights Congress grounded their charge of genocide not in the antebellum South or at the height of the Klan’s resurgence in the 1920s but in the years in which President Truman had declared the federal government a vigilant defender of Black rights. Patterson and his team delivered a direct rebuttal to the Truman administration’s assurance that the securing of rights and the momentum of progress would deliver the nation to the end of racial time. Their final statement stretched to more than two hundred pages, and ninety-four leaders and intellectuals, including Du Bois and Robeson, added their signatures to it. On December 17, 1951, Patterson delivered We Charge Genocide to Trygve Lie, the UN secretary general, and other delegates at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, the site of the sixth meeting of the General Assembly. Robeson, whom the Truman administration had blocked from foreign travel, delivered it to the United Nations in New York. The Civil Rights Congress had used an image of the singer’s accusing finger as the cover of the bound pamphlet, which Patterson could see tucked under delegates’ arms at the Palais de Chaillot. But the head of the Civil Rights Congress struggled to find a government willing to introduce his charge at the meeting. He didn’t want to go to the Soviets— the CRC had communist ties, and Patterson didn’t want to make it easier for anticommunist critics to dismiss his claims—and other amenable states, he learned, received aid from the United States that they didn’t want to risk losing.104 The General Assembly never considered his allegations.105 After a whirlwind tour of the continent to distribute We Charge Genocide, and to avoid French law enforcement, which he worried might detain him, Patterson returned to New York, where officials confiscated his luggage and most newspapers condemned his charge against the United States. The Chicago Daily Tribune described the CRC pamphlet and Patterson’s tour as a “communist dodge to distract attention from the Soviet Union’s multitudinous genocide offenses.”106 The New York Times interviewed Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide and drafted the Genocide Convention, and determined, in words not Lemkin’s own, that he considered Patterson’s accusations nothing more than a “maneuver to divert attention from the crimes

Darda-BK.indd 79

12/1/21 9:21 PM

80

Chapter 2

of genocide committed against Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles and other Soviet-subjugated peoples.”107 Eleanor Roosevelt wondered whether Patterson, after “strewing” his pamphlet all over Paris, had “decided to transfer his citizenship to the Soviets.”108 Some Black newspapers added to the chorus. The Pittsburgh Courier declared that Black Americans would not be “catspaws for the Soviet Fift h Column” and that “if this is ‘extermination,’ then let us have more genocide.”109 But Patterson and the CRC did find an audience with a receding Black Left. Twenty-five hundred demonstrators gathered in Harlem to welcome Patterson back, and the Afro-American observed that We Charge Genocide had become “a scarce item on the book market and copies in New York are at a premium.”110 It also reached a large international audience, including, as J. Saunders Redding later discovered, in India. The Civil Rights Congress went further than either the National Negro Congress or the NAACP in claiming government intent in the denial of Black human rights. The United States hadn’t failed to secure Black rights, the CRC alleged. It had made a concerted effort to rob Black people of their land and labor and shorten their lives. He and other Black Americans, Patterson wrote in his introduction, faced a constant threat of losing their lives “as the result of the consistent, conscious, unified policies of every branch of government.” We Charge Genocide did not document individual acts of irrational, racist violence but a white racial structure of anti-Black violence. “We shall show,” it announced, “that those responsible for this crime are not the humble but the so-called great, not the American people but their misleaders, not the convict but the robed judge, not the criminal but the police, not the spontaneous mob but organized terrorists licensed and approved by the state to incite to a Roman holiday.”111 Patterson enlarged the meaning of state violence to include what he termed “economic genocide”—the denial of a living wage, safe housing, decent medical care, and nutritious food—with which he, as ethnic studies scholar Dylan Rodríguez writes, constructed an “anatomy of U.S. white supremacist genocide” that called on and amended the language of the Genocide Convention.112 The President’s Committee on Civil Rights, which the CRC cited six times, had argued that government could secure Black rights with federalized law enforcement. The Civil Rights Congress identified government and law enforcement as sources of rather than solutions to an American genocide. The PCCR, Patterson later wrote in his memoir, “did not of course

Darda-BK.indd 80

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Civil Rights

81

identify those responsible for the conditions it exposed; it did its best to conceal the real criminals.”113 He took the PCCR’s data and assigned blame for the violence it documented, directing Paul Robeson’s finger back at the administration that had assembled it. Patterson recognized, as Du Bois had before him, that he would need to head off counterarguments. The United States had not ratified the Genocide Convention, but it had signed the UN Charter. So Patterson identified the convention as “clearly an extension and implementation of the Charter,” arguing that “failure to enforce the Genocide Convention would not only reduce the Convention to idle verbiage but would similarly transform the Charter.”114 Did the member states of the United Nations, he asked, stand behind their founding document? Or was it idle verbiage? Patterson and his team also organized more than a hundred pages of evidence under the headings and subheadings of the second and third articles of the Genocide Convention. If the United Nations wanted to refute their claim, it would have to go through thousands of accounts of law enforcement officers killing Black people and argue that they somehow didn’t constitute “killing members of the group.” It would have to read the statements of senators inviting mob violence to intimidate Black voters and argue that they hadn’t committed “public incitement to commit genocide.”115 Mindful of their international audience, Patterson and the CRC argued that failure to act could lead to a third world war because, as Hitler had demonstrated, “genocide at home can become wider massacre abroad” when “domestic genocide develops into the larger genocide that is predatory war.” The United States, armed with UN resolutions, had gone to war in Korea a few months earlier, and Patterson contended that “jellied gasoline in Korea and the lynchers’ faggot at home are connected in more ways than that both result in death by fire.”116 The United Nations could not afford not to act because, as Indian intellectuals later informed Redding, anti-Black racism in the United States and American wars in Asia fed on each other.117 We Charge Genocide revealed a divide on the Black Left. Truman administration officials, learning of it ahead of the UN meeting, asked Walter White if the NAACP could arrange for “some outstanding Negro leaders to be present in Paris” to discredit the Civil Rights Congress.118 White agreed, assembling a delegation that included Channing Tobias and Edith Sampson, who had delighted racial liberals when, at a round-the-world “town meeting” in India, she

Darda-BK.indd 81

12/1/21 9:21 PM

82

Chapter 2

told an audience member who asked about racism in the United States that she would “rather be a Negro in America than a citizen of any other land.”119 But the NAACP struggled to dismiss allegations that cited their own from a few years earlier. Roy Wilkins, then the assistant executive secretary, asked, in a concerned letter to White, “How can we ‘blast’ a book that uses our records as source material?”120 In a column that December, White tried to thread the needle, acknowledging the research behind We Charge Genocide as “carefully documented” while slamming the petition itself as “Communist propaganda” that the Soviets would use to “destroy faith in American democracy.”121 The Truman administration’s civil rights agenda had isolated Black struggles in the United States from human rights and international law, but Black leftists, including a young Lorraine Hansberry, heard Patterson’s charge. Hansberry, who landed in New York in 1950, after a short stint at the University of Wisconsin, immersed herself in the Black intellectual circles she had first encountered as a child in Chicago. She studied with Du Bois, a former mentor to her uncle, a Howard historian. She roomed with the communist radical Claudia Jones and befriended Alice Childress and others in the Black theater scene. She contributed some imagistic free verse to the Marxist Masses and Mainstream, including “Flag from a Kitchenette Window,” which describes a Black child on the South Side of Chicago looking out the window on “Algiers and Salerno” and American flags waving in the “steamy jimcrow airs.”122 The future author of A Raisin in the Sun merges images of Black Chicago and French Algeria, anti-Black restrictive covenants and colonialism, the limitations of civil rights and the failures of human rights. Against the rush of liberal time—the next reform, the near-future solution—she dwells on a kitchenette window, constellating a wider struggle for Black human rights. From 1951 to 1953, as Patterson charged genocide, Hansberry made $31.70 a week editing and contributing to Paul Robeson’s Freedom, which she described to a friend in Wisconsin as “the journal of Negro liberation.”123 For one of her first assignments, she attended the third World Assembly of Youth, a UN-affi liated youth human rights council, in Ithaca, New York, recounting how a few bold African delegates had stood and condemned the council’s silence on colonialism and observing that the meeting had excluded anti-Black violence in the United States from discussions of human rights violations.124 Hansberry covered the election of Kwame Nkrumah and other anticolonial Ghanaian leaders, noting that “the people of Ghana clearly see their struggles

Darda-BK.indd 82

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Civil Rights

83

and victories in connection with black folk on the rest of their continent as well as in the United States.”125 She celebrated women leading an anticolonial revolt in Cairo and, with Robeson barred from travel, attended the InterAmerican Congress for Peace in Montevideo, Uruguay, in his absence.126 She followed the Black women’s movement Sojourners for Truth and Justice to Washington, where the STJ met with a civil rights adviser in the Truman administration, asking how his government could wage war in Korea, bringing violence to “other colored peoples,” while announcing itself as a defender of civil rights at home.127 Although few remember her for her anticolonial internationalism, Hansberry, who died of cancer at thirty-four, traveled in Patterson’s radical orbit and shared his belief that the liberal embrace of human rights meant nothing if that embrace offered cover for colonial rule and genocide.128 Political scientist Richard Iton reminds us that White and other civil rights leaders of the time engaged in “speech acts” that we should read as “closer to compelled rather than frank expression.”129 Most historians attribute the growing rift between Patterson’s radical internationalism and White’s domestic liberalism to anticommunism and the red scare, the Cold War having created a “constraining environment” for Black movement building.130 But that rift also emerged from Truman’s strategic embrace of a limited civil rights agenda, with which he sought to contain communism but also a broader anticolonial, materialist antiracist Black Left. The Civil Rights Congress tried to revive a Black human rights movement and ran headlong into a rising civil rights movement with a limited horizon and short time frame. Righting America In Paris, William Patterson discovered that the US Information Service had beat him to market. Cold War state messaging had, he found, gotten smarter, more subtle. “I began to see a definite change in the forms and methods of racist ideology,” he remembered.131 The USIS had blanketed Paris and other cities around the world with a pamphlet that chronicled the obstacles that Black people faced in the United States and the gains they had made. Patterson recognized it as something new. It wasn’t an admission of guilt or a commitment to immediate action. “It was,” he realized, “an apology for racism designed to leave our colonialist allies unshaken—the United States was not going to make the UN a forum for democracy and peace.” A Paris newspaper

Darda-BK.indd 83

12/1/21 9:21 PM

84

Chapter 2

interviewed Patterson about the USIS pamphlet, reading sections of it to him and asking for his reaction. The interviewer read, for example, the claim that, while the Truman administration had taken legal measures to end segregation, it would take time for “these ideas of discrimination which remain latent in public opinion to subside.” Patterson, frustrated, answered, “Feelings of white superiority are not latent but taught in the schools, in the press, in the movies, in the churches” and, alluding to his own charge against the state, added, “It is the crime of the government, not the American people.”132 The interview went on like this for pages, the French interviewer reading from the USIS pamphlet and Patterson rebutting it, one claim after another, his own petition all but forgotten. The executive secretary of the Civil Rights Congress could see that Washington had honed a message custom built to reassure allies that the Americans would get their house in order, that the United Nations didn’t need to entertain charges of genocide from Black radicals who couldn’t see that time healed all wounds. Madison Avenue deserved some of the credit for the more restrained messaging that Patterson encountered in Paris. Two of the chief architects of the USIS cofounded the firm Benton and Bowles, an innovator in radio and television advertising, between the wars before, with their fortunes made, moving on to government. William Benton served as the first assistant secretary of state for public affairs from 1945 to 1947, consolidating the Office of War Information and the Office of Inter-American Affairs into the interim International Information Service, which included Voice of America broadcasting. Benton, never having held office before, stood out to the man who hired him, Secretary of State James Byrnes, because of his “thirteen years of experience in the advertising business.”133 Byrnes wanted him to sell the United States, and Benton obliged. Chester Bowles, after a term as governor of Connecticut, during which he named Benton to a vacated state senate seat, served as the third ambassador to India from 1951 to 1953. Bowles had asked President Truman for the assignment because he considered India “the key to Asia,” from which “a new democratic tide might be set in motion” across the continent.134 He believed that the United States, “the greatest nation of salesmen in history,” needed a new ad campaign in the decolonizing world. Bowles thought that the United States had erred in selling an image of itself “too extravagantly perfect to be believed.” That image, which Bowles likened to a Listerine advertisement,

Darda-BK.indd 84

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Civil Rights

85

seemed far-fetched to a Western audience and worse in Asia. “To Indians and other Asians,” he wrote in his 1954 account of his time in India, “the picture of a fabulous America with the biggest skyscrapers, the richest millionaires and the happiest babies, and with everyone 100 percent satisfied appeared smug and arrogant.” Bowles recommended instead that the United States “adopt a simple, positive and completely candid approach” that included “admitting our shortcomings as well as showing our achievements.”135 The ambassador built large USIS libraries, from which Indians could check out thousands of American titles, including An American Dilemma. He distributed five thousand sets of one hundred abridged books to villages and schools, making translated editions of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and The Education of Henry Adams available to rural communities. He created twentysix “mobile truck units” that traveled from village to village to hold free movie nights. And he issued thousands of What Are the Facts? pamphlets about segregation in the United States, the Korean War, and other issues, some of which he wrote himself and all of which he edited.136 The pamphlet that Patterson heard so much about in Paris, The Negro in American Life, might well have been the work of the admen Benton and Bowles. Nothing concerned Bowles more than what Indians heard about the conditions under which Black people lived in the United States. He couldn’t get through an event without someone asking, “What about America’s treatment of the Negro?” Bowles answered as best he could, “frankly describing the problem as I saw it,” he wrote, “and reporting with precise examples and statistics the progress which is now being made.”137 But the former adman knew he needed spokespeople whom his audience could trust, so he wrote to Gerald Drew, the director general of the foreign service, asking for “top notch Negro Foreign Service Officers” and visiting lecturers. Indians, he informed Drew, seemed to “open up much more freely to an American Negro than they will to others.” Black officials and guests could, he added, “help us to combat to a certain extent the feeling in India about the Negro problem in the U.S.”138 Bowles thought that Black cultural ambassadors might encourage Indians to see race in the United States as similar to caste in South Asia. “More than any other people,” he believed, “Indians should understand the very real obstacles to rapid progress in America,” and men like J. Saunders Redding, whom Bowles hosted in 1952, could remind them of this.139 (He recommended a similar campaign in Africa, declaring, “We can have no better ambassadors

Darda-BK.indd 85

12/1/21 9:21 PM

86

Chapter 2

to Africa than those sons of America who are also great-great-grandsons of Africa.”)140 Bowles flew liberal Black Americans eight thousand miles from home to domesticate Jim Crow, to reframe it as a national issue.141 The Negro in American Life shared the ambassador’s toned-down Cold War messaging. The USIS translated and distributed the thirty-three-page pamphlet as Patterson delivered his charge of genocide to the United Nations. Although it seems that the government distributed at least the Englishlanguage version of the pamphlet before Patterson and his team finished We Charge Genocide, it must have struck some readers, including his French interviewers, as a direct rebuttal to the Civil Rights Congress.142 The pamphlet admitted that the United States contained some racist elements but insisted that “to inflate such provincial chauvinism into a national policy comparable to Hitler’s master-race ideology is wholly false.” It struck the kind of measured tone that Bowles argued could, if used right, turn India and the rest of Asia toward the West. The truth of race in the United States, the pamphlet informed readers, could be found in “neither extreme”—neither horror stories of “mob violence and race segregation” nor American-dream tales of “Negroes who have reached the eminence of Ralph Bunche and Marian Anderson.”143 There remain few Bunches, it admitted. The pamphlet instead stressed “progress”—a word it used fifteen times in the first thirteen pages—that it attributed to a willingness to work with and through the government. The Negro in American Life, which included images of integrated classrooms, offices, and army units, congratulated the “powerful” NAACP and National Urban League for seeing that “their best weapons were the American rights of political organization and dissent, the civil liberties guaranteed in the Constitution and enforced by the federal court system, and, eventually, the right to vote.” The NAACP and the Urban League, the pamphlet suggested, knew that they didn’t have to look elsewhere for redress because they had found a friend in the federal government, which had “rapidly” carried out the recommendations of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights.144 The USIS didn’t lie so much as omit, touting the Fair Employment Practice Committee without acknowledging that Congress had defunded and then dissolved it in 1946 and commending Robeson’s achievements in the theater without revealing that the government had all but ended his career. It never mentioned human rights or the United Nations, but readers in 1951 wouldn’t have missed the subtext: Black Americans didn’t need human

Darda-BK.indd 86

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Civil Rights

87

rights or UN intervention when they had civil rights and a liberal antiracist government. The American dilemma, the pamphlet concluded, had a solution: time, the bend of the moral arc. Segregation, disenfranchisement, and other forms of anti-Blackness wouldn’t last long, not with the state committed to righting them. The Negro in American Life, as much as it admitted that the United States had not achieved the ideal it urged on others, announced that it would get there within a generation with limited federal action setting the tone for the emergence of cross-racial fellow feeling. It argued that once the government had secured the rights of Black people—through color-blind legal remedies, not Reconstruction-scale “authoritarian measures”—racism would die out. Discrimination “diminishes every year,” the pamphlet stated, “for democracy contains within itself the resources for eradicating this evil from the hearts of its people.”145 The nation did not need another Reconstruction, the USIS informed the French or Indian reader. It needed a nudge in the right direction from the government—some legislation, a few executive orders—and the American heart would, in time, heal. The Negro in American Life ended with an image of Black and white neighbors, men and women, gathered in a fenced yard, talking as their children run around together. Bedsheets and shirts hang on lines strung from apartment windows behind them. A white woman holds a Black toddler in her arms. “These neighbors in a housing project, like millions of Americans,” the description read, “are forgetting whatever color prejudice they may have had; their children will have none to forget.”146 The government had built the integrated apartment building. Now all it had to do was wait until the Black and white neighbors who lived in it learned to get along. Their children wouldn’t know that they ever hadn’t. That final image weaves together three figurative frames of racial liberalism: racism as something to right (antiracism as reform), to enlighten (antiracism as education), or to cure (antiracism as integration). If the liberal state now administered antiracism, then it called on American adults to unlearn racist feelings through education (cross-racial interactions, the pamphlet itself) and American children to cultivate a colorblind consciousness through integration (the Black and white neighborhood friends). The United States faced a time-bound challenge, the USIS told the world, and time would come. Racism would be righted, enlightened, and, in a generation, cured.

Darda-BK.indd 87

12/1/21 9:21 PM

88

Chapter 2

The Black human rights movement waned but never died. Hansberry and others who had cut their teeth in that movement carried it forward, often in muted form. (Most liberal theatergoers, after seeing A Raisin in the Sun, took Hansberry as one of their own, a liberal, an American dreamer.) At the end of the “classical phase” of the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, a new generation of Black radicals revived Du Bois’s appeal to the world and Patterson’s charge of genocide.147 The Nation of Islam accused the LAPD of anti-Black genocide.148 Malcolm X weighed taking “Uncle Sam to the world court.”149 The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee sought consultative status with the United Nations.150 The Black Panther newspaper profiled Patterson under the headline “There Has Been and Always Will Be Panthers,” declaring the Black radical elder a “crack warrior, strategist, and organizer of the Black liberation and working class movements.”151 Panther “assistant chief of staff ” June Hilliard wrote an article titled “We Charge Genocide,” in which she identified the courts and law enforcement not as avenues through which Black people might secure their rights but as the root of genocidal violence. “Forget the courts and the judges. I have yet to see a Black man receive justice in the courts,” she wrote, beside a sketch of a white officer with his gun drawn, staring down at a Black man on the ground. “You will find that they are a very modern, today version of genocide in practice against Black people.”152 In 1970, International Publishers, the long-standing Marxist house, brought out a new edition of We Charge Genocide. Patterson contributed a foreword. The war in Southeast Asia, he wrote, offered further evidence that, as he had claimed in 1951, “racism U.S.A. is an export commodity.” The sixty-nine-yearold no longer believed that the United Nations would ever intervene on behalf of Black Americans or that turning to it could move the United States, which still hadn’t ratified the Genocide Convention, to adhere to the organization’s charter. But he remained convinced that a future appeal to the world might yet “mobilize worldwide action against genocide.”153 The Panthers added We Charge Genocide to their reading list.154 As soon as the short, liberal civil rights movement ended, that longer anticolonial, materialist antiracist struggle—the movement of the National Negro Congress, W. E. B. Du Bois, and William Patterson—found new life, and it had, it knew, all the time in the world.

Darda-BK.indd 88

12/1/21 9:21 PM

3

Antiracism as Education

most Americans would never read An American Dilemma, the 1944 volume in which he gathered, over more than fifteen hundred pages, the latest social science research on race in the United States. The Swedish sociologist left it to novelists to reach the masses. He believed that white Americans needed to reconcile the “ever-raging conflict” in their hearts and change their minds. He and his coauthors could reach a few of them, but all needed an education in antiracism, and for that he looked to literature.1 “The personal relations arising out of Negro activity in science and literature are restricted to a small proportion of the white population, whose prejudice—if not already low—is diminished considerably by such contacts,” Myrdal observed, before adding that “indirectly the effect may be greater,” foreseeing a future in which “the literary product of a Richard Wright will achieve nation-wide publicity and acclaim and will affect people as far down as the lower middle classes.”2 The arts might remain the domain of Black and white elites, but what artists created—stories that dramatized the degradations of anti-Black racism, tales that invited fantasies of overcoming—could reach the middle and working classes and convince them to live out the nation’s unrealized ideals, a kind of trickle-down antiracism. The Swede used the antihero of Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son, Bigger Thomas, to illustrate his own sociological observations. “In the growing generation of Negroes, there are a good many individuals like Bigger Thomas,” Myrdal wrote in a section on “Negro aggression.” “They have a bearing of their whole body, a way of carrying their hats, a way of looking cheeky and talking coolly, and a general recklessness about their own and others’ personal security and property.”3 He suggested that antiracist literature served to dramatize antiracist science and to communicate it to decent but miseducated white folks as “far down” as the working classes. (Of course, the valuable

G U N N A R M Y R DA L K N E W T H AT

89

Darda-BK.indd 89

12/1/21 9:21 PM

90

Chapter 3

“sociological” lesson he took from Native Son was that young northern Black men wore hats and stole wallets.) The list of further reading tucked into the back of An American Dilemma included hundreds of scientific studies and a few novels, including Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son and James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. The sociologist did the research, and the novelist taught it. When James Baldwin leveled his famous criticism against his former idol Wright, he had that division of labor on his mind. Writing in the communistturned-liberal Partisan Review, the twenty-four-year-old aspiring novelist, still four years from his 1953 debut, described Wright’s Native Son as a naturalist inversion of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sentimental abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, suggesting that it invited readers to witness Bigger Thomas “struggle for his humanity” under the “criteria” that Stowe and other white liberals had set for him. “The ‘protest’ novel, so far from being disturbing, is an accepted and comforting aspect of the American scene,” he wrote. “Whatever unsettling questions are raised are evanescent, titillating; remote, for this has nothing to do with us, it is safely ensconced in the social arena, where, indeed, it has nothing to do with anyone, so that finally we receive a definite thrill of virtue from the very fact that we are reading such a book at all.” Baldwin offered as evidence not Stowe’s or Wright’s own writing, not their treatment of Uncle Tom or Bigger, but something an “American liberal” had once told him. “As long as such books are being published,” the liberal said of Stowe’s and Wright’s fiction, “everything will be all right.”4 While Baldwin described Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a “very bad novel” and Native Son as a “raging, near paranoic postscript” to Stowe’s sentimentalism, his condemnation of the social realist novel had as much to do with how the American liberal read it as how Wright and others wrote it.5 “Everybody’s Protest Novel” did not appear until years after Native Son made Wright one of the most famous living writers. It was not a negative review of the novel, as most scholars now treat it, but a negative review of how white liberals had, with the encouragement of social scientists, read it as an education in Black life and a lesson in antiracism—not a work of art or entertainment but an addendum to An American Dilemma.6 The young Baldwin identified, as the literature scholar Jodi Melamed argues, the rise of a constraining racial liberalism that established terms for legitimate resistance that secured rather than refuted the interests of state and capital.7 But he also recognized a

Darda-BK.indd 90

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Education

91

troubling faith in the future, his liberal friend’s belief that things “will” be all right—that racism had a solution, a resolution—if the nation could just read to the end. Baldwin articulated his misgivings about the liberal reader as critics took stock of the Black novel and forecasted a less race-conscious future for Black letters. In an issue of Phylon dedicated to “The Negro in Literature,” contributors debated whether Black literature seemed “less propagandistic than before.”8 Most thought that it did and believed that it should be. Thomas Jarrett, a literature scholar at Atlanta University, the HBCU where W. E. B. Du Bois had founded Phylon in 1940, insisted that “it is not enough” for Black authors to “talk barrenly about prejudices and merit,” that they needed “sounder literary values” to achieve “full maturity.”9 Another young literature scholar, Hugh Gloster, a future president of Morehouse College, condemned the “limiting and crippling effects of racial hypersensitivity and Jim-Crow esthetics.”10 Langton Hughes weighed in to celebrate Black authors “writing works in the general American field” rather than “dwelling on Negro themes.”11 “Everybody’s Protest Novel” might seem to align with the Phylon contributors’ arguments and the broader Cold War deradicalization of Black literature and criticism.12 But Baldwin did not share their color-blind agenda. He wondered instead why grand statements about the racial future had gathered around Native Son and a few other big race novels. “What is meant by a new society is one in which inequalities will disappear, in which vengeance will be exacted; either there will be no oppressed at all or the oppressed and the oppressor will change places,” he wrote. “But, finally, as it seems to me, what the rejected desire is, is an elevation of status, acceptance within the present community.” Wright’s novel, built from and received through the “props of reality” around him, did not incite a revolution.13 Of course, it didn’t. Baldwin didn’t ask how it could have but why critics and readers had ever demanded that of it. He asked something far bigger than most scholars acknowledge: not what kind of novel Black authors should write, as the Phylon contributors debated, but what their readers should ask of literature as a medium for social change. When does remaking the literature facilitate material change? And when might it serve as a substitute for that change? The issue of Partisan Review in which Baldwin interrogated the social function of the novel included a heated back-and-forth between the literature scholars Richard Chase and Lionel Trilling and the philosopher William

Darda-BK.indd 91

12/1/21 9:21 PM

92

Chapter 3

Barrett, regulars in the magazine and among the rightward-drifting circles of the New York intellectuals. (Chase and Trilling taught at Columbia, Barrett at NYU.) Barrett had accused Chase in an earlier issue of overvaluing literature as the source of a “philosophy of life,” asking why he and Trilling, Chase’s former graduate adviser, looked to literature rather than “facts about ourselves and our world” to construct a critical liberalism.14 Chase doubled down. “One of the functions of literature is to preserve culture from its own reductions— reductions of cogency, power, majesty, and humor—and one of the functions of literary criticism is to help literature do this,” he wrote. The “fate of liberalism” hung in the balance.15 Trilling came to his colleague’s defense, insisting that literature stood as “one of the cultural agents that form the attitudes, even the categories, by which at least some part of life is apprehended.”16 Trilling would take that argument further in his landmark 1950 book The Liberal Imagination, in which he described literature as having a “unique relevance” to liberalism because it safeguarded it from bureaucratic stagnation, forever revitalizing the liberal mind.17 He didn’t mention race or consider literature other than that of Wordsworth, Twain, Fitzgerald, and a few other white Western men, but the commercial success of The Liberal Imagination—it achieved sales of almost two hundred thousand, unheard-of numbers for a book of criticism—owes something to the climate that Baldwin addressed in “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” (In a 2008 introduction, Louis Menand credits The Liberal Imagination with having “changed the role of literature in American intellectual life.”)18 Trilling thought literature could save liberalism from itself, but it and Trilling’s brand of criticism instead saved liberalism from a materialist antiracist Left, convincing liberals that reading itself, racial signification detached from social structure, constituted a transformative act in and of itself. As long as such books are being published, they could say, turning the pages of Native Son and The Liberal Imagination, everything will be all right. If social scientists, in declaring a “war on racism,” and Truman administration officials, in vowing to right racism with federal reforms, consolidated the racial state, they and other liberals looked to novelists to educate the white mind. In 1946, Ruth Benedict, the anthropologist who had called social scientists to “the race front,” urged English teachers to see novels as ammunition in a war on racism.19 “The only positive approach to a world free of racism lies in seeing people as individuals. The great opportunity of the teacher of literature

Darda-BK.indd 92

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Education

93

begins precisely when he realizes that if this simple goal were achieved it would end race discrimination,” she wrote to the National Council of the Teachers of English. “And where so easily as in literature can our children in their school studies learn to see people as people?” Children “fortified” with broadminded books, she concluded, “will be inoculated against racism.”20 Wallace Stegner, the novelist and founder of the Stanford creative writing program, the second in the United States and a model for the hundreds later founded at other universities and colleges, wove that humanist mandate into academic creative writing. He believed that “the problem of making one nation from the many races and creeds and kinds” called for Americans with “the imagination and good will to work at it” and that literature, which “has as its primary aim the celebration of the human spirit,” could cultivate that imagination.21 The racial liberal’s faith in the novel as an instrument of antiracism revealed a divided commitment: an antiracist novel encouraged white readers to see segregation as a social ill, while the belief in change through reading and the linear time of the national novel (the movement from first to last page, the hero’s enlightenment, the reader’s awakening) militated against material desegregation; social scientists and educators celebrated the race novel for treating Black people as “just folks,” while their didacticism solidified categories of difference.22 The liberal reader hailed the novels of Wright and others as a radical break from what had come before in American letters and then treated it as a racial bridge, using it to stabilize racial stratification and knowledge. The race novel, a 1940s marketing term for books that addressed segregation and anti-Black racism, never constituted a coherent genre. The big race novels of the time, including Wright’s Native Son, Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit, and Willard Motley’s Knock on Any Door, do not share some broad, emerging racial consciousness, but they all circulated through liberal channels committed to solving racism with the arts. From 1928 to 1948, the Rosenwald Fund, the foundation of early Sears investor and chief executive Julius Rosenwald, awarded more than $1.5 million in grants to Black writers, artists, and educators and to liberal white southerners. Du Bois, a two-time Rosenwald fellow, regarded it as an “epoch-making venture,” and it aided the careers of, among almost a thousand others, Baldwin, Hughes, Smith, and Motley.23 The curator of a 2009 exhibition dedicated to artists affi liated with the Rosenwald Fund described it as “the largest and most influential single patron of African American arts and letters in the twentieth century, perhaps ever.”24 Publishers

Darda-BK.indd 93

12/1/21 9:21 PM

94

Chapter 3

would, with the fund’s encouragement, sign former fellows and then advertise their books with educational organizations like the American Council on Education and the National Council of Teachers of English, which, echoing the Rosenwald Fund’s initial intent, would recommend them to their members as lessons in antiracism. The ever-iconoclastic Zora Neale Hurston, who received a Rosenwald grant in the mid-1930s to undertake graduate studies with the anthropologist Franz Boas at Columbia and then had it retracted after running afoul of the fund’s liberal agenda, later credited that institutional circuit with having narrowed rather than enlarged white readers’ consciousness of Black life. It created, she argued, an “AMERICAN MUSEUM OF UNNATURAL HISTORY,” where “all may take [Black people] in at a glance.”25 In the age of racial liberalism, Hurston, the author of the 1937 classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, found herself cleaning houses in the Miami suburbs. Other scholars have identified how literature converged with science and government in the formation of a new racial liberal consensus. Houston Baker, the literature scholar, long ago defined that time in Black criticism as a moment of “integrationist poetics” that envisioned a lived, segregated “America” moving toward an ideal, integrated “AMERICA.”26 Some suggest how racial anticommunism delegitimized material antiracisms, forcing the Black left into a militant, active “underground” and delivering an education in “red scare racism.”27 Still others, toeing the “hearts and minds” line of An American Dilemma, defend the literature of racial liberalism as encouraging a “will-toaction” among white readers.28 Most scholars, though, look to what Melamed calls, with a nod to Cedric Robinson, “race radical” literature, which reckons with racism as a material regime woven into liberal humanist institutions from which that literature often, against the odds, emerged.29 But the trouble for radical authors didn’t end there, with academic creative writing or the Rosenwald Fund, because liberal institutions governed reading as much as they did writing. Universities and foundations treated literature as a tool for transmitting racial liberal knowledge, but they also, whatever the content, framed the reading of it as the first and last act of antiracism, encouraging readers to look to the near future—to the end of the novel, to the resolution, the denouement—for an assured overcoming. The race novel, more than a mere reflection of the dominant racial thought of the day, instilled the time measure of racial liberalism. A novel didn’t have to be liberal. It could be radical. All it needed was a linear narrative, or a narrative that could, with

Darda-BK.indd 94

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Education

95

a nudge, be received as leading the reader toward a racial awakening. Some novelists catered to the new racial liberal establishment, inviting fantasies of solutions and remedies, letting Baldwin’s liberal friend and Benedict believe in reading as an antidote or inoculation. Others challenged that establishment, connecting the cultural to the material, the desegregation of minds and bookshelves to the desegregation of social structures—connections often severed as their writing traveled through liberal institutions dedicated to reform, progress, and faith in the near future. Everybody’s Race Novel Racial liberal solutionism emanated from elite circles. So did the creed of the race novel. In 1948, some six hundred guests, including some of the biggest names in literature and the arts, gathered at Stevens Hotel in downtown Chicago to close the Rosenwald Fund, which had, as Julius Rosenwald wished, exhausted the $22 million in Sears stock with which he had endowed it before his death. Former fellows honored Rosenwald and fund president Edwin Embree with readings. Langston Hughes, who had received grants in 1931 and 1941, marked the occasion with a story, “Simple and the Rosenwald Fund,” in which Jesse B. Semple, or “Simple,” Hughes’s straight-talking, working-class Harlemite, laments to the narrator, “The Rosenwald Fund’s going out of existence and I have never had one of them Fellowships!” The narrator, a writer and stand-in for Hughes himself, tells him that the fund had awarded grants to “extra-ordinary people” but that he, Simple, benefited from the cultural change that fellows created with their art. “A dollar invested in educational, social, or cultural progress is worth many dollars to many more persons than merely the individual carrier of culture in whom it is invested,” he continues. “For example, when you read Willard Motley’s Knock on Any Door you are benefiting by the Rosenwald dollar. American culture is enriched. In that way you, me, everybody benefits by it.” Their conversation ends with Simple reassured that he and other “ordinary people” had benefited. “You are the very problems the Fund has been trying to solve,” the writer tells Simple.30 The narrator delivers a succinct account of the Rosenwald manifesto: give to the best, and the rest will see gains from a change in racial attitudes. Although Hughes wrote “Simple and the Rosenwald Fund” as a tribute to Rosenwald and fund trustees and officers—he read it onstage at the gala to an audience that included Rosenwald’s children and Embree—when it ran in the

Darda-BK.indd 95

12/1/21 9:21 PM

96

Chapter 3

Chicago Defender the next month, readers might have thought Hughes had taken a shot at the fund, satirizing it as elitist and condescending. He might well have. Rosenwald, the son of middle-class German Jewish immigrants from Springfield, Illinois, who had bought a 25 percent stake in Sears, Roebuck in 1895, founded the Rosenwald Fund in 1917 to advance “the well-being of mankind.”31 (His admirers never failed to mention that the future benefactor of Black education and art was born in 1862 in a house one block from Abraham Lincoln’s home.)32 Rosenwald ran the fund himself, collaborating with Booker T. Washington and his Tuskegee Institute to build hundreds of schools for Black children in the South, until 1928, when he hired Embree, an executive at the Rockefeller Foundation, to take over. Embree shared Rosenwald’s belief that foundations should “be expended within a generation” while “enthusiasm is fresh” and before they “sink into commonplace bureaucracy.”33 But the career foundation director had his own ideas about what the fund should invest in, believing that the creative class, if encouraged with $1,000 here and there, could instruct the masses in how to form an antiracist consciousness, an education from above rather than below. He blasted the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations for overinvesting in education and medical research when no board had yet “dirtied its hands with paint or clay or fabrics, or risked its morals with the drama or with the popular embodiment of the fine arts to-day— the talking movies.”34 Embree created the Rosenwald fellowship program in his first year on the job. James Weldon Johnson, then the executive secretary of the NAACP, received the first grant. Although Rosenwald, who died in 1932, did not devote much of his own time to the arts—he “enjoyed the theater and tolerated opera,” his biographer and grandson writes—he believed, as Embree did, that good books could change the world, himself having come to the cause of Black education in the South through Washington’s autobiography Up from Slavery and John Graham Brooks’s biography of William H. Baldwin, the president of the Long Island Rail Road and an early Tuskegee trustee.35 Embree, the grandson of John Fee, the abolitionist minister who founded Berea, Kentucky, and the integrated, coeducational Berea College in 1855, considered himself a “student of races” before he ever arrived at the Rosenwald Fund.36 He wrote or cowrote six books about race in the United States during his tenure there, including Brown America: The Story of a New Race; American Negroes: A Handbook; and Thirteen against the Odds, in which he assembled

Darda-BK.indd 96

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Education

97

thirteen miniature biographies of high-achieving Black Americans. Du Bois, Hughes, and Wright all received chapters. Embree believed, following the British historian Arnold Toynbee, author of the twelve-volume A Study of History, in “the transforming power of the ‘creative minority’ in the development of civilizations” and that foundations should serve that creative class so it could serve the less talented.37 An unapologetic elitist, he once tried to convince the Rosenwald board to launch a magazine titled the Aristocrat, which he envisioned as “not for the masses” and “high hat and proud of it.”38 The board voted against it. Embree instead carried out his vision for cultural change through his creative grants, doling out 865 awards (587 to Black fellows, 278 to white southerners) from 1928 to 1948.39 The fund president wanted the best of the best, insisting that fellows be more than “worthy and deserving”; they needed to be “people of exceptional ability” who, with an extra $2,000 in their bank accounts, might “come to their fullest powers.”40 He regarded white interest in antiracist literature as an index of the state of Black life and a reflection of the nation’s gradual realization of an American creed. “Books and pamphlets on the Negro and race relations have been in striking demand,” he declared at the end of his time at the fund, “and novels bitterly attacking racial and religious discrimination—Strange Fruit, Kingsblood Royal, Gentlemen’s Agreement—have been among the most popular and widely acclaimed books of recent years.”41 All of Embree’s own books in the 1940s included a list of “books by and about Negroes” sorted into the categories “by Negroes” and “by white authors.”42 The ultimate success of the fund, Rosenwald and Embree agreed, would come down to whether “the work is taken up by the state or by general giving,” and Embree and his team built a network of publishers, government agencies, universities, and other foundations through which they encouraged a generation of liberals to see literature as the leading edge of the civil rights struggle and reading Wright, Smith, and Motley as their contribution to the cause.43 Although the Rosenwald Fund maintained that it did not dictate the kind of work their fellows undertook, Embree and the other two regular members of the selection committee—the sociologist Charles S. Johnson and Will Alexander, the chief executive of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation and “the dean of liberal white Southerners”—still chose the winners and sometimes offered feedback.44 The committee did not, for example, award a grant to

Darda-BK.indd 97

12/1/21 9:21 PM

98

Chapter 3

Willard Motley until after he had completed the manuscript for Knock on Any Door. The first-time novelist, they could see, shared their moderate humanism.45 Embree, believing, as he wrote in American Negroes: A Handbook in 1942, that “prejudice leads to discrimination,” favored writers and artists who challenged wrongheaded ideas about Black life rather than the more intractable material structures that disadvantaged Black people from birth.46 The former, he convinced himself, caused the latter and should be treated as the root cause of all racial stratification. Johnson and Alexander agreed. In 1942, the three men warned the Rosenwald board that the Black movement had taken a “proletarian direction” that could lead it to elevate “less responsible” leaders. The fund should, they counseled, be mindful of which causes they backed.47 While the committee did offer the more radical Du Bois two sizable grants in the 1930s, Embree offered some unsolicited advice in a 1931 award letter. After first stating that the Rosenwald Fund did not enforce “any vestige of restriction, supervision, or censorship,” he asked if he could make a “purely personal suggestion,” not as a foundation officer but as a friend. “As you know, I am greatly interested in literature as a means of conveying both truth and beauty. I have long felt that you have a literary gift that might well express itself occasionally in general beauty rather than in advocating special aspects of truth as you see them,” he wrote. “I hope you can take some of the freedom made possible over the next two years to undertake at least one important composition in a non-controversial field.”48 Embree wanted Du Bois to model Black achievement, not advocate for Black rights. Du Bois took the fund’s $7,000 and, ignoring the foundation executive’s feedback, wrote Black Reconstruction in America. Although he never could control what fellows did with their grants, Embree had much to celebrate in 1948. He had achieved his goal: the wider culture, including the government, had absorbed and institutionalized the fund’s doctrine that literature and the arts could end racism through an education in the lives of others. Embree recruited Eleanor Roosevelt to the board in 1940 (he also served as an adviser to her husband). Twenty-one of the twenty-four Black social scientists who contributed to An American Dilemma had received Rosenwald grants.49 The fund’s 1945 Directory of Agencies in Race Relations cataloged more than two hundred national, state, and local agencies founded since 1943 to address “cultural and racial problems.”50 Hundreds more would follow. The Rosenwald Fund financed some of them; others modeled themselves on it.

Darda-BK.indd 98

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Education

99

Johnson saluted Embree at the closing gala, declaring him “a social statesman of rich wisdom” and “a prophet of the democratic ideal and practitioner of the art of democratic living.”51 Jacob Lawrence designed a handbill for the event. Sterling Brown read. Pearl Primus danced. Gunnar Myrdal declared the fund a “great humanitarian institution in the service of the disadvantaged groups of the American nation.”52 Lillian Smith, a former fellow and the author of Strange Fruit, thanked Julius Rosenwald for recognizing that “once a dream [her own novel] starts other people dreaming there is no end to it” and that “here in the dream’s power to set off a chain reaction of dreams lies the secret of the growth of the human spirit.”53 Smith had it right: the Rosenwald Fund had set off a chain reaction of dreams. But no one at Stevens Hotel that evening, thirteen miles from the site of the 1947 Fernwood Park anti-Black race riot, wanted to ask if it was just a dream. Well, almost no one. Du Bois delivered an address titled “Race Relations in the United States, 1917–1947,” tracing the course of Black life since the founding of the Rosenwald Fund with almost no mention of the fund itself. He instead reminded the audience that the NAACP received “90 per cent of its revenues by Negro laborers”—not, he seemed to say, from white foundations—and that all of “its chief workers have been Negroes.”54 Du Bois, at a gala otherwise dedicated to celebrating Rosenwald, Embree, and Black achievement in the arts and sciences, tied the struggle for Black rights in the United States to anticolonial movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. “Negroes are in a quasi-colonial status,” he said. “They belong to the lower classes of the world. These classes are, have been, and are going to be for a long time exploited by the more powerful groups and nations in the world for the benefit of those groups.” White people in the United States and elsewhere did not divest Black and brown people of their land, labor, and lives because they learned some racist ideas, although racist ideas offered cover, but because it served their bottom line. The West believed that all other societies should conform to a “single white European standard” of education, literature and art, and government, but most of the world, Du Bois told the gathering of donors, felt that “the Anglo-Saxon type of cultural organization has failed and that other patterns should be tried.” If the United States wanted “political democracy,” as it said it did, it would first need to embrace an ethic of “cultural democracy,” which it had refused.55 Embree, not acknowledging Du Bois, offered some closing remarks, ending the night, and closing the Rosenwald Fund, with a

Darda-BK.indd 99

12/1/21 9:21 PM

100

Chapter 3

few lines that, he said, testified to the dream to which they had all committed themselves—lines from his friend Archibald MacLeish, the white modernist. The Rosenwald Fund and other racial liberal institutions could see the error in the white man’s burden, but they had left Du Bois fending off, and Embree touting, the white man’s solution. The Education of Bigger Thomas That white man’s solution—the race novel, literature as cut-rate social treatment—entailed cultivating and marketing authors but also training readers for an education in antiracist feeling. “Dear Mr. Wright,” Dorothy Canfield Fisher, a selection committee member for the Book-of-the-Month Club, wrote Richard Wright after receiving the revised ending to his forthcoming memoir, Black Boy, in 1944. “I admire, as I did when you accepted with what seemed to me such reasonableness some changes in Native Son, your freedom from the traditional author’s prickly touchiness.”56 Fisher and her colleagues had, as she didn’t hesitate to remind him, selected Wright’s first novel for the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1940, delivering it straight to the doors of hundreds of thousands of subscribers and making Native Son an instant best seller and, for Edwin Embree and other liberal benefactors of the arts, the model race novel. (Embree recruited Wright as an adviser to the Rosenwald Fund and measured younger Black novelists, including Baldwin and Chester Himes, against him.)57 The BOMC had asked for substantial changes to that manuscript. It had demanded even more with Black Boy, insisting that Wright cut the entire second half of the manuscript, two hundred pages dedicated to the author’s adult years in Chicago, and instead end the book with his flight from the South as a teenager. It had also suggested a new name for the manuscript Wright had first titled “Black Confession” and then “American Hunger.” Wright obliged. He cut the manuscript. He retitled it. But Fisher wanted more. In the closing pages of the revised manuscript, Wright wondered what had given him the “sense of freedom” that emboldened him to leave the South as a young man. Fisher asked if, in answering that question, he could acknowledge “American ideals” as a source of his freedom dream. “Could it be,” she mused, “that even from inside the prison of injustice, through the barred windows of that Bastille of racial oppression, Richard Wright had caught a glimpse of the American flag?”58 Wright returned a draft in which he acknowledged not American ideals but “novelistic narratives” as that which had motivated his

Darda-BK.indd 100

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Education

101

younger self. Fisher, unsatisfied and undeterred, asked whether some of the novels and stories he read were American and could have taught him “American ideals” as a child through “American delineation of American characters.”59 Wright relented. “It had been my accidental reading of fiction and literary criticism that had evoked in me vague glimpses of life’s possibilities,” he wrote in the final version of Black Boy, which Fisher and her colleagues selected for the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1945. “What enabled me to overcome my chronic distrust was that these books—written by men like Dreiser, Masters, Mencken, Anderson, and Lewis—seemed defensively critical of the straightened American environment.”60 Wright didn’t give her “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but Fisher got something she and the Book-of-the-Month Club’s white liberal readers valued almost as much: a testament to reading as a transformative act of national fellow feeling.61 Juliana Spahr, the poet and critic, observes what she describes as the almost inevitable slide of radical “autonomous” literature toward state “conscription,” including Wright’s fiction.62 Fisher’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering reveals how the liberal’s faith in time—of the young Black man’s passage to freedom, of the white reader’s awakening to Black struggle—guides that conscription, sometimes before there is a book to conscript. Fisher, an education reformer who introduced the Montessori method to the United States, believed that the American novel should, above all else, bring Americans closer together by offering them an inside look at how others lived their lives. “What readers seem to like to find in a book,” she wrote in 1944, describing the BOMC’s criteria, “is the feeling of contact with living, vital personalities,” of “meeting, really meeting, fellow human beings.”63 Readers might have liked that feeling of contact, but the Book-of-the-Month Club also encouraged them to seek it out.64 Fisher contributed a three-page introduction to the first edition of Native Son—the edition that reviewers received and that 215,000 readers bought in the first three weeks—in which she framed the novel as a chance for readers to meet Bigger Thomas on the page so they wouldn’t have to meet him in real life. She dedicated the first half of her introduction not to Wright and his novel but to describing how scientists triggered “psychopathic upsets” in rats by engineering their environment—an allusion to the first scene of the novel in which Bigger, a twenty-year-old Black man who finds a sense of release in murdering a young white woman and then his Black girlfriend, corners and kills a rat in the apartment he shares

Darda-BK.indd 101

12/1/21 9:21 PM

102

Chapter 3

with his mother and siblings. Fisher didn’t mention the novel itself until the fift h paragraph, in which she made a sudden transition: “Native Son is the first report in fiction we have had from those who succumb to these disturbing cross-currents of contradictory nerve-impulses, from those whose behaviorpatterns give evidence of the same bewildered, senseless tangle of abnormal nerve-reactions studied in animals by psychologists in laboratory experiments.” She then instructed readers on how they should respond to the novel: “It can be guaranteed to harrow up any human heart capable of compassion or honest self-questioning.”65 Most readers in 1940 would have been encountering Wright for the first time. All received an edition with Fisher’s introduction wedged between Wright’s dedication to his mother and the first page of the novel. Before they ever met Bigger, Fisher had instructed them to see him as a sociological case (his violent “behavior-patterns” the result of the “contradictory nerveimpulses” of a segregated urban environment) and advised them how to feel about his situation (not fear but a condescending “compassion”). The later dismissal of Wright as a “fiction writer posing as social psychiatrist” may have as much to do with how liberal institutions like the Book-of-the-Month Club, the Rosenwald Fund, and social science departments framed his fiction as what he wrote.66 When Shirley Graham told her future husband, Du Bois, that the novel turned her “blood to vinegar” and Langston Hughes answered it with a call for fewer “tragedies of frustration and weakness” and more stories of “the heroes of the race,” they may have been reacting as much to the packaging as to the product.67 From the first roman-numeral page, the BOMC and Wright’s publisher, Harper and Brothers, sold Native Son to white readers as an education in Black suffering and described reading it as a means of cultivating and demonstrating an antiracist consciousness. Hurston, a famous critic of Wright and his imitators (and Wright of her), acknowledged the marketing tangle in which he, she, and other Black authors found themselves. “In their ‘Liberal’ championship of American negroes,” she wrote in a 1944 letter to the critic Burton Rascoe of the decision makers in the book business, “they seek out and praise characters of the lowest type and most sordid circumstances and portray the thing as the common state of all negroes.” Hurston did not care if Fisher and other liberals attributed Black characters’ shortcomings to white social structures. It still, she thought, sustained the racial biologism that her former graduate adviser, Boas, had sought

Darda-BK.indd 102

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Education

103

to undermine through a turn from the measurement of bodies to the observation of cultures, including literature. The liberal channels that had delivered Wright to the best-seller list had instituted a “sort of intellectual Jim Crow,” she wrote Rascoe, the effects of which “bolster the physical aspects [of ideas about racial difference] when our ‘friends’ defend us so disastrously.”68 She later doubled down on that argument, contributing an article to Negro Digest titled “What White Publishers Won’t Print,” in which she suggested that editors wouldn’t touch books that featured Black characters who didn’t, under the strain of anti-Black racism, “revert to type.”69 White liberals who sermonized about the forward march of racial time meant the forward march of their own consciousness, from front to back, cover to cover, ignorance to enlightenment, not Black life itself. Hurston leveled an almost identical criticism against communists’ investment in Black literature, which she described as circling around the theme of “you can’t win, Negro, you can’t win!”70 Scholars have long struggled with how to define the late Hurston. Radical? Conservative? Contrarian? Her criticism of the Brown v. Board decision could be (and has been) read as all of the above.71 But she, a nonconformist writing in the shadow of An American Dilemma, might best be described as an antiliberal. She told her agent in 1951 that she intended to break the mold and write a “truly indigenous Negro novel” that did not cater to white readers.72 Scribner’s turned it down, and she never finished it. That is not to say that Hurston let Wright off the hook or that his fiction didn’t lend itself to the Book-of-the-Month Club’s liberal framing. A famous friend of the Chicago school, Wright invited sociological readings of his novel. In the mid-1930s, he met Louis Wirth, a distinguished urban sociologist at the University of Chicago, either through Wirth’s wife and Wright’s welfare caseworker, Mary, or through the antifascist, fellow-traveling John Reed Club, which one biographer describes as “Wright’s university.”73 Wright asked Wirth for a reading list, and Wirth gave him a crash course in his and his famous department’s research on race, crime, and urban life. In 12 Million Black Voices, his 1941 ode to the Black working class, Wright cited some of that reading list, including the work of sociologists Horace Cayton, E. Franklin Frazier, Ira De A. Reid, Charles Taussig, and Wirth, as his source material.74 Scholars often remark on Wirth and the Chicago school’s influence on Native Son, but few attend to the influence Wright’s novel had on the Chicago

Darda-BK.indd 103

12/1/21 9:21 PM

104

Chapter 3

school. Robert Park, who taught at Chicago from 1914 to 1933 and mentored a small army of young sociologists, including Wirth, had advocated scientific detachment. He did not think sociologists should concern themselves with how government officials might use their research. Scientists should observe and document, not campaign. The rise of the Third Reich changed all that. Wirth, a German Jewish immigrant, seemed to take the success of Wright’s novel as a lesson in mass communication and counterpropaganda. In the war years, he addressed, as his article titles from the time communicate, the “Responsibility of Social Science” and “Race and Public Policy”—issues that Park never would have touched—and took an interest in reforming social science education, urging teachers to test “new educational frontiers” to “undo as quickly as possible the havoc wrought by the miseducation” of fascism and eugenics.75 In his 1947 presidential address at the meeting of the American Sociological Society (now the American Sociological Association), Wirth called on his fellow sociologists to engage mass media, including literature, radio, and television. “Since the mass media of communication are capable of providing the picture of social reality and the symbolic framework of thought and fantasy and the incentives for human action on an enormous scale,” he stated, “the knowledge of their effective use should become the most important quest of social science, and particularly of sociology.” Social scientists could no longer afford, he added, to “sit in their ivory tower while burly sinners rule the world.”76 Wirth and his colleagues sought to share sociological knowledge with the masses, and they looked to Wright’s race novel as a model for how to reach them. Some social scientists tried to write novelistic accounts of their own research. In 1941, W. Lloyd Warner, another Chicago sociologist, teamed with the American Youth Commission, the board of which included Fisher and the Rosenwald Fund’s Will Alexander, to write Color and Human Nature. Warner introduced the volume with a nod to how Wright had used the “techniques of fiction” to show how a young Black man “reacted to his lot” and offered as evidence a few lines not from the novel but from Fisher’s introduction. “As the author of a novel must often do, Wright was obliged to simplify facts and generalize freely in his interpretation,” he wrote. “The present volume, Color and Human Nature, which is not limited to the story of one Negro youth in Chicago, includes facts about hundreds of lives on which generalizations may be established.”77 Warner evaluated Native Son not as a novel but as a work

Darda-BK.indd 104

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Education

105

of sociological research—research that he found wanting because he thought it made “generalizations” about young Black men. Of course, Wright’s novel did nothing of the sort; Fisher, Wirth, and Warner made the generalizations. While Warner encouraged readers to see Native Son as bad science, he invited them to read Color and Human Nature as good literature: “While the present volume reviews the Negro’s reactions to [discrimination] in a systematic way, the reader’s interest is held almost as though he were reading a novel.”78 If Wright had once looked to the Chicago school for material for his novel, the Chicago school now went to Wright’s novel to authorize their research. In his footnotes, Warner cited Native Son as if it were the work of another sociologist, relating some of his case studies to Bigger Thomas and using Wright’s character to illustrate what he termed the “darkskin male series.”79 Education scholars also acknowledged the sociological value of the race novel, urging high school teachers to integrate fiction into the social science curriculum because, as two scholars wrote in 1946, “fiction stimulates and permits identification—‘putting oneself in the place of another’—in ways coldly intellectual analysis does not” and can act as a “powerful aid in destroying stereotypes and developing better intergroup relations.”80 The new outwardfacing Chicago school of Wirth and Warner wanted to combat segregation and anti-Blackness, and they looked not to courthouses, union halls, or legislative chambers but to the neighboring English department, where a formalist, the-text-is-the-text “new criticism” had taken hold. Wright’s following among sociologists might account for why St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Wright’s close friend and a former Wirth advisee, invited him to contribute an introduction to their 1945 book Black Metropolis. He acknowledged his debt to Park, Wirth, and other social scientists, through whose research he “discovered some of the meanings of the environment that battered and taunted me” and “found that sincere art and honest science were not far apart, that each could enrich the other.”81 But Wright did not see his novel as an argument for reform, as Fisher, Wirth, and Warner did, but as a warning that reform would never be enough, that Bigger Thomas demanded not civil rights but revolution. “Current American thought is so fastened upon trying to make what is presently real the only and right reality, that it has quite forgot the reality of the passion and hunger of millions of exploited workers and dissatisfied minorities,” he wrote. “It has quite forgot the reality of the impulses that made the men of Western Europe rise and slay the feudal dragon.”

Darda-BK.indd 105

12/1/21 9:21 PM

106

Chapter 3

Industrialists did not believe that another revolution could come because, he observed, they failed to see “the lives of the dispossessed,” the lives of people like Bigger Thomas, as real.82 Wright observed elsewhere that Bigger’s revolution could be communist or fascist, but one thing was certain: he would never be, like the social scientists and foundation officers who treated him as a case for intercultural education, a “supporter of the status quo.”83 The novelist, a careful reader of Marx, believed, as Cedric Robinson later remarked, that “the destruction of capitalism would come at the hands of the brute social force that it had itself created”—at the hands, that is, of Bigger Thomas and the lumpenproletariat.84 In 1940, Wright asked himself, “Would not whites misread Bigger and, doubting his authenticity, say: ‘This man is preaching hate against the whole white race’?”85 White liberals did misread Bigger, but they never doubted his authenticity or thought that he hated them and instead said, This man had a tough life because of his environment, and that environment will be better if enough of us read this book. Wright’s white readers did not see hate in the novel but something almost as destructive in their own reading of it: a solution. Playing in the Dark Unlike future iterations of racial liberal English education that assumed that novelists should write about characters who shared their racial, gender, and sexual identities, the social scientists, foundation officers, and educators who created the race novel celebrated books that crossed over because they seemed to augur a desegregated national culture (attained without desegregating much else). In 2002, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, the Twain scholar and author of Was Huck Black?, looked back on the twentieth century to consider the fate of “transgressive texts”: novels and stories in which Black authors created white protagonists and white authors Black protagonists. She argued that novels like Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee (Black author, white protagonist) and Sinclair Lewis’s Kingsblood Royal (white author, Black protagonist) had suffered under the unwritten rules of a segregated American literature. “Transgressive texts—books that violate these norms—are, as often as not, ignored,” she wrote.86 Fishkin was right, of course. Scholars had never taken much interest in Seraph on the Suwanee or Kingsblood Royal. But readers at the time did and, with liberal audiences embracing novels that crossed over as instruments of

Darda-BK.indd 106

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Education

107

integration, wouldn’t have seen them as all that transgressive. Hurston and Lewis rode a trend. In 1944, Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit (white author, Black protagonist) shot to number one on the New York Times best-seller list. In 1946, more than a million readers bought Frank Yerby’s debut novel, The Foxes of Harrow (Black author, white protagonist), and Twentieth Century– Fox shelled out $150,000 to secure the fi lm rights. In 1947, Willard Motley’s Knock on Any Door (Black author, white protagonist) lodged itself on the bestseller list for close to twelve months, and Humphrey Bogart starred in the fi lm version. When Hurston first told Carl Van Vechten, the white Harlem Renaissance booster, that she had “hopes of breaking that silly rule about Negroes not writing about white people”—a line that Fishkin and others cite as evidence of defiance—she did not have a radical message in mind. Then serving as a writer and technical adviser for Paramount Pictures, she thought it would be more lucrative to tell stories about white characters and had made that case to another studio, from which, she wrote Van Vechten, she had received a “sort of commitment.”87 Scholars might have forgotten transgressive texts, but audiences, Hurston knew, never ignored them. The Rosenwald Fund wouldn’t let them. In 1945, Bucklin Moon, author of The Darker Brother (white author, Black protagonist), edited, with Rosenwald funding, Primer for White Folks, a collection that brought Black and white writers together to, as he declared, “shatter some of white America’s most popular ideas about the Negro.”88 Moon believed, as his title suggests, that white people needed an education in Black life before they could know themselves and see what segregation had “cost” them, the architects of anti-Blackness. The table of contents reads like a roll call of Rosenwald fellows, advisers, and trustees. W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Sterling Brown, Thomas Sancton, Will Alexander, and Chester Himes all contributed to the collection. But Moon gave the first and last word to Smith, then at the height of her fame. “Is there really a Negro problem or is it, as Lillian Smith recently suggested,” he asked in his preface, “actually a white problem?”89 Smith elaborated on that idea in the closing essay, “Addressed to White Liberals,” in which she described segregation as an illness or disease, “a mechanism so destructive that it, in itself, has become a menace to the health of our culture and our individual lives,” a “cultural schizophrenia” with a “curious resemblance to the schizophrenia of individual personality.” Segregation had made the whole South sick, she argued, and that sickness radiated from white

Darda-BK.indd 107

12/1/21 9:21 PM

108

Chapter 3

southerners’ failure to know themselves and reckon with their investment in ideas and customs that reinforced white racial dominance. For this, Smith, a lifelong southerner, recommended a reading cure. “In the beginning was the Word, and today the Word is powerful”—formidable enough, she thought, to “shake this way of life to its roots.”90 She touted the book in the reader’s hands. She offered the race novel as cure-all, merging two of the dominant figurative frames of racial liberalism, racism as miseducation (as something to enlighten) and racism as disease (as something to cure). Smith believed in antiracist reading because it had worked for her. In the 1930s, while running the Laurel Falls girls summer camp in north Georgia, she undertook what her biographer describes as a “reading program on the South” of more than 130 books, including the work of Horace Mann Bond, Du Bois, and E. Franklin Frazier.91 In 1936, she and her lifelong friend, colleague, and lover, Paula Snelling, launched Pseudopodia, which they soon renamed the North Georgia Review and then South Today, to advocate for an unromantic, antiracist southern literature. Smith devoted one of her first columns to condemning Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, which she described as a “curious puffball compounded of printer’s ink and bated breath” that conformed to the “nostalgic terms of the old Planter-ideology.”92 In late 1938, Smith and Snelling wrote Embree, the head of the Rosenwald Fund, seeking a grant to sustain the Review, facilitate Smith’s work on a novel then titled “Jordan Is So Chilly,” and fund the research for a coauthored “book of criticism of southern literature” that would “contribute toward the South’s incipient willingness to move out from under the shade of the dead magnolias.”93 Embree awarded them $1,000. When they asked for a renewal, which Embree granted, in 1940, they clarified how they thought a new southern literature could transform the region. “The book’s approach to the southern scene will be through its literature,” they wrote. “For, we believe, literature not only mirrors (with clearness, or distortion) a region’s surface life but serves as symbol and symptom of the dilemmas and ambivalence of its culture and of its human relationships; hence [it] often holds within its content the means and mechanisms for understanding and interpreting those very elements of which it seems a mere reflection.” Smith and Snelling, who each took social science courses at Columbia in the 1920s, Snelling earning a master’s degree in 1925, would situate southern literature in “its societal-racial-psychological context” and then, seeing literature as mirror and mechanism, use it to remake

Darda-BK.indd 108

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Education

109

that context.94 The two women never finished the book, to which they had given the tentative title “Southbound,” but their research informed Smith’s 1949 memoir Killers of the Dream, in which she condemned southern literature for fabricating “the official daydream that the southern authoritarian system wanted the world to think our life was.”95 Embree liked what he read from Smith and Snelling. He shared their faith that literature could turn casual racists into liberal antiracists, and he hired them as talent scouts, sending them all over the South to interview and recruit young writers and artists on behalf of the Rosenwald Fund.96 In almost all her writing on race, Smith described racists as disabled and segregation as disabling the South. In a 1943 issue of Common Ground, an organ of the Carnegie-funded Common Council for American Unity, she chronicled her growing awareness as a child and young woman that segregation had left her and her fellow southerners “crippled.” “The warping distorted frame we have put around every Negro child from birth is around every white child from birth also,” she wrote. “As in its twisting distorted form it shapes and cripples the life and personality of one, it is shaping and crippling the life and personality of the other. It would be difficult to decide which character is maimed the more—the white or the Negro—after living a life in the southern framework of segregation.”97 In her 1945 “Statement of Purposes and Intentions” for Strange Fruit, Smith described the “over-esteem of one’s skin color” as a “regressive narcissism, a symptom of psychosexual maladjustment.”98 Antiabolitionists and antisuffragists had long attributed disabilities to Black people and women as an argument against their freedom and enfranchisement, leading social movements, including the abolitionist and women’s suff rage movements, to sometimes claim their rights by insisting on their able-bodiedness, making ableist arguments against racism and sexism. Smith took that liberal ableism further in the 1940s, attributing disabilities to segregationists as evidence of their inferior status. “The concept of normality,” the historian Douglas Baynton writes, arose alongside industrialism and Darwinian evolution as the West shifted “from a God-centered to a human-centered world, from a culture that looked within to a core and backward to lost Edenic origins toward one that looked outward to behavior and forward to a perfected future.”99 When Smith declared racists abnormal, she cast them as anachronisms, relics of a fast-receding world that could not resist the inevitable force of racial time, the next bend in the moral arc of the universe.

Darda-BK.indd 109

12/1/21 9:21 PM

110

Chapter 3

Smith’s first novel, Strange Fruit, delivered her ableist antiracism to millions of readers. Although the front matter credited the title to the Billie Holiday song of the same name and Smith acknowledged hearing the song before retitling her novel, she later insisted that it referred not to Lady Day’s “southern trees bearing strange fruit” but to a story she had written in 1943 in which a white man’s bad conscience, his devil on his shoulder, tells him, “I’m the seed of hate and fear and guilt. You are its strange fruit which I feed on.”100 In an unpublished reflection from the time, Smith remarked, “Strange Fruit seemed like the right title—not because it symbolized a lynching, but because it symbolized a people. We the people, white and colored, are the strange fruit which our culture has produced.”101 The novel, about the fallout from a love affair between a white man, Tracy Deen, and a Black woman, Nonnie Anderson, in a small Georgia town, identifies bad racial consciousness with disabilities and good racial consciousness with able-bodiedness. Tracy embodies the former, his bad racial consciousness manifested in his tottering walk. The reader first encounters him as he arrives at Nonnie’s house: “A drag of left foot, a lift of shoulder, half limp, half swagger. Limp, swagger.” On the one occasion that another character mentions his uneven gait, he retorts, “I’m not crippled.”102 Nonnie embodies good racial consciousness with her able-bodiedness, “her head held effortlessly high” and her bearing suggesting an “invulnerableness” and a “superiority to hurt.”103 Not until Tracy scorns her for her skin color does she find herself disoriented and struggling to stand. Other characters have lost legs at the local mill, and the children tell ghost stories about a woman who lost an arm in a train accident and now wanders the town at night searching for her missing arm. A segregated South is, in Smith’s fictional Georgia, a disabled South, a region fighting the “normal” march of time into a desegregated future. Strange Fruit offers itself, the right kind of reading material, as a treatment for what ails the South. All of the novel’s good white liberals—Tracy’s younger sister, Laura, and the mill owner’s two children, Charlie and Harriet Harris— read fiction. Others either don’t read or don’t read the right kind of books. Tracy, with his tragic racial consciousness, has read the social science but not the novels. “The anthropologists had proved there was no superior race. Sure he knew that,” Tracy reflects after an evening with Nonnie. “Books were written showing this, telling it, proving it even. He didn’t read books all the time, as Laura did, but he knew what the world was thinking. He knew what the

Darda-BK.indd 110

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Education

111

facts were. They had no more to do with his feelings than knowing the facts about bone structure or the reproductive process has to do with your feeling about the mother who bore you.”104 Tracy knows the “facts” but hasn’t learned the “feelings” to live them out. He knows what to believe but not how to act on that belief. Nonnie’s Blackness shouldn’t change how he feels about her, he knows, but it does. His mother often read to Laura as a child, we learn, but not to him. He sensed as a seven-year-old how his mother’s reading could “shut out the emptiness, shut out the bigness he had felt lost in,” and he would sit with her and Laura until she sent him outside, banishing him from the “softness and warmth” of the world of imagination and feeling.105 Smith believed that the right kind of reading could transform the South, that it could save the region as it had saved Laura. In a 1943 pamphlet, There Are Things to Do, of which the Rosenwald Fund bought and distributed more than a thousand, she called on white southern readers to act—“there are things we can do NOW”—before advising them to “read a Negro’s book or his articles; then write him a letter” or “subscribe to a Negro magazine or a Negro newspaper.”106 White liberals needed to learn to read for facts and for feeling—to know what “the anthropologists had proved” but also the “softness and warmth” of fictional lives. There Are Things to Do, though advocating nothing more radical than reading novels and subscribing to Black newspapers, attracted the attention of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. In the author’s 134-page bureau fi le, meticulous underlining suggests that some agent read it like an honors student. Smith, who studied at Columbia’s graduate school of education, regarded the next generation as a blank slate that could be raised without the wrongheaded ideas that had afflicted hers. “Members of school boards can make magnificent contributions now to world peace and human understanding,” she advised in her how-to pamphlet, “by putting into the school system books which will build appreciation and understanding” to people of other races.107 Her belief in education as the front line of antiracist struggle informed how she and Snelling ran Laurel Falls, which Smith bought from her father in 1928. A 1944 New York Herald Tribune article described it as “a summer camp for girls as different from the average as [Strange Fruit] is from Gone with the Wind.” The girls hiked and learned arts and crafts but also gathered in the afternoons to listen to Miss Lil, as they knew her, discuss race, segregation, and the South. “Suppose I had a child,” she told them at a lesson recounted in the

Darda-BK.indd 111

12/1/21 9:21 PM

112

Chapter 3

Tribune, “and I thought she had a heart murmur. Would I say to myself, ‘I love my child so much that I don’t want to know if she has a heart murmur?’” The girls answered that, of course, she wouldn’t. “Suppose,” she continued, “I said, ‘I love the South so much that I don’t want to know if it has anything wrong with it.’ Is that any more sensible?” The Tribune article concluded that an attendee “could not help finishing the summer a more tolerant girl than she started it.”108 That may be true, but Smith and the other white liberals of the Rosenwald Fund failed to see that reading antiracist books might be the first rather than the last act in transforming the racial structure of the United States, that more than racist attitudes barred Black people from wealth, health, and government. Laurel Falls closed in 1948, the same year that Embree shuttered the Rosenwald Fund. It never admitted a Black girl. Playing in the White When Richard Wright recounted in 1940 “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” he described his antihero as derived from the Bigger Thomases he had met in the South and then Chicago. Bigger No. 1 harassed Wright as a child, snatching his and his friends’ bats and baseballs in the street and making them beg him for their return. Bigger No. 3 snuck into the local movie theater where Wright worked as a teenager. He later died at the hands of a white police officer. Bigger No. 5 refused to follow Jim Crow laws, sitting wherever he liked on segregated streetcars. Wright assumed that he also met a violent end. The Biggers in the South were Black, but in the North, Wright discovered, “Bigger Thomas was not Black all the time; he was white, too, and there were literally millions of them, everywhere.” He borrowed “shadings and nuances” from white Biggers in constructing his hero.109 Bigger Thomas was Black, but, his creator suggested, he could have been white. Willard Motley, a Black Chicagoan raised in a white neighborhood, created the character Wright imagined, a white Bigger Thomas. Nick Romano, the Italian American protagonist of his 1947 novel Knock on Any Door, falls in with the wrong crowd after his father loses his job. He gets sent to reform school, then jail, then, after shooting an officer, the electric chair. He dreams of leading a church at twelve and dies at twenty-one. The novel follows Native Son beat for beat. In a draft preface to the novel, which Motley wrote in 1943, he offered his version of “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born.” “Nick Romano is not ‘just fiction,’” he wrote. “I knew two of them in their formative periods. I know at

Darda-BK.indd 112

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Education

113

least twenty of him who live within a mile from where this is written.” Motley, a committed naturalist, celebrated that he and other young novelists lived among the people about whom they wrote and, in the language of the Rosenwald Fund, from which he would later receive a grant, declared that “each novel against a world as it is is the tearing away of one more brick of the phony structure and that in this way [the novelist] is helping the making of a new world.” He signed the draft preface “Willard Motley, ‘Nick’s neighborhood’ 1943.”110 In his contribution to Phylon, Thomas Jarrett, the Atlanta University scholar, inverted Wright’s claim about Bigger Thomas, writing that Nick Romano “might well have been a Negro.”111 Although the Wrightian preface landed in a desk drawer (and later in the archives), critics noted the novel’s similarities to Native Son. Robert Bone, a white scholar of Black literature, wrote that Motley borrowed so much from Wright as to “border on plagiarism.”112 Others described it as “Native Son in whiteface.”113 In the first pages of Wright’s novel, Bigger Thomas corners a rat in his South Side apartment, a rat whose “belly pulsed with fear” and that “emitted a long thin song of defiance” before Bigger strikes it with a skillet.114 In the first pages of Motley’s novel, Nick’s mother recalls how her son had rescued a mouse from a cat that had cornered it on the street, batting it around as a crowd gathered to witness the mouse’s final moments. Nick thinks of the mouse often as he, of course, discovers that he is that mouse, cornered and taunted for the cruel entertainment of others. In the climactic trial, another echo of Wright’s novel, as the DA cross-examines him, Nick remembers “the cornered mouse and the cat’s paws going out sharp, slapping, slapping, slapping!—He was that mouse now.” The DA, he realizes, “was prepared for the kill, ready for the kill. The mouse! The mouse!”115 Motley invited readers to see his white ethnic hero as not a criminal but a tragic figure, a victim of his environment. When Look ran a “picture dramatization” of the novel, the editors titled it “Who Made This Boy a Murderer?”116 The white Bigger Thomas, it suggested, also deserved a kindhearted reading, if nothing else. A critical darling in 1947, Knock on Any Door did not age well. Most Blackauthored white protagonists and white-authored Black protagonists did not. Some scholars have tried to resuscitate Motley’s first novel as a “white life novel” that reveals the “inner workings of racialized power” and challenges the “‘fi xedness’ of concepts of race and gender.”117 That radical Motley, they suggest, knew that, as the narrator of James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography

Darda-BK.indd 113

12/1/21 9:21 PM

114

Chapter 3

of an Ex-Colored Man remarks, “the colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand themselves.”118 Knock on Any Door may have something to say about whiteness, but Motley didn’t think it did. He didn’t think it had much to say about race at all. “People, it seems to me, define down into much-alike characters regardless of race or color,” he said in an interview at the time. Nick “happened to be Italian.”119 Motley, raised in Chicago’s then-white Englewood neighborhood, had not thought of himself as Black for much of his life. “I don’t feel that the colored people are a part of me,” he confessed in his journal in 1933. “I don’t look down on Negroes but I’m not one of them any more than the Prince of Wales is.”120 As he drafted his first novel, Motley addressed the continued segregation of the army in an essay titled “I Discover I’m a Negro” and drafted a story about a light-skinned Black man that featured the refrain, and Motley’s own motto, “People were just people.”121 When the Phylon contributors argued that the Black authors looked to an “‘unlabeled’ future” of deracinated fiction, they got Black literature wrong.122 But they had Motley right. The first-time novelist fought to leave his image off the book and out of the marketing materials. He lost, and no reviewer failed to remark on the Black novelist writing about a down-on-his-luck Italian American. Motley didn’t write a self-conscious race novel, as Lillian Smith had. Racial liberals read one into being. Edwin Embree and the Rosenwald Fund wanted that novel, the race novel that Motley refused to write. When the young novelist sought a grant in 1945 to fund the writing of his second book, We Fished All Night, then titled “Of Night, Perchance of Death,” he didn’t describe it or the forthcoming Knock on Any Door as a race novel. His second book, he wrote, dealt with three World War II veterans who discover that “the elements of war are found in everyday life.”123 He didn’t mention their race, but all three were white. Embree might not have awarded Motley the $1,800 that he did had he not also received a letter of reference from a white woman named Dorothy Andrews, a friend of the novelist, who likened Motley to Richard Wright and credited him with her own newfound antiracist consciousness. “I think in his book he will do more for the betterment of race-relations than Richard Wright has done, because he writes about this problem without antagonism and bitterness and goes beyond its limitations to the problem of universal injustice, hate and crime,” she wrote, as if reading Embree’s mind. “He brought me from the

Darda-BK.indd 114

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Education

115

stage of mouthing equality to the establishment of a core within myself which could feel no differences.”124 Motley’s writing made Andrews “feel” like an antiracist. It gave her the education in racial difference that Embree and the Rosenwald Fund considered the highest achievement of Black letters, whether the author identified as Black or not. Although Motley had finished his first novel before winning the grant, Embree threw the weight of the fund behind it. The statement it released wasted no time in establishing Motley’s Blackness. “A bitter, fearless novel, written with the understanding and anger of one who had lived among the ruined derelicts of society, brought fame to a young Negro writer,” it began, mentioning that two houses had turned the novel down because they found it “too raw.” “Motley is still surprised,” the statement concluded, “by the importance people seem to attach to the fact that most of the people he writes about are white. ‘If you know people,’ he says, ‘you can write about any race.’”125 The Rosenwald Fund took Motley’s desire for racelessness and turned it into a case for integration, at least in literature. Horace Cayton, the sociologist, reviewed Knock on Any Door three times, hailing it as a contribution to science as much as literature. In the Chicago Daily Tribune, alluding to his and St. Clair Drake’s Black Metropolis, he lauded Motley’s novel for how it “exposed a side of our great metropolis which will shock and horrify” and described the novelist’s method as that of an urban sociologist. “For six years, this young author has tramped the streets of the west side, notebook in hand, making an infinite and detailed record of the lives of the people of that section,” he wrote.126 In the New Republic, he declared Motley’s debut the culmination of Chicago’s “cross-fertilization of science and literature” that had made it a hub of art-minded science and science-minded art. “In no other place have social scientists studied a locality more intensively, and in no other city has there been such an outpouring of literary endeavor to explain an urban community,” Cayton, a close friend and later biographer of Wright, stated. “Science and literature have helped each other to understand America’s most raw and beautiful metropolis,” with sociologists contributing their “data” and “material” and novelists their “rich and fruitful insight.”127 He encouraged readers of the Chicago Daily Tribune, the New Republic, and the Pittsburgh Courier, to which the sociologist contributed his third review in three weeks, to consume Knock on Any Door as more than a naturalist bildungsroman. It also, he insisted, distilled the latest in sociological research

Darda-BK.indd 115

12/1/21 9:21 PM

116

Chapter 3

on white immigrants, Black migrants, and integration. Regular readers might not get through his and Drake’s eight-hundred-page academic book, but they could get the gist from the notebook-toting Motley’s best-selling novel. Cayton endorsed Knock on Any Door as the Rosenwald Fund had: reading it would be harrowing, he suggested, but also educational and a testament to the liberal reader’s commitment to the American creed. In “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” Wright reflected on his first book, Uncle Tom’s Children, admitting that it had solicited a sentimental reaction from white readers, making them feel virtuous for having read his stories. “When the reviews of that book began to appear, I realized that I had made an awfully naive mistake. I found that I had written a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good about,” he wrote, describing sentimentalism in familiar gendered terms. “I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears.”128 That commitment led Wright to Bigger Thomas, his antihero, and Native Son, his antisentimental novel. He did not want his white readers to feel good about feeling, for the duration of a few stories, bad. He would not allow them to believe that they knew Bigger, that they identified with him and felt his suffering from the inside. Wright blamed the sentimental reaction to Uncle Tom’s Children on his writing, his “mistake,” and dedicated himself to writing a different kind of book. But that reaction had more to do with the reviews, the whole institutional infrastructure of reading, a white liberal frontlash to Black literature, than it did with his stories. Wright’s novel and the novels that it influenced, including Smith’s and Motley’s, entered a network of liberal channels—the Bookof-the-Month Club, the Rosenwald Fund, an outward-facing Chicago school, race-novel marketing, book criticism—that framed them, no matter their content, as three-dollar educations in how to feel like an antiracist. The race novel emerged as a celebrated form in the 1940s because it cohered so well with a wider culture of racial solutionism, a desire among liberals to find, on the near-future horizon, an end to racial time. Or at least an imagined one, at the end of a novel. That does not, of course, mean that all readers consumed race novels as consoling assurances of the magic of books and the forward march of time. But readers who didn’t—readers who refused the dominant liberal frame, who worried that cultural integration might act as a substitute for rather than facilitate material redistribution—had to read against a growing

Darda-BK.indd 116

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Education

117

chorus of racial liberals telling each other that as long as such books are being published, everything will be all right. A Literary Education In December 1947, nine months before her sudden death at sixty-one, Ruth Benedict delivered the presidential address at the meeting of the American Anthropological Association in New Mexico. She dedicated her remarks not to her or her fellow scientists’ achievements but to what they might learn from the humanities. “The problems posed and discussed in the humanities is closer, chapter by chapter, to those in anthropology than are the investigations carried on in most of the social sciences,” she said. Humanists and anthropologists shared “the same subject matter” of “man and his works and his ideas and his history.” Benedict credited A. C. Bradley, author of the classic Shakespearian Tragedy, and other literature scholars with having first taught her the “habits of mind” of an anthropologist, and she encouraged her colleagues to look to the humanities as a resource for educating a general audience about human culture and difference.129 At the onset of World War II, Benedict had urged grade and high schools to introduce scientific lessons on race, believing that science teachers could, with encouragement and better teaching materials, debunk a hierarchical racial biologism. In the mid-1940s, she and other social scientists found a new, more subtle instrument for antiracist education: the English classroom. She returned to the literature scholars of her own education to train the next generation in the habits of mind that could, she thought, set racism on a course for extinction. The next generation of Americans could be the first to live without a hierarchical race consciousness. An “education in truly human values is the great opportunity of the English teacher and it is a most important, positive contribution toward building a world free of racial discrimination,” she wrote at the time. “Good novels and plays and poems are generally better material on cultural conditioning, even for the serious anthropological student, than formal books on the ‘American way.’” Benedict, who had earlier devoted herself to remaking science education as a shield against Nazism, now looked to the English curriculum for a solution to the American dilemma, asking high school teachers, “Why not read, along with Ivanhoe, some of the novels of American minorities which tell like stories in modern dress?”130 Benedict and other racial liberals, tracing anti-Blackness not to white self-interest but to the

Darda-BK.indd 117

12/1/21 9:21 PM

118

Chapter 3

miseducation of the American mind, hailed the English teacher as a front-line warrior in an antiracist struggle to reform reading. The movement for “intercultural education” that arose in the mid-1940s succeeded the “cultural gifts” movement that had celebrated the cultural contributions of white ethnic immigrants.131 Intercultural educators, taking to heart social scientists’ argument that white ethnicities did not constitute races, an argument that accelerated the consolidation of whiteness, turned instead to interracial learning, creating a new institutional home for the race novel. From 1945 to 1948, the American Council on Education funded trial curricula in more than two hundred school districts with which it shared a pamphlet, Literature for Human Understanding, offering teachers guidance on how to use literature to challenge students’ “preconceived ideas about people.” (The intercultural of “intercultural education” meant, at least for the ACE, between white student and Black text.) “Fiction,” the pamphlet informed teachers and school administrators, “can supply some of the initial interest and continuous emotional learning, translate cold facts and figures into human terms, and develop the capacity to live in other people’s shoes for a little while.” It recommended that students read Wright’s Black Boy to know the “warping effect of racial discrimination.”132 Some scholars studied whether reading stories about Black characters had a measurable effect on the racial attitudes of white students. (It did, but the effect was small and didn’t last long.)133 Others argued that children’s literature that modeled “sympathetic attitudes” toward others could stifle anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism before it took root in white students’ minds.134 One education scholar described the right kind of reading as “immunizing the child against the virus of bigotry” and a “weapon” and “first line of defense” in a battle with time-limited ideas and attitudes.135 But not all teachers embraced intercultural education as an antiracist silver bullet. In 1946, at the height of the movement, a high school teacher from Newark asked, “How can such a transformation of character take place as the result of a few concentrated lessons on racial tolerance as set forth in print or presented by a few zealous evangelists?” He wondered whether some movement advocates “are unconsciously guilty, in their very humanitarian zeal, of betraying the white superiority complex of the dominant group in the community.”136 Education historian Zoë Burkholder describes intercultural education as the third act in a longer liberal education movement that defined

Darda-BK.indd 118

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Education

119

race as nation, then as color, then, in the mid- to late 1940s, as culture.137 The idea of race as culture took some of the edge off a receding racial biologism, but it also reified it, biologizing Black culture and elevating white liberal culture in relation to it through declarations of antiracism. For all that teachers contributed to intercultural education, it took the involvement of outsiders to elevate it to the status of a movement. In 1946, the Committee on Intercultural Relations, an offshoot of the National Council of Teachers of English, assembled an issue of the English Journal on how literature could guide “American youth to free themselves from prejudice.”138 The issue included the writing of education scholars and teachers but also social scientists and novelists. Thomas Mann contributed. So did Benedict; the Harlem Renaissance philosopher Alaine Locke; the intellectual Horace Kallen, who declared literature the ultimate embodiment of “a Cultural Pluralism,” a term he coined; and the Freudian Ernst Kris. “Teachers of English,” a committee member wrote, distilling the consensus among the contributors, “are helping students learn through literature how it feels to be unjustly rejected and how it feels to ‘belong.’”139 Locke commended Lillian Smith and other “white exponents of the literature of the Negro” for modeling the kind of other-directed knowledge that he and his fellow contributors believed students might gain through reading.140 Benedict, Locke, Kallen, and Kris all agreed that it fell to the English teacher to, in the words of one high school guidance counselor, “accept the challenge of the fourth R,” to counter racism with the right kind of reading and writing.141 The investment of social scientists, foundation officers, and education reformers in the English curriculum as the foremost instrument of antiracist struggle signaled the emergence of a new figurative frame of racial liberalism, the waning of antiracism as education and the arrival of antiracism as integration, of racism as something not to treat but to cure. White racial dominance in the United States, they believed, arose from and endured through the antiBlack attitudes of white adults. If white children never learned the attitudes of that older generation, if in the intimate world of a novel they could feel with and through a Black protagonist, then racism would die out within their lifetimes. Racial liberals could see that overcoming on the horizon, at the end, in the denouement, of Native Son and Strange Fruit and Knock on Any Door. The trial curricula of the American Council on Education and the educational initiatives of the Committee on Intercultural Relations attracted

Darda-BK.indd 119

12/1/21 9:21 PM

120

Chapter 3

substantial financial gifts from liberal foundations. The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, which launched the Negro History Bulletin in 1937 to “promote the study of the Negro among the children,” did not. The editors of the Bulletin, the brainchild of historian Charles Woodson, who also founded the Journal of Negro History and created “Negro History Week” (now Black History Month), believed, as they announced in a brochure, that Black students “should cease to study others exclusively and study himself in relation to others and others in relation to himself.”142 The editors of the Bulletin, never a radical venue, welcomed and lamented the rise of white-administered intercultural education and the sudden fascination of white reformers with Black literature. “We have to question the procedure of many of the white friends of the Negro whose good intentions should not be doubted,” they wrote in 1946. “Many of them are writing books about the Negro before they are sufficiently informed to take up this task. What they write is often the half truth which is more harmful than the untruth.”143 The editors of the Bulletin worried not that their white friends had chosen to do the cost-free good thing—teaching more Black novels, inviting white students to climb into a Black hero’s skin and walk around in it—but that the cost-free good thing might be a cost-free bad thing, the half-truth worse than nothing at all. The social science departments, foundations, book clubs, and reform movements that created and celebrated the race novel—that sold it as an education in racial difference—offered something tantalizing and fantastic: the belief that a centuries-old regime would come crashing down when we all learned to read like antiracists.

Darda-BK.indd 120

12/1/21 9:21 PM

4

Antiracism as Integration

“May I continue?” the psychologist asked Robert Carter, assistant counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, in the South Carolina courtroom on May 28, 1951. “Because that is an answer only to one-half of your question.” Carter had recruited Clark, then thirty-six and teaching at City College, to share his research on how segregation affected schoolchildren’s self-esteem in Briggs v. Elliott, one of the five cases that the Warren court later combined and heard as Brown v. Board of Education. Clark and his wife, Mamie, had conducted their soon-to-be-famous “doll test” on sixteen Black children between the ages of six and nine at Scott’s Branch, a local Black school, and shared their results with the district court: when offered one Black and one white doll, eleven of the children, though acknowledging that they looked more like the Black doll, identified it as “bad.” “Prejudice and segregation have definitely detrimental effects on the personality development of the Negro child,” he concluded. Carter had gotten what he wanted, but Clark hadn’t finished. Segregation also, he added, harms “the personality of the child who belongs to the segregating group.” Citing the research of his colleagues Max Deutscher and Isidor Chein, he argued that white children attending segregated schools suffered “guilty feelings” and “confusion concerning basic moral ideology” because the democratic values they learned didn’t align with the discrimination they witnessed.1 On February 27, 1952, a now courtroom-tested Clark, facing a hostile crossexamination in Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, another future Brown case, again introduced the issue of white damage. White children suffer a “confusion in moral values, a confusion that stems from the fact that they are being taught in the schools the brotherhood of man, they are being taught democracy—” he began, before the defense cut him off, declaring that the Virginia district court had heard enough. Clark continued: “And I K E N N E T H C L A R K H A D M O R E T O S AY.

121

Darda-BK.indd 121

12/1/21 9:21 PM

122

Chapter 4

think that the evidence shows that a child who is being taught moral values in a situation which contradicts these moral values becomes confused and conflicted.”2 The court ruled against Carter and the NAACP, determining that it had “found no hurt or harm to either race.”3 The highest court decided otherwise. The Warren court’s unanimous 1954 decision in Brown v. Board listed Clark and his research first in the muchdebated eleventh footnote, the “social science footnote.” Segregation “generates a feeling of inferiority” among Black children, Chief Justice Earl Warren determined. “Whatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, this finding is amply supported by modern authority.”4 The 1896 Fuller court that instated the “separate but equal” doctrine did not have the social science of 1954 to enlighten it about the detrimental effect of segregation on the young Black mind. Perhaps it would have issued a different decision, Warren suggested. Perhaps not. The chief justice’s words, as historians and legal scholars have argued ever since, stigmatized Blackness further in building the case for ending a stigmatizing institution on the image of the damaged Black mind. The historian Daryl Michael Scott argues that the Warren court “crafted a psychiatric appeal that subtly but effectively conveyed the plight of the victim without censoring the guilty.”5 (The Fuller court couldn’t be blamed for the limitations of nineteenth-century science, the decision suggested.) But Warren’s footnote also carried a psychiatric appeal that subtly but effectively conveyed the plight of the guilty. The research cited carried an urgent warning about white damage, a warning that would have, though unacknowledged in Warren’s decision, resonated with the nine white men in robes. The footnote included Deutscher and Chein’s 1948 finding that 83 percent of social scientists believed that segregation had “detrimental psychological effects on the group which enforces segregation.”6 It directed readers to Theodore Brameld’s “Educational Costs,” in which the philosopher of education declared that “social scientists are almost unanimously agreed that the white people and the Christian people of the United States suffer more from the effects of discrimination than do minority groups themselves.”7 The scholars whom Warren invoked to authorize the court’s decision believed that segregation damaged the self-esteem of Black students (the doll test) but also the moral lives of white children (learning values that the nation didn’t observe), whom the science writing of the time identified with the future of the “American personality.”

Darda-BK.indd 122

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Integration

123

The headlines that greeted the Brown v. Board decision did not fail to mention the white-damage argument. James Reston, the Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, devoted most of his column not to the court’s decision but to the social science to which it nodded. The scientists “noted that white children, under these circumstances, were hurt because they were encouraged to think of whole groups of people as inferior,” an incredulous Reston wrote. “This, it was contended, set up conflicts in the white child’s mind because he was taught principles of equality that were not applied to the Negro children.”8 Another article described the decision as an act of healing for white America: “Sociological benefits to the nation at large as outgrowths of the Supreme Court’s decision banning school segregation were envisioned throughout the country yesterday.” A University of Virginia administrator told the Times that it would “open the way to relieving millions of a sense of guilt” and “self-consciousness.”9 The Washington Post editorial board, in a statement titled “Emancipation,” declared the ruling a “profoundly healthy and healing one” that would “restore the faith of Americans themselves in their own great values and traditions.”10 Warren’s decision stressed the harm done to Black children, leading historians and legal scholars to center Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s doll test and an integrationist Black-damage narrative, but a second thread runs through the social science cited in footnote 11, a thread that a casual news reader wouldn’t have missed: a concern that the American dilemma could undermine the mental health and self-knowledge of the white child. When the Washington Post hailed the Brown v. Board decision as an “emancipation,” a careful reader might well have wondered, Whose? The idea of a national moral conflict between values and behavior would have rung familiar to readers of Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 best seller An American Dilemma, which Warren cited last in footnote 11 (“see generally Myrdal”).11 The Swedish sociologist devoted more than a thousand pages to “the split in the American’s moral personality,” by which, he acknowledged, he meant that of the white American. (“The Negro community has not been the primary object of our study,” he admitted on page 927, in the forty-third of forty-five chapters.)12 The activist Pauli Murray read An American Dilemma as a Howard law student and wove that idea into a paper, “Should the Civil Rights Cases and Plessy v. Ferguson Be Overruled?,” that Carter and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund consulted in building their own argument against segregation. The

Darda-BK.indd 123

12/1/21 9:21 PM

124

Chapter 4

Plessy doctrine had, she wrote, “helped to warp and thwart the personalities of young Americans, white and black,” breeding in white children a “dangerous superiority complex” that contradicts the “American democratic creed.”13 Clark himself contributed to An American Dilemma as a graduate student at Columbia, and the testimonies he delivered in South Carolina, Virginia, and elsewhere often shared the Swede’s faith in the American creed, that antiBlack racism endured as a strange “anomaly in the very structure of American society.”14 But Clark, though sometimes touting that creed in the courtroom, did not see the slave trade or racial segregation as anomalous. He did not think white Americans faced a dilemma. In “Effect of Prejudice and Discrimination on Personality Development,” a two-hundred-page paper he contributed to the 1950 White House Conference on Children and Youth and the first source listed in footnote 11 of the Brown decision, Clark wondered whether anti-Blackness constituted not a dilemma but the creed itself. He observed that insecurities of food, faith, and status had brought the first white settlers to North America, where that “initial insecurity of the American ‘character structure’” led the white immigrant to “attempt to enhance his personal status by denying security to another person or group.” The drive for white status in a new land made racism not a divergence from but an outgrowth of the settlers’ founding motivation. “From this dynamic level the American Creed and American racism are not contradictory but compatible ingredients of the American pattern,” Clark wrote. “It would appear, therefore, that if the resolution of the American dilemma is in the direction of [the] American Creed it will not be because of the power of the ideals, themselves, or because of the apparent contradiction, but because the pressure of economic, social, and political events . . . forced America to adhere to these ideals.”15 White people would not share the nation’s wealth with Black people because it alleviated a sense of guilt or resolved some moral conflict but because they had an incentive to act. No national creed, no matter how well taught, would make a whole generation of white children refuse the wages of whiteness. The distribution of resources and interests needed to change, not how white people felt about them. Chief Justice Warren and white news media heard the liberal Clark—the young scientist who cared about the moral growth of their white children—and ignored the radical Clark, who, in a footnote they cited and celebrated, declared racism as “American as the Declaration of Independence.”16

Darda-BK.indd 124

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Integration

125

If the racial liberals of the 1940s believed that reading novels could enlighten casual racists through lessons in tolerance and national fellow feeling, then the reformers of the 1950s identified the integrated classroom as a cure, something that could immunize the next generation against racism, eliminating it, in time, from the national bloodstream. Judge Julius Waties Waring, dissenting in the circuit court ruling in Briggs v. Elliott, declared that the desegregation of schools would “strike at the cause of infection and not merely at the symptoms of disease.”17 In Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Lindley Stiles, the author of Democratic Teaching in Secondary Schools, called for the “administration of the antidote education in everincreasing dosages” so that “this patient (our society)” could be “cured of the ailment of segregation.”18 Social scientists seeking to defeat racism through the dissemination of scientific knowledge and Truman administration officials vowing to right racism with federal reforms contributed briefs in the segregation cases. Scholars tend to treat the former as a misguided crusade to highlight the damages of Blackness under segregation and the latter as a selfserving reminder of the Cold War stakes of the case—one a tale of liberal shortsightedness, the other a testament to brutal ambition.19 But the emerging field of personality psychology, through which Clark and other contributors to the social science brief addressed the effects of school segregation on Black and white students, bound one to the other, the character of the American child to the character of the nation. Clark and a rising cohort of social scientists directed liberal reformers to the future, to a coming age in which white children raised without racist attitudes, who never had to unlearn the wrongheaded ideas of earlier generations, governed a nation cured not of racism but of race consciousness itself. From Henry Murray’s and Theodor Adorno’s studies of Adolf Hitler and the “authoritarian personality” to Gordon Allport’s, Clark’s, and Erik Erikson’s diagnosis of the “prejudiced personality” to the White House Conference on Children and Youth, from which much of footnote 11 originated, on the “American personality,” liberal social scientists urged readers and courts to see the formation of a child’s mature self as a model for the evolution of the nation’s. That model allowed them to make a case for desegregation grounded in a concern for the white child as an embodiment of the nation’s future. Queer theorist Lee Edelman, in defining what he terms “reproductive futurism,” observes that “politics, however radical the means by which specific

Darda-BK.indd 125

12/1/21 9:21 PM

126

Chapter 4

constituencies attempt to produce a more desirable social order, remains, at its core, conservative insofar as it works to affirm a structure, to authenticate social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of its inner Child.”20 We might say, to borrow from Edelman, that the mobilization of personality psychology to dismantle school segregation in the South enacted a kind of white racial futurism that affirmed and transmitted through the white child that which it alleged to condemn in the institution. Legal historians blame the Warren court’s 1955 order that the five defendant school districts in Brown v. Board desegregate “with all deliberate speed” for encouraging a foot-dragging resistance to the landmark decision, but that infamous formulation did not so much give license to a looming conservative backlash as reflect the racial liberal confidence in the gradual desegregation of the American mind, of the inoculating effect of integrated, color-blind education on future generations.21 Social scientists determined that a stable self arose through a delicate succession of cumulative stages that built toward a “final integration of the individual life cycle,” and this figurative frame—the white child as national future—structured the liberal dream of desegregation.22 “With all deliberate speed” meant slow but also certain, inviting resistance while guaranteeing that the next generation of American children would achieve, in stages, over time, the desegregated character that their forefathers couldn’t. The Authoritarian Personality In 1944, Jean-Paul Sartre, looking ahead to the end of the war, determined to construct a portrait de l’antisemite. “We are now in a position to understand [the antisemite]. He is a man who is afraid. Not of the Jews of course, but of himself, of his conscience, his freedom, of his instincts,” Sartre wrote in the third issue of Les Temps modernes, the review he founded with Simone de Beauvoir. “By adhering to antisemitism, he is not only adopting an opinion, he is choosing himself as a person.”23 Antisemitism revealed some innate fear, some need, that the antisemite could not articulate. It reflected not what he thought but who he was, not his conscious beliefs but his unconscious being. “Portrait of the Antisemite” arrived in the United States, and in English, in 1946, where it contributed to a growing consensus among leftists and liberals that antisemitism and other forms of discrimination reflected not a wrongheaded belief but a damaged sense of self. Something had gone wrong in the antisemite’s childhood that had made him vulnerable to racist and

Darda-BK.indd 126

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Integration

127

ethnocentric ideas. The adult antisemite could be contained, intellectuals believed, but not cured. The American fascination with the nature of antisemitism originated with Eduard Bloch, Hitler’s childhood doctor. In 1941, Bloch, a sixty-nine-year-old Austrian Jewish refugee who had resettled with his daughter and son-in-law in the Bronx, agreed to a long-form narrative interview with Collier’s in which he shared his memories of the Hitlers, an “unnoticed little people in an outof-the-way town,” whom he treated in Linz from 1904 until the death of Hitler’s mother, Klara, from breast cancer in 1907. Bloch remembered the fifteenyear-old Adolf as “frail looking” and bookish, a young man who loved his mother and showed gratitude to the Jewish doctor who cared for her in her final months. “I shall be grateful to you forever,” he told Bloch after his mother’s death.24 The doctor described the “growth to manhood” as a “painful experience for this boy within himself” and admitted to wondering what thoughts ran through his mind: “What dreams he dreamed I do not know.”25 Bloch, a refugee from the Third Reich, did not have a mean word to say about the young Hitler, whom he remembered not as a hateful villain but a lost soul who later sent him cards from Vienna signed “yours, always faithfully” and “in everlasting thankfulness.”26 The interview, which the magazine ran as “My Patient, Hitler” in two issues that March, included no comments from the interviewer or editors, no consideration of how the introverted Adolf whom Bloch knew in Linz turned into the authoritarian Hitler who later drove him and millions more from their homes. The Austrian doctor did not have an answer, but the founders of an emerging social science field, though lacking Bloch’s firsthand knowledge, thought they did. In 1937, Henry Murray, the director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic, caught sight of Hitler at a Wagner festival in Bayreuth, Germany. From that brief sighting, he diagnosed the führer in a letter to a friend with “severe depression & nightmares (insomnia)—probably of persecution” and remarked, “To think that the peace of Europe hangs on the electro-chemical system in that cranium!”27 In 1941, Murray, eager to contribute to the war effort but too old to serve, returned to the mind of the German leader in a graduate seminar that he cotaught with his colleague Gordon Allport, the author of Personality: A Psychological Interpretation, the 1937 textbook that introduced a generation of undergraduate students to the new field. Murray and Allport assigned Bloch’s interview, critical and Nazi-sanctioned biographies,

Darda-BK.indd 127

12/1/21 9:21 PM

128

Chapter 4

and Hitler’s own writing, including Mein Kampf and My New Order. The students distilled the material into a diagnostic whole with the tools of “personology,” which Murray defined as “the science of men, taken as gross units,” and relied on detailed case histories to determine the sometimes conflicting needs that constituted an individual’s character.28 W. H. D. Vernon, a Canadian master’s student, gathered the seminar’s findings in the article “Hitler, the Man—Notes toward a Case History,” in which he diagnosed Hitler, at a distance of two thousand miles, as the “paranoid type” with a “sado-masochistic split in his personality.” Vernon attributed that “split” to Hitler’s identification with his mother, whom he loved, and his father, whom he hated. He then, modeling a reckless move that would come to dominate the field, argued that Hitler “projected” that inner conflict onto Germany (the motherland) and Austria (the fatherland). “The destruction of the father is achieved symbolically by the destruction of the Austrian State,” Vernon wrote, with a no-duh bluntness, “and complete domination and possession of the mother through gathering all Germans in a common Reich.”29 The entire war, the seminar seemed to determine, originated from Hitler’s mind, his love for his mother, to which Bloch had attested, and hatred for his father, the child of an unwed mother whose father, Vernon suggested, as others had, might have been Jewish. Murray, a hawk who wanted nothing more than to, as he told a friend at the time, “get my hands dirty with a clear conscience & a good vengeance,” got his shot when the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the CIA, recruited him to assemble a scientific memo on Hitler that could be used to forecast his actions and undermine his mental health.30 Murray, with the benefit of the OSS’s classified “Hitler Source-Book,” which contained additional interviews with Bloch, delivered the 227-page “Analysis of the Personality of Adolf Hitler” in October 1943. He included Vernon’s article to relieve himself, he wrote, of restating “all the commonly known facts,” but he reversed his student’s logic. The mind of Adolf Hitler revealed less about his needs— his desire for his mother, his fear of his father—than it did about the rankand-fi le Nazis who glorified him. “The proper interpretation of Hitler’s personality is important as a step in understanding the psychology of the typical Nazi,” he established on the first page of the memo. Hitler’s elevation to the “status of a demi-god” suggested that “he and his ideology have almost exactly met the needs, longings, and sentiments of the majority of Germans.”31 The

Darda-BK.indd 128

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Integration

129

transference, Murray thought, ran not from man to nation but from nation to man. That established, he set about diagnosing Germany through his diagnosis of Hitler as a “nation suffering from paranoid trends,” including “delusions of grandeur” and an “age-old inferiority complex and a desire to be appreciated,” and outlined “suggestions for the treatment of Germany.” Murray attributed Hitler’s “paranoid personality” to a disordered childhood in which he had “not ascended step by step, building the structure of his character solidly as he went.”32 The treatment of Germany, he cautioned, could not be rushed. The management of an illness like antisemitism took time, generations for it to recede from the national mind, as American desegregationists would later hear from some of the same social scientists who diagnosed Hitler. Erik Erikson, a former colleague of Murray’s at the Harvard Psychological Clinic who had moved on to Yale and then to the University of California, Berkeley, also received a call from the Office of Strategic Services. He also thought that the “image” of Hitler—the Hitler of Mein Kampf and Triumph of the Will—offered a window onto the national mind, but he worried most about the rising generation of Germans coming of age under Nazi rule. Erikson, a German-born Jew who had studied under Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna, had witnessed firsthand Hitler’s magnetic hold on children and adolescents as a young man in Vienna. He wrote a first draft of the memo he delivered to the OSS in 1942, elsewhere titled “Hitler’s Imagery and German Youth,” in 1933, as he fled Austria for the United States. (Aboard the SS Scanmail to New York, the German émigré, knowing little to no English, shared that first draft with a young George Kennan, the future architect of the Cold War containment doctrine.)33 Erikson described Hitler as an actor on “the stage of German history” who had unlocked in his audience of aggrieved German nationalists a latent antisemitic “potentiality” that crested in adolescence. He found himself “haunted by an analogy” in which “Hitlerized Germany as a whole could be likened to a certain type of adolescent who turns delinquent” after failing to overcome the internal conflicts of that stage of life.34 Erikson, who would later make his name with his eight-stage model of self-formation, identified Germany as a nation stuck in adolescence and acting out. But he feared most of all that for the next generation of Germans, Hitler had substituted “the complicated conflict of adolescence as it pursued every German, with a simple pattern of hypnotic action and freedom from thought”—that the adolescent stage could,

Darda-BK.indd 129

12/1/21 9:21 PM

130

Chapter 4

without knowledge of non-Nazi alternatives, be a final stage. Erikson’s assessment would have worried OSS officers enough had he not also alluded to an “American mentality” vulnerable to some of the same forces that had driven Germany to the far right—a signal, it turned out, of the research to come.35 Erikson’s consideration of antisemitism as a latent cultural undercurrent that could be activated under the right conditions resonated with some of his fellow German Californians. In 1941, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and the refugeed Frankfurt school had reconvened in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles—what Thomas Mann called “German California”— where Horkheimer, with the assistance of a grant from the American Jewish Committee, formed a long-running collaboration with a team of University of California researchers that would culminate in 1950 with The Authoritarian Personality.36 “The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass,” Adorno, the lead author, wrote at the time, training his sights on the threat of fascism arising in his new home as it had in his first.37 He and his coauthors, refusing a behaviorist model of measuring character, argued that “personality lies behind behavior and within the individual,” not in “responses [to the environment] but readinesses for response.”38 That readiness, without the right stimuli, may never rise to the level of measurable behavior, but it remained a constant ideological determinant. To measure an individual’s readiness to consent to authoritarianism, Adorno created scales to measure antisemitism (the A-S scale) and ethnocentrism (the E scale) from which he then crafted a more subtle but correlated scale to measure fascist tendencies (the F scale). He designed the F scale, he wrote, to gauge not “surface opinion” but an “enduring structure within the person that renders him receptive to antidemocratic propaganda,” to locate not the acting or self-identified fascist, as a behaviorist might, but the “potentially antidemocratic personality.” Adorno, echoing Vernon’s read on Hitler, described the authoritarian as a sadomasochist caught between a love for his mother (Herrenvolk) and a hatred of his father (another race or creed, negated self). He believed, as did Sartre, the Harvard seminar, and Erikson, that antisemitic and fascist tendencies took root in childhood and that the adult authoritarian would remain an authoritarian for life—controllable, under the right circumstances, but not curable. “If those who stand for democracy want to win him to their side,” Adorno determined, they must demonstrate that they have what he admires most: strength. But that, he added, forced the democrat into a bind: “in inducing [the authoritarian personality] to behave in accordance with democratic

Darda-BK.indd 130

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Integration

131

principles, one is likely to strengthen his authoritarianism and, hence, his antidemocratic potential.”39 (Adorno faced a similar bind as a scientist, literature scholar Merve Emre observes, in seeking “a test of type that would, paradoxically, undo the impulse to think typologically”—an F scale that undid rather than reified the categories it created.)40 A dormant fascist streak would remain with the authoritarian, a continual danger, no matter how democratic the environment. The sturdiness of authoritarianism in adults and the concern that their fascist tendencies resisted democratic containment led Adorno and his coauthors to look instead to children. Efforts to combat anti-Black racism, antisemitism, and other forms of discrimination in adults one at a time, they believed, amounted to “the treatment of symptoms or particular manifestations rather than with the disease itself.” That work must continue, but it should, they argued, be combined with a more general movement to inhibit the formation of authoritarian tendencies (the F scale, the “disease”). “Confronted with the rigidity of the adult ethnocentrist,” Adorno wrote, “one turns naturally to the question of whether the prospects for healthy personality structure would not be greater if the proper influences were brought to bear earlier in the individual’s life, and since the earlier the influence the more profound it will be, attention becomes focused on child training.”41 Adorno, the Marxist, didn’t think that training alone could stave off fascism, but, as a Frankfurt school biographer chronicles, his collaborators, the American Jewish Council and the University of California researchers, nudged their conclusions from radicalism toward liberalism. Whereas an earlier version of the research had described the ideal F-scale score as “revolutionary,” the final version described it as belonging to the “genuine liberal” for whom the “idea of the individual” guided all interactions.42 The social scientists who later cited The Authoritarian Personality in the Brown v. Board cases, including in the famous brief, found in it what they needed: a case for guarding a future generation against all forms of race thinking with integrated, color-blind character training. Genuine liberals, not radicals. Nonauthoritarians, not antiauthoritarians. The Prejudiced Personality Adorno and the German Californians diagnosed the Nazi authoritarian. Their American colleagues trained their sights on the southern bigot. “How shall a psychological life history be written?” Gordon Allport asked at the end of his

Darda-BK.indd 131

12/1/21 9:21 PM

132

Chapter 4

career. He had been chasing that “riddle,” he admitted, for all of his adult life. He wrote the first dissertation in personality psychology, “Personality Traits: Their Classification and Measurement,” in 1921. He offered the first college course in the field, “Personality: Its Psychological and Social Aspects,” which he taught at his alma mater, Harvard, in 1924. He authored the standard textbook in 1937. He and Henry Murray, his Harvard colleague, held research interests so similar, he once admitted, that they had to allow a “narcissism of slight differences” to distinguish them.43 Allport defined his field as an alternative to the two dominant methods of the time, Freudianism and behaviorism. He often recited an anecdote about meeting Sigmund Freud in Vienna as a young man in which, nervous, he had told a reticent Freud about a “small boy about four years of age” he had witnessed on the train who had begged his mother, a “dominant and purposive looking” woman, not to let a “dirty man” sit beside him. Freud, Allport recalled, “fi xed his kindly therapeutic eyes upon me” and asked, “And was that little boy you?” The encounter taught the young Allport that “depth psychology, for all its merits, may plunge too deep” and may not give fair consideration to observable, conscious motives.44 But he did not rush to behaviorism, which he thought too tied to a “ritual of method” to remain relevant in a world that needed science’s “powers of predicting, understanding, and controlling human action.”45 Allport sought an engaged science of the mind, bound neither to Freud’s couch nor to Skinner’s lab, that studied “personality itself as a developing structure” and addressed culture not as a determinative factor but for how different individuals interiorized it.46 His method lent itself to the new science of authoritarianism. “At a time when heavy darkness has descended over the European continent,” he declared before the American Psychological Association in 1939, “[we find] the burden of scientific progress resting as never before upon the membership of this Association.”47 Although Allport contributed to Murray’s seminar on Hitler and authoritarianism, his own research drifted toward what he termed the “prejudiced personality,” a “complex subjective state in which feelings play the leading part.”48 That term allowed him to turn at the end of the war from the Third Reich to the American dilemma, from, as he wrote in 1944, “bigotry in Germany” as the “classic example of mass-surrender of maturity” to the “significant battle” unfolding in the United States between “two types of character, the bigoted and the democratic.”49 Allport endeavored to construct an “etiology

Darda-BK.indd 132

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Integration

133

of prejudice,” he wrote in 1946, through which science and government could counteract the formation of bias, which, he determined, arose between the ages of six and sixteen and solidified between the ages of twelve and sixteen. (He located the average onset of anti-Black racism at 12.6 years and antisemitism at 13.7 years.)50 Allport, echoing Sartre, Erikson, and the California Frankfurt school, attributed racism and antisemitism not to the “specific social attitudes” learned at home or school but to the training of a “total style of cognitive operation.” Parents and teachers could, without ever introducing racist ideas, nurture future racists through rigid child-rearing and regimented classroom instruction. “Prejudice was not taught,” Allport wrote, “but caught by the child from an infected atmosphere.”51 Once caught, he believed, no amount of teaching—no science lesson or Richard Wright novel—could make the child uncatch it. Personalities did not change like ideas. The field’s turn from the authoritarian to the racist mind gave Pauli Murray, then a law student at Howard, the one woman in her class, an idea. She wondered whether segregation might be struck down as a violation of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments if courts recognized the Fourteenth as “coextensive with” the Thirteenth and that “to abolish slavery” under the Thirteenth “meant to abolish all the incidents and rights of slavery, both in social and property relationships.” The research coming out of Harvard and German California suggested, for Murray, that segregation violated the Thirteenth Amendment because it carried forward the social “essence” of bondage.52 Justice John Marshall Harlan had made that argument in his dissents in the Civil Rights Cases and Plessy, and now modern science had, she thought, vindicated him. The other Howard students laughed when Murray introduced the idea in class, and one of her teachers, Spottswood Robinson, bet her ten dollars that Plessy wouldn’t be overturned for at least another generation. When later serving as counsel for the Virginia branch of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Robinson retrieved Murray’s student paper “Should the Civil Rights Cases and Plessy v. Ferguson Be Overruled?” and shared it with Thurgood Marshall and the rest of the LDF’s Brown team.53 Although she had devoted almost the entire paper to the Civil Rights Cases, which struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, Murray attached a two-page outline of strategies for overturning Plessy in which she also urged the use of the Thirteenth Amendment, the Harlan dissent, and social science, including the emerging white-damage narrative. “Not only is the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ facilities a legal delusion, but

Darda-BK.indd 133

12/1/21 9:21 PM

134

Chapter 4

positively its effect is to do violence to the personality of the individual affected, whether he is white or black,” she wrote, directing civil rights litigators to “see recent psychological and sociological data supporting this assertion.”54 Marshall, Robinson, and the LDF did, reading Allport and others, and Murray, who finished first in her Howard class and later cofounded the National Organization for Women—an NAACP for women, she called it—won ten dollars. She had convinced the LDF that the nation didn’t need an education in antiracism but, as she wrote in her 1945 “American Credo,” to heal the “psychic wounds” that continued “thwarting personalities” at their formation.55 Murray’s law school paper crossed Robinson’s mind at a moment of transition in racial liberal thought. In the mid-1940s, liberal reformers embraced race-conscious education. Teachers should, they thought, encourage their students to celebrate the distinct cultural contributions of different racial and ethnic communities and refute hierarchical race science with liberal social science. Allport disagreed. In a pamphlet for the National Conference for Christians and Jews, The Resolution of Intergroup Tensions, he argued that fact-based antiracist teaching did little good and might, for students inclined toward discrimination, reinforce their worst tendencies. “Facts themselves are inhuman; only attitudes are human,” he wrote. “While the student may thus gain a more accurate picture of [another racial or ethnic] group, he is at the same time tempted to categorize it more firmly than ever; and if he happens not to like the group, the categorization abets rather than weakens his prejudice.”56 The lessons of Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish’s 1943 pamphlet The Races of Mankind and other antiracist literature could, he thought, nurture rather than counteract anti-Black racism and antisemitism in their reliance on the same categorical thinking as racists and antisemites. Allport advised instead, in an article cited in the Brown v. Board social science statement, which he also cosigned, government-facilitated “equal-status contact” among different racial and ethnic communities.57 That kind of contact, he believed, encouraged the formation of “character-conditioned tolerance,” a more holistic “positive state of personality organization” built on a “respect for individuals” without acknowledgment of their race or faith.58 The field that Allport had all but created reached a high-water mark in the years that the Warren court heard and decided the Brown cases. In his 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice, Allport, aware of his field’s growing influence in Washington, insisted that “modern social science can be of practical

Darda-BK.indd 134

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Integration

135

assistance to courts and to legislatures” and forecasted that “social science research in the field of ethnic relations may in the future play a larger part in the shaping of public legislative policy.”59 When Chief Justice Earl Warren ruled that segregated schools inflicted on Black students a “feeling of inferiority” and affected their “hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone,” he deferred to the claims of personality psychology, a field far more invested in rescuing the white child from inner conflict and guilt than in safeguarding the self-confidence of the Black child.60 Racism had to be addressed “ab initio,” Allport liked to say, before it ever surfaced in ideas or actions.61 The cure, he maintained, would arrive not now but with the next generation. That belief received further reinforcement from Erik Erikson’s 1950 book Childhood and Society, which, as Newsweek later wrote, a whole generation of young idealists “carried like Bibles” and a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, described as the “Shakespeare” of the modern social science curriculum.62 Human life unfolded in eight stages, Erikson theorized, in which the individual faced one defining conflict after another—trust versus basic mistrust in the first year of life, initiative versus guilt in the fift h. Failure to resolve the conflict of one stage could result in failure to resolve the conflict of the next, causing a cascading disintegration of the self. The stages must remain “within the proper rate and the proper sequence which govern the growth of a personality,” Erikson wrote. “The personality, therefore, can be said to develop according to steps predetermined in the human organism’s readiness to be aware of, and to interact with, a widening social radius.”63 The healthiest individual neither fell back nor rushed ahead but managed one inner conflict at a time, ensuring that some unresolved childhood crisis did not return at a later life stage. Erikson identified anti-Black racism and antisemitism as signs that the individual had failed to integrate the conflicting desires of an earlier stage and had instead transferred that “unconscious evil identity” or “negative identification” onto another race or faith.64 The racist or antisemite remained stuck at an adolescent stage, immature, unable to embrace someone from another racial or ethnic background because he had failed as a child to integrate some other, conflicting identification or desire within himself. Erikson later insisted to his biographer that his eight life stages did not advance in a straight line but circled back on themselves, but few of his millions of readers received it—a model he described in Childhood and Society as the “timetable of the

Darda-BK.indd 135

12/1/21 9:21 PM

136

Chapter 4

organism”—as nonlinear.65 The idea of childhood as the intractable groundwork for the racist or tolerant adult dominated the liberal social sciences as the Warren court sought an integrative cure for the segregated mind. “The psychoanalyst is an odd, maybe a new kind of historian,” Erikson declared in the first pages of Childhood and Society, and he felt free in that role to diagnose the nation as he did the child.66 “A nation’s identity,” he wrote, “is derived from the ways in which history has, as it were, counterpointed certain opposite potentialities; the ways in which it lifts this counterpoint to a unique style of civilization, or lets it disintegrate into mere contradiction.” The nation grew like a child, Erikson suggested, advancing through stages in which it must confront and integrate defining inner conflicts, one at a time, forever building on earlier stages and toward the next. The nation that tried to move too fast, that failed to reconcile a conflict—he cited internationalism versus isolationism and unrestricted immigration versus guarded traditionalism— risked national disintegration in a future stage. Erikson described the modern American as heir to the “combination of dynamic polarities,” including “migratory and sedentary, individualistic and standardized, competitive and co-operative, pious and free-thinking, [and] responsible and cynical.”67 The United States had integrated intranational differences before, and it needed to again, he believed, if it wanted to stave off the degeneration that had doomed the world-ordering nations that had come before it. The growth of the nation mirrored that of the child, and the health of the child, as the embodiment of the national future, revealed that of the nation. That child Erikson described not as the Black child of the Clarks’ doll test but a white boy whom he imagined as “Anglo-Saxon, mildly Protestant, of the white-collar class” and “tall, thin, muscular in his body build”—the national child of The American Dilemma, The Authoritarian Personality, The Nature of Prejudice, and footnote 11. “The question of our time is,” he wrote, “How can our sons preserve their freedom and share it with those whom, on the basis of new knowledge and new identity, they must consider equals?”68 The nation needed a racial break, a radical restructuring, but the white national child needed, the science said, a bridge. He needed to take it one stage at a time or risk a breakdown. Erikson’s method of treating the nation as a character in a novel conformed to that of the emerging semiotic school of American studies. The

Darda-BK.indd 136

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Integration

137

cultural historian and Twain scholar Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land also arrived in 1950, setting a course for his own rising field. But Smith, Leo Marx, and other Americanists in the humanities could not frame their national allegories as scientific fact. Adorno’s collaborators had blunted his radicalism in The Authoritarian Personality, elevating the “genuine liberal” as the ideal answer to the fascist. Allport and Erikson agreed. But they also, reflecting the mood of the second red scare, warned against the radical. Allport, encouraging what he called the “tolerant personality,” described radicals as “reverse bigots” who used the “same overcategorizing and the same hidden psychodynamics” as the racist or antisemite. Radicals, Allport wrote, “may mistakenly type all prejudiced people as ‘fascists,’ or accuse all employers of exploiting their employees.” Their whole outlook, he added, “is negativistic—charged with hate.”69 Erikson, though not as hostile to radicalism as his former Harvard colleague, defined moderate liberalism as the most mature stage in the life of a nation. The ideal modern nation, he believed, followed the arc of the “freeborn child who becomes an emancipated adolescent and a man who refutes his father’s conscience and his nostalgia for a mother”—a man who arrives at a “third position, between the extremes” of obedience and rebellion.70 Erikson’s once-rebellious, now-mature nation, cultural historian Leerom Medovoi argues, offered the United States a framework for seeing itself as the reasonable, moderate actor between the extremes of Nazi obedience and Soviet rebellion and a model for the decolonizing world.71 (Childhood and Society included a revised version of “Hitler’s Imagery and German Youth.”) The American colonies had rebelled against the British Crown and then matured into liberal national adulthood, and decolonizing Africa, Asia, and Latin America could follow their lead. But others, including E. Franklin Frazier, the sociologist and a lead contributor to An American Dilemma, identified another, more radical transnational identification. “The struggle of the Negro to achieve equality in American society can no longer be separated from the struggle of colored colonial peoples to attain freedom and independence,” he wrote in The Negro in American Life.72 Earl Warren cited Frazier’s book in footnote 11. That line coming on page 701, the chief justice might have missed it, or chosen to ignore it. The other scholars he and his clerks read—Clark, Murray, Adorno, Allport, Erikson—did not mention the anticolonial mind.

Darda-BK.indd 137

12/1/21 9:21 PM

138

Chapter 4

The American Personality When Theodore Roosevelt convened the inaugural White House Conference on Children and Youth in 1909, he chose the theme “Care of Dependent Children,” reflecting the progressive movement’s commitment to serving the neediest and addressing the social costs of the industrial revolution. It led to the formation of the Children’s Bureau. When Franklin Roosevelt held the fourth decennial conference in 1940, his theme, “Children in a Democracy,” affirmed the tenets of the New Deal and looked ahead to World War II. When Harry Truman hosted the fift h, the largest yet, in 1950, he assigned a theme that nodded to his Fair Deal and to a growing social science field: “For Every Child a Fair Chance for a Healthy Personality.”73 Six thousand delegates from all forty-eight states and almost five hundred national organizations gathered at the Armory, the largest convention hall in Washington, DC, to consider how they could “develop in children the mental, emotional, and spiritual qualities essential to individual happiness and to responsible citizenship.”74 A fact-finding committee that included Clark, Frazier, Margaret Mead, and Benjamin Spock (“Dr. Spock”) assembled and distributed a two-hundredpage digest of research that included an abbreviated version of Clark’s “Effect of Prejudice and Discrimination on Personality Development,” the first item in the Brown v. Board social science footnote. Two committee staff members, Helen Witmer and Ruth Kotinsky, later revised that digest into Personality in the Making, the second item in footnote 11. “What are the real roots of character?” and “What configuration of events in the life history leads to the making of a bigot?” the committee asked in the preface. “We are speaking for Americans,” Witmer and Kotinsky wrote in their introduction, “when we say that the healthy personality is one in which individual happiness and responsible citizenship are combined” to ensure that the rising generation “will improve the circumstances of later generations.”75 It fell to their children, whom they hailed as blank slates, uncontaminated, to attain the ideal national character—free of racism and antisemitism, democratic—that had eluded their generation. Two hundred fift y foreign delegates from thirty nations attended the conference, and Truman, mired in the Korean War, delivered an address that seemed cued to them. “We must remember that the fighting in Korea is but one part of the tremendous struggle in our time—the struggle between freedom and Communist slavery,” he told the Armory audience. “I believe the

Darda-BK.indd 138

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Integration

139

single most important thing our young people will need to meet this critical challenge in the years ahead is moral strength—and strength of character.”76 When meeting with the conference organizers a year earlier, he had reminded them that more than a third of World War II draftees had been “physically or mentally unfit for service,” suggesting that it fell to them to lower that number.77 Now, with China intervening on behalf of the Korean People’s Army, guaranteeing a long, back-and-forth war, Truman doubled down on his stance that strengthening the mind of the American child amounted to strengthening the nation’s defenses against an encroaching communism. He enlisted the child, as an embodiment of an innocent, maturing nation, to reassure the foreign delegates in attendance that segregation and anti-Black violence—the stuff of Soviet propaganda in the decolonizing world—wouldn’t survive long with young Americans steeled against discrimination. “Our teachers,” Truman stated, must make their students understand that “every time our American institutions fail to live up to their high purposes, every time they fail in proper administration of justice, the forces of communism are aided in their attempt to poison the minds of men everywhere.”78 He wielded what historian Victoria Grieve calls “little Cold Warriors” to communicate to the world that the United States would, in time, live out the values it avowed through the well-trained mind of the innocent child.79 President Truman, whether or not he ever read the research gathered for the conference, shared at least one conviction with the scientists: the first years of life matter a lot. In his first meeting with the organizing committee of the White House Conference on Children and Youth, he stated, “You know, if a child has a good mother, and most of them do have, and the first three grade teachers are good teachers, who understand the moral outlook as we see it, there is no danger of that child being anything but a good citizen, no matter what happens after the first eight or ten years.”80 Allport, who designated 12.6 years as the average age of onset for anti-Black racism, would have agreed with the president. A good mother and a few good grade-school teachers could inoculate a child against racism. Or they could leave that child vulnerable, for life, to racist messages. In calling attention to a mother’s role in raising broadminded (or bigoted) children, Truman contributed to what historian Ruth Feldstein identifies as the gender conservatism of racial liberalism. Black and white mothers received the blame, she argues, for the shortcomings of their sons, who either could not weather the discrimination they faced (unfit Black

Darda-BK.indd 139

12/1/21 9:21 PM

140

Chapter 4

men, the children of “matriarchs”) or doled it out (unfit white men, the children of “moms”).81 In his Armory address, Truman delivered a warning that echoed Murray’s and Erikson’s wartime Hitler studies, remarking that young Germans had struggled to define themselves after the war because “the great weakness of dictatorships is that they enslave the minds and the characters of the people over whom they rule.”82 That included, he added, the communist state. The mother, the teacher, and the government had to act in the first eight to ten years, which all but determined, for the president and most of the scientists listening, the future of the American character. The White House Conference on Children and Youth issued a series of statements that included an endorsement of the still-untouched 1947 recommendations of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights and a demand that “racial segregation in education be abolished.”83 That national integration would begin, the fact-finding committee suggested in Personality in the Making, which it released to a mass audience in 1952, with the successful integration of the individual child’s inner conflicts. Erikson contributed an abridged version of his research from Childhood and Society, “Growth and Crises of the ‘Healthy Personality,’” and it showed in Witmer and Kotinsky’s account of childhood as a series of cumulative stages in which the child must face and integrate one crisis after another. Likening personality to an organism, they warned that “a part that misses its time of ascendency or is severely damaged during its formative period is apt to doom, in turn, the whole hierarchy of organs.” The child’s lifelong mental health hung on the “personality’s integration” in stage after stage, over time, without a missed beat.84 Erikson’s model offered Witmer and Kotinsky a framework for talking about school integration as something that would facilitate not the self-worth of Black students (the argument behind the Clarks’ doll test) but the resolution of a moral conflict within the minds of white students. The white child would learn, they wrote, not habits of “thinking” about Black people but of “feeling” toward their Black classmates.85 Their argument signaled a transition in liberal education at the end of the 1940s from, as education historian Zoë Burkholder chronicles, race-conscious lessons in tolerance to the color-blind training of a sound, integrated self.86 With encouragement from the White House, the factfinding committee embraced and elevated the idea of the American child as the vessel for a liberal individualist, anticommunist national future—a future in which the integration of institutions and neighborhoods would follow the

Darda-BK.indd 140

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Integration

141

gradual, one-stage-at-a-time model of the integration of the growing mind. It looked not to the receding “treatment” of a liberal antiracist education (the how-to pamphlet, the race novel) but to a slow, color-blind cure (the Black classmate as vaccine for the white child’s American dilemma), resetting the racial clock to the Eriksonian life stages of the next generation. The most famous but least read document to come out of the fift h White House Conference on Children and Youth had to be Clark’s two-hundredpage paper “Effect of Prejudice and Discrimination on Personality Development,” some of which the organizing committee included in the conference digest and in Witmer and Kotinsky’s Personality in the Making. Although Chief Justice Warren cited it first and Witmer and Kotinsky second in footnote 11, Clark’s paper never circulated outside of a few law libraries. Most conference attendees would have read the five-page abstract in the digest, while casual readers might have encountered the twenty-five-page excerpt in Personality in the Making. The former doesn’t mention the doll test at all. The latter devotes a few sentences to it. The longest section of the former is titled “Effects on Dominant Group Children,” the longest section of the latter “The Personality of the Prejudiced Person.” “Prejudice and discrimination,” Clark wrote in the Witmer and Kotinsky volume, “are even more detrimental to the emotional well-being of the prejudiced person than to those who are the objects of discrimination.” That person’s “inner conflicts” and “deterioration of moral values” surface in the “symptom” of segregation.87 Integration, the excerpt suggested, would serve the white child as much as or more than the Black student. Clark does cite the doll test, Bigger Thomas, and the detrimental effects of segregation on Black children’s self-worth—the material with which we most associate him—but no conference attendee, casual reader, or Warren clerk could have missed the white-damage narrative that he constructed and that the White House Conference magnified. The rare reader of the entire two-hundred-page “Effect of Prejudice and Discrimination on Personality Development” would have discovered a different, more radical take on the American dilemma. Clark did not see racism as a fast-receding anachronism in national life but as a structuring force. AntiBlack thought and behavior did not diverge from an otherwise democratic culture; national culture informed that thought and rewarded that behavior. “If one were to assume that all individuals who have racial or religious prejudices are emotionally unstable or neurotic,” he wrote, “one would be forced to

Darda-BK.indd 141

12/1/21 9:21 PM

142

Chapter 4

conclude that the culture as a whole predisposes the majority of individuals to be neurotic and is itself, therefore, a neurotic culture.” Didn’t something have to be abnormal or disadvantageous, Clark wondered, to constitute a neurosis? The United States had a far bigger task ahead of it: counteracting not a handful of “neurotic” cases but the “advantages or personality gains which accrue to the prejudiced individual.”88 Near the end of his paper, Clark wondered about the sense of racial time to which much of the nation subscribed—the faith that, if it remained true to a founding creed, if it held the line, it would defeat (the war on racism), right (counterinsurgent civil rights), educate (the race novel), and cure (school integration) racism. “If one were to grant [that] the broader attacks on the social manifestations of prejudice and discrimination could in themselves be successful in a relatively short period of time,” he wrote for the sake of argument, that wouldn’t, without a whole new societal-level incentive structure, change the generations of adults accustomed to the “previous social pathology,” to which they would introduce their children and grandchildren. The gradualism of his own field—stages of individual and national integration, the child-centered futurism—also, Clark observed, did little for Black people living their lives now, including himself. “It would seem to be small comfort to continue to assure these human beings that things will eventually get better and are gradually improving,” he wrote. “Their point of maximum vulnerability is now.”89 Clark worried about the shortsightedness of liberal solutionism. He worried about the anti-Black racism of liberal gradualism. President Truman and most of Clark’s colleagues at the White House Conference on Children and Youth worried about the character of the white national child. The Segregated Personality A legal Cold Warrior, Earl Warren shared their concern. “Powerful forces are at work in the world—both to preserve liberty and to extinguish it,” the chief justice declared at Washington University in St. Louis on February 19, 1955, nine months after declaring segregated schools unconstitutional.90 Warren knew that his ruling had undercut anti-American propaganda in the decolonizing world, where American law was, in his words, “on trial.”91 But he also discerned a more subtle threat to the future of the nation. “It is easier to know how to combat a foreign enemy,” he said in St. Louis, “than it is to subject ourselves to daily analysis and discipline for the purpose of preventing

Darda-BK.indd 142

12/1/21 9:21 PM

Antiracism as Integration

143

the erosion that can with equal effectiveness destroy [our freedoms].” Warren warned that the nation must guard against the “latent suspicion and prejudice inherent in human nature,” which he attributed not to the individual but to the “entire body politic” and, most of all, “the mores, the attitudes, and the state of mind of the dominant groups of society.”92 Legal scholars have raised doubts as to whether the Warren court relied on social science in deciding Brown v. Board, suggesting that it, foreseeing a “crisis of institutional legitimacy,” might have included footnote 11 as a kind of fallback defense.93 Some contend that Cold War self-interest, not half-baked social science, drove the decision. But a closer look at the narrative structure of the social science—of the white child as the embodiment of an innocent national future, maturing one stage at a time—reveals how it ordered the white self-interest and gradualism of that Cold War nationalism. Public education, Warren wrote in the Brown decision, “is the very foundation of good citizenship” and a “principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment.” Barring Black children, on whose behalf the NAACP had fi led the class action suit, from a good education would “affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”94 But it would also, the decision and Warren’s comments from the time suggest, stunt the moral growth of the white national child. The chief justice and his clerks did not look far for the sources they cited in footnote 11. All seven received mention in the social science statement “The Effects of Segregation and the Consequences of Desegregation,” which the NAACP counsel submitted to the court with their briefs. Thirty-two social scientists signed the statement, including Allport, Isidor Chein, Kenneth and Mamie Clark, and two of Adorno’s coauthors of The Authoritarian Personality, Else Frenkel-Brunswik and R. Nevitt Sanford. Robert Carter, Thurgood Marshall, and Spottswood Robinson of the NAACP introduced it as a “consensus of social scientists.” The authors determined, reciting the findings of the White House Conference on Children and Youth, that segregation damaged the “personality of all children—the children of the majority group in a somewhat different way than the more obviously damaged children of the minority group.” The more subtle white damage, they wrote, manifested in “guilty feelings,” the “acquisition of an unrealistic basis for self-evaluation,” and “unrealistic fears and hatreds.”95

Darda-BK.indd 143

12/1/21 9:22 PM

144

Chapter 4

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund found the social scientists’ argument so convincing that it led with it in submitting Brown to the Vinson court in 1951, stating that “it is an integrated, intelligent and open-minded personality that can best benefit from education at any level” and that because “the educational process is cumulative in nature, a person’s ‘knowledge’ or ‘education’ can never be separated from the total personality.”96 The LDF encouraged the justices to see the case as a matter of what kind of mind—integrated or disorganized? tolerant or bigoted?—they wanted for their children and for the nation as the Truman administration sent more soldiers and marines into combat in Korea. That framing worried John Davis, counsel for the South Carolina school district, enough that he tried to counter it with a clever, massaged reference to W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1935 argument that a good segregated school would serve the “rounded personality” better than a bad integrated education.97 Carter, Marshall, and Robinson could claim a “consensus of social scientists” thanks to the research of Max Deutscher and Isidor Chein. In 1947, Deutscher and Chein asked 849 social scientists whether they thought segregation had “detrimental psychological effects” when controlling for differences in facilities and other resources. Of the 517 scientists who returned their mailers, 90 percent believed it harmed the “segregated group” and 83 percent believed it also harmed the “segregating group.”98 The mailer included a few lines for additional comments, and Deutscher and Chein devoted most of their 1948 article, “The Psychological Effects of Enforced Segregation,” to the unattributed free-form observations they gathered. “Discriminating groups,” one scientist, who admitted to a lack of research-based knowledge, wrote, suffer “the deterioration of moral values, the coarsening of interpersonal sensitivity, the generation of guilt feelings which are given no opportunity to erase their cause, and general disruptive effects created by the requirement to act according to an irrational (and frequently inconsistent) double standard of conduct”—a belief later echoed in Clark’s paper and then in the findings of the White House Conference on Children and Youth and then in the social science brief to which the chief justice of the United States then deferred in ruling segregation unconstitutional.99 In a 1949 article, “What Are the Psychological Effects of Segregation under Conditions of Equal Facilities?,” Chein defended their findings as unbiased, insisting that “there is probably no other group of people as accustomed as are scientists to distinguishing between their biases and pertinent evidence.”100 The science itself might not be credible, he suggested, but the scientists themselves were. Trust us.

Darda-BK.indd 144

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Antiracism as Integration

145

Chein testified in Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County. The defense challenged him, but not on the science. The counsel for the school board instead argued that he and Deutscher should have contacted more scientists from “south of the Mason and Dixon Line.”101 Warren cited Deutscher and Chein third and Chein fourth in footnote 11. The social science brief made another argument that would have resonated with the anti-Soviet chief justice: segregation could turn the United States into a nation of authoritarians. While some white students attending segregated schools might form a “moral cynicism” or “guilty feelings,” others, the authors argued, would “react by developing an unwholesome, rigid, and uncritical idealization of all authority figures—their parents, strong political and economic leaders.” The brief cites Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, and Sanford’s The Authoritarian Personality and warns that a failure of integration—of the mind and of the nation—could lead to a generation of young white men who “despise the weak” and “obsequiously and unquestioningly conform to the demands of the strong.”102 For Warren and other Cold Warriors, that would have read not as fascist, as Adorno meant it, but communist. Southern segregation offered material for Soviet messaging in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, but it also, a “consensus of social scientists” determined, made young Americans amenable to totalitarian government. The American Civil Liberties Union and allied liberal organizations made a similar argument in their amicus brief, also citing The Authoritarian Personality and also arguing that “social evils,” including authoritarianism, “necessarily flow from racially segregated education.”103 A recognition that Jim Crow damaged the government’s Cold War interests, as Mary Dudziak and other legal scholars argue, informed the Warren court’s desegregation decision. But so did a fear that Jim Crow could instill an authoritarian streak in the minds of white children, leading them into Stalin’s arms. The Truman White House entertained that fear. In December 1952, the outgoing administration, in an unusual move in a case without an immediate federal interest, submitted an amicus brief. It reminded the court that segregation “furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills” and urged it to “reexamine and overrule” Plessy v. Ferguson. Although the brief recited the Black-damage narrative, describing the “detrimental effect” of segregated education on a Black child’s “mental development,” the Truman administration dwelled on the damage Jim Crow did to the national character—a national character it raced white. “We must set an example for others by showing firm determination to remove existing flaws in our democracy,” the brief declared.

Darda-BK.indd 145

12/1/21 9:22 PM

146

Chapter 4

“The subordinate position occupied by Negroes in this country as a result of governmental discriminations (‘second-class citizenship,’ as it is sometimes called) presents an unsolved problem for American democracy, an inescapable challenge to the sincerity of our espousal of the democratic faith.”104 The administration condemned Jim Crow for the harm it did to Black students in the South, but most of all it condemned the harm that harm did to the nation as a model for the Black, brown, and Asian “developing” world. If the United States wished to contain communism in Korea and elsewhere, it would have to, in Erikson’s language, model the integration of the next stage of national growth. Warren received the message. In an address at the 1955 meeting of the American Bar Association, the chief justice, with President Eisenhower in attendance, insisted that in an “ideological world” of “constant struggle for the minds and hearts of people” in which “the eyes of a critical world are constantly upon everyone, the power of example is far more forceful than that of precept.”105 His desegregation ruling had, he suggested, set a standard for white schoolchildren (integration) that would allow them to set their own for Africa and Asia (liberalism). The Truman administration brief encouraged the justices to see overturning Plessy not as a refutation but a rehabilitation of the 1896 Fuller court. It strained to read the “separate but equal” doctrine not as “axiomatic” but circumstantial, highlighting that the Plessy ruling had held that Jim Crow laws “do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other”—meaning, it suggested, segregation could discriminate and could be unconstitutional. The administration also elevated Justice John Marshall Harlan, the lone dissenter in the 7–1 decision, to the status of shadow chief justice of the Fuller court, citing his dissent in the first and final pages of the brief. “We boast of the freedom enjoyed by our people above all other people,” Harlan wrote, and the Truman administration recited. “But it is difficult to reconcile that boast with a state of the law which, practically, puts the brand of servitude and degradation upon a large class of our fellow-citizens.”106 The brief called on the Warren court to overturn Plessy but also insisted that the “separate but equal” doctrine had never been a doctrine at all but a divergence from an otherwise democratic tradition maintained in Harlan’s dissent. Murray, who had resuscitated Harlan in the mid-1940s, also hailed his foresight, crediting him in a letter to the New York Times with a neglected wisdom now cast “in the light

Darda-BK.indd 146

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Antiracism as Integration

147

of history and overwhelming psychological and sociological authority.”107 But Murray also felt her faith in the American creed waning. She had since served in California government and found herself slowed to a walk, “stalling for time” and racked with the “tremendous conflict which must rage in the mind of any ‘militant,’ ‘aggressive,’ ‘race relationist.’”108 She had abandoned the moral conflict of An American Dilemma for the more tangled conflict of racial time, of what to do with radical dreams among the grinding gears of reform. The constitutional law scholar Michael Klarman argues that the Brown decision did little more than organize resistance to the civil rights movement. “Deep background forces,” he contends, made the reforms of the civil rights era all but inevitable, Brown or no Brown.109 Jack Balkin, his fellow constitutionalist, disagrees, maintaining that the decision structured the “basic shape” of debates about race in the United States.110 Background forces and a longer movement did, as Klarman suggests, create the conditions for the coming civil rights reforms. But the Brown ruling also, as Balkin argues, gave a certain structure to them. It bolstered a Black-damage narrative that would itself enable further harm; it formalized an alliance between anticommunism and liberal civil rights; and it bound them together—doll-test social science and Cold War civil rights—with a concern for the segregated mind of the white child. Deliberate Speed Desegregating that child’s mind took time, Thurgood Marshall discovered, time he didn’t have. “I’ve finally figured out what ‘all deliberate speed’ means,” the head counsel for the NAACP liked to say, after Chief Justice Warren ordered the defendant school districts in Brown v. Board to desegregate “at the earliest practicable date” and “with all deliberate speed.” “It means ‘slow.’”111 The origin of that formulation—an ornate touch for the matter-of-fact Warren—has fascinated legal scholars ever since. Warren got it from Justice Felix Frankfurter, who insisted, in letters to the chief justice, that it would “habituate the public’s mind to the realization” that “we are at the beginning of a process of enforcement and not concluding it.”112 Frankfurter borrowed it, he told Warren, from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who had used it in the court’s 1911 decision in Virginia v. West Virginia. Holmes believed that he had taken it from the English Chancery, which had never used it, leading scholars to trace it to, among other sources, the Treaty of Paris, Sir Walter Scott, and Francis Thompson’s 1893 Christian ode “The Hound of Heaven,” in which God trails

Darda-BK.indd 147

12/1/21 9:22 PM

148

Chapter 4

a sinner “With unperturbèd pace,  /  Deliberate speed, majestic instancy.”113 Marshall had called for desegregation “forthwith” and “forthright.”114 He got “not long” and “soon enough.” Scholars blame the court’s 1955 order and Warren’s language for undercutting the 1954 decision. (Warren later came to regret that language himself.) But the second Brown decision did not weaken the first. It illuminated it. For as fascinating as it may be to credit the toothlessness of the order to a Victorian ode, Frankfurter had heard J. Lee Rankin use “deliberate speed” in oral reargument in Briggs v. Elliott and Davis v. Prince Edward County School Board. Rankin, arguing on behalf of the federal government as an amicus curiae, had suggested “handling the matter [of desegregation] with deliberate speed” and “with all diligent speed” on December 8, 1953.115 Frankfurter did not need to reach back to Holmes or Thompson or the American Revolution to handcuff Brown. He could go to Brown itself. In a brief submitted ahead of oral argument on relief, Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund urged the court not to accommodate gradualism. “Each day relief is postponed is to the appellants [the Black students of the defendant school districts] a day of serious and irreparable injury,” the LDF wrote, recalling the social science of footnote 11, “for this Court has announced that segregation of Negroes in the public schools ‘generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.’”116 The Warren court had ruled segregated education unconstitutional on the grounds that it did irreversible harm to Black schoolchildren. How then, the NAACP asked, could it so much as entertain the idea of a gradual correction? The brief from Attorney General Herbert Brownell on behalf of the United States delivered an answer retrieved from footnote 11: the risk of white harm. “Racial segregation affects the hearts and minds of those who segregate as well as those who are segregated, and it is also detrimental to the community and the nation,” Brownell wrote, alluding to the claim of Clark and the other authors of the social science statement. “In similar fashion, psychological and emotional factors are involved—and must be met with understanding and good will—in the alterations that must now take place in order to bring about compliance with the Court’s decision.”117 The attorney general, making a case for gradual relief, returned to the white-damage narrative to argue against immediate desegregation. Segregation might harm the white child’s mind, he suggested, but desegregation, if carried out forthwith, might also harm it.

Darda-BK.indd 148

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Antiracism as Integration

149

When Robert Penn Warren declared himself a gradualist in a 1956 book of interviews with southerners, he described desegregation as a “process of mutual education for whites and blacks” that would not succeed until enough white southerners decided that they could no longer “live with themselves” under Jim Crow.118 The South would not desegregate until the white southerner’s inner moral conflict became more distressing than the thought of change—until the American creed overcame the American dilemma. If the first Brown decision announced a concern for the health of the Black child, the second decision revealed a more subtle concern for the health of the white child, whose growth into a desegregated future could not, the court determined, be rushed. Kenneth Clark later dismissed the “with all deliberate speed” order as unscientific. “The Court, which appeared to rely on the findings of social scientists in the 1954 decision, rejected the findings in handing down the 1955 implementation decision,” Clark reflected in the late 1960s. “Students of social change have observed that prompt, decisive action on the part of recognized authorities usually results in less anxiety and less resistance in cases where the public is opposed than does a more hesitant and gradual procedure.” The government, he added, should have tackled desegregation as if it were “pulling off adhesive tape—the pain is sharper but briefer and hence more tolerable.”119 The 1954 decision stood as a testament to the value of science in law, the 1955 decision as a lesson in the limits of law without science. That may be, but the order to desegregate in time also carried forward some of the science that informed the earlier decision. Since Henry Murray traced Adolf Hitler’s behavior to a childhood in which the future Nazi leader had “not ascended step by step, building the structure of his character solidly as he went; but instead had rushed forward with panting haste,” social scientists had argued that the growth of a durable, integrated self took time, that it unfolded in stages, that moving too fast led to disordered minds.120 And they suggested that the healthiest nations followed the same careful, unrushed evolution. The nonauthoritarian, nonracist, democratic child and nation formed in time. Loren Miller, a member of Marshall’s Legal Defense Fund, later concluded, “The harsh truth was that the first Brown decision was a great decision; the second Brown decision was a great mistake.”121 In his 2004 book All Deliberate Speed, the legal scholar Charles Ogletree describes “those three words” as the about-face that left the original decision “flawed from the beginning.”122 The distinction between the grandness of 1954

Darda-BK.indd 149

12/1/21 9:22 PM

150

Chapter 4

and the gradualism of 1955 has solidified into common sense. But the mistake and flaw of gradualism did not overturn the science of 1954. That science—the science of cumulative stages, of the nation as delicate child—authorized deliberate racial time. Clark, while never renouncing the doll test, came to lament the Blackdamage narrative that the Warren court authorized and credited to him. The “eagerness” with which liberals embraced that narrative, he later wrote, “was itself a subtly racist symptom.” The court had, he thought, overlooked his argument that racism arose not from Black but white damage, which had stronger roots than he knew then. “The attempt was to use the Brown decision as a form of therapy, to free American whites and Negroes from the depth of the disease,” he recalled. “It became apparent, however, that the extent of the metastasis had been underestimated and misunderstood, that the pattern of resistance, evasion, and tokenism that followed Brown could only be explained by a racism that had rotted the roots of American life.”123 But Clark and the social scientists of footnote 11 did not have the wrong diagnosis or the wrong treatment but the wrong metaphor. The idea of racism as a disease severs the connection between white racial thought and white racial social structure, the economic incentives and differential life chances that underwrite the wages of whiteness. The figurative frame directs attention from life lived under a durable regime—the here and now, the struggle of living in the world that is—to cure seeking. It assumes a health-giving structure (liberalism) under threat from an external agent (white racial dominance), ruling out that the latter could emerge from the former, that liberalism itself may generate, work through, and need racial divisions. The idea of racism as a disease invites solutionism, demands reform, and negates transformation. When the white man’s solution failed to materialize—when racism remained undefeated, unreformed, unenlightened, uncured—racial liberals changed tack, seeking not to end racism but to dismantle race itself, to treat it, as white neominstrels John Howard Griffin and Grace Halsell later did, as an illusion, an artificial line to trouble and transgress until it ceased to exist. Conservative resistance held the civil rights movement back, but so did the constraints of liberal social science and law—not a conservative backlash but a liberal frontlash to material antiracisms that converged with that backlash on color blindness. When Martin Luther King, in his letter from Birmingham Jail, defended nonviolent direct action, he deferred to Murray, Adorno,

Darda-BK.indd 150

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Antiracism as Integration

151

Allport, Erikson, Clark, Chein, and the Warren court’s reconstruction of their research. “Any law that degrades human personality is unjust,” King wrote. “All segregation statutes are unjust because desegregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.”124 The dream of children immunized from that distortion and damage fueled fantasies of an inevitable end to racism, whether defeated with science, righted with reform, educated with literature, or, the Warren court thought, cured with integration. One stage at a time, somewhere off on the horizon, soon enough, the mind of the American child would desegregate and the nation would, with age, follow.

Darda-BK.indd 151

12/1/21 9:22 PM

5

Antiracism as Color Blindness

“ ‘ PA S S I N G ,’ ” A J E T H E A D L I N E D E C L A R E D

in 1952, “Is Passing Out.” With the wartime growth of the NAACP and the National Urban League, the modest reforms of the Truman administration, and a budding civil rights movement, Black Americans had fewer incentives to cross over than before the war and more to lose. “As race barriers fall,” the article argued, “the thousands of Negroes who ‘passed’ to find decent employment ‘return’ to their race.”1 The editors of the new magazine, which media giant and Ebony founder John H. Johnson launched in 1951, billing it as “The Weekly Negro News Magazine,” contributed to an emerging genre in Black media. “I Refuse to Pass,” actress Janice Kingslow declared in Negro Digest. “I’m Through with Passing,” a young Black woman announced in Ebony after living for twelve years as a white woman. “Is Passing for White a Dying Fad?” Color asked. “Have Negroes Stopped Passing?” another Jet headline wondered.2 Chicago school sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton estimated in their 1945 Black Metropolis that somewhere between twenty-five thousand and three hundred thousand light-skinned Black people “permanently leave the Negro group and are assimilated into white society each year,” an act they described as a kind of “sociological death” that most considered too great a sacrifice for higher wages or to circumvent redlining. “There is too much to lose and too little to be gained,” Drake and Cayton determined, observing that few “cross over completely” and fewer still never “return to their race.”3 Jet and an increasing number of Black entertainment and fashion magazines, echoing the sociologists, reframed crossing the color line not as traitorous abandonment or economic coercion but social exile and a bad bet.4 The editors of Jet cited as evidence the successful careers of light-skinned Black Americans who made their names without crossing over, including the minister Archibald Carey, the singer Herb Jeff ries, Kingslow, and Paul 152

Darda-BK.indd 152

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Antiracism as Color Blindness

153

Williams, the “architect to the stars,” who designed the homes of, among others, Lucille Ball, Cary Grant, and Frank Sinatra. “I was almost tempted,” Williams admitted, “but suddenly asked myself just what the hell I had to run away from.” The editors also reminded readers of the case of Albert Johnston, a New England doctor who, after living for years as a white man in a white town, informed his neighbors of his Black heritage and discovered that he, his wife, and his children could “continue to live as equals in a town which wears its democracy like a shining shield.”5 William Lindsay White, an editor at Reader’s Digest, made Johnston famous in 1948, when he chronicled the doctor’s transformation from Black Chicagoan to white New Englander in a slender volume titled Lost Boundaries. White’s book led to a “message movie” of the same name that brought further attention to the waning tradition of Black-to-white crossing and showcased a different kind of racial deceit: white people, including lead actor Mel Ferrer, in his first fi lm role, assuming the identities of light-skinned Black people. The fi lm ends with Dr. Scott Carter (Ferrer), his wife, and his two children attending a church service in which the white minister, a ringer for President Truman, delivers a sermon on racial tolerance, hails the commander in chief’s vow to desegregate the armed forces, and leads the all-white congregation in singing “Once to Every Man and Nation.” The white churchgoers shake the doctor’s hand and smile at his wife and children, welcoming them—four white actors—as their now-Black neighbors. The New York Times celebrated the fi lm, culminating as it did with a church full of white people congratulating each other on their antiracism, for how it revealed the “many bitter aspects of racism in our land” with “extraordinary courage, understanding and dramatic power.”6 It won an award at the Cannes Film Festival and launched Ferrer’s movie career. Black-to-white racial transgressions might have been receding, but another white liberal form of crossing over had arrived at the box office.7 In 1972, Sepia, an Ebony competitor out of Fort Worth, Texas, ran yet another farewell to racial crossing, offering an account, it said, of “How Passing Passed Out.” The author, Doris Black, interviewed a Black government executive in a “big Midwest city” who, after fifteen years as a white man, transferred to another office, this time as a Black man, and found that his earnings doubled. In an era of “black militance, liberation and revolution,” she wrote, the man thought he would rise faster through the executive ranks, he told her, if he had darker skin. His light skin had, he believed, gone from asset to

Darda-BK.indd 153

12/1/21 9:22 PM

154

Chapter 5

drawback. “As the old traditional folk saying goes, ‘the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice,’ and that,” Black determined, “applies to job potentials and salary scales at the executive level which often are in relation to the darkness of color complexion.”8 Black’s interviewee crossed back over in 1966, the year that Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panthers in Oakland, marking the unofficial launch of the Black Power movement. He described his return to Blackness as a kind of homecoming, but he could see that he, a light-skinned executive, didn’t reflect the ideal of the Panthers’ anticolonial, Marxist radicalism. Of course, Newton and Seale weren’t hiring him. White liberals were. But they also wanted what Black described as “highly visible blackness” to establish their liberal bona fides and cultivate Black consumer markets and constituencies. His “light skin, blue eyes, and ‘blow hair’ have become a handicap,” Black concluded.9 (Her evidence of an executive-level “reverse colorism” was limited to interviews with two Black administrators, the local government official and an insurance executive in Los Angeles, so light skin might not have been the new bourgeois burden she made it out to be.) Passing had “passed out,” Black suggested, because of the rise of Black Power “with its ‘black is beautiful’ attitude” but also because white liberal elites—the people courting Black executives, the Wall Street Journal wrote, “as eagerly as a football coach wooing an all-state halfback”—sought to surround themselves with Blackness, without forfeiting control or their own salaries, as evidence that their moral arcs bent toward justice.10 But not all forms of racial crossing had died out, Black acknowledged. “Today the longtime traditional pattern of passing has changed drastically,” she wrote, before mentioning, without elaboration, “Now the only passing that is prevalent is from white to black.”11 She would know, because it had been her magazine that had first run the most famous, and notorious, account of civil rights blackface, John Howard Griffin’s series “Life as a Negro: Journey into Shame,” which the white Texan later turned into one of the best-selling books of the 1960s, Black Like Me. From the end of World War II to the rise of Black Power, as Black media heralded the end of Black-to-white racial crossing, more and more white liberals entertained fantasies of the reverse. Millions read firsthand accounts of white authors—first Ray Sprigle, then Griffin and his fellow Texan Grace Halsell—living as Black people in the South and in Harlem. When Jet declared that “‘Passing’ Is Passing Out,” it reminded

Darda-BK.indd 154

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Antiracism as Color Blindness

155

readers of Mel Ferrer’s turn as a Black doctor. When Sepia declared transgressing the color line “passé,” it alluded to Griffin in blackface. Passing hadn’t ended. It had gone from a Black secret to a white liberal exhibition. White-to-Black racial crossing wasn’t new, of course. Mark Twain wrote about a white man living as an enslaved Black man in his 1894 novel Pudd’nhead Wilson. Drake and Cayton recalled that their mentor, Robert Park, had sometimes presented himself as a Black man to obtain rooms in Black hotels while conducting research. (“The lightest blond can, if he wishes, pass for colored,” they observed.)12 In 1941, Langston Hughes drafted “Who’s Passing for Who?,” about white people feigning Blackness feigning whiteness. (“We just thought we’d kid you by passing for colored a little while—just as you said Negroes sometimes pass for white.”)13 But after the war, white-to-Black racial crossing reemerged not as a Twainian comic scenario or a nightlife diversion but a grand liberal gesture, a theater of white racial liberalism that, like Lost Boundaries, fi lled the seats with other white racial liberals. Sprigle, Griffin, and Halsell cast themselves, in books, articles, and interviews, as antiracists in blackface. Their white readers hailed them as courageous and self-sacrificing. Their Black critics asked why white people looked to other white people to learn about Black people. Scholars have since treated their minstrel acts as a means not of knowing Blackness but of constructing whiteness, of surveilling Blackness, of accessing a more “authentic” form of being, of holding together a strained Democratic coalition, and of staging a hollow gesture of identification across difference.14 But white-to-Black crossing also grew out of the racial liberal belief in racism as time-limited crisis. Immersive blackface—crossing over for four weeks (Sprigle), six weeks (Griffin), or six months (Halsell)—stood as the ultimate act of racial liberalism, a bid to resolve the American dilemma and heal the racial divide with one radical feat of other-identification. “The only way I could see to bridge the gap between us [Black and white Americans] was to become a Negro,” Griffin wrote in 1961. “I decided I would do this.”15 Transgressing racial boundaries, revealing them as “constructed,” might, white liberals thought, deliver them to the end of racial time. If three weeks of Florida sunshine and thick-framed glasses (Sprigle), vitiligo medication and a shaved head (Griffin), or a cocktail of melanin boosters and a Puerto Rican vacation (Halsell) could turn a white person Black, then the South had built a regime of segregation and disenfranchisement on a mirage. Sprigle, Griffin, and

Darda-BK.indd 155

12/1/21 9:22 PM

156

Chapter 5

Halsell all, holding the racial liberal line, regarded race as a social invention, but their investment in dark skin as a means of accessing Black being reified the color line they thought they were troubling, casting race as an essence and an illusion but never a material regime. From 1948, when Sprigle refashioned himself as James R. Crawford and took a segregated coach to Atlanta, to 1968, when Halsell boarded a bus to Harlem as “Black Grace Halsell,” white liberal minstrels sought to know Blackness from the inside while also revealing it to be nothing at all, a fetish and a trick mirror. The strange career of liberal blackface shadowed that of racial liberalism itself. Sprigle, at the height of Jim Crow and with the assistance of NAACP head Walter White, made a case for integration. Halsell, at the height of Black Power and with the assistance of Griffin, made a case for color blindness. The commitment to ending racism—to defeating, righting, enlightening, and curing it—mutated into the conviction that race itself must end, that ending racism meant abolishing racial consciousness. “The problem is larger than black and white,” Halsell wrote in 1969, reflecting on her time as a Black woman in Harlem and then in the South. “It is man’s inhumanity to man (and woman), always and everywhere.”16 The nation, she determined, as Black people built a movement grounded in Black consciousness, needed to abandon racial thinking and address each other as nothing more or less than human. The timebound figurative frames of Sprigle’s generation had crumbled. The scientists’ race front had not defeated racism. The Truman administration’s reforms had not righted it. The race novel had not enlightened it. Integration had not cured it. The racial liberal’s near-future solutions hadn’t taken, so Griffin, Halsell, and others rushed ahead to the end of racial time, inaugurating a final, badfaith frame: antiracism as color blindness. If the racial liberals of the 1940s had traded the white man’s burden for the white man’s solution, then the liberals of the 1960s abandoned that solution for the white man’s delusion. Historians have often remarked on the contradictions at the heart of blackface, an institution of desire and angst, love and theft. In 1993, Eric Lott, the cultural historian, described the minstrel show as a manifestation of white “envy as well as repulsion, sympathetic identification as well as fear” and added that “every time you hear an expansive white man drop into his version of black English, you are in the presence of blackface’s unconscious return.”17 Literature scholar Baz Dreisinger identifies modern white minstrels as entertaining “anxieties and fantasies” in “panic or ecstasy.”18 Alisha Gaines, the author of

Darda-BK.indd 156

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Antiracism as Color Blindness

157

Black for a Day, observes that Griffin and others treated Blackness as a “confounding space of discomfort, pleasure, desire, anxiety, anticipated violence, fame, and care.”19 Contradictions abound. Or do they? Perhaps the desire is the angst, the love the theft. The white liberal’s Black mask installed a convenient confusion between racial biologism (going Black to know an essential Blackness) and color blindness (going Black to trouble an artificial color line). Racial liberalism wedded what might seem like conflicting racial regimes, segregation and color blindness, forming a bridge from one to the next, through a narrative of racial advancement that constructed as it deconstructed, reified as it dereified, ensuring a white racial future as it summoned ever wilder fantasies of transcendence. In the Land of Jim Crow In 1967, Grove Press released the first English-language edition of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks with the tagline “the experiences of a black man in a white world.” The French West Indian philosopher argued that Black people must combat colonialism through social and economic struggle, as well as in their own minds, throwing off what he termed the internalization or “epidermalization” of colonialism.20 Black Skin, White Masks, which Fanon first drafted while a medical student in France in 1951, arrived with an ironic twist in the United States, where white liberals had authored numerous investigations that might well have been subtitled “the experiences of a white man in a Black world.” Fanon, who died of leukemia at thirty-six in 1961, argued that two “facts” sustained colonialism. “There is a fact: White men consider themselves superior to black men” and build and sustain colonies on that belief, he wrote. “There is another fact: Black men want to prove to white men, at all costs, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect.”21 Colonialism had, he thought, encouraged Black people to don white masks, and no social or economic liberation could be achieved until they discarded them. Black radicals in the United States, including the Panthers, read Fanon and agreed. No more simulating white culture. No more addressing or writing for white audiences. But a third, troubling fact had emerged since the onset of the civil rights movement: white liberals wanted to demonstrate to other white liberals, at no cost, the rightness of their thought. Ray Sprigle, John Howard Griffin, and Grace Halsell donned Black masks to reveal the horrors of segregation but their method naturalized them, binding Black skin to inevitable—and

Darda-BK.indd 157

12/1/21 9:22 PM

158

Chapter 5

because fi ltered through a white surrogate—unimaginable suffering. Of white abolitionists, the cultural theorist Saidiya Hartman once observed, their “masochistic fantasy” of their own enslavement, their desire to know Black suffering from the inside, did not confirm the humanness of the enslaved but obliterated them in a ritual of abolitionist anti-Blackness.22 Sprigle, Griffin, and Halsell carried on and elevated that tradition, offering, as a model for other white liberals, a strange exhibition in antiracist anti-Blackness. Sprigle, the first of the neominstrels, might have borrowed his idea from William Lindsay White’s account of Albert Johnston’s life as a light-skinned Black doctor living as a dark-skinned white doctor in New England. White, a white liberal and the son of the influential editor William Allen White, contributed a teaser for Lost Boundaries under the same title in Reader’s Digest in December 1947, a few months before Sprigle began entertaining thoughts of crossing over.23 In the Digest excerpt and the short book, which Harcourt, Brace released that winter, the Johnstons’ youngest child, Donald, after learning of his Black heritage, stands before a mirror and, “looking frowningly at his blond, curly hair, his light brown eyes, his fair complexion,” confronts his new Blackness. “I just can’t believe we are,” he tells his father. White ends the scene with Donald staring at himself, wondering how he could be white one moment and Black the next: “He looked at [his features] for a long time.”24 Sprigle, Griffin, and Halsell would all recreate that scene in their own blackface narratives, reckoning with a change in racial consciousness through a reflection in a mirror. White dedicated most of Lost Boundaries to the struggles of the doctor’s older son, Albert Jr., who, at least in White’s telling, considers suicide after learning the truth about his background and devotes all of his time to listening to Paul Robeson records and writing what White describes as a neverending blues song—“a little tune which started brightly, but somehow got overwhelmed with sorrow and wandered off into plaintive dissonant chords, a tune which could find no ending.”25 Albert Jr. does not recover until the final pages of Lost Boundaries, when he commits himself to doing something for his race. “If you really want to help the Negro,” he tells a Black classmate at the University of New Hampshire, “isn’t the first step to stand up and say, ‘Sure, I’m one, this is the way it is, this is how it feels to be colored.’” Albert Jr., fi ltered through White’s recreated dialogue, suggests that his first few months as a Black man had taught him that he must do what he can for “the Negro”—as

Darda-BK.indd 158

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Antiracism as Color Blindness

159

if he were a white liberal making the courageous choice to disguise himself as a Black man. The book ends with Albert Jr. at last finishing his blues song: “No longer a heart-broken little tune which can find no ending, but a slow, sad, sturdy song for all his people.”26 Lost Boundaries dangled the idea that a white man could do as Albert Jr. had, that he could also learn the blues. Walter White, the NAACP leader, reviewed Lost Boundaries for the New York Times. After first establishing that he had not authored the book— William Lindsay White wrote under the name W. L. White, and some of his readers had misdirected their letters to the NAACP executive secretary—he commended it as a “unique and immensely moving story” while criticizing William Lindsay White for not directing his condemnations where they belonged: south of the Mason–Dixon.27 Sprigle, a sixty-one-year-old journalist from Pittsburgh, took note. Although he identified for most of his life as a “staunch conservative Republican,” he would come to embrace the emerging racial liberal consensus—a consensus that attracted more than a few conservatives, including cantankerous old newspapermen—as the nation realigned around him.28 Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for revealing Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black’s ties to the Ku Klux Klan, Sprigle had worn disguises before, going undercover to investigate state mental wards, coal mines, and underground gambling rings, sometimes using his future “Black name,” James R. Crawford. After receiving the go-ahead from his editor and the blessing of Walter White, who agreed to coordinate his tour of the South, he researched methods to darken his skin. After consulting with chemists at the Mellon Institute, who suggested some treatments but worried they might kill him, and staining his skin with walnut husks, which, when he sweated, Sprigle discovered, left him “striped like a tiger,” he shaved his head and mustache, baked in the Florida sun for three weeks, bought himself thick-framed glasses and a Scottish “tam-o’-shanter” hat, and declared himself “Brother Crawford.”29 (Why he thought glasses and a Scottish hat would make him look Black is unclear.) White introduced him to Black civic leader John Wesley Dobbs, the grand master of Georgia’s Black Masonic lodges, who showed him around the South. In the second of twentyone articles, Sprigle described Dobbs, whom he never named, and himself as “just a couple Negroes Jim Crowing it through the Southland.”30 The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran the articles on A1, above the fold, under the banner headline “I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days.” At least

Darda-BK.indd 159

12/1/21 9:22 PM

160

Chapter 5

fifteen other dailies, including the New York Herald Tribune, carried the series. The Pittsburgh Courier gave Sprigle the honorific “Nation’s No. 1 White Reporter.”31 From August 9 to September 1, 1948, readers followed an odd kind of serial travel memoir, as Sprigle ventured into the South and into Blackness, often conflating one with the other—his own heart of darkness. Although he returned to Pittsburgh with his Florida sunburn before boarding a train from Washington, DC, to Atlanta, Sprigle didn’t feel Black, he said, until he entered the South. “It was a strange, new—and for me, uncharted—world that I entered when, in a Jim Crow coach, we rumbled across the Potomac out of Washington,” he wrote. “Now I was black and the world I was to know was as bewildering as if I had been dropped down on the moon.”32 The further he traveled into “the land of Jim Crow,” the more he doubted that he could ever “regain the satisfied, superior white psychology that I took south with me.” Something about the region and the “grim tales of injustice and cruelty and the wanton shedding of blood” that he heard from the men and women to whom Dobbs introduced him brought about a “psychological change,” he wrote, and left him “worried over the problem of turning my mind white again.”33 Sprigle defined Blackness as a condition of the southern brand of racial segregation that might vanish without it, along with, he suggested, the wrong kind of white consciousness. He had his tan, his shaved head, his thick-framed glasses, and his tam-o’-shanter hat in the North, but it took Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee for that disguise to turn him Black, to make him feel and think, he believed, like a real Black man. The white newspaperman had immersed himself in communities not his own before, but he went further as Crawford, Dobbs’s curious “guest from Pittsburgh.” In the first sentence of In the Land of Jim Crow, a book-length version of his Post-Gazette series, Sprigle announced, “I was a Negro in the Deep South.”34 Margaret Halsey, the white liberal author of Color Blind: A White Woman Looks at the Negro, contributed a foreword in which she addressed whether Sprigle’s embodiment of Blackness made him less reliable. “In view of the importance and intricacy of the whole subject,” she wrote, “it is only fair to ask whether he is also impartial and objective. To which the answer is, he was impartial and objective when he started, and when he finished he was still objective.”35 Of course, to ask that at all suggested that a Black observer couldn’t offer a fair account of race in the United States, unless that Black observer was a white man with a sunburn.

Darda-BK.indd 160

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Antiracism as Color Blindness

161

Sprigle seemed to agree, remarking throughout the series on “the obsession the Southern Negro has with this racial problem.” Whenever Black people gathered in the South, he wrote, “there is one thing they always talk about—the relations between the races, what are the white folks going to do next? And why not?”36 In his second week on the road with Dobbs, Sprigle attended the meeting of a Black Masonic lodge in Chickamauga, Georgia. He ate with the Masons afterward, asking them about their lives, and listened as local musicians and singers entertained the gathering. From this, he determined that race “colors all [a Black person’s] thinking and every phase of his life. Every recitation, every theme so laboriously written, stresses only the one great fact of these people’s lives: their relations with the whites.”37 He didn’t acknowledge that Dobbs introducing him as a northern Black man researching segregation and “a friend of Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP” might skew the conversations he had with the people he met in northern Georgia and elsewhere in the South.38 Sprigle, assuming that all Black people talked about “race relations” and nothing else, fashioned his Black self as a race man, ending the last of his articles with “one last word to the white man in the South from a Negro, even though a temporary one” in which, writing as a Black man, he demanded the franchise and a decent education for “our children.”39 Sprigle affirmed for his white liberal readers their image of the white racist—a southern man, rural and uneducated—but also their idea of who counted as a real Black person: a southern man, segregated and disenfranchised, forever talking about what the white folks think. When he crossed back over the Ohio River, returning to Pittsburgh after four weeks in the South, Sprigle described a feeling of “safety and freedom and peace” wash over him.40 But he hadn’t left his Black self behind. On November 9, 1948, the radio show America’s Town Meeting of the Air invited Sprigle to debate segregation with Walter White and two conservative southern news editors, Harry Ashmore of the Arkansas Gazette and Hodding Carter of the Democrat Delta-Times. The show’s longtime moderator, George Denny, introduced the theme, “What Should We Do about Race Segregation?,” and invited Sprigle to share his thoughts first. The white northerner, six months removed from his travels in Blackness, declared that he wished to answer from “the standpoint of the Southern Negro,” as if summoning James R. Crawford to the stage. “The Southern Negro has been waiting for 80 years for his first fundamental right of citizenship,” he reminded them, referring to voting. “How

Darda-BK.indd 161

12/1/21 9:22 PM

162

Chapter 5

much longer must we wait?”41 White, the one Black panelist, had to somehow follow a northern white man addressing the radio audience as a southern Black man on behalf of his race. Although Denny introduced the debate as a contest between two racial liberals, Sprigle and White, and two racial conservatives, Ashmore and Carter, the three white newspapermen found common ground in agreeing that “the South has shown a constant trend for the better” (Sprigle) and “made great and heartening progress in solving its peculiar problem and in gradually dismantling the peculiar institution that has grown out of it” (Ashmore). Progress, they agreed, could be slowed but never halted. What should we do about race segregation? Their answer: wait. Sprigle recommended less time. Ashmore and Carter called for more. White, although he echoed their devotion to the bend of the arc in other venues, criticized their “gradualism,” likening it to treating cancer with Vaseline.42 But Sprigle, Ashmore, and Carter had good reason to advocate gradualism. Race talk made for good business, at least for white men. White made $100 that night on Town Meeting. Sprigle received $400, and he wouldn’t be the last white liberal to make a buck off blackface.43 In the Land of Racial Liberalism On the afternoon of October 31, 1959, as his wife dressed their three young children in Halloween costumes, John Howard Griffin retreated to his writing studio, a converted barn in Mansfield, Texas, where he wrote, “Strange moments—yesterday I received the go-ahead on the oddest project of my life.” Sepia, the white-run Black culture magazine, had agreed, on his urging, to send him across the South disguised as a Black man to chronicle what “segregation does to a man’s body and soul.” Griffin, who maintained a detailed journal that ran for hundreds of pages a year, had made no mention of the idea before and hadn’t written about race at all in months. (Most of his entries had to do with classical music, Catholicism, and Latin. “Too little sleep, too much Latin scholars last night,” he had written the week before.)44 The assignment, though arriving out of nowhere in his recorded thoughts, overwhelmed Griffin with dread and fascination, and he wrote all day and late into the night, wondering what he might learn in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia not about Black life or the South but about himself and his own racial hatred. “Am I not myself, all in having studied the situation of racism, loathing injustice, etc., still fi lled with the clichés that form our concept

Darda-BK.indd 162

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Antiracism as Color Blindness

163

of the southern Negro[?]” Griffin asked himself. “Yes, and do I not loath even more deeply the prospect of becoming a Negro; and I must be clear here—not because of the reprisals, not because of the subterfuge, which I shall minimize, but because there is the deeper taint within me, as though becoming a Negro will do some profound damage to my humanity[?]” He did not, as Sprigle had, cross the line to investigate Jim Crow but to clear his mind and cleanse his soul of “injustice, etc.,” which took the form, in his thoughts that Halloween afternoon and night, of clearing his mind and cleansing his soul of Blackness. Griffin, a devout Catholic convert, set out on a pilgrimage to the Black South, a “god-act” through which he sought to discover himself anew, to transcend “the superficial level of black-white relationships” with vitiligo medication and a shaved head.45 For all his talk of transcendence, of thinking and acting at the “level of humanity,” as he liked to say, Griffin described the color line as a hard existential divide that, if he managed to cross it, could transform him forever, that he might never shake a lingering “Negroness.”46 He worried about what it might do to his children and, most of all, to his sex life with his wife, Elizabeth, a much younger white woman. “I promise I won’t come back while I’m a Negro,” he told her that night. “But if I did—if some emergency made it necessary—and we went to bed together—would you be able to overcome what you saw, conceive of me as the husband you’ve always known; or would you have the impression you were committing adultery with a Negro man?” Elizabeth “couldn’t answer,” he noted in his journal at 4:30 a.m. after a restless night beside her.47 In 1957, Norman Mailer had made waves and more than a few enemies with his essay “The White Negro,” in which he fetishized the “cramp, pinch, scream and despair of [a Black man’s] orgasm.”48 Griffin entertained similar fantasies, admitting that he wanted to know but couldn’t bring himself to ask whether the idea “excited” Elizabeth “in this weird situation where intercourse would be legal, morally okay, but give the illusion of being a profoundly forbidden and even monstrous act according to Southern mores and according to our concept of marital fidelity.” The next evening, when she visited him in his studio and they embraced, he felt an “excitement deeper than sensuality” wash over them “like some deep inevitable animal rut.”49 None of this made it into Black Like Me, the massive best seller that would turn Griffin into the most famous and infamous blackface liberal of his time.50

Darda-BK.indd 163

12/1/21 9:22 PM

164

Chapter 5

Until the end of his life, he maintained that he had not written the book for the cause of desegregation or for himself but rather for his wife and children, whom he wished to shield, he wrote in his final book in 1977, “from the dehumanizing poison of racism.”51 He declared that child-centered futurism from the outset. “I need to make it clear, that I do all of this, plan all of this hell because of my children—that is the real reason, so they will not have to grow up in a world dictated by bigots,” he wrote in his journal on the evening of November 1, 1959. “It is not for the Negroes, since I do not know what I will find— but for humanity.”52 But the sense of existential dread with which Griffin ventured into Blackness, including his fear that Black John Howard Griffin would go to bed with his white wife, suggests something else: that he sought to defend his white children not from racism but from Black men, including his own Black self, and the racial consciousness that he believed they embodied. When Ray Sprigle first considered crossing the color line, he consulted Walter White and the NAACP. When Griffin, with no awareness of Sprigle’s almost identical article series, first considered it, he consulted his white friend George Levitan, the owner of Sepia Publishing. Griffin had been what he described as an “adventure-prone person” all his life.53 He had left home at fifteen to enroll in a school in Tours, France, after reading about it in a magazine. He fought for the French resistance in Tours before returning to the United States to enlist in the army, for which he served in the Pacific on Guadalcanal and then Morotai, where, wounded in an air raid in the final months of the war, he lost his sight. (Griffin regained his vision, without medical intervention, in 1957, confounding his doctors.) He traveled to Solesmes Abbey, where he studied Gregorian chant. He converted to Roman Catholicism. Griffin wasn’t a radical. He was a seeker. Blackness was his next adventure in selfinvention. Levitan discouraged him but agreed on the condition that he first talk with his editorial director, a Black woman. She also advised him against it, telling him that he didn’t know what he was getting himself into. He ignored her and booked a ticket to New Orleans to meet with a dermatologist. Griffin didn’t have much interest in interacting with Black people. He thought he could learn about Black life from himself, seeing his darkened skin not as a disguise but a whole new self, a total transformation of his being. “The pigmentation will resonate to the depths of my being, and all the culture that goes with that skin pigmentation will automatically become mine,” he wrote in his journal on November 1. “My past will not lead back to John Griffin’s but

Darda-BK.indd 164

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Antiracism as Color Blindness

165

back through the long corridors of time and tradition to Africa and slavery.”54 In the late 1940s, Sprigle crossed over to learn something about being Black in the South from Black people in the South. In the late 1950s, Griffin crossed over to learn something about being Black in the South from Black John Howard Griffin. In the first pages of Black Like Me, the white Texan noted that the book had originated as “a scientific research study of the Negro in the South”—a collaboration with a sociologist at the University of Texas, he later revealed— but had transformed into a chronicle of “the changes to heart and body and intelligence” he had undergone as a white man with a chemical burn because, he asked, “How else except by becoming a Negro could a white man hope to learn the truth?”55 Most historians of race argue that World War II marked a break in Western racial regimes, after which biological race science faded and culture emerged as the dominant mode of racialization. But Griffin, among the most celebrated racial liberals of the time, believed that culture, including ancestral heritage, radiated from his melanin. His darkened skin changed how others treated him but also, he thought, his mind and his soul. More than ten million people bought his book. In Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, Griffin made a habit of standing before hotel mirrors—sometimes “cracked,” often “mottled”—and meditating on his Black face. “The transformation was total and shocking,” he wrote of examining himself, after shaving his head, in a bathroom mirror in New Orleans. “Even the senses underwent a change so profound it fi lled me with distress. I looked into the mirror and saw nothing of white John Griffin’s past. No, the reflections led back to Africa.”56 He shouldn’t have been shocked. He had told himself, before ever darkening his skin, that he would feel like that when he looked in the mirror. Griffin built a self-conscious allusion to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man into his encounters with mirrors, observing in the New Orleans bathroom that “the Griffin that was had become invisible.” When later he caught sight of his reflection while conversing with a Black woman, he exclaimed, “Light gleamed from the elderly Negro’s head as he looked up to talk to the Negro woman. The sense of shock returned; it was as though I were invisible in the room.”57 But Griffin’s invisible man, unlike Ellison’s, is not a Black man invisible to white people but a white man— the white John Howard Griffin, “the Griffin that was”—watching Black people without their knowing. Shrouded in liberal blackface, he conducts what

Darda-BK.indd 165

12/1/21 9:22 PM

166

Chapter 5

the sociologist Simone Browne refers to as “racialized surveillance,” in which “enactments of surveillance reify boundaries, borders, and bodies along racial lines” and the uneven distribution of resources across and among them, all while assuming to trouble racial distinctions.58 Griffin did not dismantle the color line. He wielded it.59 The Texan—a “fringe southerner,” as he described himself—ended his tour of the South in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where he visited an old friend and fellow white liberal integrationist, the editor P. D. East.60 In Hattiesburg, Griffin read East’s forthcoming book, The Magnolia Jungle, which concluded with a wish for his young daughter: “What I have and what I know are not good enough for me; they are far short of being good enough for my daughter and for her children and theirs.”61 Griffin read through the night. He couldn’t have agreed more, and he ended his own book with a meditation on the innocence of children, recalling how a young Black man in Mansfield had asked him, “Your children don’t hate us, do they?” “God no,” Griffin answered. “Children have to be taught that kind of fi lth. We’d never permit ours to learn it.” He then transitioned, in the final sentences of the book, to lamenting that Black children now absorbed a different kind of racism, a “racism” against white people. “The Negro who turns now, in the moment of near-realization of his liberties, and bares his fangs at a man’s whiteness,” Griffin concluded, “makes the same tragic error the white racist had made.”62 The 1964 film version, starring James Whitmore in blackface, ends with a young Black man telling his father and the earnest Griffin character, “We don’t need his help. What we want we’ll get by our own strength.”63 Griffin had done what he could, he later wrote, to encourage his children to “see fellow human beings in their true light, simply as people.”64 His best-selling book, the culmination of a racial liberal ethic of white self-sacrifice, suggested that Black children had learned something else from their fathers: a divisive racial consciousness. Griffin’s six weeks in blackface fed a lifelong obsession with innocence and absolution. On November 1, 1961, as Black Like Me made headlines, he wrote a fan letter to Lillian Smith, a mutual friend of his and East’s, telling her how much he admired her memoir Killers of the Dream. The two white southerners, although they never met, wrote one another for years. Smith recommended Griffin for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, which he won in 1962, and they soon took to signing their letters “love” and describing each other as “twins.”65 Reading Black Like Me had, Smith wrote Griffin, “made me want

Darda-BK.indd 166

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Antiracism as Color Blindness

167

to know you,” and she admitted that writing Killers of the Dream had left her “overwhelmed with sadness.”66 Griffin confessed that he had suffered a similar bout of sorrow after finishing his book—“a sense of utter disbelief,” he wrote, “and then a sort of cosmic terror that we have stepped beyond the limits of absolvable sin.”67 The white racial liberal had sought absolution through conversion before. When he took his first communion in Solesmes as a young man, it stirred in him a “desire for innocence,” he later wrote. “Such innocence for me is the base of joy, which is without color, without stain.”68 His faith had returned him “to innocence, to simplicity” that he had known as a child but had been “too young to value.” When he regained his sight in 1957, he marveled at how he had to “learn to see again, like a newborn infant,” taking in the world with a clean visual slate, freed of entrenched habits of seeing.69 Griffin did not see anti-Blackness as a regime of organized theft but as a deficit of innocence to be remedied through a rebirth as a color-blind child. He argued until the end of his life that men and women had forgotten what children knew from birth, that “the Other is self.”70 Griffin’s biographer, Robert Bonazzi, who married Griffin’s widow, described him as a “universal writer” and a “‘radical’—but only one for equal justice for all people.”71 Griffin, that rare thing, a bornagain Catholic, was a radical for innocence. The racial liberal had trusted in time, trusted in the clock to deliver the nation to a just future somewhere off on the near horizon. That future not arriving, he reset the clock, declaring himself reborn, cleansed of sin, color blind. He declared that racial time had ended, at least for him. When the classic Saturday Night Live skit “White Like Me” aired in 1984, Griffin’s liberal blackface seemed absurd, almost hard to believe for a Gen-X audience. But the idea he delivered to ten million readers in the 1960s—color blindness—had won out in the 1980s, after containing the race radicalism that emerged in force not long after Griffin made his last visit to the dermatologist. I Want to Know You Griffin’s Black Like Me coincided with a more enduring lesson in racial crossover. “If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kind of folks,” Atticus Finch, the consummate white southern liberal, tells his daughter in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—.” “Sir?” Scout asks.

Darda-BK.indd 167

12/1/21 9:22 PM

168

Chapter 5

“—until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”72 In 1963, a year after Gregory Peck immortalized Atticus in the fi lm version of Lee’s novel, President Kennedy, with five months to live, echoed the fictional southerner’s words in a radio and television address to the nation after federalizing state national guardsmen to integrate the University of Alabama. “If an American, because his skin is dark,” the president asked, “cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who will represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?”73 That gesture, of climbing into another person’s skin and walking around in it, stood as the highest ideal of the white racial liberal for a generation, from Sprigle’s blackface to Atticus’s broad-minded advice to his daughter. No one ever took that charge further than Grace Halsell, who did what Sprigle and Griffin had done before her, darkening her skin and living as a Black person, and then went on to remake herself as an American Indian and an undocumented Mexican immigrant. “When one talks about research, one generally talks about primary and secondary source material,” she wrote in an unpublished reflection on her first book, Soul Sister, her account of living as a Black woman in Harlem and the South in 1968. “But there is a source more primary than primary—you are not only there, on the scene, seeing it happen. But it is happening to you.”74 Her adventures in Blackness (and Indianness and Mexicanness), coming as they did amid the Black Power movement, signaled a crisis and transformation of the racial liberalism of Sprigle and Griffin, a transformation that wed, while seeming to differentiate, color blindness and multiculturalism. Halsell was a latecomer to the racial liberal cause. She admitted in the first pages of Soul Sister that she hadn’t thought much about race at all until 1968, when she, a staff writer in the Johnson administration, learned of Griffin’s book from a business executive visiting the White House. Halsell went home, bought the book, read it, and, discovering that Griffin, with whom she shared roots in Fort Worth, spoke to her “like an inner voice, calm, suggestive,” wrote him a letter. On White House letterhead, she announced, as Smith had before her, “I want to know you.”75 Griffin wrote back, informing her that he would be in Baltimore two weeks later to give a talk. “Perhaps we might have supper

Darda-BK.indd 168

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Antiracism as Color Blindness

169

together,” he suggested.76 Halsell met him in Baltimore and drove him to her home in Washington, where, over dinner, she shared her book idea: to do what he had done but as a woman. Griffin encouraged her, something he hadn’t done for others. That spring, he wrote to Robert Gutwillig, an editor at New American Library, encouraging him to offer Halsell a book contract. “Let me just say that many people have approached me about such a project and I have consistently discouraged it, because it is dangerous and it takes very special gifts of perception,” Griffin wrote Gutwillig. “When Grace Halsell suggested this to me, I jumped at the idea enthusiastically, because she combines the experience and the perception and the ‘feeling’ more than any person I know.”77 Halsell had a contract within weeks, and Griffin coached her throughout her ensuing six months masquerading as a Black woman, offering her advice on vitiligo medication and connecting her with people he had met on his own tour of the Black South. Of first meeting Griffin, Halsell later wrote, “We were intuitively close and understanding, like friends who have known each other in trust and affection all their lives.”78 Nothing, it turned out, bound white liberals together like a shared affair with blackface, whether lived in Harlem and the South or read at home. Griffin had found a kindred soul in Halsell, a fellow seeker. When Halsell met Griffin in 1968, she had, at forty-four, lived more than a few lives. She had landed a job at her hometown newspaper, the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, right out of high school. In 1943, she moved to New York to live with her sister, where she worked at the New York Times, first in the reference room, then on the news desk. In 1945, Halsell moved back to Texas to take a job at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. She got married and divorced, worked in big oil, and then traveled around the world, making a living as a freelance writer in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, where she wrote about the successes and limitations of the Marshall Plan and the Cold War’s first hot wars. In 1963, she returned to the United States to take an assignment at the Washington bureau of the Houston Post, where, while covering the White House, she came into the orbit of Lyndon Johnson. In 1965, noticing her during a briefing on the South Lawn, the president exclaimed, “Come over here! You are the prettiest little thing I ever saw!” She joined his staff soon after and later described Johnson as “the worst boss I ever had.”79 Halsell attributed her taste for adventure to where she came from—the southern High Plains of West Texas. “Being born in a place where there was

Darda-BK.indd 169

12/1/21 9:22 PM

170

Chapter 5

little except space had advantages,” she wrote in her memoir, In Their Shoes. “Who, I might ask, am I, amidst this infinite expanse?”80 She had inherited a colonial attitude of entitlement and self-making from her father, Harry, whose death in 1957 merited a notice in the New York Times. The first sentence read, “Fort Worth, Tex., Feb. 4—Harry H. Halsell, trail driver, Indian fighter and author who credited his long life to many guns and the ability to use them, died in his home here today.”81 Of her father and her West Texas childhood, Halsell recalled, “I took this sense of space, of openness, with me,” adding, “Not wanting a frozen face or a set identity for all time, I gave myself the freedom to wear many masks.”82 If Griffin had sought absolution through blackface, Halsell sought a radical kind of freedom from her racial and gender identities that she thought she might find in someone else’s. Although Halsell often credited Griffin with stirring her interest in race and racial segregation, she also traced it back to World War II, when she met the anthropologist Ruth Benedict. In New York, Halsell and her sister lived four blocks from Columbia University, where Benedict taught. Columbia did not admit women, but female students could enroll in night classes, and Halsell did, devoting her evenings after work to attending Benedict’s lectures on race and human cultures. “It was through her lectures and assigned reading material that I first considered the manner in which pigmentation can be used as a means of discrimination,” Halsell recalled. “What she taught, stored in recesses of my mind, became the earliest seed of my decision twenty-five years later to change the color of my skin and write Soul Sister.”83 Benedict had taken on the race science establishment, arguing that it had given cover to the Third Reich. Her 1940 book, Race: Science and Politics, which she wrote at the behest of her former graduate adviser and mentor, Franz Boas, drew a hard distinction between race and racism, defining the former as a scientific “fact” and the latter as a “modern superstition.” She recognized race as a science and sorted all humans into three “zoologically divided” classifications (Negroid, Mongoloid, and Caucasoid), while dismissing racism as “a belief which can be studied only historically” and that must “be judged only by its fruits and by its votaries and its ulterior purposes.”84 Benedict defended the biological investigation of race but insisted that biological difference had no bearing on behavior or intelligence. Halsell echoed the lesson in remarking that “pigmentation” (scientific race) could be used as a “means of

Darda-BK.indd 170

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Antiracism as Color Blindness

171

discrimination” (unscientific racism) and that the liberal antiracist knew to distinguish one from the other, race from racism, science from dogma.85 But Benedict’s research, against her best intentions, wedded biological difference to culture, reforming rather than dismantling human hierarchies for a racial liberal age. Her wartime lectures might have informed Halsell’s simultaneous investment in Blackness as essence and illusion, a whole different kind of being tied to skin color, hair texture, and bone structure and nothing more than some behaviors that could be learned in six months of make-believe. Griffin embraced his role as Halsell’s adviser in blackface. Soon after their first meeting, Halsell wrote Griffin, asking whether she should take on a fake name. “Off-hand,” he wrote back, “I think the best thing is to keep the story as near the truth as possible. Negroes have unusual names, so that is no problem.” He then offered her some unsolicited advice on the behaviors of Black people: “If Negroes ask questions you can give honest answers; if whites (especially strangers) ask questions, just assume that cold-staring ‘sullen’ attitude and mumble the minimum replies . . . This is what most Negroes do now, when questions are unwarranted.”86 Griffin, seeing Blackness as a set of teachable cultural behaviors, never suggested that Halsell might want to consult a Black woman before writing a book about being a Black woman. He advised her instead to act sullen, mumble, and meet with another white southern liberal, Sarah Patton Boyle, the author of The Desegregated Heart, most famous for receiving a mention from Martin Luther King in his letter from Birmingham Jail. After reading a review of Soul Sister, Griffin wrote Halsell a letter in which he blamed himself for the challenges she faced in Harlem and the South. “It hurt me so much that you went through the experience leading up to the book,” he admitted. “I have often reproached myself for being somewhat instrumental in making you go through that. Thank God that part of it is over and you came out safely.”87 Griffin’s chief concern remained not the future of Black southerners but the well-being of white southern women among Black southerners—his wife in the late 1950s and Halsell in the late 1960s—an arrangement that had long sustained the racial regime that Griffin believed himself to be fighting. Halsell welcomed his guidance, referring to him, until the end of his life, as “Soul Brother Number One Howard,” her white guru in Blackness.88 Where Ray Sprigle had consulted Walter White and John Wesley

Darda-BK.indd 171

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Grace Halsell at John Howard Griffi n’s home in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1968. Photograph by Griffi n. Grace Halsell Papers, Special Collections, Texas Christian University Library.

Darda-BK.indd 172

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Antiracism as Color Blindness

173

Promotional photographs of Grace Halsell for Soul Sister. Grace Halsell Papers, Special Collections, Texas Christian University Library.

Dobbs before crossing over, Grace Halsell looked to John Howard Griffin and Sarah Patton Boyle for advice. White racial liberalism had liberated itself from Black people. Halsell wrote Soul Sister as a near facsimile of Black Like Me, while stressing the difference that her gender made to her blackface liberalism. Griffin himself advised her to sell the book as “a kind of ‘lady’ Black Like Me,” and she did.89 He asked, in the first pages of Black Like Me, “How else except by becoming a Negro could a white man hope to learn the truth?”90 Halsell asked, in the first pages of Soul Sister, “How could I be sure I understood this feeling [of being Black] unless I passed as a Negro in the South—and in Harlem— and subjected myself to the same problems that a Negro woman must cope with day in and day out?” She then added, “After all, Black Like Me was written by a man.”91 Black women lived different lives than Black men did, Halsell argued. But her book demonstrated instead that a white woman acting as a Black woman lived a different life than a white man acting as a Black man. Halsell believed that her gender licensed and enabled her blackface (and redface and brownface). “From the beginning,” she wrote in her 1996 memoir, “I had credentials to ‘pass’ as the Other, having lived a lifetime not as a minority but nevertheless a Second Sex, one Other Than a Man.” Her credentials as

Darda-BK.indd 173

12/1/21 9:22 PM

174

Chapter 5

a woman gave her, she thought, the tools to dissolve self/other distinctions, a dream in which all would come to see each other as nothing more or less than an “authentic human being” without “preferential treatment” built on a belief in stable racial and gender identities that arose from skin color and sex—color blindness and an uncritical multiculturalism united in an antiredistributive ideological alliance.92 In the Land of Color Blindness In her six months in blackface, Halsell interacted with few Black women. Most of her contacts in Harlem and the South were men. That changed on her book tour, when she sat for an interview with Hazel Bright, Betty Lomax, and Marian Etoile Watson, whom Halsell described in an unpublished manuscript as “three angry young blacks,” on the PBS talk show Black Journal. Lomax, as Halsell remembered it, told her she “couldn’t have a ‘black’ soul,” and Bright asked her what she thought soul meant. Halsell defined soul as a “feeling on the inside” that was “not restricted to being black” and told Watson, who had French heritage, that she wouldn’t condemn her if she “wanted to live in Paris and eat camembert and sing French songs and feel that in her soul of souls she was French.” Halsell likened the interview to a “trial or inquisition.”93 In a loose-leaf note from the time, she accused Toni Morrison of hating white women while, she believed, using white men to get ahead. “Toni Morrison, who is an editor at Random House, and let’s say ‘gets along’ says that [when the] black woman looks at the white woman she sees the enemy,” she wrote. “I am very suspect of [her] and [her] honesty.”94 Halsell deflected Black women’s resistance to Soul Sister with a Black man’s reassuring words. “Your criticism will come from black women, who will wish they had written the book,” Price Cobbs, a coauthor of the 1968 book Black Rage, had forewarned her, and Halsell clung to that idea. “In the year 1969,” Halsell recalled in the unpublished manuscript, “blacks were heralding that the best of all possible roles was that of being young, black, and beautiful, and many who could fit in this category were saying it’s our bag, our thing and you stay out.”95 Alluding to Nina Simone’s 1970 soul song “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” a nod to Simone’s late friend Loraine Hansberry, Halsell blamed Black women for restricting who could be with whom and who could claim which identities and bristled at the idea that Black women knew something that she didn’t and couldn’t as a white woman with Black male confidantes.96

Darda-BK.indd 174

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Antiracism as Color Blindness

175

She remained convinced that she could understand what it felt like to be a Black woman by adding Black men’s race to her own gender. Halsell believed that real Blackness resided not with women, not with Morrison or Simone or Hansberry, but with young radical Black men. In Harlem, she took a job as an administrative assistant at a health clinic, which she considered not Black enough because she worked among women and middleclass Black men. “I now see my job as the worst of all possible jobs for my purposes of trying to get an idea of how the mass of black people live,” she wrote. “The people with whom I work are good top-level, intelligent, upper-middleclass people, and no different, the middle class being the middle class, from whitey.” When one of her coworkers instructed her to wear stockings to the office, Halsell railed against her and the other Black women with whom she worked for “holding up the standards, the values of the white System.” When she met a Black organizer who disagreed with the Revolutionary Action Movement and the Panthers, she dismissed him as an “MC” who “talks of being ‘militant’” but “acts as master of ceremonies for programs whitey controls.”97 Dreisinger, the literature scholar, remarks that most modern white minstrels turned to Black men rather than Black women “in order to acquire their authenticity.”98 Halsell, disguising herself as a Black women in 1968, further narrowed that gendered understanding of Blackness to young, working-class Black men who identified with the Black Power movement and disdained white liberals like herself. Older, middle-class, or more moderate Black men weren’t, in her mind, Black at all. She tested her own assumed Blackness against Roscoe, her older, mild-mannered Black neighbor in Washington, and found him wanting. She gave him The Autobiography of Malcolm X and told him that she was tired of “that ole whitey” after returning from the South.99 If Sprigle had located Blackness in the segregated South, Halsell identified it with the radical urban North—with a Black Power movement that wanted nothing to do with her. Black Grace fled her race but also, through a shallow embrace of Black radicalism, her liberalism. Hansberry, who died in 1965, long before Halsell’s racial awakening, had once identified that desire among bohemian white men, including Norman Mailer, whom she described in the Village Voice as the “new paternalists.”100 Mailer had fallen in love with an image of the Black man as a “miracle of sensuality” and a “repository of all the suppressions the dominant society found unseemly in certain of its classes.”101 His longing for something

Darda-BK.indd 175

12/1/21 9:22 PM

176

Chapter 5

he imagined Blackness to be, through which he fashioned his white Negro, dated back to the minstrel show at least. He hadn’t invented that image, Hansberry observed, but he and other down white men had wielded it with new arrogance, believing that it might liberate them from social mores as well as “the hanky-panky of liberalism,” the language of which had traveled from urgent to cliché in their lifetimes.102 Some white liberals had gotten tired of waiting on time for change, tired of their own hollow solutionism, and turned to the Black iconoclast—the musician for Mailer, the militant for Halsell—not for revolution but to free themselves from a time measure of their own making. Malcolm X, assassinated three years before Halsell landed in Harlem, figured in Soul Sister as her North Star of Blackness. When Roscoe described a news segment about Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s doll test (“small babies, still in their cribs, given the choice between white and black playthings, choose the white one”), Halsell fired back, “Who produced the show, who owns all the TV? That’s all part of the white Establishment, the white System.” Roscoe mentioned Malcolm X, and Halsell reminded him that she had given him X’s Autobiography, which he had taken from her, she said, “as if it were a bomb.” Halsell marveled at her “effrontery” as a white woman “turning into a teacher of Black Power.”103 She used X, or at least the X of the Autobiography, as the standard against which she measured Roscoe’s Blackness and her own, and she took that standard with her to Harlem and then to the South. She later befriended Alex Haley, with whom X wrote the Autobiography, telling him in a 1970 letter that she wanted “to feel that I can draw strength from you” and declaring him one of her “favorite Soul Brothers.”104 But when a black Harlemite, learning of Halsell’s secret minstrel act, denounced her as a self-interested white liberal, she turned X into a shield. Jim Hamilton, a man she had first met in Puerto Rico, where she had gone to turn herself Black in the Caribbean sun, caught her off guard when he told her she wasn’t welcome to write about him or his friends and suggested that she leave Harlem. “Your timing is just too right,” he said. “Just at the time Harlem closes itself off to the white press, you come up, to make your ‘study,’ no doubt to report on ‘Negro violence,’ while the violence against black people is taken for granted, like the weather!” The encounter with Jim shook Halsell’s confidence in her book, but she found solace in Malcolm X, reminding herself of when the Black Muslim leader had discovered a different kind of cross-racial “brotherly love” on his 1964 pilgrimage to Mecca, where he had connected with Muslims

Darda-BK.indd 176

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Antiracism as Color Blindness

177

of all races. “The trip convinced him that skin color is less important than point of view,” she told herself. “You can hate the System—Malcolm had told the black people in his last days—but there’s no need to hate the person.”105 She found that she could use the idea of structural racism to deflect accusations of individual racism, including her own blackface, which she refused to admit might have some not-so-innocent relation to “the System” she believed herself to be challenging. Halsell, for all her writing about white structures and institutions, did not have much interest in changing them. When one of the dermatologists she consulted about darkening her skin asked her about the 1968 presidential campaigns, she remarked, “I am so little interested in politics (the subject of my life for the past three years!) that he could have asked me about the other side of the moon.” Halsell did not seek institutional change but racial transcendence. She wanted to change her own mind, to achieve a state of color blindness through a total immersion in Blackness. “I have begun,” she decided after a few months in blackface, “to see beyond the blackness of Harlem. A black among blacks, I have forgotten to ‘see’ black so much as people, individuals: fat, short, clean, dirty, pretty, ugly.”106 She had moved, she asserted, from “integration to transformation,” throwing out an earlier time-bound integrationist racial liberalism for an immediate, imagined rush to the end of the arc of the moral universe. Finding Black Power closed to her and other white liberals, Halsell threw off her whiteness and declared herself a deracinated human. “At one time I thought ‘my people’ were Koreans, another time Mexicans, and still another, Peruvians,” she wrote in the final pages of Soul Sister. “I cannot escape the fact that I was born a Southern white. But nothing prevents me from feeling spiritually black—or brown, or yellow or red, for that matter. ‘My people’ abide in my heart and mind—and that is the reality that all people must come to know and recognize.”107 Halsell, who consulted three leading dermatologists, including the doctor who discovered and named the hormone melatonin, trafficked in the idea of Blackness as a biological endowment. Then she declared it a matter of choice, a thing to be tried on and taken off as she wished, traded out for Indianness or Mexicanness. Blackface had, she concluded, delivered her to color blindness. Halsell later tried to achieve that same kind of transcendence by ghostwriting books for Black leaders, editing a book about Charles Evers and asking Jim Brown, Angela Davis, and others to do the same for them. She

Darda-BK.indd 177

12/1/21 9:22 PM

178

Chapter 5

sought to alter her racial consciousness, and instead she fled it, trading the march of time for deliverance, racial liberalism for color blindness. More than a million readers in seven languages bought Soul Sister. Some younger readers encountered it as a 1970 issue of the comic book Superman’s Girl Friend, Lois Lane, “I Am Curious (Black)!”108 Lois, on assignment for the Daily Planet, takes a taxi to “Little Africa” to interview the neighborhood’s Black residents. “I should get the Pulitzer Prize for telling it like it is!” she declares to Clark Kent after receiving the assignment. “The nitty-gritty no newspaper ever printed before!” But no one in Little Africa will talk with her, a white woman from the white news media. A Black man, addressing a small crowd on the street, gestures to her and declares, “Look at her, brothers and sisters! She’s young and sweet and pretty! But never forget . . . she’s whitey!” Lois walks on, thinking to herself, “He’s wrong about me . . . but right about so many others!” Then Superman arrives, offering to turn her “black for a day” with his “plastimold machine.”109 Now Black, Lois finds herself welcome all over Little Africa, where she reencounters the man who had warned other residents not to talk to her, Dave Stevens. When white drug dealers shoot Dave, Lois saves his life, giving him a blood transfusion that revives him: “With each pulse of Lois’s heart, her blood surges toward the victim of violence.” When Lois’s skin turns white again, she fears that Dave will rebuff her. But, as he regains consciousness, Dave smiles at white Lois Lane, and the issue ends with them shaking hands in a sign of racial reconciliation. Lois, like Halsell, seeks racial transcendence (and a Pulitzer Prize) through blackface and her literal heart and blood, entertaining fantasies about radical Black men while blaming them for acknowledging the white racial consciousness she wishes to flee. Superman emerges as the comic book’s raceless ideal, telling Lois that, while he may look white, he, an “alien” and “universal outsider,” lacks human skin and identifies with no race.110 The heroic white liberals of 1970 did not combat the racism in their hearts but the racial consciousness in their minds that, they believed, dogmatic radicals refused to let them defeat. Liberal blackface, wedding racial biologism to color blindness, gave rise to some constrained theories of race after civil rights. In 1997, the literature scholar Walter Benn Michaels, addressing the new abolitionists, a cohort of white scholars advocating “nothing less than the abolition of the white race,” argued that the new racial Left, which he defined as “antiessentialist” and in

Darda-BK.indd 178

12/1/21 9:22 PM

“I Am Curious (Black)!,” a 1970 issue of the comic book Superman’s Girl Friend, Lois Lane. Grace Halsell Papers, Special Collections, Texas Christian University Library.

Darda-BK.indd 179

12/1/21 9:22 PM

180

Chapter 5

which he included the new abolitionists, reified ideas associated with the old racial Right, which he defined as “essentialist.”111 “If,” Michaels determined, “it is only the antiessentialist conception of race that makes the project of crossover possible (because only an antiessentialist conception makes it possible for you to stop being white by giving up white behavior), it is only an essentialist conception of race that makes it desirable (because only an essentialist conception of race makes your behavior white and thus makes it something you can give up).” The antiessentialist desire to cross over, Michaels concluded, “turns out to be a tribute to essentialism.”112 The white new abolitionists did not declare themselves Black, as Michaels suggested, but Sprigle, Griffi n, and Halsell did, and their careers in blackface did confuse essentialism with antiessentialism but with an identifiable order, biologizing Black culture while treating their own whiteness as the social construct, a construct from which Black people can be barred but in which white people can’t be confined. (The liberal minstrels inherited that trick from the Boasians, including Halsell’s former teacher, Benedict.) Halsell darkened her skin to know an authentic Blackness, she claimed, but also to reveal her own whiteness as a kind of mirage. Michaels later built on his conclusions about racial crossover to argue that his antiracist essentialists, in their commitment to fighting anti-Blackness and white racial dominance (or, as he would say, in their allegiance to racial identities), served neoliberalism in condoning “any form of inequality that isn’t produced by discrimination.”113 Obsessed with revealing antiracism as a veiled commitment to essentialism or a front for global capital, he discounts how racism itself functions as a material regime, introducing the human divisions—a color line but more fluid, less visual, sometimes ideological after racial liberalism—through which capital accumulates and misdistributes resources and life chances. The confusion between essentialism and antiessentialism, racial biologism and color blindness, the old racial Right and the new racial Left that Halsell embodied did not, as Michaels seems to think, reveal race as a mere “identitarian” distraction from a “solidaristic” labor struggle. It held it together. The Strange Career of Multiculturalism In 1994, Amherst College hosted a conference with the theme “Brown at Forty,” at which the Black feminist scholar Hazel Carby, at the height of the

Darda-BK.indd 180

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Antiracism as Color Blindness

181

culture wars, worried that the Left had traded human integration for cultural inclusion, multiracial classrooms for multiracial reading lists. She reserved her toughest criticism for “multiculturalists”—whom Michaels would have considered confused essentialists—for limiting “their political imagination and vision to dreams of culturally integrated syllabi instead of agitating for the institutionalizing of a political vision of a just and equitable social formation.” Carby, although she wouldn’t have agreed with Michaels on much else, reached a similar conclusion about the relation between the mainstream racial Left and the mainstream racial Right. “Whereas proponents of multiculturalism like to see themselves as part of an attack on the racist formation,” she wrote, their commitment to “cultural integration works in harmony with not in opposition to the anti–civil rights hegemony first secured during the Reagan and Bush years.”114 Carby’s Yale colleague bell hooks shared her concern, admitting around the same time that she feared that “cultural, ethnic, and racial differences will be continually commodified and offered up as new dishes to enhance the white palate—that the Other will be eaten consumed and forgotten.”115 Carby and hooks recognized that the two sides of the culture wars, a multicultural Left and a color-blind Right, had more in common than they let on, that they, in fact, descended from the same antimaterialist racial liberalism that had made Sprigle, Griffin, and Halsell best-selling authors. Halsell’s career after Soul Sister foretold the emergence of a Left-Right consensus that looked, in the late 1980s and 1990s, like a war for the soul of America. Turning from the Black-white relations that had obsessed racial liberals, she refashioned herself first as an American Indian, taking the name Bessie Yellowhair, and then as an undocumented Mexican immigrant. “Like Whitman,” she declared, “I am many persons in one. I feel that I am part black, part Bessie Yellowhair, part Mexican.”116 But she remained committed to a colorblind humanism that she could achieve, as a white woman, through the valorization and hardening of other women’s cultural difference—a white universalism rebuilt out of a Black and brown multiculturalism. In her final book, the memoir In Their Shoes, Halsell traced her fascination with the identities of others back to 1928, when she, an adventurous fiveyear-old, would sit with her father for hours as he told stories about fighting Comanche warriors as a young man. She recalled borrowing her mother’s

Darda-BK.indd 181

12/1/21 9:22 PM

182

Chapter 5

cosmetics and asking her father, “Daddy, let me paint your face like the Indians.” When he assented, she “roughed his cheeks, ran lipstick across his forehead. Then plaited his long white hair.”117 She did not see that moment as her inauguration into settler colonialism—the theft of land that redface signifies and carries forward—but her earliest act of racial liberal trouble. In 1972, Halsell moved to the sixteen-million-acre Navajo Nation, where her brother, Ed, had served as a legal adviser to the tribe. There, in a western Arizona town, she met twenty-four-year-old Bessie Yellowhair, whose name she borrowed and took with her to Irvine, California, working, as the real Bessie Yellowhair had, as a live-in maid in a white suburb. When she returned to Washington to write her next book, Bessie Yellowhair, a friend asked if she had wanted to live as an Indian because of “what your forefathers did to them.” Halsell insisted that her father’s and grandfather’s theft of Indigenous land had not left her “guilt-stained.” She felt “weighted down” not with settler colonial guilt but with her “values, rules, and judgments,” of which she sought to free herself through another racial makeover, this time as an Indian woman who lived with a “directness of perception” and an unmediated connection to “all of creation.”118 She had not lost her talent for reducing others’ lives to tired clichés. In all of her books, Halsell distanced herself from “bad” white people, whom she characterized as, at best, tourists of difference and, at worst, cultural thieves. Anthropologists and sociologists had “studied the Indian almost out of existence,” she wrote in Bessie Yellowhair, suggesting that her own research differed from the kind that white social scientists did, though never explaining how. While living in a hogan on the Arizona-Utah border, Halsell met a middle-aged white woman who asked to take a photograph of her and her host, believing that Halsell belonged to the tribe. Later recalling the encounter in her book, she mocked the tourist for wanting a photo of “real, live Indians,” as if she had not arrived on the reservation with a similar, if more committed, desire for some kind of authentic Indianness.119 Halsell had learned her lesson from Soul Sister and the criticism she had received from Black women. She knew she needed the endorsement of American Indians, that the backing of Griffin and a few other white liberals wouldn’t do. She sought out blurbs from tribal leaders as well as Vine Deloria, the Dakota scholar, activist, and author of Custer Died for Your Sins. The front cover featured the blessing of Virgil Kirk, the chief justice of the Navajo Nation’s

Darda-BK.indd 182

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Antiracism as Color Blindness

183

A promotional photograph of Grace Halsell for Bessie Yellowhair. Grace Halsell Papers, Special Collections, Texas Christian University Library.

highest court, who recommended her book “to readers everywhere” and gave Halsell the name Keh Yilnazbah (“meaning ‘Went with Peace and Understanding’”). In the first pages, Halsell informed the reader that she had used the name Bessie Yellowhair with the consent of the real Bessie, who wouldn’t receive a formal introduction for more than a hundred pages. “I asked if I might borrow her clothes, her name, her identity,” she wrote. “And she gave me the

Darda-BK.indd 183

12/1/21 9:22 PM

184

Chapter 5

greatest compliment, ‘Of course, Grace, you are like a sister.’”120 This time, she stressed, recalling the title of her first book, that she had secured the sisterhood that Black women had denied her. Other white people—anthropologists and sociologists, reservation tourists—might eat the other, but she would swallow her whole. Throughout her time in the Southwest and as “Bessie Yellowhair” in California, Halsell meditated on the differences between the situation of Black Americans and that of Indigenous peoples. “As a ‘black’ I was like any other tough-minded, competitive, aggressive American,” she wrote. “But as an ‘Indian,’ I was submissive, passive, and extremely vulnerable, not knowing how to defend myself against the more subtle oppression of an almost impersonal ‘enemy.’” When Ed, her brother, encouraged her to live among white people and write about anti-Indigenous racism, Halsell at first dismissed the idea, believing that nothing American Indians faced could rival what Black people endured. “I argued,” she recalled of their conversation, “that the black is encapsulated in his blackness. The white who wants to practice racism has an easy target. But the Indian can ‘pass,’ he can leave the reservation any day he wants.”121 After her stint as Bessie Yellowhair in Irvine, she, of course, changed her mind. Halsell, on her second adventure in otherness, modeled an emerging multicultural comparativism, organizing people into stable categories of difference that derived their meaning from suffering and the hatred of white people. That comparativism restricted the kinds of identities Black and brown people could form, at least within the logic of multiculturalism, while leaving white liberals free to reveal their identities as “constructed,” as costumes that someone like Halsell might wear for a few months at a time. Although she dwelled on the constraints of being Black or Indigenous in the United States, Halsell ended Bessie Yellowhair with a celebration of her own sense of freedom: “I come back to what I basically believe: that I am sovereign. No clan or cult—no government, even—and no one religion speaks for me. I am ‘free’ to be my individual self.”122 She arrived at that radical, deracinated individualism through “Black Grace Halsell” and Bessie Yellowhair, claiming a white color blindness not against but through a Black and Indigenous multiculturalism. At the end of her brief time as Bessie, Halsell reached out, through Ed, to Vine Deloria. She had wanted, she told her brother, “my own impressions, etc., before I went to any ‘authorities,’” but now would like, she added in all caps, “MOST OF ALL TO MEET VINE DELORIA.”123 She got her wish. She

Darda-BK.indd 184

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Antiracism as Color Blindness

185

wrote him at the Native American Rights Fund in Boulder, Colorado, and he wrote back, offering her feedback on her manuscript and agreeing to blurb the book. The two became friends, with Deloria visiting Halsell when work took him to Washington and Halsell sometimes signing her letters “Bessie Yellowhair.”124 The historian Robin D. G. Kelley credits Deloria with having “planted the seeds for a critique of settler colonialism” in Halsell’s future work on the Israeli settlement of Palestinian lands. Had she contacted him before she bought a calico blouse and borrowed an Indian name, he might have saved her from writing Bessie Yellowhair.125 Vine Deloria’s son, Philip Deloria, later, without mentioning his father’s old friend, identified how Halsell’s generation of white liberals engaged in “Indian play” out of a misguided belief that American Indians embodied some authentic self that they had lost and could regain through feathers, headdresses, and blankets. Philip Deloria, while generous in his treatment of white Indians, acknowledged what Halsell had failed to see: that “the ability to wield power against Indians” meant “simultaneously drawing power from them,” that the theft of Indigenous lands had long entailed acts of white self-making through Indians—a love that is the theft.126 Halsell’s 1978 book, The Illegals, her last to involve racial drag, reminded white Americans that they also embodied a kind of genealogical difference. For the book, she crossed the border from Mexico to the United States three times without documentation, twice swimming the Rio Grande. She did more research for The Illegals than she had for her earlier books, beginning not with herself, as she had in Soul Sister and Bessie Yellowhair, but with the MexicanAmerican War, the braceros, and the arrival in the 1970s of “armed men, with guns, knives, walkie-talkies, helicopters, sensors” straight from the Vietnam War. But Halsell also, catering to her white readers, cast undocumented Mexican immigrants as the Irish or Italian Americans of their day. “As wave after wave of immigrants reached the United States those who were already here cried out in alarm,” she wrote. “And all the pejoratives flung in former years against Russians, Czechs, Poles, Chinese, Irish, and Italians today are hurled against the Mexicans.”127 The front cover did not include the endorsement of another writer or an immigrant rights activist but the words of John Kennedy—“We are a nation of immigrants”—as if the president had blurbed the book from the grave. Halsell wrote The Illegals as the TV miniseries Roots, based on her friend Alex Haley’s novel, attracted more than a hundred million viewers and

Darda-BK.indd 185

12/1/21 9:22 PM

186

Chapter 5

launched a genealogical craze, including among white viewers three or four generations removed from Bohemia or Ireland or Poland. White Americans, reacting to the miniseries and the Black Power movement from which it arose, declared themselves not white but Czech American, Irish American, Polish American. White people discovered that they could situate themselves within a rising multiculturalism not as multicultural beings but, like Halsell, multicultural tourists—Irish American on St. Patrick’s Day, white the rest of the time. The white ethnic revival borrowed from and contained the radical antiracist movements of the late 1960s and 1970s but also fell back on the racial liberal’s faith in time. Mexican immigrants could also, it suggested, achieve a kind of melted universalism if they stuck with it like white immigrants had. Mexican Americans were out of time with a color-blind nation, living their difference rather than touring it. Halsell never crossed the color line again after 1978. She didn’t need to in the nation of immigrants.128 Halsell, the serial minstrel, traversed two racial binaries. Passing as a Black woman, she had sought racial transcendence through a liberal anti-Blackness that accentuated the division between Black and non-Black. When the Black Power movement challenged that iteration of racial liberalism, she changed course. Passing as an American Indian woman, she sought transcendence instead through a liberal multiculturalism that revolved around the distinction between white and nonwhite. With her final turn as a Mexican immigrant and her insistence that Chicanos followed in the tradition of her own white immigrant ancestors, she at last, amid the rise of the white ethnic revival, dissolved her whiteness into ethnic difference, sorting the nation into an emerging, confounding schema not of Black/non-Black or white/nonwhite but of Black/nonwhite. Her final trick was to make white Grace Halsell vanish into the break between Black people and people of color.129 Grace Halsell died in 2000 from skin cancer, to which her high doses of vitiligo medication might have contributed. Until the end of her life, she remained committed to the idea that through racial difference white people could achieve transcendence. In an undated book proposal from the 1990s with the working title “Blacks and Whites: Two Nations—Separate and Unequal,” Halsell issued an urgent warning: “I feel strongly that we have only a little time: to rid ourselves—as whites—of old fears, old guilts. And make this not a country of colored—and whites—but of one people.”130 From Sprigle to Halsell, the neominstrel evolved with racial liberalism, first distilling it into a white fantasia of antiracist anti-Blackness and then

Darda-BK.indd 186

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Antiracism as Color Blindness

187

looking ahead to the racial ideologies that succeeded it. Most scholars see color blindness as the child of a conservative backlash to civil rights reforms. Most see liberal multiculturalism as the successor to racial liberalism, a racial liberalism struggling to accommodate and defuse the race radicalisms of the late 1960s and 1970s. But color blindness and multiculturalism, the two dominant racial ideologies to emerge after civil rights, share roots in the racial liberalism of C. Vann Woodward, Ruth Benedict, Gunnar Myrdal, Harry Truman, Lillian Smith, and Kenneth and Mamie Clark, a liberal frontlash that confused racial constructionism with racial biologism, race as illusion with race as essence, shutting materialist antiracisms out of the conversation altogether while guaranteeing that time, the forward march, the near future, would solve all. When it didn’t, when time didn’t come, liberals, whether turning to a badfaith color blindness or a wishful multiculturalism, clambered to invent an end to racial time. First they tried to defeat racism, to right, enlighten, and cure it. Then they agreed to dismantle, as they reified, race itself, renouncing the near-future solution for the immediate delusion. Conservatives, enemies of the earlier figurative frames of racial liberalism, got on board. In 1971, Halsell wrote Myrdal, then researching his never-finished “An American Dilemma Revisited,” asking him to contribute an introduction to Black/White Sex, her book on the taboos of interracial sex. He declined, telling her that it lacked the “balanced view” and “normal cases” of good science.131 She wrote back, defending the book as a meditation on a “societal trend,” not an academic investigation of their “sociological implications.” “It is merely an effort to acquaint people who are unfamiliar” with your and others’ work, she added.132 Myrdal, the leading racial liberal intellectual of the 1940s, failed to see that Halsell had carried his banner into the next generation, that she had written her own “An American Dilemma Revisited” with Soul Sister. From his creed to Griffin and Halsell’s minstrel shows, racial liberalism installed a convenient confusion for white America, launching, after civil rights, a debate between an antiredistributive color blindness and an antiredistributive multiculturalism, in which white people, and no one else, could achieve the former through the latter. White people “have only a little time,” Halsell wrote at the end of her life, to free themselves of that thing that defined James R. Crawford, Black John Howard Griffin, and Bessie Yellowhair but never them: race.133

Darda-BK.indd 187

12/1/21 9:22 PM

EPILOGUE

Time Now

Margaret Mead asked James Baldwin in 1970. “I still don’t know how to put it, quite,” he told her, “but it has something to do with time present. This time and time.”1 Baldwin struggled to articulate what he meant. Mead struggled to understand. The conversation broke down. Mead, then sixty-eight, had arranged to meet Baldwin, then forty-six, in New York, she wrote in her Redbook column, to “talk and talk and talk until (we hoped) we reached some point of clarity.”2 Mead, the last of the Boasians, the former students of Franz Boas, had watched the racial liberalism that she and her colleagues had forged in the 1940s crumble as racial conservatives reunited, liberals retreated, and radicals took their fight to the streets. She felt she had to defend her record. Baldwin, a reluctant, often frustrated voice of the movement for desegregation and Black enfranchisement, found himself on the outside of the Black Power movement, an elder statesman of a waning liberal struggle. He felt he had to revisit his former commitment to transforming “the American future.”3 Their conversation, which lasted for seven and a half hours, generating a book and an abridged album, amounted to a kind of wake for racial liberalism. The elder white liberal scientist and the middleaged Black novelist, who, if not a liberal himself, had made a career of writing to them, met to comb through the bones. Mead, with a hand resting on her signature forked walking stick, reflected on how her generation had thought of racism. “They used to say children don’t have any race prejudice. We heard that until the sacred cows screamed,” she said. “We’ve got to be taught to hate,” Baldwin added, miming the refrain of that time. “It’s true, you’ve got to be taught to hate,” Mead observed, “but the appreciation and fear of difference is everywhere.”4 The racism that her generation of liberals had sought to solve—whether through war, reform, “ N O W W H AT ’ S B E E N B U G G I N G YO U A L L DAY ? ”

188

Darda-BK.indd 188

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Time Now

189

James Baldwin and Margaret Mead on The Dick Cavett Show, June 1, 1971. Reproduced by permission from Global Image Works.

education, integration, or color blindness—endured, and it left her searching for an answer not in culture, as she might have claimed, but in human nature. She turned, not for the first time, to her fieldwork in New Guinea and mused about a hardwired fear of the dark. Baldwin listened. “That’s a weird and frightening perspective,” he told her.5 Mead had studied under Boas and Ruth Benedict, her close friend and sometimes lover, at Columbia in the 1920s. She made her name with her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, in which she studied the sexual lives of Samoan girls, determining that their “simpler civilization” revealed that “adolescence is not necessarily a time of stress and strain, but that cultural conditions [in the United States] make it so.”6 Samoa offered the West a mirror in which to consider itself anew. She subtitled the book A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization. Boas declared it a “lucid and clear” testament to how “much of what we ascribe to human nature is no more than a reaction to the restraints put upon us by our civilization.”7 After Boas’s death in 1942 and Benedict’s in 1948, Mead established herself as the leading figure of a science transforming how the nation talked about race and difference. She

Darda-BK.indd 189

12/1/21 9:22 PM

190

Epilogue

served as a curator at the American Museum of Natural History; headed the American Anthropological Association, the second woman to lead the AAA, after Benedict; contributed a regular column to Redbook from 1962 until her death in 1978; and, if not a feminist herself, emerged as an icon of the feminist movement. She entertained a secret ambition to win the Nobel Peace Prize.8 She might well have. Learning of her death, President Carter issued a statement lauding her for having “brought the humane insights of cultural anthropology to a public of millions.”9 Mead and the Boasians had their critics, though. Once they had come from the Right. Now they came from the Left. Not long after Mead’s conversation with Baldwin, William Willis, a Black anthropologist who had studied at Columbia from 1946 to 1955, leveled a famous criticism against the Boasian model, contending that Boas and his students had all along studied Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color in the interest of “the improvement of white societies everywhere.” Boas, Benedict, and Mead’s “scientific antiracism” had, he argued, functioned not to combat anti-Blackness but to lessen “racial discrimination among white people,” concerning itself with Nordicism and antisemitism, while enlisting Black people as a mere “strategic” resource in that crusade.10 (The anthropologist Nicholas De Genova has carried forward that criticism, calling for a critical “anthropology of the United States” rather than an “anthropology merely in its national space.”)11 Mead met Baldwin as the face of a hobbled science. Time had also been bugging the anthropologist. Mead had delivered a series of lectures at the American Museum of Natural History in which she sought to categorize how different cultures conceived of time and change. She identified three forms: cultures in which children look to elders to imagine the future (postfigurative); cultures in which, amid immense social change, children and adults look to members of their own generation for lessons about the future (cofigurative); and cultures in which elders look to children to lead them into an unknown future (prefigurative). Mead, with the liberal consensus disintegrating around her, argued that the United States must transition to the latter, to a culture in which not the “white-haired elder” but the “unborn child” foretold the future.12 Time had not defeated racism. It had not righted, enlightened, or cured it. So Mead looked further into the future, to the child of tomorrow, unborn and innocent. But she clung to her own generation of liberals as a model. “I stand here,” she said at the AMNH, months before her

Darda-BK.indd 190

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Time Now

191

conversation with Baldwin, “as one who lived through the urgencies of World War II when, under pressure of what seemed inevitable disaster, we as a people were able to rally what resources we had to fend off that disaster.” She remained steadfast in her belief that science—the gradual accrual of knowledge over time—held the answer to the trials before the nation: “Each discovery of a new level of scientific penetration of the nature of the universe which includes man opens up new vistas of hope.”13 Although she later admitted to Baldwin that her generation had been naive to think that they could solve racism with a reform here or there, she could not surrender that solutionism or her faith that the future, unknown as it might be, held an almost inevitable resolution to what ailed the nation at the end of the 1960s. She could not see that her generation—the generation that had lived through the urgencies of World War II—had brought it there. The late 1960s revealed that we might not overcome. Watts rebelled. Vietnam escalated. The gulf between Black and white wealth showed no signs of receding. Did time not, the nation had to ask, march forward into a better, brighter tomorrow? Did the moral arc of the universe not bend toward justice? Mead still believed that it did. Conflict had escalated, she thought, as different human times had converged. The world contained in it “examples of the ways men have lived at every period over the last fift y thousand years,” which she described as a linear evolution from postfigurative/primitive to cofigurative/historic to prefigurative/contemporary. She dedicated a chapter to each, titled “The Past,” “The Present,” and “The Future.” Trouble arose, she argued, whenever societies failed to follow that course. She cited “peoples who have left thousands of years of one kind of culture to enter the modern world, with none of the intervening steps,” and Maoists who had, in her schema, enlisted the “techniques of temporary cofiguration” to return China to a “postfigurative culture.”14 Some societies had moved too fast, others in the wrong, noncapitalist direction. Although Mead and the Boasians often receive credit for establishing that “the only scientific way to study human societies was to treat them all as parts of one undivided humanity,” most of their research substituted one kind of white supremacist human division for another.15 Mead did not describe non-Westerners as unhuman but as humans from a different time, reiterating, in global form, the command of racial liberalism: look to the (Western) state, wait on time. The last of the Boasians concluded her lectures with a nod to the antiracist, feminist, and antiwar movements, declaring that,

Darda-BK.indd 191

12/1/21 9:22 PM

192

Epilogue

“as the young say, The Future Is Now.”16 But she continued to train her gaze on the dreamed-of tomorrow, the future of the unborn child, through whom the nation could imagine itself innocent, the wait almost over. Mead had harsh words for some intellectuals and artists of the Black Power movement, whom she accused of “social bulldozing” in their “attempt to restructure the past in their struggle to restructure the present.”17 She urged them to look instead to the future. In 1967, Amiri Baraka, then Leroi Jones, had argued that Black music, though ever taking on new forms and instrumentation, contained an enduring “blues impulse” that united a heterogeneous diaspora—his “changing same.” While Mead might have charged Baraka with historical invention, of fabricating a tradition, he had something different in mind. He did not see earlier times as giving immutable form to his own but as existing with and in it. “It is all there,” he wrote. Black music, whatever the genre, took listeners on “a mystical walk up the street to a new neighborhood where all the risen live.”18 It did not reach backward but alongside to what W. E. B. Du Bois once called the “present-past.”19 Mead, Baldwin, and Baraka all encountered the late 1960s as a crisis of liberal time. Mead doubled down, looking to the future to resolve the crisis. Baldwin and Baraka doubled back, interrogating that failed capitalist futurism, wondering about another time—a time now, a changing same, a present-past. This book has traced the rise of racial liberalism through a succession of time-limited, future-facing figurative frames. Liberal scientists, officials, novelists, and jurists defined antiracism first as a war, then as reform, education, and integration, then as color blindness, encouraging Americans to trust in time and the state to deliver the nation to a just future. Historians of the civil rights movement often describe the late 1960s as a moment at which either a conservative backlash, a white liberal reversal, or a radical resurgence fractured the movement. But the Black freedom struggle also ran out of the time racial liberalism had allotted it. A liberal frontlash, looking like a backlash, struck the movement. How long? Long enough. Scholars have wrestled ever since with how to untether racial time from liberalism. The critical theorist Homi Bhabha, among the first to challenge Benedict Anderson’s dominant model of national time as homogeneous and homogenizing, argued that the subaltern attests to the “disjunctive temporality” of the nation as something given and made, taught and reinvented,

Darda-BK.indd 192

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Time Now

193

with the migrant navigating “betwixt and between times and places,” revealing time as unstable, a mess of different encounters with the national clock.20 Michael Hanchard, the scholar of race and nationalism in the Americas, identifies how time structures and hides relations of racial domination, forcing Black people in the United States to “wait for nearly everything,” and he outlines an “Afro-modernism” that refuses that wait and demands the eradication of anti-Black time.21 The literature scholar Wai Chee Dimock theorizes American literature as constituted in “deep time,” entangled with other continents and other ages, bound neither to North America nor to a historical arc that begins in 1620 or 1776.22 Others find a “strategic presentism” or a “freedom time” in Black avant-garde writing of the late 1960s and the 1970s.23 The obvious failures of racial liberal time after 1965—the recognition that an imagined future couldn’t erase all that had come before, that the moral arc didn’t bend—left us wondering what Baldwin had in 1970: what do we do with time? Mead and Baldwin’s conversation, though cordial, often devolved into arguments over the distribution of guilt; Israel, Palestine, and the relation between anti-Arab and anti-Black racism; and the usefulness of historical knowledge to antiracist struggle. The white scientist and the Black novelist couldn’t agree on issues big or small because they couldn’t agree on time. Mead continued to see racial time as linear, advancing forever forward, a bending arc, while Baldwin sought to articulate an alternative time, a time that did not move forward but accumulated, not an arc but a constellation of struggle— “time now,” he called it. He did not discount the “historical point of view,” as Mead assumed, but believed that she and he lived with the time she thought of as historical, that, more than a structuring force, it inhabited their “now.”24 The refusal to acknowledge that time, Baldwin thought, had doomed the nation to fantasizing forever about either an unmarked now or a blank future. He did not see time as heterogeneous (Bhabha), stolen (Hanchard), or entangled (Dimock) but as a material congregation of the dead, believing, as Walter Benjamin had before him, that the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren nourished revolution. (The image of liberated grandchildren, we might say, nourishes reform.) Baldwin understood that confronting the end of civil rights meant first confronting the time measure, the narrative structure, that had handcuffed the movement, that still handcuffs it, in time.

Darda-BK.indd 193

12/1/21 9:22 PM

194

Epilogue

The End of the Arc Mead knew she needed Baldwin. She and other white anthropologists had long felt entitled to make declarations about what constituted Black culture. Mead, although she had not lost that sense of entitlement, as her conversation with Baldwin would demonstrate, determined that, at the height of Black Power, she needed the endorsement of a race man. She liked to recount how a “young Black editor,” Art Aveilhe, had urged her to write a book on race after hearing her talk about how her first visit to the South in 1942 had reminded her of her time among the Chambri of New Guinea. “You have something different to say and people might listen,” Aveilhe said, as she recalled their conversation. “I won’t write a book on race,” she told him, “unless I can write it together with a Black man. We need both parts of the picture.” Black men and white women, she believed, “carried the burden” of their races and the violence that white men had carried out against the former in the alleged defense of the latter.25 (Black women did not figure in her racial calculus.) Aveilhe suggested James Baldwin. Mead described her conversation with the novelist, then living in France, as a meeting of unlike minds. She, the scientist, brought “the long-disciplined experience of many kinds of difference in many parts of the world.” He, the artist, delivered “the passion, the fury, the intensity.” She, the white humanist, contributed her “hope that through what I have learned to understand, more people can and will understand.” He, the Black militant, added his “passionate determination that no one will suffer in the future as he suffered in the past.”26 Mead, as much as she acknowledged that she could not write a book about race without Baldwin, cast herself as the rational observer, the scholar of human difference, and him as the observed, the embodiment of that difference. Although scholars have described Mead and Baldwin’s meeting as staging a “dialectic” between racial liberalism and race radicalism, as Mead herself thought of it, Baldwin did not belong to the radical vanguard of the time.27 He found himself struggling as much as Mead with his role in an evolving Black freedom struggle. It took them all of five minutes to arrive at the Black Power movement. Mead felt confident that she understood it and that she had embraced it. “The kids all say—and they’re pretty clear about it—that the future is now,” she said. “Right now, this minute.” Baldwin agreed: “That’s the only time there is; there isn’t any other time.” “So,” she added, “I’m very much in sympathy, and I’ve been able to make the move to understand that black power

Darda-BK.indd 194

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Time Now

195

isn’t a betrayal of the ideals of those of us who worked for integration.”28 The Black Power movement, Mead believed, had not refuted but modified her generation’s liberal creed, demanding not integration but the choice to integrate, or not, as and when it wished. Baldwin did not share her confidence. He now found it “devious,” he told Mead, to assure Black children, without the slightest evidence, that “we shall overcome.” For their generation, “to say that, with patience, time will do this or that was absolutely meaningless.”29 Black Power did not, for Baldwin, signal the next stage in a racial liberal movement to which Mead and then he had contributed. It signaled the movement’s demise and the need for something new, something other than an American creed, or civil rights, or lessons in antiracism, or color-blind children. He couldn’t say what form that emerging struggle might take, but he knew it couldn’t cling, as Mead’s and his generations had, to fantasies of a future overcoming. The failures of racial liberalism at the end of the 1960s had cast doubt on much of what the Boasians had established as science and instilled in the national consciousness. It left Mead straining to reconstruct a broken arc, situating the Black Panthers as inheritors of a twenty-five-year march through racial time, and Baldwin imagining otherwise. Mead admired the Panthers’ call to “seize the time” (“the future is now,” in her words) for different reasons than did Baldwin. She heard in the slogan a desire to move forward, a warning against dwelling on the suffering of the dead. She resented Black intellectuals and artists whom she thought either made too much of the nation’s sins or invented alternative histories that better served their interests. “If we are going to have to continually go back and go back and go back over the past, I don’t know how we’re going to escape from it,” Mead insisted. She turned to the standard Boasian model for that flight. “I do think that if we look at American cities and look at the fate of the immigrants into the cities, that it is from that point of view that you could think of black migrants from the South as immigrants,” she told Baldwin, who said nothing. “Their struggle for political power is comparable to the Irish or the Italians.”30 Overlooking how Baldwin’s ancestors had neither immigrated to the Americas nor northern cities and how darker-skinned Black people could not abscond into whiteness like lighter-skinned Irish or Italian immigrants, who often constructed their whiteness through anti-Blackness, Mead held firm to her faith in a linear narrative of national integration that culminated

Darda-BK.indd 195

12/1/21 9:22 PM

196

Epilogue

in her own liberal whiteness. She and the Boasians had not, the anthropologist and historian Mark Anderson observes, shed but “reinscribed in new terms the equation between whiteness and America,” and, until the end of her life, through civil rights and Black Power, Mead could not abandon the idea of whiteness as the end of the arc.31 Baldwin, a famous critic of Black-immigrant analogies, who had once blasted Robert Kennedy for describing Black northerners as the Irish immigrants of the 1960s, answered Mead’s insistent futurism, her refusal to “go back and go back and go back over the past,” with words she heard as a statement of assent: “Well, we won’t be able to use the past.”32 Mead took him to mean that forever retreading old wrongs inhibited the nation from learning the lessons they had to teach and using that knowledge to create a more just future. But Baldwin meant something else: that refusing to go back meant forfeiting a great resource, not lessons learned but knowledge of time then as time now—of, as he later told her, how “what was is what is.”33 Mead knew that Baldwin didn’t want to hear more stories about white immigrants and their hardscrabble climb to the corner office, but she didn’t know what else to say. Boasian science, though avowing cultural relativism, had been built on a linear narrative of race and change. Baldwin wondered if that narrative, a narrative to which he had once subscribed, might have been not a guiding light but an obstacle all along. Mead remembered her and Baldwin’s seven-and-a-half-hour conversation as congenial. Within five minutes of meeting, they had, she later wrote, fallen into a “vivid” dialogue.34 Baldwin biographer David Leeming, a longtime friend of the novelist, writes that “very quickly a feeling of trust and rapport seemed to develop between them.”35 That might be, but their conversation featured more than a few tense and awkward moments, most of which did not receive mention from reviewers or make it onto the live album version. Cultural theorist Keith Feldman observes, for example, that the album excludes their recurring debate about Israel, in which Baldwin describes himself as “the Arab at the hands of the Jews,” to which Mead retorts, “Oh, fiddlesticks!”36 She disagreed most of all with his ideas about guilt and atonement. Baldwin argued that he and she had to reckon with the fact that they had inherited a kind of social guilt for which they must atone. “At a certain point in one’s own life—at a certain point in my own life—one has to accept the history which created you,” he said. “And if you don’t accept it, you can’t atone.”

Darda-BK.indd 196

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Time Now

197

Mead, who felt obliged to inform Baldwin of her “completely Northern ancestry” and that her grandfather had fought for the Union, refused that burden. “I will not accept any guilt for what anybody else did,” she told him. So Baldwin tried another tack. “If something comes down in time, in that peculiar chemistry which we call time, it comes down from one person to another,” he offered. “There are lots of metaphors for it—ancestry, genealogy, or whatever—it doesn’t make any difference. Something does descend from generation to generation. In time.”37 Mead agreed. How could she not? She had devoted her career to defining and categorizing handed-down cultural forms. Baldwin insisted that she and he embodied that “something”—call it guilt or inheritance or culture—in their material lives. It constituted where and how they lived, their health, what they owned and ate. White supremacist guilt did not reset from generation to generation. Unacknowledged, it accumulated. Subtle differences in language often left Mead and Baldwin thinking they agreed and then, frozen in mid-nod, discovering that they didn’t. In their third and final session, Baldwin, in a reflective mood, mused about “watching my children’s children discovering, beginning to apprehend that they have been marked by the most unfriendly forces” and then trailed off: “Watching the time, your eyes get heavier or lighter. . . .” Mead thought they had found common ground in the child as a vehicle for imagining and galvanizing future change. “It matters to know the long, long road we’ve come through,” she said. “And this is the thing that gives me hope that we can go further.” She thought it fell to elders to teach children about what had come before so that they could learn the lessons of their forebears’ time and continue down that long road. And she thought Baldwin agreed. But he didn’t see what had come before as a structuring force that either constrained or enriched the child’s life. He believed that the child embodied that other time, Mead’s time and his time, all of it. In watching the child, he watched not the ticking of a historical clock, as Mead took him to mean, but time in full. Assuming otherwise, Baldwin argued, meant never reckoning with the world as it is. “What we call history,” he told her, “is perhaps a way of avoiding responsibility for what has happened, is happening, in time.”38 The 1960s had given the lie to racial liberal solutionism, and Baldwin didn’t want to hear about how far they’d come or how far they had to go. Mead could not shake the language of racial liberalism. For her, time—time to defeat, right, enlighten, or cure racism, time to dismantle race—remained the answer. What

Darda-BK.indd 197

12/1/21 9:22 PM

198

Epilogue

else, she asked, was there? Resignation? Doom? Baldwin, knowing that he could not trust in time, struggled to find another language. The 1971 book version of their conversation, A Rap on Race, sold well. Dick Cavett hosted Mead and Baldwin on his late-night show. Mead touted the book in her Redbook column. Their names sold, but fame couldn’t ward off negative reviews. One of Mead’s former research assistants said she felt embarrassed for her mentor after reading the “outrageous things she said to James Baldwin.”39 A friend described the conversation as “her lowest moment.”40 A New York Times reviewer knocked Baldwin for stacking “clause upon clause in what seems to be merely rhythms, without cognitive content.”41 That reviewer made a career of bashing the novelist, reminding “Mr. Baldwin” in a 1974 review of If Beale Street Could Talk that “there is no color line in clichés” and describing his writing as “so dated” that it “might even qualify for our current nostalgia craze.”42 Baldwin’s great heckler, in an incredible twist, turned out to be a light-skinned Black man who enlisted in the segregated World War II army as white and, after overseeing an all-Black stevedore battalion, cut ties with his darker-skinned sister and never looked back. Anatole Broyard, a chief book critic at the Times, whom a friend later described as the “Gatsby” of the New York intelligentsia, accused Baldwin of an “insistent dwelling on the past” and, echoing Mead, declared, “There is a difference between acknowledging and perpetuating. We can’t undo the past, and the steps that got us here have to be incorporated into where we are going next.”43 He had left his race at the onset of World War II and the Boasians’ “race front” because, as Henry Louis Gates suggested after Broyard’s death, he wanted to be known as a writer, not a “Negro writer.”44 Broyard wanted to believe what Mead believed, what he had heard from her and her generation of social scientists in the 1940s: that time moved forward into a blank future out of which he could make whatever he wanted, inventing a whole new self if he wished. He could not undo what had come before, but he could flee it. In 1971, little more remained of that racial liberal dream than fantasies of white flight—color blindness, multiculturalism, the innocent future of the unborn child. A Working Theory of Time Now Something had changed for James Baldwin in 1968. He couldn’t write. The demise of the movement, the election of Richard Nixon, and the murders of his friends left him without the words he had never, until then, lacked. He

Darda-BK.indd 198

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Time Now

199

agreed to “talk” a book with Mead because he couldn’t bring himself to write one. “For a time it went badly because I was on the edge of something I didn’t want to face,” he later confessed to the Times.45 His next book, No Name in the Street, which he at last delivered to his editor in 1972, ended with a flourish of a dateline that hinted at his struggle: “New York, San Francisco, Hollywood, Istanbul, St. Paul De Vance, 1967–1971.”46 Often sick and sometimes suicidal, Baldwin had carted the manuscript all over the world, not writing. He alluded to his writer’s block in his 1970 conversation with Mead, attributing it to the assassination of Martin Luther King. “There was a time in my life not so very long ago that I believed, hoped,” he told her, “that this country could become what it has always presented as what it wanted to become. But I am sorry, no matter how this may sound: when Martin was murdered for me that hope ended.”47 With King’s death, he later wrote in No Name, “something has altered in me, something has gone away.”48 Baldwin’s critics thought he had thrown in the towel. Mead accused him of inviting “despair” and “bitterness.”49 Where had the Baldwin of 1962, who had assured his brother’s son that “we can make America what America must become,” gone?50 But he had not abandoned the struggle. He had abandoned a time-limited, state-bound antiracism that he could not, after 1968, continue to endorse in good faith. That antiracism had not made America what America must become. It had instead sustained the fiction that the nation was destined to become what it said it would, that it must, in time, fulfill the American creed. Baldwin could not write after 1968 not because he had forsaken the movement but because he had forsaken the language that had consigned it to an ever-deferred tomorrow. The novelist’s sometimes scattershot writing after 1968 showed him straining to find a new course, throwing off the eschatological time he had inherited from his father’s church and that had made him a favorite of the white liberal set. That tension surfaced late in his conversation with Mead. He felt that he needed historical knowledge but also couldn’t “afford” to address it as historical, as of some other time. “Given the situation of this time now, and my role in it, my role in the present,” he told her, “on a very serious level, the trap I’m in is that I can’t afford the historical point of view. And yet I know something about time present and time now.” Baldwin asked Mead if she understood what he meant. She said she did, but Baldwin knew he hadn’t gotten through to her because he hadn’t yet gathered his own thoughts. His third

Darda-BK.indd 199

12/1/21 9:22 PM

200

Epilogue

session with Mead had him talking in fragments and circling back to earlier arguments, unsatisfied with how he had worded them. Of “time now,” he at last concluded, “the question is, How can it be arrested?”51 Whenever Mead addressed the future, turning to her imagined “prefigurative” culture, Baldwin returned to a now that he described as filled with all that had come before, the times that most considered historical but that he thought of as immanent. He couldn’t afford historical distance because he couldn’t afford to think of time as a forward march into a blank future. He needed to arrest it. Scholars have described the late Baldwin as a “critic of the after times” of civil rights or as advancing his own “chronoethics,” but his time now never amounted to a coherent thesis.52 It constituted more a direction of thought. He chafed, in his conversation with Mead and afterward, at what could be coherent within the constraints of liberalism and sometimes at the idea of coherence itself. The sociologist Evitar Zerubavel observes that what and how societies remember tends to conform with learned narrative structures and that conflicts between societies often originate not from differences in facts but differences in how societies arrange facts, their “time maps.”53 While Mead and other reformers barreled ahead, assured of the liberal structure of time, Baldwin, unable to ignore the bodies left in their wake, sought to get outside that relentless arc and have a look around. Something more fundamental than facts and feelings seemed to be working against him and the movement. What Mead missed in her “long-range, historical” account of racism, he wrote in a letter to his brother David, is that “me and mine are being murdered . . . in time.”54 While she looked backward and forward, he looked alongside, to the material accumulation of other times in his own. After his meeting with the anthropologist, Baldwin announced a break with his generation. He wrote his famous letter to Angela Davis that fall, telling her that he agreed with the radicals who argued that his generation had no model to offer them and admired how she and others had “absorbed their history” and, in absorbing it, “freed themselves of it.”55 In 1971, he and Nikki Giovanni, then twenty-eight and a leading figure of the Black Arts Movement, met in London to record a long-form conversation for the television show Soul!, which, working with Aveilhe, Mead and Baldwin’s editor, they turned into the slim volume A Dialogue. Although conceived as a conversation between generations, Baldwin disavowed his, refusing to act as a stand-in for it. “I’ve written off my generation,” he told her. Giovanni, not letting him

Darda-BK.indd 200

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Time Now

201

off the hook, observed that the difference between their generations might be described as the difference between “morals” and “power.” “What does it profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul?” she asked, miming the liberal argument against Black Power. “The world! You know what I mean? The world. That’s what it profits him.” Baldwin had to agree, but he also wondered, as he had elsewhere, if the world could ever be enough if won on existing terms. “Power without some sense of oneself is to me another kind of instability, and black people would then become exactly what white people have become,” he said, suggesting a need not for morals but for what he called a certain kind of “energy.”56 Baldwin might have been ducking—Giovanni thought he was—but he continued to see a danger in the linear time that he thought had doomed his movement and could hers. Linear time achieved dominance in the West, subduing recurrent and cumulative forms of time, not because it best served humans and their environment but because it accommodated dominant institutions: the church, the modern state, the market.57 Baldwin worried that Black Power risked getting sucked into the vortex of liberal time as civil rights had, that it could slide from revolution to reform, a world lost in the winning. But Giovanni’s criticism landed. In an interview with the Times following the Soul! dialogue, Baldwin declared, “There will be no moral appeals on my part to this country’s moral conscience,” adding, “It has none.”58 He had reconceived his role, he told the Essence editor Ida Lewis, as a “witness” with the charge to construct a new narrative of race and change not bound to the national clock. Baldwin’s conversations with Mead and Giovanni got him writing again. He finished No Name and then Beale Street. “I’m beginning again,” he said at the time, and he meant it.59 The curtain had come down on racial liberalism, but the narrative structure it had installed—racism as anachronism, the federal government as arbiter of antiracism—remained. Baldwin agreed with Giovanni and others that the movement had to confront white racial dominance as not a moral deficit but a material regime that defined Western governance, and that, he thought, called for a wholesale restructuring of time. “I suspect that there really has been some radical alteration in the structure, the nature, of time,” he writes in No Name. He recalls a talk-show roundtable in which he shared the stage with, among others, Malcolm X. “The others were discussing the past or the future, or a country which may once have existed,

Darda-BK.indd 201

12/1/21 9:22 PM

202

Epilogue

or one which may yet be brought into existence,” he remembers. “Malcolm was speaking of the bitter and unanswerable present.”60 The further he got from that moment and from X’s death, the more Baldwin felt that the Black Muslim minister had been addressing a different racial time than the others on set—immediate, urgent, weighted with other times, refusing the comfortable distance of historical lessons and future dreams. (Columbia Pictures had recruited Baldwin as a screenwriter for a fi lm version of X’s Autobiography. He later, after abandoning the assignment, declared it a “second assassination.”)61 From his struggle to find a common language with Mead, his conversations with a rising generation of Black radical women, and his memories of X, Baldwin determined that the next movement would fail if it, like his, could not divorce itself from the detached historicism and chimeric futurism of liberal time. The racial liberalism of Boas, Benedict, and Mead, though fading, had lent a durable structure to the stories the nation told about race. Baldwin, the novelist, wondered what other stories might be told if time allowed. “This book is not finished,” he wrote at the end of No Name. It “can never be finished.”62 The 1970 debate between Mead, the defender of the liberal creed, and Baldwin, the searching critic of that creed, has recurred ever since. In 1992, with anticommunists celebrating the demise of the Soviet Union and Los Angeles on fire, two authors addressing the state of liberalism did the rounds on TV talk shows. After creating a stir with an article in which, on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall, he forecast the universal embrace of Western liberalism, Francis Fukuyama, the neoconservative intellectual, then a consultant for RAND, reissued his thesis in book form as The End of History and the Last Man. He argued that the end of the Cold War marked not the transition from one era to the next but “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.”63 Fukuyama, recovering what he considered a true, capitalist Hegelianism, argued that the American and French revolutions had set the world on a course for the gradual achievement of an ideal, uncontested form of human government. Although he acknowledged that race had often frustrated that ideal, he urged his readers to not get “sidetracked” with “this or that social group or individual which is demonstrably dissatisfied by being denied access to the good things of society due to poverty, racism, and so forth.”64 He ended most acknowledgments of race with a “so forth” or an “etc.” and never mentioned his own Asian heritage. While most Western societies and cultures

Darda-BK.indd 202

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Time Now

203

had reached his “end of history,” others remained mired in historical time, including, Fukuyama wrote, some Black Americans whose commitment to “self-segregation” exhibited an “illiberal” or “authoritarian” streak.65 The liberal world looked forward to a blank, bright future. So should Black people, who, he determined, had fallen out of time. The legal scholar Derrick Bell followed the neoconservative RAND man on the talk-show circuit that fall to discuss his new book, Faces at the Bottom of the Well, an indirect rebuttal to The End of History. A former assistant counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where he had teamed with Thurgood Marshall and Robert Carter, Bell asked his readers to not get diverted with fantasies of liberal social evolution. “What we designate as ‘racial progress’ is not a solution to the problem,” he wrote. “It is a regeneration of the problem in a particularly perverse form.”66 In his career with the LDF, Bell had believed, as most of his colleagues had, that time was on the movement’s side. It moved forward. The nation evolved, grew more enlightened. But that belief had itself been an obstruction, offering a reassuring narrative in the face of no assurances. Bell did not see acknowledging what he called “the permanence of racism” as a sign of submission but, as Baldwin had before him, an act of “ultimate defiance”—defiance of faith in time, of the constraints of racial liberalism that now structured neoconservative and “New Democratic” thought.67 The names had changed. Ideological identifications had shifted. But Mead and Baldwin’s argument never ended. For others on the left, Bell and his circle of critical race theorists stood not as radicals but unknowing accessories to a new, woke liberalism. The political scientist Adolph Reed remembers hearing Bell declare at a conference at Harvard Law School around this time that Black communities had “made no progress since 1865.” He couldn’t see how a Black man with tenure at Harvard addressing an audience of Black Harvard law students could make that argument and concluded that Bell and other antiracist scholars discounted historical change for rhetorical effect, to “mobilize outrage” and maintain their own status among the elite as race men and race women.68 Reed and others of the anti-antiracist Left, which found a wide audience after the 2008 economic downturn and the election of Barack Obama, contend that antiracism since civil rights amounts to nothing more than the left wing of a dominant neoliberalism, a faux Left serving Black and non-Black elites that functions “more as a misdirection that justifies inequality than a strategy for eliminating it.”69

Darda-BK.indd 203

12/1/21 9:22 PM

204

Epilogue

The historical evidence that antiracists ignore, Reed argues, suggests that racism no longer drives economic stratification but constitutes instead “a species within a genus” of hierarchal relations of social worth. It needs to be situated among other forms of “ascriptive differentiation” that do and do not “overlap [with] already marked ascriptive populations defined by racial narratives.”70 His favorite example is “the urban underclass,” which he cites as evidence that racialization amounts to a “historically discrete” and waning mechanism of economic stratification under capitalism.71 But that uneven detachment of racialization from the color line, a detachment attributable to the racial liberalism of the 1940s and 1950s, indicates not how race ceased to matter as much as class and other forms of differentiation but how racialization suff uses them, giving rise to new stigmatized categories: the gang member, the illegal alien, the Islamic extremist, Reed’s urban underclass. (That suff usion—the weaving of biological theories of race into racial liberal ideas about cultural difference—has also allowed for a resurgence of race science in consumer genetic testing services and the human-interest media devoted to telling stories about discovering our racial scientific “roots.” Thanks to the Boasians, Americans never ceased thinking about race in muted biological terms.) Reed considers Bell and his successors bad historicists for treating racism as a “transhistorical force,” but, for Baldwin, Bell, and others since, refusing a linear historicism has constituted not a failure to acknowledge change but a strike against time-bound liberal solutionism.72 Better historicism will not save us. The anti-antiracist Left assumes that all antiracists must be liberals, including antiracists who might think of themselves as radicals, and that all liberals must be antiracists, that antiracism is the face of global capital after civil rights. The ideas of racism and antiracism did emerge with Ruth Benedict (who coined the former) and other racial liberals, and liberals have dominated the terms of antiracism ever since. But that does not mean that antiracism has not and cannot be claimed as the ground for an anticapitalist Left. It must be, because it is racism—sometimes detached from the color line, as the anti-antiracist Left notes as reason to dismiss it—that enshrines the human divisions that facilitate the accumulation of capital. The failure of the racial liberalism that Benedict and her colleagues inaugurated left some convinced that race itself resists meaningful redistributive change, that the solution has to be class and that antiracism does nothing more than distract from escalating attacks on labor. The anti-antiracist Left might loath racial liberals, but it shares with them a devotion to a solutionist futurism.

Darda-BK.indd 204

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Time Now

205

The liberal demand for short-range solutions reached new heights in the age of Black Lives Matter, but the go-to answer didn’t change: read this! A new generation of race writers emerged to teach liberals how to “interrupt white fragility,” “become less stupid about race,” shed “the mask of racial neutrality” and be an antiracist, a “good ancestor,” and someone who invites “productive conversations about race.”73 Some of them acknowledged their debt to the literature of the Rosenwald Fund and the Book-of-the-Month Club. Robin DiAngelo, an antiracist trainer who has led sessions at Amazon, Google, and Microsoft and coordinated a “family discussion on race” for the House Democratic Caucus, introduces her 2018 best seller White Fragility with words from Lillian Smith (“These ceremonials in honor of white supremacy, performed from babyhood . . .”), one of the Rosenwald Fund’s brightest stars.74 But DiAngelo and her fellow race writers, whose titles achieved astronomical sales amid the racial consciousness raising of 2020, distinguish themselves from Smith in insisting that reading is not enough, that changing minds does not change structures. “Knowledge is only power if knowledge is put to the struggle of power,” Ibram Kendi writes in How to Be an Antiracist, another best seller.75 Racial consciousness raising is, for Crystal Fleming, author of How to Be Less Stupid about Race, a crucial but insufficient “first step” toward transformative change.76 “This book does not attempt to provide the solution to racism,” DiAngelo establishes in the introduction to White Fragility.77 Few of the new race writers describe themselves as liberals. Some flirt with race radicalism. But solutions sell, and the easier the solution, the better it sells. The most successful of the new race books tended to announce themselves, no matter the content between the covers, as “how-to” guides to becoming something—an antiracist, a good ancestor, someone with racial stamina, with the right words, the right thoughts, the right living-room bookshelf. The new race writers remind their readers that “changing minds is not activism,” but their own stories, racial bildungsromans that often end in academia, offer models that contradict that message.78 Some end their books with “resources for continuing education” or “further learning.”79 In a foreword to Layla Saad’s antiracist workbook Me and White Supremacy, DiAngelo scolds racial liberals for “rushing ahead to solutions” but then recommends a reading cure: “Now, each time I am asked by a white person, ‘What do I do?,’ my answer will include ‘Work through this book.’”80 The content of antiracist literature might not matter as much as the framing. The content might be radical. It might call for revolution. But the liberal channels through which it circulates tend to soften the edges, redirecting

Darda-BK.indd 205

12/1/21 9:22 PM

206

Epilogue

us to reading, reform, and the dream of a better tomorrow. Racial liberalism faced what often felt like a terminal crisis in the 2010s, and it offered itself as the solution. Crises elevate our desire for solutions. But what if it is our desire for solutions that creates the crises?81 The 2010s also brought an astonishing Baldwin revival. Ta-Nehisi Coates modeled his 2015 best seller Between the World and Me after Baldwin’s 1962 essay “A Letter to My Nephew.” Raoul Peck turned a clutch of Baldwin notes from the late 1970s and snatches of other late Baldwin texts into the 2016 film I Am Not Your Negro, with narration from—who else?—Samuel L. Jackson. A 2018 movie version of Beale Street received three Oscar nominations, winning one. New editions arrived in a rush. So did murals and T-shirts, banners and coffee mugs. The creators and consumers of the revival often had two different Baldwins in mind. Some turned to the civil rights Baldwin, the Baldwin of Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time, who believed that the American creed might mean something after all. Others elevated the more fatalistic Baldwin of No Name and The Devil Finds Work. Some looked backward with a nostalgic longing for the national confidence of racial liberalism. Others looked ahead to a fire this time. The fascist turn in Washington had left some former critics of liberalism defending, if not embracing, it and others believing, with a bleak kind of relief, that we had reached the end times. Baldwin, who died in 1987, offered an icon for all. That might have had something to do with his refusal to fantasize about times either behind or ahead. He thought historicists and futurists shared in a desire to deflect from an urgent time now, a time that held all others. The strangest thing about the strange career of racial liberalism is that we still live it.

Darda-BK.indd 206

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Neda Atanasoski, Kathleen Belew, Sean Goudie, Dinidu Karunanayake, Priscilla Wald, Cécile Whiting, Jim Zeigler, and all of my colleagues and students at Texas Christian University. I’m grateful to Erica Wetter, Loren Glass, Kate Marshall, and the two reviewers for Stanford University Press for their valuable advice. Thank you. And thank you to the friends and colleagues who offered feedback at meetings of the American Studies Association and the Modern Language Association. I owe editors and reviewers at MELUS and Representations for giving me direction as I wrote and revised and librarians at Columbia University, Fisk University, Northern Illinois University, TCU, and Yale University for letting me dig around in their collections. Dave Darda, Patty Garvey-Darda, Zack Darda, and Sam Darda, thank you for making me feel at home, wherever I’m at, and for, in the language of racial liberalism, tolerating me. I finished this book in an apartment next to the ocean with Sam Gailey. I’d give this world just to dream a dream with you. For teaching me how to learn, I dedicate this book to Cathy Schlund-Vials.

207

Darda-BK.indd 207

12/1/21 9:22 PM

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

Introduction: The Bend of the Arc 1. Martin Luther King Jr., “Address at the Conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery March,” in A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson and Kris Shephard (New York: Warner Books, 2001), 131. 2. King, 122–23. 3. C. Vann Woodward, Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 92. See John Herbert Roper, C. Vann Woodward, Southerner (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 198. 4. The historian David Brion Davis, a colleague of Woodward’s at Yale, acknowledged in a footnote in the New York Review of Books that “historical bible” seemed to be Woodward’s rendering of King’s thoughts. David Brion Davis, “The Rebel,” review of The Future of the Past, by C. Vann Woodward, New York Review of Books, May 17, 1990, 30n1. 5. Woodward, Thinking Back, 89. See brief for appellants on reargument, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, in Landmark Briefs and Arguments of the Supreme Court of the United States, vol. 49, ed. Philip B. Kurland and Gerhard Casper (Arlington, VA: University Publications of America, 1975), 563–78. 6. C. Vann Woodard, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 47. 7. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), 1021. 8. See Mark Anderson, From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism, and American Anthropology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019), 109–16; Neda Atanasoski, Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 12; Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930–1965 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 4, 46–53, 73–80; Karen Ferguson, Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 23–48; Roderick A. Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The 209

Darda-BK.indd 209

12/1/21 9:22 PM

210

Notes to Introduction

University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 189–97; Lani Guinier, “From Racial Liberalism to Racial Literacy: Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Divergence Dilemma,” Journal of American History 91, no. 1 (2004): 95; Daniel Martinez HoSang, Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 13–23; Gregory S. Jay, White Writers, Race Matters: Fictions of Racial Liberalism from Stowe to Stockett (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 13–34; Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 18–26, 51–90; Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 11, 31–39; Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 11, 37–39; Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); and Ellen D. Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 4, 152–53, 227–28. 9. Nikhil Pal Singh, Race and America’s Long War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), xvii. 10. Jason Morgan Ward, Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 2. For two famous versions of the backlash thesis, see Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: Norton, 1991), 15, 59; and Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010), 21–22, 207. For a “longer view of massive resistance” that dates back to the New Deal era, see Ward, Defending White Democracy, 7. Historian Daniel Geary argues that, although racial liberalism all along contained “diverse and conflicting strands” that never amounted to a real consensus, sociologist and future senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s infamous 1965 The Negro Family brought irreconcilable fissures in the “postwar liberal mindset” to the surface. Daniel Geary, Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 9. 11. For longer histories of a never-not-racialized liberalism, see David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 57–73; Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 115–24; Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 6–7, 39–41; and Charles W. Mills, Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (New

Darda-BK.indd 210

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Notes to Introduction

211

York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 28–48. Hartman writes that “the universality or unencumbered individuality of liberalism relies on tacit exclusions and norms that preclude substantive equality” (122). Lowe argues that “modern liberalism defined the ‘human’ and universalized its attributes to European man,” with race enduring as the “trace” of violent exclusions from and inclusions within that universal (6). Mills, while theorizing a “radical black liberalism,” contends that “racial liberalism, or white liberalism, is the actual liberalism that has been dominant since modernity” (203, 31). 12. The sociologist Howard Winant describes how migration, movement building, state reform, and greater transnational, cross-racial interaction set off a “worldwide crisis of racial formation” after World War II. That crisis ended, he argues, with a “dualistic” reformism that curbed but also allowed for the survival of white racial dominance. Howard Winant, The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 135, 146. See also Melamed, Represent and Destroy, 4–7. 13. Francis Thompson, “The Hound of Heaven” (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1922), 45. 14. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, rev. ed. (New York: Galaxy, 1957), 179. 15. Woodward, Thinking Back, 94. 16. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 191. 17. Quoted in John Herbert Roper, C. Vann Woodward, Southerner (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 198. 18. C. Vann Woodward to Susan Woodward, January 1, 1970, box 60, folder 735, C. Vann Woodward Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. 19. For more on Woodward’s ostensible rightward turn, see Sheldon Hackney, “C. Vann Woodward, Dissenter,” Historically Speaking 10, no. 1 (2009): 31–34. 20. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), v. 21. See Howard N. Rabinowitz, “More Than a Woodward Thesis: Assessing The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” Journal of American History 75, no. 3 (1988): 853. 22. King, “Selma to Montgomery March,” 131. 23. Martin Luther King Jr., “‘A Look to the Future,’ Address Delivered at Highlander Folk School’s Twenty-Fift h Anniversary Meeting,” in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson, vol. 4, Symbol of the Movement, January 1957–December 1958 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 271, 275. 24. Hortense J. Spillers, “Moving on Down the Line: Variations on the AfricanAmerican Sermon,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 252, 259.

Darda-BK.indd 211

12/1/21 9:22 PM

212

Notes to Introduction

25. Martin Luther King Jr. “Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution,” in A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson and Peter Holloran (New York: Warner Books, 1998), 209, 210. 26. “Blitzkrieg on Harlem,” Amsterdam News, November 15, 1941. 27. “The Other Side of Harlem,” New York Times, November 12, 1941. 28. Pearl S. Buck, “Harlem Seen as Symbol,” New York Times, November 15, 1941. 29. Buck. 30. Anderson, Boas to Black Power, 11; HoSang, Racial Propositions, 20; Melamed, Represent and Destroy, xv; Murakawa, First Civil Right, 44; Reddy, Freedom with Violence, 37. 31. Melamed, Represent and Destroy, 8–9. 32. Charles S. Johnson, introduction to Directory of Agencies in Race Relations: National, State, and Local (Chicago: Julius Rosenwald Fund, 1945), 3. 33. Directory of Agencies in Intergroup Relations: National, Regional, State and Local, 1948–1949 (Chicago: American Council on Race Relations, 1948), ii. 34. Edwin R. Embree, “Timid Billions,” Harper’s, March 1949, 29. Embree had been making that argument—that foundations should seek to model behavior for the state— crediting it to Julius Rosenwald himself, since taking charge of the fund in 1928. See Edwin R. Embree, “The Business of Giving Away Money,” Harper’s, August 1930, 327. 35. Carey McWilliams, Brothers under the Skin (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943), 300, 324–25, 325. 36. Goldberg, the scholar of race and liberalism, argues that the modern state “has always conceived of itself as racially configured.” Self-defined color-blind states, including the United States, would best be described, Goldberg writes, as “racist states absent race, post-racial but not post-racist, raceless yet racist.” The United States has also at times fashioned itself as an antiracist state without ever forfeiting white racial rule. Goldberg, Racial State, 2, 263. 37. Myrdal, American Dilemma, 49, 1010. 38. President’s Committee on Civil Rights, To Secure These Rights: The Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1947), 173. 39. Melamed, Represent and Destroy, 15. 40. Jay, White Writers, Race Matters, 16. 41. UNESCO, “The Race Question” (Paris: UNESCO, 1950), 1, 3. 42. Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946), 189. 43. For more on the interaction between white racial rule and anti-Blackness and how it functions in non-Black communities of color as a ceiling and floor, an inclusive

Darda-BK.indd 212

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Notes to Introduction

213

“foundational Blackness,” or a disorienting “racial interstitiality,” see Claire Jean Kim, “Are Asians the New Blacks? Affirmative Action, Anti-Blackness, and the ‘Sociometry’ of Race,” Du Bois Review 15, no. 2 (2018): 226; John D. Márquez, Black-Brown Solidarity: Racial Politics in the New Gulf South (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 51–52; and Leslie Bow, Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 9. 44. Pauli Murray, States’ Laws on Race and Color (Cincinnati: Woman’s Division of Christian Service of the Methodist Church, 1951), 5. 45. Jared Sexton, “People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery,” Social Text 28, no. 2 (2010): 47. 46. Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society (Boston: South End Press, 1983), 2. 47. Guinier, “Racial Liberalism,” 100. 48. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 6, 10. 49. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (New York: Macmillan, 1915), 10. 50. Lynn Hunt, Measuring Time, Making History (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008), 4. 51. Carol J. Greenhouse, A Moment’s Notice: Time Politics across Cultures (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 22. 52. King, “Selma to Montgomery March,” 131. Greenhouse observes that linear time does not have to serve the ends of the state or a ruling class but can be a “technology of resistance and counterresistance.” She cites, for example, labor struggles for restrictions on working hours. The legal scholar Mary Dudziak observes that linear time can sometimes “dictate history,” that in wartime “actions that would normally transgress a rule of law are seen as compelled by the era, as if commanded by time.” A wartime leader may blame the times for an extreme decision, believing that time will move forward and out of that era of time-dictated decision making. “Faith in the inevitability of progress,” Dudziak writes elsewhere, “can generate complacency.” Greenhouse, Moment’s Notice, 23; Mary L. Dudziak, War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 23; Mary L. Dudziak, “Brown and the Idea of Progress in American Legal History: A Comment on William Nelson,” Saint Louis University Law Journal 48, no. 3 (2004): 857. 53. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 22–31. 54. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 261, 262, 260.

Darda-BK.indd 213

12/1/21 9:22 PM

214

Notes to Introduction

55. Lowe, in surfacing the enduring “intimacies” between colonized, enslaved, and Indigenous peoples in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reveals how a residual social formation “may be articulated within new practices, in effect, as a ‘new’ emergent formation.” What Raymond Williams called residual, dominant, and emergent social formations (and pre-emergent structures of feeling) should not, she argues, be mistaken for a linear forward march through time. Atanasoski identifies how the United States has wielded linear time as an instrument of race making, sorting the world into the “progressive expansive racial time of U.S. liberalism and the regressive, cyclical racial time of the other” in which freedom has not and may never be achieved. Lowe, Intimacies of Four Continents, 19; Atanasoski, Humanitarian Violence, 40. 56. While Anderson argued that the novel and the newspaper “provided the technical means for ‘re-presenting’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation,” Lowe identifies the autobiography as the “liberal genre par excellence” for how it affirmed “the individual’s passage to freedom through economic industry and political emancipation.” Historian Michael O’Malley suggests that the emergence of the feature fi lm in the early twentieth century “restocked the reformer’s quiver” with linear, causal tales stitched together to communicate the “temporal foundations of morality” to immigrant audiences. Novels, newspapers, autobiographies, and narrative fi lms—all have served to naturalize linear time and the racial divisions it creates and conceals. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 25; Lowe, Intimacies of Four Continents, 46; Michael O’Malley, Keeping Watch: A History of American Time (New York: Viking, 1990), 221, 214. 57. Erica R. Edwards, Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 17. From Frederick Douglass to Barack Obama, the charismatic scenario, Edwards argues, mistakes “a series of collective attempts to remake the world” for “a liberal rights struggle produced by gifted leadership” (119). The political scientist Shatema Threadcraft chronicles how that scenario— she casts it within the larger tradition of Afro-modern political thought—has elevated masculine “black action in civic space” and devalued “the realm of intimate relations and its associated capacities,” combating racial hierarchies with a “gendered bodily capacity hierarchy.” The charismatic scenario, for all that it hasn’t delivered, has endured because it conforms to the comfortable grooves of racial liberal time, reassuring the nation that it will, under the rhetorical guidance of a singular Black leader, overcome racism. Shatema Threadcraft, Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 27, 28. 58. Margaret Mead, “A Rap on Race: How James Baldwin and I ‘Talked’ a Book,” Redbook, September 1971, 71. 59. Claudia Jones, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!,” Political Affairs 28, no. 6 (1949): 56, 63.

Darda-BK.indd 214

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Notes to Introduction

215

60. “Modern Harriet Tubman Fights for Peace, Freedom on Chicago’s Teeming Southside,” Freedom, June 1951, 3. 61. Alice Childress, Gold through the Trees, in Selected Plays, ed. Kathy A. Perkins (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 30, 33. 62. Childress challenged the Moses model elsewhere. In one of her “Conversations from Life” columns, which ran in Freedom and later in the Baltimore AfroAmerican, Mildred, Childress’s working-class alter ego, attends a Black History Week meeting, where she grows tired of hearing about “Frederick Douglass, Nat Turner, and many others.” She stands and tells the gathering, “You folks kept talkin’ about ‘many others.’ . . . But you didn’t tell much about them,” and shares some stories about her grandmother, a miner’s wife who raised seven children and “rassled with death, Jim Crow and starvation.” Alice Childress, “The ‘Many Others’ in History,” Freedom, February 1952, 2, 8. 63. Childress and other race radicals faced enormous obstacles in the anticommunist 1950s, the literature scholar Mary Helen Washington writes, because “a major support for antiracist radicalism in the 1940s and 1950s was the Communist Party,” leading anticommunist crusaders to go after radical Black writers regardless of their affi liation, or lack thereof, with the CPUSA. She identifies Childress’s generation of Black left ists as the censored link between the Black Popular Front of the 1930s and 1940s and the Black Power and Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Mary Helen Washington, The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 2. 64. Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, The Races of Mankind (New York: Public Affairs Committee, 1943), 3. 65. UNESCO, “Race Question,” 1. 66. “Nation Lauds Courier’s ‘Double V’ Campaign,” Pittsburgh Courier, March 7, 1942. 67. President’s Committee on Civil Rights, To Secure These Rights, 10. 68. See Philleo Nash, oral history interview by Jerry N. Hess, February 21, 1967, Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/oral-histo ries/nash12#transcript. 69. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 191, 190. 70. Schlesinger, 190. 71. Marion Horton, “Invitation to Read,” ALA Bulletin 41, no. 12 (1947): 436. 72. Alfred McClung Lee, “The Press in the Control of Intergroup Tensions,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, no. 244 (1946): 151. 73. James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Partisan Review 16, no. 6 (1949): 582.

Darda-BK.indd 215

12/1/21 9:22 PM

216

Notes to Chapter 1

74. Helen Leland Witmer and Ruth Kotinsky, eds., Personality in the Making: The Fact-Finding Report of the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1952), 414. 75. R. M. MacIver, The More Perfect Union: A Program for the Control of Intergroup Discrimination in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 236. 76. Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1954), 339. 77. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 349 U.S. 294, 300, 301 (1955). 78. Grace Halsell, Soul Sister (New York: World Publishing, 1969), 22. 79. James Baldwin, “The Black Scholar Interviews: James Baldwin,” Black Scholar 5, no. 4 (1973–74): 34, 42. 80. James Baldwin, “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” New Yorker, November 17, 1962, 144. 81. Baldwin, “Black Scholar Interviews,” 35. 82. HoSang, Racial Propositions, 20; Melamed, Represent and Destroy, 4; Murakawa, First Civil Right, 9; Reddy, Freedom with Violence, 37. 83. Vesla M. Weaver, “Frontlash: Race and the Development of Punitive Crime Policy,” Studies in American Political Development 21, no. 2 (2007): 236. 84. Baldwin, “Black Scholar Interviews,” 41, 42. 85. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 133. 86. Benjamin, “Theses,” 263. 87. Saidiya Hartman, “The Time of Slavery,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 759. 88. Alex Raksin, review of Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism, by Derrick A. Bell, Los Angeles Times, August 23, 1992. 89. Charlie Rose, season 1, episode 233, aired August 17, 1992, on PBS. 90. Baldwin, “Black Scholar Interviews,” 42. 91. Woodward, Strange Career, 1st ed., 95. Chapter 1: Antiracism as War 1. Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, The Races of Mankind (New York: Public Affairs Committee, 1943), 3. 2. “Army Drops Race Equality Book; Denies May’s Stand Was Reason,” New York Times, March 6, 1944. 3. “Race Question,” Time, January 31, 1944, 58. 4. Ruth Benedict, Race: Science and Politics (New York: Modern Age Books, 1940), v–vi. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first use of the term racism to 1903, but

Darda-BK.indd 216

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Notes to Chapter 1

217

it did not come into wider usage until the 1930s with the rise of fascism on the Continent. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “racism,” www.oed.com/view/Entry/157097. See George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 165; and Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 342. 5. Benedict, Race, vii. 6. Benedict and Weltfish, Races of Mankind, 31. 7. Benedict and Weltfish, 16. 8. Benedict and Weltfish, 11. 9. Quoted in “Race Question,” 58. 10. Quoted in “Army Drops Race Equality Book.” 11. Quoted in “Plans New Edition of Race Pamphlet: Public Affairs Group Differs with May’s View That Led to Army Circulation Ban,” New York Times, March 8, 1944. 12. Constance Warren, “A Plea for Racial Truth,” New York Times, March 10, 1944. 13. For more on the circulation and different versions of The Races of Mankind, see Zoë Burkholder, Color in the Classroom: How American Schools Taught Race, 1900–1954 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 74–79; and Tracy Teslow, Constructing Race: The Science of Bodies and Cultures in American Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 246–82. 14. See Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 55–62; Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 40–54; and Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 142–51. 15. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), xix. 16. Chester Himes, “Now Is the Time! Here Is the Place!,” Opportunity, September 1942, 272. 17. Himes, 271. 18. Howard Winant, The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 145. 19. Melamed, Represent and Destroy, 4. 20. Ralph Ellison, “An American Dilemma: A Review,” in Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), 317. 21. “The New York Meeting of the American Anthropological Association,” Science 89, no. 2298 (1939): 30. 22. Franz Boas, “What Is Race?,” Nation, January 28, 1925, 91.

Darda-BK.indd 217

12/1/21 9:22 PM

218

Notes to Chapter 1

23. Franz Boas, “Race and Character,” in Race, Language and Culture (New York: MacMillan, 1940), 195. Boas wrote “Race and Character” in German in 1932, translating it into English for inclusion in the 1940 collection of his writing. 24. For more on Boas’s racial thought, see Teslow, Constructing Race, 32–73. Scholars celebrate Boas for challenging scientific racism, but most, historian Tracy Teslow argues, fail to reckon with his commitment to refining rather than abolishing race science. “His fight against erroneous ideas, invidious distinctions, faulty logic, and poorly conducted investigations,” she writes, “was married to his persistent efforts to use the methods and theories of physical anthropology and genetics to comprehend variation that he still understood in fundamentally racialized terms” (66). His and his students’ bridging of race science and culture made that science integral to a racial liberalism often thought to have ousted it. 25. Alain Locke, “The Theoretical and Scientific Conceptions of Race,” in Race Contacts and Interracial Relations: Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Race, ed. Jeffrey C. Stewart (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1992), 11, 12. 26. For more on Locke’s engagement with Boas’s research at the Races Congress and in his Howard lectures, see Jeff rey C. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 217–18, 265–66. 27. Zora Neale Hurston to Ruth Benedict, December 4, 1933, in Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, ed. Carla Kaplan (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 283, 284. 28. Margaret Mead, preface to Patterns of Culture, by Ruth Benedict (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), vii. 29. Franz Boas, introduction to Patterns of Culture, by Ruth Benedict (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), xiii. 30. Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 6. 31. Benedict, 278. 32. Benedict, Race, 3, 5. 33. Benedict, vi. 34. Fredrickson, Racism, 165; Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 342. 35. Benedict, Race, 50. 36. Benedict, 40, 41, 43. 37. Benedict, 256. 38. Cultural anthropologist Mark Anderson argues that Benedict’s reliance on a white immigrant model of assimilation and her devotion to the nation’s founding ideals allowed her to deflect “the question of whether racism was endemic to (white) American culture.” The wartime context informed and limited her writing and the emerging racial liberal consensus to which it contributed. Mark Anderson, From Boas

Darda-BK.indd 218

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Notes to Chapter 1

219

to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism, and American Anthropology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019), 117. 39. Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941), 298. 40. Alain Locke, “Enter the New Negro,” in “Harlem,” ed. Alain Locke, special issue, Survey Graphic 53, no. 11 (1925): 632. 41. Melville J. Herskovits, “The Dilemma of Social Pattern,” in “Harlem,” ed. Alain Locke, special issue, Survey Graphic 53, no. 11 (1925): 678, 676. 42. Locke biographer Jeff rey Stewart suggests that the philosopher’s influence on Herskovits “laid the groundwork for a revolution in anthropological thinking,” shifting the discipline from “the sociological model of assimilation” toward “the concept of cultural pluralism.” It did, but Herskovits continued to see the acknowledgment of cultural difference as the most direct route to national assimilation and, ever Boas’s student, could not shake the discipline’s muted biological rubric for sorting cultural forms. Stewart, New Negro, 471, 472. 43. Herskovits, Myth of the Negro Past, 32. 44. M. F. Ashley Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), 5, 7, 8. 45. Benedict and Weltfish, Races of Mankind, 7. 46. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 94. 47. See Christopher P. Lehman, The Colored Cartoon: Black Representation in American Animated Short Films, 1907–1954 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 105. 48. Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, In Henry’s Backyard: The Races of Mankind (New York: Henry Schuman, 1948), 14, 19. See also Brotherhood of Man, directed by Robert Cannon (United Productions of America, 1947). 49. UNESCO, “The Race Question” (Paris: UNESCO, 1950), 1. 50. UNESCO, 8. 51. UNESCO, 4. 52. John Hope Franklin, Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 103. 53. Franklin, 104. 54. “For Manhood in National Defense,” Crisis, December 1940, 375. 55. “Still Cannon Fodder,” Baltimore Afro-American, April 20, 1940. 56. A. Philip Randolph, “Let’s March on Capital 10,000 Strong, Urges Leader of Porters,” in For Jobs and Freedom: Selected Speeches and Writings of A. Philip Randolph,

Darda-BK.indd 219

12/1/21 9:22 PM

220

Notes to Chapter 1

ed. Andrew E. Kersten and David Lucander (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), 203. 57. See A. Philip Randolph, “Letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt,” in For Jobs and Freedom: Selected Speeches and Writings of A. Philip Randolph, ed. Andrew E. Kersten and David Lucander (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), 206–7. 58. “100,000 to March in Job Protest,” New York Amsterdam Star-News, April 21, 1941. 59. James G. Thompson, “Should I Sacrifice to Live ‘Half-American’?,” letter to the editor, Pittsburgh Courier, January 31, 1942. 60. “‘Double V’ Campaign Material Now Available,” advertisement, Pittsburgh Courier, July 4, 1942. 61. Frank E. Bolden, “We Want Full Participating Rights in War to Save Democracy,” Pittsburgh Courier, March 7, 1942. 62. For more on the Double V movement, see Kimberley L. Phillips, War! What Is It Good For? Black Freedom Struggles and the U.S. Military from World War II to Iraq (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 20–63; and Rawn James Jr., The Double V: How Wars, Protest, and Harry Truman Desegregated America’s Military (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 137–43. 63. Robin D. G. Kelley, “The Riddle of the Zoot: Malcolm Little and Black Cultural Politics during World War II,” in Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994), 166, 172. 64. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, with Alex Haley (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 105. 65. Dizzy Gillespie, To Be, or Not . . . to Bop, with Al Fraser (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979), 120. 66. “Send Fighters, Too,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 4, 1942. 67. A. Philip Randolph, “March on Washington Movement Presents Program for the Negro,” in For Jobs and Freedom: Selected Speeches and Writings of A. Philip Randolph, ed. Andrew E. Kersten and David Lucander (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), 212, 213. 68. James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son,” in Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon, 1955), 102, 101, 100. 69. Baldwin, 90. 70. “N.Y. Editors Disagree over Issue of War,” Chicago Defender, March 28, 1942. 71. Himes, “Now Is the Time!,” 272. 72. Chester Himes, “Democracy Is for the Unafraid,” Common Ground, Winter 1944, 54. See also Chester Himes, “Negro Martyrs Are Needed,” Crisis, May 1944, 159, 174.

Darda-BK.indd 220

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Notes to Chapter 1

221

73. Mary L. Dudziak, War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 5, 8. 74. Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1945), 45, 46. 75. Himes, 138. 76. Franklin, Mirror to America, 105. 77. Franklin, 106. 78. “Dixie Prefers Nazis to Negroes, Soldier Finds,” Chicago Defender, January 27, 1945. 79. Quoted in “Army, Navy Agreed on Blood Ban,” Baltimore Afro-American, November 29, 1941. 80. Quoted in “Randolph Says Red Cross Bias Reeks of Nazism,” Baltimore AfroAmerican, January 24, 1942. 81. Roy Wilkins, The Watchtower, New York Amsterdam Star-News, January 17, 1942. 82. Quoted in “Red Cross Turns Down Negro Blood,” Chicago Defender, January 17, 1942. 83. Quoted in “Blood Policy of Red Cross Ill Founded,” Baltimore Afro-American, February 14, 1942. 84. Quoted in “Red Cross Solves Problem: Will Accept and Segregate Negro Blood,” Chicago Defender, January 31, 1942. 85. See Phillip McGuire, He, Too, Spoke for Democracy: Judge Hastie, World War II, and the Black Soldier (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 77. 86. Chandler Owen, Negroes and the War (Washington, DC: Office of War Information, 1942), 1. 87. Owen 5, 3, 2. 88. Quoted in “Lester B. Granger, Urban League Head, Assails ‘White Cabinet,’” New York Amsterdam Star-News, March 20, 1943. 89. Frank Kelley, “O.W.I. Booklet Designed to Boost Negro Morale,” New York Times, January 31, 1943. 90. Owen, Negroes and the War, 2. 91. Owen, 69. 92. This Is the Army, directed by Michael Curtiz (Warner Bros., 1943). 93. Kelley describes the wartime zoot suit as a “subversive form of refusal” through which young Black and brown men renounced “both petit bourgeois respectability and American patriotism.” Kelley, “Riddle of the Zoot,” 166. 94. Quoted in Mark Harris, Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War (New York: Penguin, 2014), 306.

Darda-BK.indd 221

12/1/21 9:22 PM

222

Notes to Chapter 1

95. Quoted in Harris, 136. 96. Frank Capra, The Name above the Title (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 358. 97. Quoted in Thomas Cripps and David Culbert, “The Negro Soldier: Film Propaganda in Black and White,” American Quarterly 31, no. 5 (1979): 637–38. 98. The Negro Soldier, directed by Stuart Heisler (War Activities Committee of the Motion Pictures Industry, 1944). 99. Jason Morgan Ward, Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 39. 100. Quoted in “Negro Film Pleases Novelist,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 16, 1944. 101. Langston Hughes, “Here’s a War Film Everyone Should See, Writes Defender Columnist,” Chicago Defender, February 26, 1944. 102. S. W. Garlington, “War Department Movie Glorifies Negro Soldiers,” New York Amsterdam News, February 19, 1944. 103. Phillips, War!, 60. 104. Hortense J. Spillers, “Moving on Down the Line: Variations on the AfricanAmerican Sermon,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 258, 254. 105. Henry A. Wallace, “The Price of Free World Victory,” in Democracy Reborn (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1944), 193. 106. Henry A. Wallace, “America Tomorrow,” in Democracy Reborn (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1944), 240. 107. Wendell L. Willkie, One World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943), 1, 158. 108. Willkie, 190. 109. Willkie, 19. 110. Quoted in “Negro Rights,” Life, April 24, 1944, 32. 111. Quoted in Myrdal, American Dilemma, ix. 112. F. P. Keppel, foreword to An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, by Gunnar Myrdal (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), vi. 113. Keppel, vii–viii. 114. Myrdal, American Dilemma, xix. 115. Walter A. Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938–1987 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), xvii. 116. Quoted in Jackson, 163. 117. Myrdal, American Dilemma, 997, xlvii. 118. Singh, Black Is a Country, 39.

Darda-BK.indd 222

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Notes to Chapter 1

223

119. Myrdal, American Dilemma, xlv, xlvi, xlviii. 120. Myrdal, 1021. 121. Myrdal, 115. 122. Myrdal, 928, 929. 123. For an account of how An American Dilemma marshaled “nonheteronormativity in the inscription of African Americans as pathological,” defining Black families as unstable and Black church services as overemotional, see Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 91. 124. See Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal, 241. 125. Ralph J. Bunche, “Nothing Is Impossible for the Negro,” in Ralph J. Bunche: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Charles P. Henry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 263, 264. 126. Ellison, “American Dilemma,” 303, 304. 127. Ellison, 316, 317. 128. Frances Gaither, “Democracy—The Negro’s Hope,” review of An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, by Gunnar Myrdal, New York Times, April 2, 1944; Robert S. Lynd, “Prison for American Genius,” review of An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, by Gunnar Myrdal, Saturday Review, April 22, 1944, 5. 129. Quoted in Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 2007), 181; Lawrence Jackson, Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius (New York: John Wiley, 2002), 303. 130. Quoted in Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 182. 131. Ellison, “American Dilemma,” 317. 132. Frederick Douglass, “The Color Question,” July 5, 1875, Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, www.loc.gov/item/mfd000413. 133. Ralph Ellison, introduction to Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), xx. 134. Ellison, “American Dilemma,” 310. 135. Ellison, 311. 136. Quoted in Urban Lehner, “Ellison Doubts Social Findings; Claims They Veer from Reality,” Michigan Daily, October 5, 1967. 137. Quoted in Lehner. 138. See Kenneth W. Warren, So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 29. 139. Kenneth W. Warren, What Was African American Literature? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 42, 18.

Darda-BK.indd 223

12/1/21 9:22 PM

224

Notes to Chapter 2

140. Warren has faced an avalanche of criticism for suggesting, as he reasserted in a 2013 “Reply to My Critics,” that “the very idea of African American literature at present asserts the priority of fighting racial discrimination over other forms of racial inequality.” The literature scholar Walter Benn Michaels argues along similar lines that “celebrating diversity” has served as the Left’s “way of accepting inequality.” The political scientist Adolph Reed, the dean of left ist anti-antiracist thinkers, insists that the agenda of antiracism, far from radical, constitutes a “pursuit of racial parity within neoliberalism,” a commitment to maintaining “racism’s status as uniquely egregious among forms of injustice over the goal of challenging injustice itself.” Liberals did, as Warren, Michaels, and Reed observe, define the terms of a dominant reformist antiracism, but that does not mean that antiracism has not taken and cannot take other forms. An anticapitalist Left cannot dismiss antiracism because it is racism that introduces and sustains the human divisions—including but, thanks to racial liberals’ uneven detachment of culture from biological difference, not limited to colorline divisions—through which capital accumulates, on which capitalism thrives. Kenneth W. Warren, “A Reply to My Critics,” PMLA 128, no. 2 (2013): 406; Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Metropolitan Books), 199; Adolph Reed Jr., “Antiracism: A Neoliberal Alternative to a Left,” Dialectical Anthropology 42, no. 2 (2018): 110; Adolph Reed Jr., “The ‘Color Line’ Then and Now: The Souls of Black Folk and the Changing Context of Black American Politics,” in Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought, ed. Adolph Reed Jr. and Kenneth W. Warren (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2010), 276. Chapter 2: Antiracism as Civil Rights 1. Harry S. Truman, “Address before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,” June 29, 1947, American Presidency Project, www.presidency .ucsb.edu /documents/address-before-the-national-association-for-the-advancement -colored-people. 2. Exec. Order No. 9808, 11 Fed. Reg. 14153 (December 5, 1946). 3. Truman, “Address.” 4. Harry S. Truman, fourth draft of NAACP speech with Truman’s corrections, June 28, 1947, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum. 5. See “Gov’t Must Ensure Rights to All,” Atlanta Daily World, July 1, 1947; and “Truman Asks Action ‘Now’ on Racism,” Chicago Defender, July 5, 1947. 6. W. E. B. Du Bois, draft of introduction to An Appeal to the World! A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress, 1946, W. E. B. Du

Darda-BK.indd 224

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Notes to Chapter 2

225

Bois Papers, mums312-b229-i015, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Library. 7. See Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 102; and David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 1919–1963: The Fight for Equality and the American Century (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 499, 534. 8. Truman, “Address.” 9. Truman. 10. Walter White, “Speech at NAACP Annual Convention,” in Say It Plain: A Century of Great African American Speeches, ed. Catherine Ellis and Stephen Drury Smith (New York: New Press, 2005), 17, 18, 19. 11. W. E. B. Du Bois, “My Relations with the NAACP,” 1948, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, mums312-b159-i407, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Library. 12. Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, The Races of Mankind (New York: Public Affairs Committee, 1943), 3; Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), xlvii. 13. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 21. The legal historian Mary Dudziak describes the movement in and out of wartime as a “pendulum” that swings from “strong protection of rights and weaker government during peacetime to weaker protection of rights and stronger government during wartime” but that hasn’t swung back to the former since at least Truman’s time, with administrations waging wars without declaring them and declaring wars over without ending them. The figurative “war on racism” that liberal social scientists declared during the Second World War authorized the executive branch to govern official antiracism ever since. Mary L. Dudziak, War Time: An  Idea,  Its History, Its Consequences (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 15–16. 14. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1933, American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/inaugural-address-8. 15. Truman, “Address.” 16. Exec. Order No. 9981, 13 Fed. Reg. 4313 (July 26, 1948). 17. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Truman on Discrimination,” Chicago Defender, February 7, 1948. 18. A Petition to the United Nations on Behalf of 13 Million Oppressed Negro Citizens of the United States of America (New York: National Negro Congress, 1946), 4. 19. The Negro in American Life, ca. 1951, box 112, folder 503, Chester Bowles Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, 2.

Darda-BK.indd 225

12/1/21 9:22 PM

226

Notes to Chapter 2

20. See Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 77. 21. See Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (2005): 1233–63. Hall argues that “by confining the civil rights struggle to the South, to bowdlerized heroes, to a single halcyon decade, and to limited economic objectives, the master narrative [of the civil rights movement] simultaneously elevates and diminishes the movement,” containing it to “a triumphal moment in a larger American progress narrative” (1234). The Truman administration’s overtures to a civil rights struggle also, long before the events elevated in that master narrative, isolated it from the international stage, a civil rather than human rights movement. 22. Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 109. See also Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize; Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 23. Carol Anderson, Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1945–1961 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 7. 24. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, with Alex Haley (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 153. 25. X, 179. 26. See Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2011), 95. 27. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), 288. 28. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, rev. ed. (San Diego: Harvest, 1973), 280n26. 29. Arendt, 294, 295. 30. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston L. Churchill, telegram, August 14, 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, www.fdrlibrary.org /docu ments/356632/390886/atlantic _charter.pdf. 31. Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 32. Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 6.

Darda-BK.indd 226

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Notes to Chapter 2

227

33. United Nations General Assembly, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” December 10, 1948, www.un.org /en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights. 34. Quoted in Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize, 132. 35. Historian Randall Williams detects an “anti-anticolonial logic implicit in the Universal Declaration,” arguing that it alludes to the dangers of anticolonial movements in Africa and Asia when it states “whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law.” Human rights, in Williams’s reading, offered a means of moderating rather than encouraging the struggle for selfgovernment in the colonies. Randall Williams, The Divided World: Human Rights and Its Violence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xxii. 36. Quoted in Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize, 133. That is not to say that liberal human rights cannot be harnessed as an effective means of resistance. Sometimes, as historian Naomi Paik observes, it isn’t a matter of choice. “Rightless subjects craft opportunity through the very same mechanisms that created their rightless condition,” she writes of Guantánamo detainees. “While their invocations of rights cannot be equated with justice and do not alter the organization of state power, claiming rights is one of their only means to resist rightlessness.” A. Naomi Paik, Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 13. 37. Neda Atanasoski, Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 7, 10. See also Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Reddy, a literature scholar and queer of color theorist, describes the association of war with colonial liberation as a “freedom with violence” that allowed the United States to define what did and didn’t count as legitimate or “rational” violence (38). 38. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Peace Is Dangerous” (New York: National Guardian, 1951), 6. 39. Du Bois, 4. 40. Harry S. Truman, “Remarks Broadcast on the Second Anniversary of the United Nations,” June 26, 1947, American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb .edu/documents/remarks-broadcast-the-second-anniversary-the-united-nations. 41. Truman, “Address.” 42. The political scientist Michael Dawson argues that as long as Black radical movements remained “entangled” with other movements, “there existed many different potential democratic futures that were more unrealizable and, just as important, unimaginable if black radicalism became isolated.” He identifies the late 1940s and

Darda-BK.indd 227

12/1/21 9:22 PM

228

Notes to Chapter 2

1950s as a moment of isolation, “when the civil rights movement was radically sundered from black radicals” and the alternative social worlds they imagined “assigned to the realm of the ‘impossible.’” Michael C. Dawson, Blacks in and out of the Left (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 68, 69, 60–61. 43. Petition to the United Nations, 3. 44. Petition to the United Nations, 7, 14, 3. 45. See Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize, 82. 46. Earl Conrad, “Sign That Petition,” Chicago Defender, November 2, 1946. 47. Article 2.7 of the UN Charter, the domestic jurisdiction clause, states that “nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter.” Officials have been debating the meaning of that clause since the signing of the charter in 1945. Charter of the United Nations and Statute of the International Court of Justice (San Francisco: United Nations, 1945), 3. 48. W. E. B. Du Bois to Lasker Smith, March 9, 1949, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, mums312-b126-i032, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Library. 49. W. E. B. Du Bois, Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945), v, 103. 50. Du Bois, 101. 51. For more on Du Bois’s two months as an NAACP delegate to the San Francisco Conference, see Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 502–10. 52. W. E. B. Du Bois to the National Negro Congress, August 1, 1946, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, mums312-b111-i133, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Library. 53. W. E. B. Du Bois to Walter White, memorandum, August 1, 1946, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, mums312-b111-i290, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Library. 54. Walter White to W. E. B. Du Bois, memorandum, August 1, 1946, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, mums312-b111-i291, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Library. 55. An Appeal to the World! A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress (New York: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1947), 12, 13, 14. 56. Appeal to the World, 86. 57. Appeal to the World, 6, 5, 2.

Darda-BK.indd 228

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Notes to Chapter 2

229

58. Du Bois, draft of introduction, 3, 5. 59. W. E. B. Du Bois to Walter White, memorandum, November 14, 1946, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, mums312-b111-i360, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Library. 60. The historian Penny Von Eschen sees the liberal nationalism of the final version of An Appeal to the World! as marking “a departure from the internationalism of the World War II period” and “the argument that linked the struggle of black Americans against Jim Crow with that of Africans against colonialism.” It also foreshadowed the realignment of the NAACP with the emerging racial liberal consensus in Washington. Von Eschen, Race against Empire, 117. 61. Thurgood Marshall to W. E. B. Du Bois, August 31, 1946, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, mums312-b111-i301, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Library. 62. John Humphrey to W. E. B. Du Bois, October 9, 1947, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, mums312-b116-i004, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Library. 63. George Streator, “Negroes to Bring Cause before U.N.,” New York Times, October 11, 1947. 64. Quoted in “UN Gets Petition on Cold Treatment of U.S. Minority,” Baltimore Afro-American, November 1, 1947. 65. “An Important Appeal,” Chicago Defender, November 1, 1947; “That the World Might Know,” Baltimore Afro-American, November 1, 1947. 66. Walter White, A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White (New York: Viking, 1948), 358. 67. Quoted in Donald R. McCoy and Richard T. Ruetten, Quest and Response: Minority Rights and the Truman Administration (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1973), 67. 68. Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 529. 69. Du Bois, “My Relations with the NAACP.” 70. “Racial Unit Scored as Aiding Truman,” New York Times, September 9, 1948. 71. Du Bois, “My Relations with the NAACP.” 72. Louis T. Wright to W. E. B. Du Bois, September 13, 1948, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, mums312-b121-i059, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Library. 73. Quoted in Martin B. Duberman, Paul Robeson (New York: Knopf, 1989), 343. 74. Quoted in Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize, 107. 75. Quoted in Anderson, 109, 110.

Darda-BK.indd 229

12/1/21 9:22 PM

230

Notes to Chapter 2

76. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 121, 117. 77. Exec. Order No. 9808. 78. Quoted in White, Man Called White, 331. 79. Robert Bendiner, “Civil Rights—Fresh Start,” Nation, May 10, 1947, 536–37. White advised President Truman not to include more than a few Black people on his Committee on Civil Rights, believing that “the report would have little impact on public opinion if the committee were made up wholly or predominantly of especially interested persons like myself.” White, Man Called White, 332. 80. Quoted in William E. Juhnke, “President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights: The Interaction of Politics, Protest, and Presidential Advisory Commission,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 19, no. 3 (1989): 598. 81. Walter White, “Moral Advance Seen in Report by Committee on Civil Rights,” New York Herald Tribune, November 9, 1947. 82. President’s Committee on Civil Rights, To Secure These Rights: The Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1947), 3, ix, 17. 83. President’s Committee on Civil Rights, 100, 10, 99. 84. Philleo Nash, oral history interview by Jerry N. Hess, February 21, 1967, Harry  S. Truman Library and Museum, www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/oral-histo ries/nash12#transcript. 85. President’s Committee on Civil Rights, To Secure These Rights, x. 86. Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3. 87. Harry S. Truman, “Statement by the President Making Public a Report by the Civil Rights Committee,” October 29, 1947, American Presidency Project, www .presidency.ucsb.edu /documents/statement-the-president-making-public-report-the -civil-rights-committee. 88. See McCoy and Ruetten, Quest and Response, 92–93. 89. “Inalienable Rights,” Washington Post, October 30, 1947. 90. “Christmas Check-List,” New York Times, December 7, 1947. 91. White, Man Called White, 333. 92. See Roy Wilkins, Standing Fast: The Autobiography of Roy Wilkins, with Tom Mathews (New York: Viking, 1982), 200. 93. Clifford Clark to Harry S. Truman, memorandum, November 19, 1947, Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, www.trumanlibrary.gov/public/1948Campaign_Clifford Memo.pdf. Although Clark delivered the message to Truman, James Rowe, then serving on the Hoover Commission, wrote most of the forty-three-page memo. See E. J. Dionne, “Clark Clifford Ends Mystery over Memo,” Washington Post, May 22, 1991.

Darda-BK.indd 230

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Notes to Chapter 2

231

94. Harry S. Truman, “Special Message to the Congress on Civil Rights,” February 2, 1948, American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/spe cial-message-the-congress-civil-rights-1. 95. Du Bois, “Truman on Discrimination.” 96. Quoted in “Along the N.A.A.C.P. Battlefront,” Crisis, August 1948, 245; Wilkins, Standing Fast, 200. 97. J. Saunders Redding, “Report from India,” American Scholar, Autumn 1953, 441. 98. Redding, 442, 443. 99. Redding, 444. 100. J. Saunders Redding, review of Jim Crow, by Jesse Walter Dees Jr., and We Charge Genocide, by the Civil Rights Congress, Baltimore Afro-American, December 22, 1951. 101. Redding, “Report from India,” 449. 102. United Nations General Assembly, “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” December 9, 1948, www.un.org /en/genocidepre vention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1 _Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention %20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf. 103. We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief for a Crime of the United States Government against the Negro People (New York: Civil Rights Congress, 1951), 41. See Charles H. Martin, “Internationalizing ‘The American Dilemma’: The Civil Rights Congress and the 1951 Genocide Petition to the United Nations,” Journal of American Ethnic History 16, no. 4 (1997): 44. 104. See William L. Patterson, The Man Who Cried Genocide (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 197. 105. For more on Patterson’s time in Paris, see Gerald Horne, Black Revolutionary: William Patterson and the Globalization of the African American Freedom Struggle (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 125–40. 106. “The Genocide Trap,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 22, 1951. 107. “U.S. Accused in U.N. of Negro Genocide,” New York Times, December 18, 1951. 108. Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, January 7, 1952, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, www2 .gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/displaydoc.cfm?_y=1952& _f=md002111. 109. “Propaganda Facts of Life,” Pittsburgh Courier, December 15, 1951. 110. “2,500 Greet Left ist,” New York Times, January 28, 1952; James L. Hicks, “Patterson Charges U.S. Stole Passport,” Baltimore Afro-American, February 2, 1952. 111. We Charge Genocide, xi, 5. 112. Dylan Rodríguez, Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 119.

Darda-BK.indd 231

12/1/21 9:22 PM

232

Notes to Chapter 2

113. Patterson, Man Who Cried Genocide, 200. 114. We Charge Genocide, 33, 34. 115. United Nations General Assembly, “Crime of Genocide.” 116. We Charge Genocide, 3, 7. 117. In charging the United States with genocide, Patterson, cultural historian Christopher Vials argues, cast himself within a long tradition of Black antifascism dating back to the Double V campaign. That tradition, Vials writes, holds that “when a society creates a space of abjection for its racial others—a space capitalism requires— the space to which they have been consigned threatens to expand like a cancer, engulfing all in the telos of fascist genocide.” If white liberals thought that wartime nationalism could end racism, Black radicals believed the antithesis: that white people’s desire to maintain their dominance and accumulate wealth through racial theft drove the United States to wage ever more destructive wars, that racism and war fueled one another. Christopher Vials, Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight against Fascism in the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), 169. 118. Quoted in Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize, 192. 119. “Mrs. Sampson Asks No Extra Consideration,” Indiana Gazette, August 30, 1950. 120. Quoted in Martin, “Internationalizing ‘The American Dilemma,’” 46. 121. Walter White, “Genocide Charges Sure to Hurt U.S.,” Detroit Free Press, December 2, 1951. 122. Lorraine Hansberry, “Flag from a Kitchenette Window,” Masses and Mainstream, September 1950, 39. 123. Quoted in Imani Perry, Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (Boston: Beacon, 2018), 46. 124. See Lorraine Hansberry and Stan Steiner, “Cry for Colonial Freedom Jolts Phony Youth Conference,” Freedom, September 1951, 6. 125. Lorraine Hansberry, “‘Gold Coast’s’ Rulers Go, Ghana Moves to Freedom,” Freedom, December 1951, 2. 126. See Lorraine Hansberry, “Egyptian People Fight for Freedom,” Freedom, March 1952, 3; and Lorrain Hansberry, “‘Illegal’ Conference Shows Peace Is Key to Freedom,” Freedom, April 1952, 3. 127. Quoted in Lorrain Hansberry, “Women Voice Demands in Capital Sojourn,” Freedom, October 1951, 6. 128. Imani Perry, the cultural historian, legal scholar, and author of Looking for Lorraine, describes Hansberry as Du Bois’s and Robeson’s “political daughter,” bringing a feminist edge to their Pan-Africanism. Perry, Looking for Lorraine, 57. 129. Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post– Civil Rights Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 40.

Darda-BK.indd 232

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Notes to Chapter 2

233

130. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 15. 131. Patterson, Man Who Cried Genocide, 196. 132. Patterson, 194. 133. Sidney Hyman, The Lives of William Benton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 313. 134. Chester Bowles, Ambassador’s Report (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954), 2. 135. Bowles, 298–99, 299–300. 136. Bowles, 301, 304, 307. 137. Bowles, 31. 138. Quoted in Michael Krenn, Black Diplomacy: African Americans and the State Department, 1945–69 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 57. 139. Bowles, Ambassador’s Report, 31. 140. Chester Bowles, “Africa,” Collier’s, June 10, 1955, 44. 141. Anticolonial Afro-Asian connections did emerge, though. Von Eschen, the historian, observes that Washington’s recruitment of Black artists as cultural ambassadors to decolonizing Africa and Asia failed to “anticipate that artists and audiences would interact, generating multiple meanings and effects unanticipated by the State Department.” Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 24. 142. Historian Herbert Shapiro, the first to write about The Negro in American Life, dates the pamphlet to 1951 and describes it as a “countermeasure against any possible impact We Charge Genocide might have on world opinion.” Dudziak, the legal historian, later dated it to 1950 or 1951, noting that the USIS finalized one of numerous translations on December 15, 1951, right before Patterson delivered his petition to the United Nations, suggesting that it had distributed the English-language version well before news of We Charge Genocide reached Washington. Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 517n65; Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 268n5; Mary L. Dudziak, “Josephine Baker, Racial Protest, and the Cold War,” Journal of American History 81, no. 2 (1994): 567n75. 143. Negro in American Life, 7, 2. 144. Negro in American Life, 12, 11. 145. Negro in American Life, 13, 2. 146. Negro in American Life, 32. 147. Hall, “Long Civil Rights Movement,” 1251–54. 148. “We Charge Genocide,” Muhammad Speaks, June 1962. 149. Malcolm X, “The Black Revolution,” Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. George Breitman (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 53.

Darda-BK.indd 233

12/1/21 9:22 PM

234

Notes to Chapter 3

150. See Horne, Black Revolutionary, 194. 151. “There Has Been and Always Will Be Black Panthers,” Black Panther, May 4, 1969. 152. June Hilliard, “We Charge Genocide,” Black Panther, February 7, 1970. 153. William L. Patterson, foreword to We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief for a Crime of the United States Government against the Negro People (New York: International Publishers, 1970), ix, x. 154. See Robert L. Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), 88. Chapter 3: Antiracism as Education 1. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), xlvii. 2. Myrdal, 656. 3. Myrdal, 763. 4. James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Partisan Review 16, no. 6 (1949): 585, 582. 5. Baldwin, 578. 6. For more on how scholars, critics, and authors have read and misread the Black novel of the late 1940s, see Stephanie Brown, The Postwar African American Novel: Protest and Discontent, 1945–1950 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 7–40. Brown argues against sometimes one-dimensional accounts of the 1940s as a “golden age of ‘protest fiction’” in which Wright imitators dominated, attracting the ire of Baldwin and a wave of anticommunist critics (12). 7. See Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xiii–xv. 8. Mozell C. Hill and M. Carl Holman, preface to “The Negro in Literature: The Current Scene,” special issue, Phylon 11, no. 4 (1950): 296. 9. Thomas D. Jarrett, “Toward Unfettered Creativity: A Note on the Negro Novelist’s Coming of Age,” in “The Negro in Literature: The Current Scene,” special issue, Phylon 11, no. 4 (1950): 316. 10. Hugh M. Gloster, “Race and the Negro Writer,” in “The Negro in Literature: The Current Scene,” special issue, Phylon 11, no. 4 (1950): 369. 11. Langston Hughes, “Some Practical Observations: A Colloquy,” interview by the editors of Phylon, in “The Negro in Literature: The Current Scene,” special issue, Phylon 11, no. 4 (1950): 311. 12. Mary Helen Washington, the literature scholar, attributes the conservative bent of the Phylon issue to FBI surveillance and other Cold War tactics designed to

Darda-BK.indd 234

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Notes to Chapter 3

235

bring Black left ists into the anticommunist fold, observing that contributors “reproduce, almost verbatim, the official State Department line that racism ‘was a fastdisappearing aberration, capable of being overcome by talented and motivated individuals.’” Kenneth Warren identifies the issue instead as signaling a waning of “African American literature,” which he defines as a form bound to Jim Crow, a form that “was” rather than “is.” The contributors, which included novelists, should also be understood as answering and contributing to the constraining liberal channels into which their books were fed and consumed as totems of sociological truth and racial solutionism. Mary Helen Washington, The Other Blacklist: The African American Literature and Cultural Left of the 1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 41; Kenneth W. Warren, What Was African American Literature? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 44–80. 13. Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” 584, 583. 14. William Barrett, “What Is the ‘Liberal’ Mind?,” Partisan Review 16, no. 3 (1949): 333. 15. Richard Chase, “Liberalism and Literature,” Partisan Review 16, no. 3 (1949): 650. 16. Lionel Trilling, “A Rejoinder to Mr. Barrett,” Partisan Review 16, no. 3 (1949): 656. 17. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Viking, 1950), xv. 18. Louis Menand, introduction to The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society, by Lionel Trilling (New York: New York Review of Books, 2008), vii. 19. Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, The Races of Mankind (New York: Public Affairs Committee, 1943), 3. 20. Ruth Benedict, “Racism Is Vulnerable,” in “Intercultural Education,” ed. Louise M. Rosenblatt, special issue, English Journal 35, no. 6 (1946): 301, 303. 21. Wallace Stegner and the editors of Look, One Nation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1945), 15; Wallace Stegner, “Variations on a Theme by Conrad,” Yale Review 39, no. 3 (1950): 522. 22. Melamed describes the confusion between ascribing (race making) and describing (disinterested data collection) as the “trick of racialization,” in which the state constitutes “differential relations of value and valuelessness according to reigning orders while appearing to be (and being) a normative system that merely sorts human beings according to categories of difference.” This book identifies the time measure of racial liberalism—linear, forward marching, accelerated relative to earlier liberal racial ideologies with a gaze on the not-too-distant future—as integral to that trick, resigning racial ascribing to another, earlier time and assuming racial describing to be a

Darda-BK.indd 235

12/1/21 9:22 PM

236

Notes to Chapter 3

means to a future end. The race novel instilled that trick of the clock like nothing else. Melamed, Represent and Destroy, 2, 11. 23. W. E. B. Du Bois to Edwin Embree, April 24, 1935, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, mums312-b076-i047, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Library. 24. Daniel Schulman, introduction to A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund, ed. Daniel Schulman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 13. 25. Zora Neale Hurston, “What White Publishers Won’t Print,” Negro Digest, November 1949, 86. 26. Houston A. Baker Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 69. 27. Washington, Other Blacklist, 164; James Zeigler, Red Scare Racism and Cold War Black Radicalism (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015), xix. 28. Gregory S. Jay, White Writers, Race Matters: Fictions of Racial Liberalism from Stowe to Stockett (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 15. 29. Melamed, Represent and Destroy, 47. 30. Langston Hughes, “Simple and the Rosenwald Fund,” Chicago Defender, June 12, 1948. 31. Edwin R. Embree and Julia Waxman, Investment in People: The Story of the Julius Rosenwald Fund (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949), 223. 32. Peter M. Ascoli, Julius Rosenwald: The Man Who Built Sears, Roebuck and Advanced the Cause of Black Education in the American South (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 2. 33. Edwin R. Embree, “The Business of Giving Away Money,” Harper’s, August 1930, 329. 34. Embree, 328. 35. Ascoli, Julius Rosenwald, 363; Embree and Waxman, Investment in People, 25. 36. Quoted in Alfred Perkins, Edwin Rogers Embree: The Julius Rosenwald Fund, Foundation Philanthropy, and American Race Relations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 45. 37. Edwin R. Embree, “Timid Billions,” Harper’s, March 1949, 37. 38. Quoted in Perkins, Edwin Rogers Embree, 155. 39. For a list of all 862 Rosenwald fellows, see Embree and Waxman, Investment in People, 238–61. 40. Embree and Waxman, 148. 41. Embree and Waxman, 172.

Darda-BK.indd 236

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Notes to Chapter 3

237

42. See Edwin R. Embree, American Negroes: A Handbook (New York: John Day, 1942), 70–74; and Edwin R. Embree, Brown Americans: The Story of a Tenth of the Nation (New York: Viking, 1943), 235–40. 43. Embree, “Timid Billions,” 29. 44. John Egerton, Speak Now against the Day: The Generation before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York: Knopf, 1994), 95. 45. See Embree and Waxman, Investment in People, 145. 46. Embree, American Negroes, 52. 47. Quoted in Walter A. Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938–1987 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 235. 48. Edwin Embree to W. E. B. Du Bois, February 16, 1941, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, mums312-b060-i409, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Library. 49. See Perkins, Edwin Rogers Embree, 252. 50. Charles S. Johnson, introduction to Directory of Agencies in Race Relations: National, State, and Local (Chicago: Julius Rosenwald Fund, 1945), 3. 51. Quoted in Ira De A. Reid, “Julius Rosenwald Fund, 1917–1948,” Phylon 9, no. 3 (1948): 195. 52. Gunnar Myrdal, “Social Trends in America and Strategic Approaches to the Negro Problem,” Phylon 9, no. 3 (1948): 196. 53. Lillian Smith, “The Artist and the Dream,” Phylon 9, no. 3 (1948): 233. 54. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Race Relations in the United States, 1917–1947,” Phylon 9, no. 3 (1948): 234. 55. Du Bois, 245, 246. 56. Dorothy Canfield Fisher to Richard Wright, July 1, 1944, box 97, folder 1333, Richard Wright Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. 57. See Melamed, Represent and Destroy, 67–68. 58. Fisher to Wright, July 1, 1944. 59. Dorothy Canfield Fisher to Richard Wright, July 12, 1944, box 97, folder 1333, Richard Wright Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. 60. Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1945), 227. 61. For more on Wright’s negotiations with the Book-of-the-Month Club over revisions to “American Hunger”/Black Boy, see Arnold Rampersad, “Notes on the Text,” in Later Works: “Black Boy (American Hunger),” “The Outsider,” by Richard Wright (New York: Library of America, 1991), 868–71. 62. Juliana Spahr, Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 16.

Darda-BK.indd 237

12/1/21 9:22 PM

238

Notes to Chapter 3

63. Dorothy Canfield Fisher, “American Readers and Books,” American Scholar 13, no. 2 (1944): 191. 64. The cultural historian Janice Radway writes that the Book-of-the-Month Club encouraged “a reading experience that promoted interest in an object or situation beyond the self” and nurtured “hope and the possibility of commitment to the future”—a future without racism, built one book at a time. Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 288. 65. Dorothy Canfield Fisher, introduction to Native Son, by Richard Wright (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940), x. 66. Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 98. 67. Shirley Graham to W. E. B. Du Bois, March 6, 1940, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, mums312-b091-i366, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Library; Langston Hughes, “The Need for Heroes,” Crisis, June 1941, 184. 68. Zora Neale Hurston to Burton Rascoe, September 8, 1944, in Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, ed. Carla Kaplan (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 503. 69. Hurston, “White Publishers,” 88. 70. Zora Neale Hurston, “Why the Negro Won’t Buy Communism,” American Legion Magazine, June 1951, 58. 71. See Zora Neale Hurston, “Court Order Can’t Make Races Mix,” Orlando Sentinel, August 11, 1955. 72. Zora Neale Hurston to Jean Parker Waterbury, May 1, 1951, in Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, ed. Carla Kaplan (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 655, 656. 73. Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 78. 74. See Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States (New York: Viking, 1941), 6. 75. Louis Wirth, “Postwar Political and Social Conditions and Higher Education,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, no. 231 (1944): 162, 157. 76. Louis Wirth, “Consensus and Mass Communication,” American Sociological Review 13, no. 1 (1944): 14–15. 77. W. Lloyd Warner, Buford H. Junker, and Walter A. Adams, Color and Human Nature (Washington, DC: American Council on Education, 1941), xi. 78. Warner, Junker, and Adams, xi–xii. 79. Warner, Junker, and Adams, 65n7.

Darda-BK.indd 238

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Notes to Chapter 3

239

80. Hilda Taba and Howard E. Wilson, “Intergroup Education through the School Curriculum,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, no. 244 (1946): 21. 81. Richard Wright, introduction to Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945), xvii, xviii. 82. Wright, xxiii, xxiv. 83. Richard Wright, “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940), 19. 84. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed, 1983), 428. For a thorough account of the lumpenproletariat in the fiction of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Margaret Walker, see Nathaniel Mills, Ragged Revolutionaries: The Lumpenproletariat and African American Marxism in Depression-Era Literature (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2017). 85. Wright, “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” 20. 86. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Desegregating American Literary Studies,” in Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age, ed. Emory Elliott, Louis Freitas Caton, and Jeff rey Rhyne (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 125. 87. Zora Neale Hurston to Carl Van Vechten, November 2, 1942, in Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, ed. Carla Kaplan (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 467. 88. Bucklin Moon, preface to Primer for White Folks, ed. Bucklin Moon (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1945), xi. 89. Moon, xi, xii. 90. Lillian Smith, “Addressed to White Liberals,” in Primer for White Folks, ed. Bucklin Moon (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1945), 485, 487. 91. Anne C. Loveland, Lillian Smith: A Southerner Confronting the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 27. 92. Lillian Smith, “One More Sigh for the Good Old South,” review of Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell, Pseudopodia 1, no. 3 (1936): 15, 6. 93. Lillian Smith and Paula Snelling, “Statement of Plan of Work,” ca. December 1938, box 447, fi le 11, Julius Rosenwald Fund Archives, Special Collections and Archives, Fisk University Library. 94. Lillian Smith and Paula Snelling, “Plans for Continuation of Work,” February 14, 1940, box 447, fi le 11, Julius Rosenwald Fund Archives, Special Collections and Archives, Fisk University Library. 95. Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (New York: Norton, 1949), 215. 96. See Lillian Smith, How Am I to Be Heard? Letters of Lillian Smith, ed. Margaret Rose Gladney (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 57.

Darda-BK.indd 239

12/1/21 9:22 PM

240

Notes to Chapter 3

97. Lillian Smith, “Growing into Freedom,” Common Ground, Autumn 1943, 51. 98. Lillian Smith, “Personal History of Strange Fruit: A Statement of Purposes and Intentions,” Saturday Review of Literature, February 17, 1945, 10. 99. Douglas C. Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 35, 36. 100. Lillian Smith, “Two Men and a Bargain: A Parable of the Solid South,” South Today 7, no. 3 (1943): 14. 101. Lillian Smith, “Lillian Smith Answers Some Questions about Strange Fruit,” Georgia Review 66, no. 3 (2012): 476. See also Smith, How Am I to Be Heard?, 71. 102. Lillian Smith, Strange Fruit (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1944), 2, 69. 103. Smith, 99, 23. 104. Smith, 40. 105. Smith, 74. 106. Lillian Smith, “Addressed to Intelligent White Southerners,” South Today 7, no. 2 (1942–43): 35, 37. See Dorothy Elvidge to Paula Snelling, May 15, 1944, box 447, fi le 11, Julius Rosenwald Fund Archives, Special Collections and Archives, Fisk University Library. 107. Smith, “Intelligent White Southerners,” 39. 108. Frances Mendelson, “Psychology Teaching Stressed at Lillian Smith’s Girls’ Camp,” New York Herald Tribune, August 27, 1944. 109. Wright, “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” 11, 13. 110. Willard Motley, preface to “Leave without Illusions” (Knock on Any Door), 1943, box 16, folder 1, Willard Motley Papers, Rare Books and Special Collections, Northern Illinois University Libraries. 111. Jarrett, “Toward Unfettered Creativity,” 315. 112. Robert A. Brown, The Negro Novel in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958), 179. 113. Quoted in Brown, Postwar African American Novel, 37. 114. Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940), 5. 115. Willard Motley, Knock on Any Door (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1947), 437. 116. Willard Motley, “Who Made This Boy a Murderer?,” Look, September 30, 1947, 21. 117. Stephanie Li, Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 6; Alan M. Wald, American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 201.

Darda-BK.indd 240

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Notes to Chapter 3

241

Literature scholar John Charles observes of white life novels, including Knock on Any Door, that their authors’ engagement with white suffering should be understood not as a naive catering to white readers but as strategic “enactments of sympathy” that established their “moral and cultural authority” over white people. John C. Charles, Abandoning the Black Hero: Sympathy and Privacy in the Postwar African American WhiteLife Novel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 6. 118. James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (Boston: Sherman, French, 1912), 20. See also David Roediger, ed., Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (New York: Schocken, 1998). 119. Quoted in Horace R. Cayton, “Literary Expansion: Another Best-Seller by a Negro Is Not of the Negro or His Environs,” Pittsburgh Courier, May 24, 1947. 120. Willard Motley, diary, January 30, 1933, box 3, folder 3, Willard Motley Papers, Rare Books and Special Collections, Northern Illinois University Libraries. 121. Willard Motley, “I Discover I’m a Negro,” 1940, box 22, folder 59, Willard Motley Papers, Rare Books and Special Collections, Northern Illinois University Libraries; Willard Motley, “The Almost White Boy,” in Soon, One Morning: New Writing by American Negroes, 1940–1962, ed. Herbert Hill (New York: Knopf, 1963), 393. 122. Hill and Holman, preface to “The Negro in Literature,” 296. 123. Willard Motley, Rosenwald Fund fellowship application, December 11, 1945, box 436, fi le 6, Julius Rosenwald Fund Archives, Special Collections and Archives, Fisk University Library. 124. Dorothy Andrews, letter of reference for Willard Motley, ca. 1945, box 436, fi le 6, Julius Rosenwald Fund Archives, Special Collections and Archives, Fisk University Library. 125. Julius Rosenwald Fund, untitled promotional statement, ca. 1947, box 436, fi le 6, Julius Rosenwald Fund Archives, Special Collections and Archives, Fisk University Library. 126. Horace R. Cayton, “A Terrifying Cross Section of Chicago,” review of Knock on Any Door, by Willard Motley, Chicago Daily Tribune, May 4, 1947. 127. Horace R. Cayton, “The Known City,” New Republic, May 12, 1947, 30. 128. Wright, “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” 29–30. 129. Ruth Benedict, “Anthropology and the Humanities,” American Anthropology 50, no. 4 (1948): 585, 591. 130. Benedict, “Racism Is Vulnerable,” 302, 303. 131. For more on the cultural gifts movement, in which “native-born whites and ethnic leaders worked together to fashion arguments for cultural persistence rather than forced assimilation” (3), see Diana Selig, Americans All: The Cultural Gifts Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

Darda-BK.indd 241

12/1/21 9:22 PM

242

Notes to Chapter 4

132. Hilda Taba et al., Literature for Human Understanding (Washington, DC: American Council on Education, 1948), 4, 12. 133. See Evalene P. Jackson, “Effects of Reading upon Attitudes toward the Negro Race,” Library Quarterly 14, no. 1 (1944): 47–54. 134. Floss Ann Turner, “Unity through Children’s Literature,” Elementary English Review 23, no. 5 (1946): 189. 135. Samuel Tenenbaum, Why Men Hate (New York: Beechhurst Press, 1947), 302, 304, 300. 136. Charles I. Glicksberg, “Intercultural Education: Utopia or Reality,” Common Ground 6, no. 4 (1946): 63, 65. 137. See Zoë Burkholder, Color in the Classroom: How American Schools Taught Race, 1900–1954 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 137–70. 138. Louise M. Rosenblatt, preface to “Intercultural Education,” ed. Louise M. Rosenblatt, special issue, English Journal 35, no. 6 (1946): 285. 139. Marjorie B. Smiley et al., “Intercultural Education in English Classrooms,” in “Intercultural Education,” ed. Louise M. Rosenblatt, special issue, English Journal 35, no. 6 (1946): 343. 140. Alain Locke, “The Negro Minority in American Literature,” in “Intercultural Education,” ed. Louise M. Rosenblatt, special issue, English Journal 35, no. 6 (1946): 319. 141. Charles K. Cummings Jr., “First Step for the Teacher,” in “Intercultural Education,” ed. Louise M. Rosenblatt, special issue, English Journal 35, no. 6 (1946): 333. 142. Brochure for Negro History Bulletin (Washington, DC: Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1937), 1, 2. 143. “Working without Knowledge,” Negro History Bulletin 9, no. 4 (1946): 96. Chapter 4: Antiracism as Integration 1. Briggs v. Elliott, No. 101, 1952 U.S. S. Ct. Briefs 86, 87 (E.D.S.C. June 3, 1952). 2. Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, No. 191, 1952 U.S. S. Ct. Briefs 263, 264 (E.D. Va. July 12, 1952). 3. Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, 103 F. Supp. 337, 340 (E.D. Va. 1952). 4. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483, 494 (1954). 5. Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 136. 6. Max Deutscher and Isidor Chein, “The Psychological Effects of Enforced Segregation: A Survey of Social Science Opinion,” Journal of Psychology 26, no. 2 (1948): 265.

Darda-BK.indd 242

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Notes to Chapter 4

243

7. Theodore Brameld, “Educational Costs,” in Discrimination and National Welfare, ed. R. M. MacIver (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949), 44. 8. James Reston, “A Sociological Decision,” New York Times, May 17, 1954. 9. “Court Said to End ‘a Sense of Guilt,’” New York Times, May 18, 1954. 10. “Emancipation,” Washington Post, May 18, 1954. 11. Brown, 347 U.S. at 495n11. 12. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), 615, 927. 13. Pauli Murray, “Should the Civil Rights Cases and Plessy v. Ferguson Be Overruled?,” May 1944, box 84, folder 1467, Pauli Murray Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, 11. 14. Myrdal, American Dilemma, xlv. 15. Kenneth B. Clark, “Effect of Prejudice and Discrimination on Personality Development,” White House Conference on Children and Youth, 1950, 12, 13. 16. Clark, 13. 17. Briggs v. Elliott, 98 F. Supp. 529, 548 (E.D.S.C. 1951). 18. Davis, No. 191, 1952 U.S. S. Ct. Briefs at 498. 19. For detailed accounts of the emergence of the liberal Black-damage narrative, see Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 49–53; Michael E. Staub, The Mismeasure of Minds: Debating Race and Intelligence between Brown and “The Bell Curve” (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 6–9; and Scott, Contempt and Pity, 119–36. For more on the Cold War motivation behind and significance of the Brown decision, see, Derrick A. Bell Jr., “Brown v. Board of Education and the InterestConvergence Dilemma,” Harvard Law Review 93, no. 3 (1980): 518–33; Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 79–114; Lani Guinier, “From Racial Liberalism to Racial Literacy: Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Divergence Dilemma,” Journal of American History 91, no. 1 (2004): 92–118; and Kimberley L. Phillips, War! What Is It Good For? Black Freedom Struggles and the U.S. Military from World War II to Iraq (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 112–51. 20. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 2–3. 21. The legal scholar Charles Ogletree argues that Brown II, the Supreme Court’s 1955 gradualist desegregation order, “created the method and manner in which America would resist the mandate of the equality ideal” and guaranteed that the “legal imperative” of the 1954 decision would not translate into a “social imperative.” “Brown II was a solid victory for white southerners,” a ruling that organized and “invited delay,”

Darda-BK.indd 243

12/1/21 9:22 PM

244

Notes to Chapter 4

Michael Klarman, the legal historian, adds. Charles J. Ogletree Jr., All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half Century of Brown v. Board of Education (New York: Norton, 2004), 306; Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 338, 317. For an account of Brown II not as an accommodation of massive resistance but a gesture of deference to “the property interest in whiteness,” see Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review (1993): 1754–56. 22. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1950), 222. 23. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Portrait of the Antisemite,” trans. Mary Guggenheim, Partisan Review 13, no. 2 (1946): 177, 177–78. 24. Eduard Bloch, “My Patient, Hitler,” as told to J. D. Ratcliff, Collier’s, March 15, 1941, 35, 36. 25. Eduard Bloch, “My Patient, Hitler,” as told to J. D. Ratcliff, Collier’s, March 22, 1941, 69; Bloch, “My Patient, Hitler, ” March 15, 1941, 36. 26. Bloch, “My Patient, Hitler,” March 22, 1941, 69, 70. 27. Quoted in Forrest G. Robinson, Love’s Story Told: A Life of Henry A. Murray (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 229. 28. Henry A. Murray et al. Explorations in Personality: A Clinical and Experimental Study of Fifty Men of College Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938), 4. 29. W. H. D. Vernon, “Hitler, the Man—Notes for a Case History,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 37, no. 3 (1942): 306, 307. 30. Henry A. Murray to Lewis Mumford, November 30, 1942, in In Old Friendship: The Correspondence of Lewis Mumford and Henry A. Murray, 1928–1981, ed. Frank G. Novak Jr. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 170. 31. Henry A. Murray, “Analysis of the Personality of Adolf Hitler” (Office of Strategic Services, 1943), 3, 1. 32. H. Murray, 47, 52, 8. 33. See Lawrence J. Friedman, Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson (New York: Scribner, 1999), 109–10. 34. Erik H. Erikson, “Hitler’s Imagery and German Youth,” Psychiatry 5, no. 4 (1942): 476, 486. 35. Erikson, 491. 36. Quoted in Detlev Clausen, Theodor Adorno: One Last Genius, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2008), 116. 37. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1974), 50. 38. Theodor Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950), 5.

Darda-BK.indd 244

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Notes to Chapter 4

245

39. Adorno et al., 223, 228, 816. 40. Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing (New York: Doubleday, 2018), 157. 41. Adorno et al., Authoritarian Personality, 973, 975. 42. See Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (New York: Little, Brown, 1973), 131, 227; Adorno et al., Authoritarian Personality, 781, 782. 43. Gordon W. Allport, “Autobiography,” in A History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 5, ed. Edwin G. Boring and Gardner Lindzey (Boston: Appleton-CenturyCrofts, 1967), 7, 13. 44. Allport, 8. 45. Gordon W. Allport, “The Psychologist’s Frame of Reference,” Psychological Bulletin 37, no. 1 (1940): 16, 26. 46. Gordon W. Allport, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (New York: Henry Holt, 1937), viii. 47. Allport, “Psychologist’s Frame of Reference,” 1. 48. Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1954), 395, 125. 49. Gordon W. Allport, “The Bigot in Our Midst: An Analysis of His Psychology,” Commonweal, October 6, 1954, 585. 50. Gordon W. Allport and Bernard M. Kramer, “Some Roots of Prejudice,” Journal of Psychology 22, no. 1 (1946): 10, 21. 51. Allport, Nature of Prejudice, 396, 438, 300. 52. P. Murray, “Overruled,” 51, 31, 25. 53. See Rosalind Rosenberg, Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 132, 171. 54. P. Murray, “Overruled,” n.p. 55. Pauli Murray, “An American Credo,” Common Ground, Winter 1945, 23. Murray contributed to the NAACP’s antisegregation crusade again in 1951, when she and the Woman’s Division of Christian Service of the Methodist Church released States’ Laws on Race and Color, an exhaustive guide to state segregation and antidiscrimination laws. Thurgood Marshall later referred to it, at least in Murray’s telling, as the “bible” of civil rights litigation. Pauli Murray, Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 289. 56. Gordon W. Allport, The Resolution of Intergroup Tensions (New York: National Conference of Christians and Jews, 1952), 15, 16. 57. Allport and Kramer, “Some Roots of Prejudice,” 23.

Darda-BK.indd 245

12/1/21 9:22 PM

246

Notes to Chapter 4

58. Allport, Nature of Prejudice, 429. 59. Allport, 474, 477. 60. Brown, 347 U.S. at 494. 61. Allport, Resolution of Intergroup Tensions, 7. 62. Quoted in “Erik Erikson: The Quest for Identity,” Newsweek, December 21, 1970, 84. 63. Erik H. Erikson, “Growth and Crises of the ‘Healthy Personality,’” in Symposium on the Healthy Personality, Supplement II: Problems of Infancy and Childhood, ed. Milton J. E. Senn (New York: Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, 1950), 97, 98. 64. Erikson, Childhood and Society, 215. 65. Erikson, 218. See Friedman, Identity’s Architect, 227. 66. Erikson, Childhood and Society, 12. 67. Erikson, 244, 245. 68. Erikson, 267, 283. 69. Allport, Nature of Prejudice, 429, 432. 70. Erikson, Childhood and Society, 258, 164. 71. A desire for the market resources of decolonizing nations, Medovoi writes, drove the United States to announce itself as “their historical precursor, and thus a postrevolutionary society.” Erikson’s allegorical model of national growth—from childhood to adolescence to mature adulthood—encouraged Cold Warriors to imagine themselves as living in the third world’s ideal future. Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 13. 72. E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro in American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 701. 73. For more on the White House Conference on Children and Youth from the first Roosevelt administration to Eisenhower, see Marilyn Irvin Holt, Cold War Kids: Politics and Childhood in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014), 12–47. For an account of the 1950 conference, see Dean W. Roberts, “Highlights of the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth,” American Journal of Public Health 41, no. 1 (1951): 96–99. 74. A Healthy Personality for Every Child: A Digest of the Fact Finding Report to the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth (Raleigh, NC: Health Publications Institute, 1951), 2. 75. Helen Leland Witmer and Ruth Kotinsky, eds., Personality in the Making: The Fact-Finding Report of the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1952), x, xviii. 76. Harry S. Truman, “Address before the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth,” December 5, 1950, American Presidency Project, www.presi

Darda-BK.indd 246

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Notes to Chapter 4

247

dency.ucsb.edu /documents/address-before-the-midcentury-white-house-conference -children-and-youth. 77. Harry S. Truman, “Remarks to Members of the National Committee for the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth,” September 8, 1949, American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-mem bers-the-national-committee-for-the-midcentury-white-house-conference-children. 78. Truman, “Address.” 79. Grieve identifies how the child allowed government officials to reframe Cold War decision making as “apolitical and impartial,” carried out in the interest of the “neutral” child, not the anticommunist state. Victoria M. Grieve, Little Cold Warriors: American Childhood in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 3. 80. Truman, “Remarks.” 81. Feldstein observes that scholars often overlook the gender conservatism of racial liberalism because gender tends to serve as the “point of entry” for studies of white-mother blaming while race serves that function for Black-mother blaming, obscuring the larger gendered structure of racial liberalism. Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1935–1960 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 61. 82. Truman, “Address.” 83. “Recommendations of the White House Conference on Children and Youth,” Social Security Bulletin 14, no. 2 (1951): 11. 84. Witmer and Kotinsky, Personality in the Making, 7, 25. 85. Witmer and Kotinsky, 239. 86. See Zoë Burkholder, Color in the Classroom: How American Schools Taught Race, 1900–1954 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 137–70. 87. Witmer and Kotinsky, Personality in the Making, 147. 88. Clark, “Effect of Prejudice,” 126, 130. 89. Clark, 161, 160. 90. Earl Warren, “Blessings of Liberty,” Washington University Law Quarterly 1955, no. 2 (1955): 105. 91. Earl Warren, “The New Home of the Profession: The American Bar Center Dedication Address,” American Bar Association Journal 40, no. 11 (1955): 956. 92. Warren, “Blessings of Liberty,” 106, 107. 93. Sanjay Mody, “Brown Footnote Eleven in Historical Context: Social Science and the Supreme Court’s Quest for Legitimacy,” Stanford Law Review 54, no. 4 (2002): 823. 94. Brown, 347 U.S. at 493, 494. 95. “The Effects of Segregation and the Consequences of Desegregation: A Social Science Statement,” appendix to appellants’ briefs, Brown v. Board of Education of

Darda-BK.indd 247

12/1/21 9:22 PM

248

Notes to Chapter 4

Topeka, in Landmark Briefs and Arguments of the Supreme Court of the United States, vol. 49, ed. Philip B. Kurland and Gerhard Casper (Arlington, VA: University Publications of America, 1975), 42, 46, 48, 52. 96. Statement as to jurisdiction, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, in Landmark Briefs and Arguments of the Supreme Court of the United States, vol. 49, ed. Philip  B. Kurland and Gerhard Casper (Arlington, VA: University Publications of America, 1975), 13–14, 14. 97. Oral argument, Briggs v. Elliott, December 10, 1952, in Landmark Briefs and Arguments of the Supreme Court of the United States, vol. 49, ed. Philip B. Kurland and Gerhard Casper (Arlington, VA: University Publications of America, 1975), 338. 98. Deutscher and Chein, “Psychological Effects,” 265. 99. Quoted in Deutscher and Chein, 277. 100. Isidor Chein, “What Are the Psychological Effects of Segregation under Conditions of Equal Facilities?,” International Journal of Opinion and Attitude Research 3, no. 2 (1949): 230. 101. See oral argument, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, December 10, 1952, in Landmark Briefs and Arguments of the Supreme Court of the United States, vol. 49, ed. Philip B. Kurland and Gerhard Casper (Arlington, VA: University Publications of America, 1975), 374. 102. “Effects of Segregation,” 48, 49. 103. Brief on behalf of American Civil Liberties Union, American Ethical Union, American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, Japanese American Citizens League, and Unitarian Fellowship for Social Justice as amicus curiae, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, in Landmark Briefs and Arguments of the Supreme Court of the United States, vol. 49, ed. Philip B. Kurland and Gerhard Casper (Arlington, VA: University Publications of America, 1975), 172. 104. Brief for the United States as amicus curiae, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, in Landmark Briefs and Arguments of the Supreme Court of the United States, vol. 49, ed. Philip B. Kurland and Gerhard Casper (Arlington, VA: University Publications of America, 1975), 121, 132, 133, 121, 146. 105. Earl Warren, “Chief Justice John Marshall: A Heritage of Freedom and Stability,” American Bar Association Journal 41, no. 11 (1955): 1010. 106. Brief for the United States, 128, 147. 107. Pauli Murray, “Justice Harlan’s Contribution to Segregation Outlawing Acknowledged,” letter to the editor, New York Times, May 21, 1954. 108. Pauli Murray, “On the Receiving End,” Baltimore Afro-American, March 9, 1946.

Darda-BK.indd 248

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Notes to Chapter 4

249

109. Klarman, Jim Crow to Civil Rights, 468. 110. Jack M. Balkin, “Brown v. Board of Education: A Critical Introduction,” in What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said: The Nation’s Top Legal Experts Rewrite America’s Landmark Civil Rights Decision, ed. Jack M. Balkin (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 24. 111. Quoted in Cass R. Sunstein, “Did Brown Matter?,” New Yorker, May 3, 2004, 103; Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 349 U.S. 294, 300, 301 (1955). 112. Quoted in Bernard Schwartz, The Unpublished Opinions of the Warren Court (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 368. 113. Francis Thompson, “The Hound of Heaven” (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1922), 45. 114. Brief for appellants on further reargument, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, in Landmark Briefs and Arguments of the Supreme Court of the United States, vol. 49A, ed. Philip B. Kurland and Gerhard Casper (Arlington, VA: University Publications of America, 1975), 646, 657. 115. Oral argument, Briggs v. Elliott and Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, December 8, 1953, in Landmark Briefs and Arguments of the Supreme Court of the United States, vol. 49A, ed. Philip B. Kurland and Gerhard Casper (Arlington, VA: University Publications of America, 1975), 538, 543. 116. Brief for appellants, 647. 117. Brief for the United States on the further argument of the questions of relief, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, in Landmark Briefs and Arguments of the Supreme Court of the United States, vol. 49A, ed. Philip B. Kurland and Gerhard Casper (Arlington, VA: University Publications of America, 1975), 747, 749. 118. Robert Penn Warren, Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South (New York: Random House, 1956), 65, 64. 119. Kenneth B. Clark, “The Social Scientists, the Brown Decision, and Contemporary Confusion,” in Argument: The Oral Argument before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1952–55, ed. Leon Friedman (New York: Chelsea House, 1969), xxxvii, xxxiii. 120. H. Murray, “Analysis,” 8. 121. Loren Miller, The Petitioners: The Story of the Supreme Court of the United States and the Negro (New York: Pantheon, 1966), 351. 122. Ogletree, All Deliberate Speed, xiii. 123. Clark, “Social Scientists,” xli, xl. 124. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 85.

Darda-BK.indd 249

12/1/21 9:22 PM

250

Notes to Chapter 5

Chapter 5: Antiracism as Color Blindness 1. “Why ‘Passing’ Is Passing Out,” Jet, July 17, 1952, 13. 2. Janice Kingslow, “I Refuse to Pass,” Negro Digest, May 1950, 22–31; “I’m Through with Passing,” Ebony, March 1951, 22–27; “Is Passing a Dying Fad?,” Color, April 1957, 46–49; “Have Negroes Stopped Passing?,” Jet, September 13, 1956, 10–12. 3. St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945), 160, 163, 171. 4. Historian Allyson Hobbs argues that what Black families lost when they crossed over has gone unacknowledged in histories that stress the material gains of going white. “Racial passing is an exile, sometimes chosen, sometimes not,” she writes. “The core issue of passing is not becoming what you pass for, but losing what you pass away from.” Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 4, 18. 5. “Why ‘Passing’ Is Passing Out,” 16, 14. 6. Bosley Crowther, “‘Lost Boundaries,’ Racial Study with Mel Ferrer in Lead, New Feature at Astor,” New York Times, July 1, 1949. 7. For more on Albert Johnston and Lost Boundaries, see Hobbs, Chosen Exile, 219–58. The liberal fanfare that surrounded the Ferrer fi lm couldn’t save Johnston’s job. He found his contract terminated in 1953, and he and his wife left New England for Hawaii. 8. Doris Black, “How Passing Passed Out,” Sepia, December 1972, 66. 9. Black, 66. 10. James MacGregor, “White-Collar Blacks: Big Companies Battle to Recruit Negroes,” Wall Street Journal, July 23, 1969. 11. Black, “How Passing Passed Out,” 66. 12. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 164. 13. Langston Hughes, “Who’s Passing for Who?,” in Laughing to Keep from Crying (New York: Holt, 1952), 7. Hughes contributed “Who’s Passing for Who?” to the short-lived magazine Negro Story in late 1945, but he had described a finished version of it in a letter to Carl Van Vechton in October 1941. See Langston Hughes to Carl Van Vechten, October 30, 1941, in Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925–1964, ed. Emily Bernard (New York: Knopf, 2001), 193–95. 14. See Eric Lott, “White Like Me: Racial Cross Dressing and the Construction of American Whiteness,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 474–95; Eric Lott, Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 119–38; Gayle Wald, Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,

Darda-BK.indd 250

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Notes to Chapter 5

251

2000), 152–81; Laura Browder, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 203–30; Baz Dreisinger, Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008); Michael Szalay, Hip Figures: A Literary History of the Democratic Party (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012); and Alisha Gaines, Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 15. John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 2. 16. Grace Halsell, Soul Sister (New York: World Publishing, 1969), 203. 17. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 9, 5. 18. Dreisinger, Near Black, 8. 19. Gaines, Black for a Day, 8. 20. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967), 13. 21. Fanon, 12. 22. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 19. 23. W. L. White, “Lost Boundaries,” Reader’s Digest, December 1947, 135–54. 24. W. L. White, Lost Boundaries (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948), 47, 46. 25. White, 44. 26. White, 88, 91. 27. Walter White, “On the Tragedy of the Color Line,” review of Lost Boundaries, by W. L. White, New York Times, March 28, 1948. 28. Bill Steigerwald, “Undercover Mission: Sprigle’s Secret Journey,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 2, 1998. 29. Ray Sprigle, In the Land of Jim Crow (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949), 20, 7. 30. Ray Sprigle, “Sprigle, Mildly Sun-Tanned, Encounters Many Negroes with Lighter Skin Than His,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 10, 1948. 31. Ray Sprigle, “Discrimination Is Annoying in North; It’s Bloodstained Tragedy in Dixie,” Pittsburgh Courier, August 28, 1948. 32. Sprigle, Land of Jim Crow, 2. 33. Sprigle, 15. 34. Sprigle, 68, 1. 35. Margaret Halsey, foreword to In the Land of Jim Crow, by Ray Sprigle (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949), viii. 36. Sprigle, Land of Jim Crow, 145, 29.

Darda-BK.indd 251

12/1/21 9:22 PM

252

Notes to Chapter 5

37. Sprigle, 145. 38. Sprigle, 78. 39. Sprigle, 215. 40. Sprigle, 210. 41. Quoted in “What Should We Do about Race Segregation?,” Bulletin of “America’s Town Meeting of the Air,” November 9, 1948, 4, 5. 42. “What Should We Do?,” 13, 11, 8. 43. See Barbara Dianne Savage, Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938–1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 241. Historian Barbara Savage remarks that “although Sprigle had assumed the racial status of the ‘Negro’ and wanted to speak on behalf of the race, apparently he had no desire to suffer the economic consequences of having that identity” (241). White guests on Town Meeting received a minimum of $200 in the mid-1940s, she reveals, while Richard Wright received $150 and Langston Hughes a mere $75. Charles Taft, head of the Federal Council of Churches and the youngest child of President William Howard Taft, received $1,000 as a guest on the show in 1947 (347n149). 44. John Howard Griffin, journal, 1958–59, box 33, folder 828, John Howard Griffin Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries, 982, 977. 45. Griffin, 982, 993, 987. Literature scholar Laura Browder observes that Griffi n rendered Blackness as “a spiritual condition—the condition, that is, of living in hell.” He also characterized it as an obstacle to transcendence, a consciousness to overcome. Browder, Slippery Characters, 215. 46. Griffin, journal, 1001, 983. 47. Griffin, 984. 48. Norman Mailer, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” Dissent, Summer 1957, 279. 49. Griffin, journal, 985, 990. 50. Griffin did describe in Black Like Me how he struggled to write a letter to his wife, believing that he couldn’t, as a Black man, address a white woman. “The observing self saw the Negro, surrounded by the sounds and smells of the ghetto, write ‘Darling’ to a white woman,” Griffin wrote, as if straining under his own white gaze. “The chains of my blackness would not allow me to go on.” Griffin, Black Like Me, 71–72. 51. John Howard Griffin, A Time to Be Human (New York: Macmillan, 1977), 24. 52. Griffin, journal, 992. 53. John Howard Griffin, Scattered Shadows: A Memoir of Blindness and Vision (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004), 18.

Darda-BK.indd 252

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Notes to Chapter 5

253

54. Griffin, journal, 986. 55. Griffin, Black Like Me, 2. 56. Griffin, 70, 11. 57. Griffin, 12, 35. 58. Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 16. 59. Lott, the cultural historian, situates Griffi n’s mirror within a broader culture of “imaginative speculation” in which the white artist’s “black mirror is simultaneously shot through with another register of speculation, that of cultural and economic value, the capitalizing on which, whenever racial imaging comes into play, is the bedrock of white cultural dominance,” including Griffin’s (and Houghton Mifflin’s) dominance of the “race relations” book market. Lott, Black Mirror, 20. 60. Griffin, journal, 982. 61. P. D. East, The Magnolia Jungle: The Life, Times, and Education of a Southern Editor (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 242. 62. Griffin, Black Like Me, 175. 63. Black Like Me, directed by Carl Lerner (Continental, 1964). 64. Griffin, Time to Be Human, 24. 65. Lillian Smith to John Howard Griffin, September 25, 1962, box 10, folder 364, John Howard Griffin Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries; John Howard Griffin to Lillian Smith, January 25, 1962, box 10, folder 365, John Howard Griffin Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries. 66. Lillian Smith to John Howard Griffin, December 3, 1961, box 10, folder 364, John Howard Griffin Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries. 67. John Howard Griffin to Lillian Smith, December 7, 1961, box 10, folder 365, John Howard Griffin Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries. 68. Griffin, Scattered Shadows, 142. 69. Griffin, 217. 70. John Howard Griffin, “The Intrinsic Other,” in The John Howard Griffin Reader, ed. Bradford Daniel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), 467. 71. Robert Bonazzi, Reluctant Activist: The Spiritual Life and Art of John Howard Griffin (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2018), 9. 72. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1960), 36. 73. John F. Kennedy, “Radio and Television Report to the American People on Civil Rights,” June 11, 1963, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, www

Darda-BK.indd 253

12/1/21 9:22 PM

254

Notes to Chapter 5

.jfk library.org /archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/civil-rights-radio -and-television-report-19630611. 74. Grace Halsell, untitled manuscript, n.d., box 30, Grace Halsell Papers, Special Collections, Texas Christian University Library. 75. Halsell, Soul Sister, 9, 15. 76. John Howard Griffin to Grace Halsell, March 22, 1968, box 10, Grace Halsell Papers, Special Collections, Texas Christian University Library. 77. John Howard Griffin to Robert Gutwillig, May 23, 1968, box 10, Grace Halsell Papers, Special Collections, Texas Christian University Library. 78. Halsell, Soul Sister, 15. 79. Grace Halsell, In Their Shoes (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1996), 114. 80. Halsell, 5. 81. “Harry H. Halsell, Indian Fighter, 96,” New York Times, February 4, 1957. 82. Halsell, In Their Shoes, 2. 83. Halsell, 69. 84. Ruth Benedict, Race: Science and Politics (New York: Modern Age Books, 1940), 153, 37. 85. Halsell, In Their Shoes, 69. 86. John Howard Griffin to Grace Halsell, April 20, 1968, box 10, Grace Halsell Papers, Special Collections, Texas Christian University Library. 87. John Howard Griffin to Grace Halsell, August 22, 1969, box 10, Grace Halsell Papers, Special Collections, Texas Christian University Library. 88. Grace Halsell to John Howard Griffin, March 20, 1978, box 10, Grace Halsell Papers, Special Collections, Texas Christian University Library. 89. Griffin to Halsell, April 20, 1968. 90. Griffin, Black Like Me, 1. 91. Halsell, Soul Sister, 11. 92. Halsell, In Their Shoes, 251, 252. 93. Grace Halsell, “Reflections on Soul Sister,” n.d., box 30, Grace Halsell Papers, Special Collections, Texas Christian University Library. 94. Grace Halsell, untitled note, n.d., box 15, Grace Halsell Papers, Special Collections, Texas Christian University Library. 95. Halsell, “Reflections on Soul Sister.” 96. Halsell introduced her young, gifted Black self at a time when, as Gaines, the literature scholar and author of Black for a Day, notes, “black separatists began to question and reject the place of white liberals in the civil rights movement.” Halsell knew it, and made much of Black Power in Soul Sister, but didn’t see her blackface as a liberal gesture but a radical act of other-identification. Gaines, Black for a Day, 84.

Darda-BK.indd 254

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Notes to Chapter 5

255

97. Halsell, Soul Sister, 114, 116, 99. 98. Dreisinger, Near Black, 80. 99. Halsell, Soul Sister, 5. 100. Lorraine Hansberry, “Genet, Mailer, and the New Paternalism,” Village Voice, June 1, 1961, 14. 101. Lorraine Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words, ed. Robert Nemiroff (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hill, 1969), 199. Robert Nemiroff, Hansberry’s ex-husband and executor, wove sections of her Village Voice takedown of Mailer, the Beats, and other white bohemians into To Be Young Gifted and Black, which he described as a “self-portrait” and an “adaptation.” Nemiroff used a different draft of “Genet, Mailer, and the New Paternalism” than the one that ran in the Voice. Robert Nemiroff, foreword to To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words, by Lorraine Hansberry, ed. Robert Nemiroff (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hill, 1969), xviii. 102. Hansberry, “New Paternalism,” 14. 103. Halsell, Soul Sister, 29, 30. 104. Grace Halsell to Alex Haley, July 20, 1970, box 11, Grace Halsell Papers, Special Collections, Texas Christian University Library. 105. Halsell, Soul Sister, 59, 60. 106. Halsell, 42, 72. 107. Halsell, 208–9. 108. See Werner Sollors, Neither Black nor White yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 493n7. 109. “I Am Curious (Black)!,” Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane, no. 106 (1970): 2, 4, 6, 5. 110. “I Am Curious (Black)!,” 12, 13. 111. Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, introduction to Race Traitor, ed. Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey (New York: Routledge, 1996), 2. 112. Walter Benn Michaels, “Autobiography of an Ex-White Man,” Transition, no. 73 (1997): 135, 136. Michaels’s take on the new abolitionists stemmed from his thenforthcoming book Our America, in which he argued that the idea of race as a “social construct” remains anchored in the idea of race as a form of biological difference. Passing, he wrote, couldn’t exist otherwise: “If race really were nothing but culture, that is, if race really were nothing but a distinctive array of beliefs and practices, then, of course, there could be no passing, since to believe and practice what the members of any race believed and practiced would, by definition, make you a member of that race.” Michaels identified a confusion between cultural and biological difference among racial liberals, but that confusion itself masks and facilitates a material color line, a line of theft, extraction, and accumulation. Walter Benn Michaels,

Darda-BK.indd 255

12/1/21 9:22 PM

256

Notes to Chapter 5

Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 133. 113. Walter Benn Michaels, “Let Them Eat Diversity: An Interview with Walter Benn Michaels,” by Bhaskar Sunkara, Jacobin, Winter 2011, 21. Michaels first introduced his argument against racial redistribution near the end of his 2004 book, The Shape of the Signifier—“the logic of reparations” holds that “poverty is acceptable (i.e., not compensable) as long as it’s not the product of injustice”—and then devoted his next book, The Trouble with Diversity, to elaborating on it. Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 165. For more from the anti-antiracist Left, see Adolph Reed Jr., “Antiracism: A Neoliberal Alternative to a Left,” Dialectical Anthropology 42, no. 2 (2018): 105–15; Adolph Reed Jr., “The Limits of ‘Anti-racism,’” Left Business Observer, no. 121 (2009): 2–3, 7; Adolph Reed Jr. and Kenneth W. Warren, eds., Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2010); and Kenneth W. Warren, “Race to Nowhere,” Jacobin, Summer 2015, 92–99. 114. Hazel Carby, “Can the Tactics of Cultural Integration Counter the Persistence of Political Apartheid? Or the Multicultural Wars, Part Two,” in Race, Law, and Culture: Reflections on Brown v. Board of Education, ed. Austin Sarat (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 221, 225. 115. bell hooks, “Eating the Other,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End, 1992), 39. 116. Halsell, In Their Shoes, 2. 117. Halsell, 12. 118. Grace Halsell, Bessie Yellowhair (New York: William Morrow, 1973), 11, 211. 119. Halsell, 31, 71. 120. Halsell, 12. 121. Halsell, 10, 163. 122. Halsell, 213. 123. Grace Halsell to Ed Halsell, December 16, 1972, box 6, Grace Halsell Papers, Special Collections, Texas Christian University Library. 124. Grace Halsell to Vine Deloria, February 22, 1980, box 6, Grace Halsell Papers, Special Collections, Texas Christian University Library. 125. Robin D. G. Kelley, “In Search of Grace Halsell,” Link 47, no. 1 (2014): 9. 126. Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 191. 127. Grace Halsell, The Illegals (New York: Stein and Day, 1978), 97, 206.

Darda-BK.indd 256

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Notes to Epilogue

257

128. For more on the white ethnic revival and the rise of a new normative “Ellis Island whiteness,” see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots, Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post– Civil Rights America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 7. 129. The political scientist Clare Jean Kim argues that not one but two binaries govern the racial order: “Historically, the White/non-White binary, for all of its influence, has been contingent upon the non-Black/Black binary, which structures the terms within which it plays out.” The cultural theorist Jared Sexton observes that liberals’ embrace of multiracial or “mixed” identities after civil rights recruits and strengthens the white/nonwhite and Black/non-Black binaries. “Blackness is negatively purified insofar as mixed-ness and blackness are strictly demarcated,” he writes, while “whiteness, whose purity remains intact, is revalorized by a people of color contingent flying the banner of antiracism” and sharing in the white identification with non-Blackness. The career of Grace Halsell shows how white racial liberals, scrambling for a new solutionism in the face of Black Power, managed to extract themselves from racial discourse in merging Black/non-black and white/nonwhite into the racial Frankenstein of Black/nonwhite. Claire Jean Kim, “Are Asians the New Blacks? Affirmative Action, Anti-Blackness, and the ‘Sociometry’ of Race,” Du Bois Review 15, no. 2 (2018): 226; Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 66. 130. Grace Halsell, “Blacks and Whites: Two Nations—Separate and Unequal,” n.d., box 30, Grace Halsell Papers, Special Collections, Texas Christian University Library. 131. Grace Halsell to Gunnar Myrdal, August 7, 1971, box 14, Grace Halsell Papers, Special Collections, Texas Christian University Library; Gunnar Myrdal to Grace Halsell, February 11, 1972, box 14, Grace Halsell Papers, Special Collections, Texas Christian University Library. 132. Grace Halsell to Gunnar Myrdal, February 28, 1972, box 14, Grace Halsell Papers, Special Collections, Texas Christian University Library. 133. Halsell, “Blacks and Whites.” Epilogue: Time Now 1. Margaret Mead and James Baldwin, A Rap on Race (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1971), 167. 2. Margaret Mead, “A Rap on Race: How James Baldwin and I ‘Talked’ a Book,” Redbook, September 1971, 71. 3. James Baldwin, “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” New Yorker, November 17, 1962, 137. 4. Mead and Baldwin, Rap on Race, 28.

Darda-BK.indd 257

12/1/21 9:22 PM

258

Notes to Epilogue

5. Mead and Baldwin, 33. 6. Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization (New York: William Morrow, 1928), 234. 7. Franz Boas, introduction to Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization, by Margaret Mead (New York: William Morrow, 1928), xv. 8. See Nancy C. Lutkehaus, Margaret Mead: The Making of an American Icon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 234. 9. Jimmy Carter, “Margaret Mead Statement on the Death of the Anthropologist,” November 15, 1978, American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu /documents/margaret-mead-statement-the-death-the-anthropologist. 10. William S. Willis Jr., “Skeletons in the Anthropological Closet,” in Reinventing Anthropology, ed. Dell H. Hymes (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 131, 139. 11. Nicholas De Genova, “The Stakes of an Anthropology of the United States,” New Centennial Review 7, no. 2 (2007): 232–33. 12. Margaret Mead, Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap (Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 1970), 68. 13. Mead, xx, xxiii. 14. Mead, xi, 52. 15. Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century (New York: Doubleday, 2019), 13. 16. Mead, Culture and Commitment, 76. 17. Mead, 67, 66. 18. Leroi Jones [Amiri Baraka], “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music),” in Black Music (New York: William Morrow, 1967), 180, 203, 181, 210. 19. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903), 30. 20. Homi K. Bhabha, “Dissemination: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 148, 158. 21. Michael Hanchard, “Afro-modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora,” Public Culture 11, no. 1 (1999): 263, 247. Charles Mills builds on Hanchard’s theories of racial time and Afro-modernism to reckon with white time as an unacknowledged norm through which Western societies demarcate the “appropriate use of time” and delegitimize the alternative “chronopolitics” of Black and non-Western societies and cultures. See Mills, “White Time: The Chronic Injustice of Ideal Theory,” Du Bois Review 11, no. 1 (2014): 31; and “The Chronopolitics of Racial Time,” Time and Society 29, no. 2 (2020): 297–317.

Darda-BK.indd 258

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Notes to Epilogue

259

22. Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 3. 23. See Daylanne K. English, Each Hour Redeem: Time and Justice in African American Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 104; Anthony Reed, Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 9. 24. Mead and Baldwin, Rap on Race, 169. 25. Mead, “Rap on Race,” 70, 71. 26. Mead, 71, 75. 27. Junaid Rana, “Anthropology and the Riddle of White Supremacy,” American Anthropologist 122, no. 1 (2020): 102. See also Mark Anderson, From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism, and American Anthropology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019), 1–6; and De Genova, “Stakes of an Anthropology,” 255–57. 28. Mead and Baldwin, Rap on Race, 61. 29. Mead and Baldwin, 58. 30. Mead and Baldwin, 62, 134. 31. Anderson, Boas to Black Power, 13. 32. Mead and Baldwin, Rap on Race, 62. In 1963, Attorney General Robert Kennedy had told Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, Kenneth Clark, Lorraine Hansberry, Lena Horne, and other Black artists in a closed-door meeting that “in forty years in America we might have a Negro president,” to which Baldwin later said, in a 1965 debate with William Buckley, that from where he, Belafonte, Clark, Hansberry, and Horne sat, “Bobby Kennedy only got here yesterday and now he is already on his way to the Presidency.” James Baldwin and William Buckley, “The American Dream and the American Negro,” New York Times, March 7, 1965. 33. Mead and Baldwin, Rap on Race, 62, 189. 34. Mead, “Rap on Race,” 71. 35. David Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1994), 310. 36. Mead and Baldwin, Rap on Race, 210. See Keith P. Feldman, A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), xi. 37. Mead and Baldwin, Rap on Race, 178, 17, 177, 178. 38. Mead and Baldwin, 167, 173–74, 177. 39. Quoted in Jane Howard, Margaret Mead: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 399. 40. Quoted in Howard, 399. 41. Anatole Broyard, “Poet and the Anthropologist,” New York Times, May 21, 1971.

Darda-BK.indd 259

12/1/21 9:22 PM

260

Notes to Epilogue

42. Anatole Broyard, “No Color Line in Clichés,” New York Times, May 17, 1974. 43. Quoted in Henry Louis Gates Jr., “White Like Me,” New Yorker, June 17, 1996, 71; Broyard, “Poet and the Anthropologist.” 44. Gates, “White Like Me,” 68. 45. Quoted in George Goodman Jr., “For James Baldwin, a Rap on Baldwin,” New York Times, June 26, 1972. 46. James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (New York: Dial, 1972), 197. 47. Mead and Baldwin, Rap on Race, 244. 48. Baldwin, No Name, 9. 49. Mead and Baldwin, Rap on Race, 234. 50. James Baldwin, “My Dungeon Shook,” Progressive, December 1962, 20. 51. Mead and Baldwin, Rap on Race, 169, 173. 52. Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (New York: Crown, 2020), 16; Mikko Tuhkanen, “Watching Time: James Baldwin and Malcolm X,” James Baldwin Review 2 (2016): 101. The religion scholar and historian Eddie Glaude, borrowing from Walt Whitman, describes the Baldwin of the late 1960s and 1970s as “betwixt and between possibilities,” reckoning with the “dashed hopes and expectations” of a receding movement but also discovering a new resilience in the “phrasing of new possibility” (17). Mikko Tuhkanen, a literature scholar, argues that Baldwin’s time immersed in Malcolm X’s life and thought adapting his Autobiography for Columbia Pictures led him to conceive of a “temporally expansive now” that Tuhkanen sees as an alternative “temporal ethics” to the urgent but fleeting moment (114). 53. Evitar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 110. 54. Quoted in Leeming, James Baldwin, 310. 55. James Baldwin, “An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis,” New York Review of Books, January 7, 1971, 15. 56. James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni, A Dialogue (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1973), 91, 24, 26, 35. 57. See Carol J. Greenhouse, Time Politics across Cultures (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 23. 58. Quoted in Goodman, “For James Baldwin.” 59. Quoted in Goodman. 60. Baldwin, No Name, 178, 96. 61. Baldwin, 11. 62. Baldwin, 196.

Darda-BK.indd 260

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Notes to Epilogue

261

63. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), xi. See also Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” Public Interest, Summer 1989, 4. 64. Fukuyama, End of History, 139. 65. Fukuyama, 237, 238. 66. Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 3. 67. Bell, 12. 68. Adolph Reed Jr., “Antiracism: A Neoliberal Alternative to a Left,” Dialectical Anthropology 42, no. 2 (2018): 105. 69. Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed Jr., “The Trouble with Disparity,” Nonsite.org, no. 32 (2020), https://nonsite.org /the-trouble-with-disparity/. 70. Adolph Reed Jr., “The ‘Color Line’ Then and Now: The Souls of Black Folk and the Changing Context of Black American Politics,” in Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought, ed. Adolph Reed Jr. and Kenneth W. Warren (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2010), 259, 260. 71. Adolph Reed Jr., “The Post-1965 Trajectory of Race, Class, and Urban Politics in the United States Reconsidered,” Labor Studies Journal 41, no. 3 (2016): 263. 72. Reed, 262. 73. Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (Boston: Beacon, 2018), 14; Crystal M. Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid about Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide (Boston: Beacon, 2018), 3; Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (New York: One World, 2019), 10; Layla F. Saad, Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2020), 3; Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk about Race (New York: Seal, 2018), 205. 74. House Democratic Caucus, “Democratic Caucus Family Discussion on Race,” press release, June 4, 2020, www.dems.gov/newsroom/press-releases/readout-demo cratic-caucus-family-discussion-on-race; Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (New York: Norton, 1949), 91. 75. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist, 209. 76. Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid, 45. 77. DiAngelo, White Fragility, 5. 78. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist, 209. 79. DiAngelo, White Fragility, 155; Saad, Me and White Supremacy, 231. 80. Robin DiAngelo, foreword to Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor, by Layla Saad (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2020), xi, xiii.

Darda-BK.indd 261

12/1/21 9:22 PM

262

Notes to Epilogue

81. For more on the 2020 surge in demand for antiracist reading, see Lauren Michele Jackson, “Keep Reading. But Don’t Expect Black Writers to Do the Hard Work for You,” New York, June 8, 2020, 12–14; and Melissa Phruksachart, “The Literature of White Liberalism,” Boston Review, August 21, 2020, http:// bostonreview.net/race /melissa-phruksachart-literature-white-liberalism.

Darda-BK.indd 262

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Index

AAA (American Anthropological Association), 28–29, 117, 189–90 ACE (American Council on Education), 93–94, 118, 119–20 ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), 145 “Addressed to White Liberals” (Smith, L.), 107 Adorno, Theodor, 125, 130–31, 137, 143, 145, 150–51 African American literature. See Black literature Agamben, Giorgio, 59 AHA (American Historical Association), 6 Alexander, Will, 97–98, 104, 107 All Deliberate Speed (Ogletree), 149 Allport, Gordon, 131–35; antiracism as color blindness, 18; antiracism as integration, 134; children, 18, 125, 133, 134, 139; fascism, 137; King, Martin Luther, 150–51; personality psychology, 125, 127–28, 131–33, 137, 143; prejudice, 125, 131–33, 134–35, 136, 137; racism, 134–35, 139; Warren, Earl, 137, 143 American Council on Race Relations, 76 “American Credo” (Murray, P.), 134 American creed, 46–51; antiracism as war, 37–38, 46–51; Baldwin, James, 195, 199, 206; Benedict, Ruth, 31; Blackness, 124; Clark, Kenneth, 124;

Cold War, 47; literature, 97; Murray, Pauli, 147; Myrdal, Gunnar, 10, 48; The Negro Soldier (Capra), 46; racial liberalism, 21; racism, 8, 49, 124; segregation, 123–24; Warren, Robert Penn, 149; white liberalism, 48; whiteness, 124; Woodward, C. Vann, 4 American Dilemma, An (Myrdal), 47–55; American creed, 123–24; antiracism as education, 10, 89–90; antiracism as war, 25–27; Blackness, 223n123; Black soldiers, 10; Brotherhood of Man/In Henry’s Backyard (Benedict and Weltfish), 34; Clark, Kenneth, 124; Du Bois, W. E. B., 69–70; Ellison, Ralph, 27, 51–55; Erikson, Erik, 136; footnote 11, 123; Frazier, E. Franklin, 11, 137; Murray, Pauli, 147; racial liberalism, 10, 25, 54, 69– 70; readers, 25, 50; Rosenwald Fund, 98; USIS, 85; Woodward, C. Vann, 2 American fascism, 36–41 American Indians, 181–85, 186. See also Indigenous cultures American Negroes (Embree), 96–97, 98 American personality, 18, 122, 123, 138–42 American Red Cross, 41–42 American Scholar, 77–78 American Unity and Asia (Buck), 8 America’s Town Meeting of the Air, 161–62

263

Darda-BK.indd 263

12/1/21 9:22 PM

264

Index

Anderson, Benedict, 14–15, 192–93, 214n56 Anderson, Carol, 61 Anderson, Mark, 8, 196, 218n38 Andrews, Dorothy, 114–15 anthropology: antiracism as war, 26, 28– 36, 59; Bessie Yellowhair (Halsell), 182; Black culture, 194; Nazism, 28; race, 8, 23–24, 27–28, 218n24; racial biologism, 27–28; racial liberalism, 54–55, 59–60; racism, 27, 28–36 anticolonialism: Black human rights, 99; Black leadership, 58; Black Left, 83; Du Bois, W. E. B., 57–58, 61, 65– 66, 68, 70, 75, 99; Hansberry, Lorraine, 82–83; human rights, 65, 83; NAACP, 61, 70, 71–72, 75; Warren, Earl, 137; Williams, Randall, 227n35; X, Malcolm, 62 Antioch Review, 51–52 antiracism: Baldwin, James, 22, 195, 199; Bell, Derrick, 203; capitalism, 180, 204; civil rights, 16–17; Dudziak, Mary, 225n13; frontlash, 150; gender, 15–16; How to Be an Antiracist (Kendi), 205; intercultural education, 118–20; labor, 204; liberalism, 27, 92, 109, 204; literature, 89–98, 108, 110–11, 117, 205–6; Lost Boundaries (Werker), 153; Me and White Supremacy (Saad), 205; Michaels, Walter Benn, 180; Motley, Willard, 114–15; The Negro in American Life (USIS), 86–87; racial liberalism, 61; Reed, Adolph, 203–4, 224n140; reform, 13, 60; Roosevelt, Franklin, 9; state violence, 27, 53; Truman, Harry, 58–61, 76–77; US, 8, 24, 65, 199, 201; white liberalism, 20, 119, 158; WWII, 4, 9, 27 antiracism as civil rights, 56–88; civil rights without human rights, 62–66; Du Bois, W. E. B., 57–61, 64–72; racial liberalism, 61; time, 18; Truman, Harry, 10, 16–17, 56–61, 72–77; USIS,

Darda-BK.indd 264

83–88; We Charge Genocide (CRC), 77–83, 86 antiracism as color blindness, 152– 87; Allport, Gordon, 18; Baldwin, James, 195; children, 18, 195; Halsell, Grace, 168–87; Jim Crow, 157– 62; as metaphor, 13; passing, 19, 152– 56, 167–74; racial liberalism, 162–67, 188–89, 192; racial/time, 3–4, 18, 156, 192 antiracism as education, 89–120; Baldwin, James, 195; Benedict, Ruth, 31, 117–18; intercultural education, 118–20; literature, 10, 17–18, 89–95, 97, 98, 112–20; Melamed, Jodi, 8; as metaphor, 13; prejudice, 18; race, 17– 18, 97, 140–41; race novels, 18, 93– 100, 105, 106, 108, 116–17; The Races of Mankind (Benedict and Weltfish), 25; racial liberalism, 10–11, 17– 18, 90–95, 134, 188–89, 192; racial theft, 10; readers, 17–18, 92–94, 100– 102, 112, 117–20; Rosenwald Fund, 95–100, 112; Schlesinger, Arthur, 17– 18; Smith, Lillian, 107–12; time, 3–4, 18, 90–91, 101, 192; UNESCO, 10–11; Wright, Richard, 89–91, 93, 97, 100– 106; WWII, 9–11 antiracism as integration, 121–51; Allport, Gordon, 134; American personality, 138–42; authoritarian personality, 126–31; Clark, Kenneth, 121–26; color blindness, 18; intercultural education, 119; as metaphor, 13; prejudiced personality, 131–37; The Races of Mankind (Benedict and Weltfish), 25; racial liberalism, 188– 89, 192; segregated personality, 142– 47; segregation, 121–26; time, 3–4, 147–51, 192 antiracism as war, 23–55; American creed, 37–38, 46–51; An American Dilemma (Myrdal), 25–27; American fascism, 36–41; anthropology, 26, 28–36, 59; Benedict, Ruth,

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Index

37; Blackness, 51–55; Black soldiers, 26, 36, 41–46; Boas, Franz, 37; color blindness, 27; Double V movement, 26, 37–41, 43; as metaphor, 13; “The Race Question” (UNESCO), 34; racial liberalism, 16–17, 24, 26–27, 192; racism, 28–36, 188–89; time, 3–4, 18, 27, 41, 59, 192. See also WWII (World War II) antisemitism, 126–31, 133, 134, 135, 138, 190 APA (American Psychological Association), 132 Appeal to the World!, An (NAACP), 57, 59, 62, 66–73, 76, 229n60 Aptheker, Hebert, 6, 67 Arendt, Hannah, 62–63 Ashmore, Harry, 2, 161–62 Atanasoski, Neda, 15, 65, 214n55 Atlantic Charter, 9, 63–64 authoritarianism, 65, 130, 132, 145 authoritarian personality, 125, 126–31 Authoritarian Personality, The (Adorno et al.), 130, 136, 137, 143, 145 Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, The (Johnson, J. W.), 90, 113–14 Autobiography of Malcolm X, The, 62, 175, 176, 202, 260n52 Aveilhe, Art, 194, 200 Baker, Houston, 94 Baldwin, James, 188–202; American creed, 195, 199, 206; antiracism, 22, 195, 199; Black/literature, 18, 90–92, 95, 234n6; Black Power, 19, 188, 194– 95; children, 21, 195, 197; civil rights/ movement, 19, 193, 195, 200, 206; Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 206; desegregation, 188; Giovanni, Nikki, 200–201; Glaude, Eddie, 260n52; immigrants, 196; Kennedy, Robert, 259n32; King, Martin Luther, 199; liberalism, 200, 202; Mead, Margaret, 15– 16, 188–202; racial liberalism, 194, 197–98, 202, 203, 206; racism, 193,

Darda-BK.indd 265

265

200; Rosenwald Fund, 93, 100; time, 19–20, 21, 188, 192–203, 206; Trilling, Lionel, 92; white racial rule, 197; WWII, 39; X, Malcolm, 201–2, 260n52 Baldwin, William H., 96 Balkin, Jack, 147 Baltimore Afro-American, 36, 41, 76, 77– 78, 80 Baraka, Amiri, 192 Barrett, William, 91–92 Baynton, Douglas, 109 Bell, Derrick, 21–22, 203–4 Benedict, Ruth, 23–36; AAA, 117–18; American creed, 31; antiracism as education, 31, 117–18, 134; antiracism as war, 37; Boas, Franz, 23, 29–30, 170; cultures, 29–31; English Journal, 119; Halsell, Grace, 170–71; Hurston, Zora Neale, 29; immigrants, 218n38; integration, 112; literature, 92–93, 95; Mead, Margaret, 30, 189– 90; Myrdal, Gunnar, 25, 48; Nazism, 23–24, 117; race, 15, 16, 23–24, 26, 31, 33–34, 117–18, 170; race science, 30– 31, 33, 170; racial biologism, 30–31, 33–34, 49–50, 117, 170; racial liberalism, 25, 30–31, 47, 54, 117–18, 171, 187, 202, 218n38; racism, 12, 23–28, 30–31, 33–34, 92–93, 117–18, 170, 204, 216n4, 218n38; white racial rule, 27; WWII, 218n38 Benjamin, Walter, 14–15, 21, 193 Benton, William, 84 Bessie Yellowhair (Halsell), 182–85 Between the World and Me (Coates), 206 Bhabha, Homi, 192–93 Bixler, Paul, 51–52 Black, Doris, 153–54 Black Boy (Wright), 100–101, 118 Black civil rights. See civil rights; civil rights movement; PCCR (President’s Committee on Civil Rights)

12/1/21 9:22 PM

266

Index

Black culture: An American Dilemma (Myrdal), 51; anthropology, 194; blackface, 180; Bunche, Ralph on, 50–51; Ellison, Ralph, 51–55; Herskovits, Melville, 31–32; immigrants, 32; intercultural education, 119; Locke, Alain, 31–32; Myrdal, Gunnar on, 50; nationalism, 51; new abolitionists, 180; racism, 50–53; Roosevelt, Franklin, 53; US, 32, 51; white/liberalism, 50, 52 Black damage, 121–23, 125, 135, 141, 145, 147–50 blackface: Black culture, 180; color blindness, 177; Griffi n, John Howard, 154–58, 163–67, 171, 180; Halsell, Grace, 157–58, 173, 177–78, 180, 254n96; racial biologism, 157; racial liberalism, 19, 155–56, 178; segregation, 157–58; Sprigle, Ray, 157– 58, 180; Superman’s Girl Friend, Lois Lane, 178–79; white liberalism, 19, 157, 162, 169; white minstrels, 19, 156–57. See also passing Black feminism, 60, 180–81 Black for a Day (Gaines), 156–57 Black human rights, 62–66; anticolonialism, 99; civil rights/movement, 56, 59, 60–61, 66, 75; Cold War, 61; Du Bois, W. E. B., 57, 60, 64, 99; Hansberry, Lorraine, 82, 88; internationalism, 74; law enforcement, 80–81, 88; NAACP, 80; The Negro in American Life (USIS), 86– 87; racial theft, 80–81, 99; Truman, Harry, 56, 58; UN, 17, 69; US, 62, 80, 82; White, Walter, 58; X, Malcolm, 62 Black Journal, 174 Black leadership, 36, 41, 43, 47, 57–58, 62, 98, 177–78, 214n57 Black Left, 39–40, 80, 81, 82, 83, 94, 215n63, 234n12 Black Like Me (Griffin), 154, 163–64, 165– 67, 173, 252n50

Darda-BK.indd 266

Black literature: Bone, Robert, 113; Brown, Stephanie, 234n6; Cold War, 91; frontlash, 116; Hughes, Langston on, 91; intercultural education, 119, 120; Jim Crow, 91, 103, 234n12; Phylon, 91, 114; racial biologism, 102–3; racial/time, 103, 193; readers, 91, 94– 95, 116, 205; Rosenwald Fund, 93–94, 114–15, 205; Warren, Kenneth, 54–55, 224n140; “What White Publishers Won’t Print” (Hurston), 103; white/ liberalism, 116, 234n12. See also race novels Black Lives Matter, 205 Black Metropolis (Cayton and Drake), 105, 115–16, 152 Black Moses narrative, 15–16, 215n62 Black music, 192 Blackness: American creed, 124; An American Dilemma (Myrdal), 223n123; criminality, 7, 20, 75, 78– 81; Ellison, Ralph, 51–52; Griffin, John Howard, 156–57, 163–65, 171, 252nn45,50; Halsell, Grace, 171, 175– 77, 180, 186; Indigenous cultures v., 184; Kim, Claire Jean, 257n129; liberalism, 20; Mailer, Norman, 175–76; passing, 153–55, 156; racial biologism, 157; racial liberalism, 12; Rosenwald Fund, 115; segregation, 125, 160; Sexton, Jared, 257n129; Sprigle, Ray, 160; war on, 51–55; Warren, Earl, 122; white liberalism, 52, 53–54, 154–56; “Who’s Passing for Who?” (Hughes), 155 Black Panthers, 88, 154, 157, 175, 195 Black Power: Baldwin, James, 19, 188, 194–95; Black Left, 215n63; Black Panthers, 154; civil rights movement, 60; Halsell, Grace, 19, 168, 175, 176, 177, 186, 254n96, 257n129; liberalism/time, 201; Mead, Margaret, 192, 194–96; racial liberalism, 186, 257n129 Black Rage (Cobbs and Grier), 174

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Index

Black Reconstruction in America (Du Bois), 98 Black Scholar, 19 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 157 Black soldiers, 41–46; An American Dilemma (Myrdal), 10, 26; antiracism as war, 26, 36, 41–46; Baldwin, James on, 39; de/segregation/integration, 3, 9, 26, 36–37, 38, 41–42, 114; Double V movement, 37–39; NAACP, 36; National Emergency Committee against Mob Violence, 73; The Negro Soldier (Capra), 44–46; PCCR, 59– 60; Roosevelt, Franklin, 9, 26, 36–38 Black/White Sex (Halsell), 187 Black women, 15–16, 83, 171, 173–75, 182, 184, 194 Bloch, Eduard, 127–28 Boas, Franz, 28–31; antiracism as war, 37; Benedict, Ruth, 23, 29–30, 170; cultures, 28–29; Hurston, Zora Neale, 29, 94, 102–3; Mead, Margaret, 188–90, 191; Myrdal, Gunnar, 48; race, 23–24, 196; race science, 29, 218n24; racial liberalism, 12, 54, 195, 202, 218n24; racism, 27, 28–31, 36 Bolden, Frank, 37–38 BOMC (Book-of-the-Month Club), 100– 103, 116, 205, 238n64 Bonazzi, Robert, 167 Bond, Horace Mann, 108 Bone, Robert, 113 Borisov, Alexander, 72, 73–74 Bowles, Chester, 84–86 Boyle, Sarah Patton, 171–73 Brameld, Theodore, 122 Breakthrough on the Color Front, The (Nichols), 2 Briggs v. Elliott, 121, 125, 148. See also Brown v. Board of Education Bright, Hazel, 174 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 46 Brooks, John Graham, 96 Brotherhood of Man, 25, 34

Darda-BK.indd 267

267

Brothers under the Skin (McWilliams), 9 Brown, Sterling, 99, 107 Brown America (Embree), 96–97 Browne, Simone, 165–66 Brownell, Herbert, 148 Brown v. Board of Education: The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al.), 131; children, 143–44, 149; civil rights movement, 60, 147; Clark, Kenneth, 138, 143; desegregation, 5, 126, 143, 146, 147–49, 243n21; Hurston, Zora Neale, 103; NAACP, 2, 133–34, 143–44; race, 147; racial liberalism, 2–3; racism, 150; segregation, 25, 121–23, 124, 144, 147–48; time, 5, 18, 147–49, 243n21; Warren, Earl, 2, 5, 18, 126, 134, 143, 147–48; whiteness, 243n21; Woodward, C. Vann, 2, 5. See also footnote 11 Broyard, Anatole, 198 Buck, Pearl S., 7–8, 10 Bulosan, Carlos, 11–12 Bunche, Ralph, 48, 50–51 Burkholder, Zoë, 118–19, 140 Byrnes, James, 84 capitalism: antiracism, 180, 204; integration, 12; Melamed, Jodi, 90; race, 232n117; racial liberalism, 224n140; racism, 38–39, 204, 224n140; Reed, Adolph, 204; Robinson, Cedric, 106; time, 192; war, 65 Capra, Frank, 44–45 Carby, Hazel, 180–81 Carnegie Corporation, 10, 47–48, 50 Carter, Hodding, 161–62 Carter, Jimmy, 190 Carter, Robert, 121–22, 123, 143, 144, 203 Cavett, Dick, 189, 198 Cayton, Horace, 103, 105, 115–16, 152 Chase, Richard, 91–92 Chein, Isidor, 121, 122, 143, 144–45, 150–51 Chicago Daily Tribune, 79, 115

12/1/21 9:22 PM

268

Index

Chicago Defender, 41–42, 67, 76, 95–96 Chicago school, 103–5 Childhood and Society (Erikson), 135– 36, 137, 140 children: Adorno, Theodor, 131; Allport, Gordon, 18, 125, 133, 134, 139; antiracism as color blindness, 18, 195; antisemitism, 130, 131, 132–33, 135, 138; authoritarianism, 145; Baldwin, James, 21, 195, 197; Brown v. Board of Education, 143–44, 149; color blindness, 21, 87, 131, 140–41, 167; communism, 139; cultures, 190; desegregation, 125, 151; fascism, 131; Grieve, Victoria, 247n79; Griffin, John Howard, 164, 166–67; Hitler, Adolf/Nazism, 129; integration, 18, 140–41; intercultural education, 118–20; Jim Crow, 146; The Magnolia Jungle (East), 166; Mead, Margaret, 197; Personality in the Making (Witmer and Kotinsky), 138, 140; prejudice, 121, 138, 141–42, 188; racial liberalism, 198; racism, 34, 118–19, 125, 131, 133, 135–36, 138, 139–40, 151, 164, 166; segregation, 121–26, 135, 141, 143, 145–46; time, 197; whiteness, 124. See also White House Conference on Children and Youth Childress, Alice, 16, 82, 215nn62–63 Chrisman, Robert, 19, 21 Churchill, Winston, 63–64 civil rights: antiracism, 16–17; Baldwin, James, 193, 195, 200, 206; Black leadership, 57–58, 62; Cold War, 17, 75; color blindness, 187; conservatism, 54; Du Bois, W. E. B., 68, 99; human rights without, 59, 62–66; Klarman, Michael, 147; literature, 97; Mead, Margaret, 196; Murray, Pauli, 133– 34, 245n55; NAACP, 17, 56–61, 68; The Negro in American Life (USIS), 86–87; racial liberalism, 12–13, 61; racism, 17, 55, 58; reform, 9; Sprigle, Ray, 161–62; as term, 17, 74–75;

Darda-BK.indd 268

Truman, Harry, 10, 17, 56–61, 66, 72– 77, 82, 83; UN, 75–76; US, 17, 19, 56– 61, 62, 74–76; white racial rule, 58; WWII, 9, 17; X, Malcolm, 62–63. See also antiracism as civil rights; PCCR (President’s Committee on Civil Rights) Civil Rights Act, 60 civil rights movement: An American Dilemma (Myrdal), 25; backlash, 192; Baldwin, James, 19, 193; Black human rights, 56, 60–61, 66, 75; Brown v. Board of Education, 60, 147; color blindness/conservatism, 150; Dawson, Michael, 227n42; desegregation, 60; Du Bois, W. E. B., 88; frontlash, 4, 61, 150, 192; Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, 226n21; passing, 152; Patterson, William, 88; Truman, Harry, 56–61, 75, 76–77, 226n21; white/liberalism, 150, 254n96; Woodward, C. Vann, 1–2, 13; WWII, 27 Clark, Kenneth: American creed/An American Dilemma (Myrdal), 124; antiracism as integration, 121–26; Black damage, 123, 150; Brown v. Board of Education, 138, 143; de/segregation, 2, 144, 149; Halsell, Grace, 176; Kennedy, Robert, 259n32; liberalism, 142; prejudice, 138, 141–42; racial liberalism, 187; racial time, 142; racism, 141–42; Warren, Earl, 124, 137, 150; White House Conference on Children and Youth, 138, 142, 144. See also doll test Clark, Mamie, 121, 123, 143, 176, 187 Clark, Tom, 71 Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 206 Cobbs, Price, 174 Cold War: American creed, 47; Black human rights, 61; Black literature, 91; Brown v. Board of Education, 143; civil rights, 17, 75; Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, 125; Erikson, Erik, 246n71;

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Index

Fukuyama, Francis, 202; Grieve, Victoria, 139, 247n79; integration/ Jim Crow, 145; nationalism, 143; The Negro in American Life (USIS), 86; Phylon, 234n12; Truman, Harry, 47, 57–58, 75; USIS, 83; White, Walter, 83. See also Korean War; Soviet Union Collier’s, 127 colonialism: Du Bois, W. E. B., 65–66, 68, 71; Fanon, Frantz, 157; Frazier, E. Franklin, 137; Halsell, Grace, 182, 185; Hansberry, Lorraine, 82–83; Himes, Chester, 26; liberalism, 4, 8; NAACP, 61; race, 8; racial liberalism, 2–3, 11; racial theft, 68, 99, 182; Robeson, Paul, 72; time, 15; Truman, Harry, 59, 77; UN, 65–66, 68; US, 26, 68, 71, 77, 82–83; Von Eschen, Penny, 229n60; war, 68, 227n37; white racial rule, 26, 57; WWII, 2–3, 68. See also anticolonialism Color, 152 Color and Democracy (Du Bois), 57, 68 Color and Human Nature (Warner), 104–5 Color Blind (Halsey), 160 color blindness, 174–80; antiracism as integration, 18; antiracism as war, 27; backlash, 187; blackface, 177; children, 21, 87, 131, 140–41, 167; civil rights/movement, 150, 187; frontlash, 20; Griffin, John Howard, 167; Halsell, Grace, 156, 168, 174–80, 181, 184; integration, 87, 131; liberalism, 4; Melamed, Jodi, 8; multiculturalism, 6, 168, 174, 181, 184, 187; racial biologism, 157, 178, 180; racial liberalism, 6, 157, 177–78, 187, 198; racial time, 6, 20, 27; States’ Laws on Race and Color (Murray, P.), 12. See also antiracism as color blindness Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead), 189 Commission on Human Rights (UN), 57–58, 67, 72, 73–74

Darda-BK.indd 269

269

communism, 17, 61, 79–80, 81, 94, 138–41, 145, 146. See also Korean War; Soviet Union conservatism, 24, 54, 162, 187, 188 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 78–81, 88 CPUSA (Communist Party USA), 39, 215n63 CRC (Civil Rights Congress), 17, 60, 77–83, 86, 88. See also Patterson, William criminality, 7, 20, 53, 75, 78–81 Crisis, 36, 41 cultures: Benedict, Ruth, 29–31; Boas, Franz, 28–29; Mead, Margaret, 189– 90, 197; race, 33–34, 34–35, 50, 118–19, 165, 171; time, 258n21. See also Black culture; Indigenous cultures Custer Died for Your Sins (Deloria, V.), 182 Daily Worker, 39 Daniels, Jonathan, 72, 73 Darker Brother, The (Moon), 107 Davis, Angela, 177, 200 Davis, John, 144 Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, 121, 125, 145, 148 decolonization, 25, 137, 142, 233n141. See also colonialism De Genova, Nicholas, 190 Deloria, Philip, 185 Deloria, Vine, 182, 184–85 Democratic Teaching in Secondary Schools (Stiles), 125 Denny, George, 161–62 Desegregated Heart, The (Boyle), 171 desegregation: Baldwin, James, 188; Black Like Me (Griffin), 164; Black soldiers, 9, 36–37; children, 125, 151; civil rights movement, 60; Clark, Kenneth, 2, 149; King, Martin Luther, 151; labor, 34; Marshall, Thurgood, 2, 143, 147–48; NAACP, 36,

12/1/21 9:22 PM

270

Index

desegregation (continued) 143, 147–48; racial liberalism, 126; Strange Fruit (Smith, L.), 110; time, 147–48; Waring, Julius Waties, 125; Warren, Earl, 5, 18, 126, 145–47; Warren, Robert Penn, 149; white damage, 125, 148; WWII, 9. See also Brown v. Board of Education: desegregation; segregation “Desegregation: An Appraisal of the Evidence” (Clark, K.), 2 Deutscher, Max, 121, 122, 144, 145 Devil Finds Work, The (Baldwin, J.), 206 Dialogue, A (Baldwin and Giovanni), 200 DiAngelo, Robin, 205 Dickey, John, 73 Dimock, Wai Chee, 193 Directory of Agencies in Race Relations (Rosenwald Fund), 98 disabilities, 109–10 Dobbs, John Wesley, 159, 160, 161 doll test, 121–23, 140, 141, 147, 150, 176. See also Clark, Kenneth; Clark, Mamie Double V movement, 37–41; antiracism as war, 26, 37–41, 43; Black soldiers, 37–39; Franklin, John Hope, 36, 40– 41; NAACP, 61; The Negro Soldier (Capra), 45; OWI, 42; prejudice, 16, 37–39, 41; racism, 43, 45, 52; Roosevelt, Franklin, 26, 37–38, 41; white liberalism, 45 Drake, St. Clair, 105, 115–16, 152 Dreisinger, Baz, 156, 175 Drew, Gerald, 85 Du Bois, W. E. B., 64–72; anti/colonialism, 57–58, 61, 65–66, 68, 70, 71, 75, 99; antiracism as civil rights, 57– 61, 64–72; Black human rights, 57, 60, 64, 99; civil rights/movement, 68, 88, 99; Davis, John, 144; Embree, Edwin, 97; “Encyclopedia of the Negro,” 47–48; genocide, 79; Hansberry, Lorraine, 82; integration, 144;

Darda-BK.indd 270

Marshall, Thurgood, 70; NAACP, 57–60, 67–72, 75–76, 99; Native Son (Wright), 102; NNC, 67–69; Phylon, 91; Primer for White Folks (Moon, ed.), 107; race, 57; racism, 69, 70; Roosevelt, Franklin, 57; Rosenwald Fund, 93, 98, 99–100; Smith, Lillian, 108; time, 192; Truman, Harry, 57– 60, 66, 69, 71, 75, 76–77; UN, 57, 59, 60, 65–66, 68–72, 75–76; US, 69–70, 77, 99–100; White, Walter, 57, 67–68, 70–72; white racial rule, 69. See also Appeal to the World!, An (NAACP) Dudziak, Mary, 39–40, 145, 213n52, 225n13, 233n142 Durkheim, Émile, 13–14 East, P. D., 166 Ebony, 152, 153 Edelman, Lee, 125–26 education, 106, 118–20, 144. See also antiracism as education; Brown v. Board of Education “Educational Costs” (Brameld), 122 Edwards, Erica, 15, 214n57 “Effect of Prejudice and Discrimination on Personality Development” (Clark, K.), 138, 141–42 “Effects of Segregation and the Consequences of Desegregation, The,” 143–44 Eisenhower, Dwight, 5, 59, 146 Ellison, Ralph, 27, 51–55 Embree, Edwin, 9, 10, 95–100, 108–9, 112, 114–15, 212n34. See also Rosenwald Fund Emre, Merve, 131 “Encyclopedia of the Negro” (Du Bois), 47–48 End of History and the Last Man, The (Fukuyama), 202–3 English Journal, 119 Erikson, Erik, 125, 129–30, 133, 135–37, 140–41, 150–51, 246n71 Essence, 201

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Index

ethnicities, 12, 32, 34, 118, 134–35, 185–86 eugenics movement, 28, 104 “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (Baldwin, J.), 90–91, 92 Faces at the Bottom of the Well (Bell), 21–22, 203 Fanon, Frantz, 157 fascism: AAA, 28; Adorno, Theodor/ authoritarianism, 130–31; Allport, Gordon, 137; American fascism, 36– 41; children, 131; integration, 145; liberalism, 17, 137, 206; The Negro Soldier (Capra), 45; race science, 31; racism, 26, 27, 216n4; Wirth, Louis, 104 Fast, Howard, 79 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), 16, 62, 111, 234n12 Fee, John, 96 Feldman, Keith, 196 Feldstein, Ruth, 139–40, 247n81 Ferrer, Mel, 153, 154–55 Fire Next Time, The (Baldwin, J.), 206 Fisher, Dorothy Canfield, 100–102, 104–5 Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, 106, 107 “Flag from a Kitchenette Window” (Hansberry), 82 Fleming, Crystal, 205 footnote 11, 122–25, 136, 137, 138, 141, 143, 145, 148 Foxes of Harrow, The (Yerby), 107 Frankfurter, Felix, 147–48 Franklin, John Hope, 1, 36, 40–41 Frazier, E. Franklin, 2, 11, 48, 103, 108, 137, 138 Freedom, 82 Frenkel-Brunswik, Else, 143, 145 Freud, Sigmund, 53–54, 132 frontlash: Black literature, 116; civil rights movement, 4, 61, 150, 192; color blindness, 20; racial liberalism, 19–22, 54, 61, 187; Weaver, Vesla, 20 Fukuyama, Francis, 202–3

Darda-BK.indd 271

271

Gaines, Alisha, 156–57, 254n96 Gates, Henry Louis, 198 gender, 15–16, 139–40, 170, 173–75, 247n81. See also women genocide, 4, 8, 11, 60, 77–84, 86, 88, 232n117. See also We Charge Genocide (CRC) Gillespie, Dizzy, 38 Giovanni, Nikki, 200–201 Gloster, Hugh, 91 Goldberg, David Theo, 4, 212n36 Gold through the Trees (Childress), 16 Gone with the Wind (Mitchell), 108 gradualism. See time Graham, Shirley, 102 Granger, Lester, 43 Greenhouse, Carol, 14, 213n52 Grieve, Victoria, 139, 247n79 Griffin, John Howard, 162–73; blackface, 154–58, 163–67, 171, 180; Blackness, 156–57, 163–65, 171, 252n45, 252n50; children, 164, 166–67; color blindness, 167; Halsell, Grace, 19, 168–73, 182; Lott, Eric, 253n59; racial liberalism, 165, 166–67, 168; racial time, 167; racism, 150, 162–63, 164; segregation, 162, 170; Smith, Lillian, 166– 67; white liberalism, 167 Gutwillig, Robert, 169 Haley, Alex, 176, 185–86 Halsell, Grace, 154–58, 168–87; antiracism as color blindness, 168– 87; Benedict, Ruth, 170–71; blackface, 157–58, 173, 177–78, 180, 254n96; Blackness, 171, 175–77, 180, 186; Black Power, 19, 168, 175, 176, 177, 186, 254n96, 257n129; Clark, Kenneth, 176; colonialism, 182, 185; color blindness, 156, 168, 174–80, 181, 184; Deloria, Vine, 184–85; doll test, 176; Gaines, Alisha, 254n96; gender, 15, 170, 173–75; Griffin, John Howard, 19, 168–73, 182; Haley, Alex, 176, 185–86; immigrants, 168, 181, 186;

12/1/21 9:22 PM

272

Index

Halsell, Grace (continued) Indigenous cultures, 168, 184–85; integration/segregation, 170, 177; multiculturalism, 186; Myrdal, Gunnar, 187; New York Times, 169– 70; passing, 18–19, 154–58; race, 150, 170–71, 177–78, 186; racial liberalism, 168, 173, 177–78, 181, 182; racism, 170– 71, 177; white liberalism, 173, 175–77, 182, 185, 254n96; whiteness, 177, 180 Halsey, Margaret, 160 Hamilton, Jim, 176 Hanchard, Michael, 193, 258n21 Hansberry, Lorraine, 82–83, 88, 175–76, 255n101, 259n32 Harlan, John Marshall, 133, 146–47 Hartman, Saidiya, 4, 15, 21, 158, 210n11 Hawkins, Octavia, 16 Herskovits, Melville, 27, 31–32, 33, 48, 54, 219n42 Hilliard, June, 88 Himes, Chester, 26, 39–40, 52, 100, 107 Hitler, Adolf, 125, 127–30, 132, 137, 149 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 147–48 hooks, bell, 181 Horkheimer, Max, 130 HoSang, Daniel, 8, 20 “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” (Wright), 112– 13, 116 “How Passing Passed Out” (Black), 153–54 How to Be an Antiracist (Kendi), 205 How to Be Less Stupid about Race (Fleming), 205 Hughes, Langston: Black literature, 91; Embree, Edwin, 97; Native Son (Wright), 102; The Negro Soldier (Capra), 46; Primer for White Folks (Moon, ed.), 107; Rosenwald Fund, 93, 95–96; Town Meeting, 252n43; “Who’s Passing for Who?,” 155, 250n13 human rights, 62–66; anticolonialism, 65, 83; Arendt, Hannah, 62– 63; Atlantic Charter, 63–64; civil rights/movement, 62–66, 75;

Darda-BK.indd 272

internationalism, 66, 75; NAACP, 64; Paik, Naomi on, 227n36; racial/ liberalism, 61, 64, 65; racial theft, 64; Truman, Harry, 65, 66, 82; UN, 66, 69; Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 57–58, 64–65, 78; US, 63, 65, 66; war, 65–66; Williams, Randall on, 227n35; X, Malcolm, 63. See also Black human rights; Commission on Human Rights (UN) Hunt, Lynn, 13–14 Hurston, Zora Neale, 16, 29, 94, 102–3, 106–7 I Am Not Your Negro (Peck), 206 If Beale Street Could Talk (Baldwin, J.), 198, 201, 206 If He Hollers Let Him Go (Himes), 26, 40 Illegals, The (Halsell), 185–86 immigrants: Anderson, Mark, 218n38; Baldwin, James, 196; Benedict, Ruth, 218n38; Black culture, 32; Erikson, Erik, 136; Halsell, Grace, 168, 181, 186; Herskovits, Melville, 32; Knock on Any Door (Motley), 115; Mead, Margaret, 195–96; racism, 124; whiteness, 118, 124, 195–96, 218n38 India, 77–78, 80, 81–82, 84–86 Indigenous cultures: Blackness v., 184; Halsell, Grace, 168, 184–85; Lowe, Lisa, 214n55; Patterns of Culture (Benedict), 29–30; racial binaries, 12; racial liberalism, 3, 26; racial theft, 70, 182, 185; racism, 184; Willis, William, 190 In Henry’s Backyard (Benedict and Weltfish), 25, 34, 35 “Instability of Human Types, The” (Boas), 29 integration: authoritarianism, 145; Benedict, Ruth, 112; Black soldiers, 38; capitalism, 12; children, 18, 140– 41; color blindness, 87, 131; communism, 145, 146; doll test, 140; Du Bois, W. E. B., 144; Eisenhower,

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Index

Dwight, 5; Halsell, Grace, 177; literature, 94, 106–7, 115; Marable, Manning, 12; Mead, Margaret, 194–96; multiculturalism, 180–81; NAACP, 57; The Negro in American Life (USIS), 86, 87; passing, 106–7; racial liberalism, 12; racism, 125, 156; reform, 125; Rosenwald Fund, 115; Sprigle, Ray, 156; time, 18; Warren, Earl, 145, 146. See also antiracism as integration; Brown v. Board of Education; desegregation; segregation intercultural education, 106, 118–20 internationalism, 46–47, 49, 61, 66, 67– 68, 73–74, 75, 78. See also Patterson, William In Their Shoes (Halsell), 169–70, 173, 181–82 In the Land of Jim Crow (Sprigle), 160 Invisible Man (Ellison), 54 Israel, 185, 193, 196 Iton, Richard, 83 Jacobson, Matthew, 34 Jarrett, Thomas, 91, 113 Jet, 152–53, 154–55 Jim Crow, 157–62; authoritarianism, 145; Black literature, 91, 103, 234n12; Bowles, Chester, 86; children, 146; Cold War, 145; Ellison, Ralph, 54; genocide, 78; In the Land of Jim Crow (Sprigle), 160; Native Son (Wright), 112; Plessy v. Ferguson, 146; racial liberalism, 7, 11; Truman, Harry, 146; Von Eschen, Penny, 229n60; Warren, Robert Penn, 149; Woodward, C. Vann, 1–2, 5–6, 12– 13, 22, 72 Johnson, Charles S., 48, 97–98, 99 Johnson, James Weldon, 90, 96, 113–14 Johnson, John H., 152 Johnson, Lyndon, 169 Johnson, Mark, 13 Johnston, Albert, 153, 250n7 Jonah’s Gourd Vine (Hurston), 29 Jones, Claudia, 16, 82

Darda-BK.indd 273

273

Jones, Leroy, 192 Julius Rosenwald Fund. See Rosenwald Fund Kallen, Horace, 119 Kelley, Robin D. G., 38, 185, 221n93 Kendi, Ibram, 205 Kennan, George, 64, 129 Kennedy, John F., 168, 185 Kennedy, Robert, 196, 259n32 Keppel, Frederick, 47–48 Killers of the Dream (Smith, L.), 109, 166–67 King, Martin Luther, 1–2, 5, 6–7, 14, 21, 150–51, 171, 199 Kingsblood Royal (Lewis, S.), 18, 97, 106 Kirk, Virgil, 182–83 Klarman, Michael, 147 Klineberg, Otto, 27 Knock on Any Door (Motley), 93, 95, 97– 98, 107, 112–16, 240n117 Korean War: American Red Cross, 42; Bowles, Chester, 85; genocide, 81, 88; Hansberry, Lorraine, 83; human rights, 65; Reddy, Chandan, 77; Truman, Harry, 138–39, 144; X, Malcolm, 62 Kotinsky, Ruth, 138, 140, 141 Kris, Ernst, 119 labor: antiracism, 204; Aptheker, Hebert, 67; Bulosan, Carlos, 11; de/segregation, 1, 34, 37; Himes, Chester, 39–40; Marable, Manning, 12; Michaels, Walter Benn, 180; Randolph, A. Philip, 37 Lakoff, George, 13 Laurel Falls camp, 111–12 law enforcement, 73, 75, 80–81, 88 LDF (Legal Defense Fund) (NAACP): Bell, Derrick, 203; Carter, Robert, 121; de/segregation, 2, 147; Miller, Loren, 149; Murray, Pauli, 12, 123, 133–34; social science, 144; time, 147, 148; Woodward, C. Vann, 2 Lee, Harper, 167–68

12/1/21 9:22 PM

274

Index

Leeming, David, 196 Lemkin, Raphael, 79–80 Leuchtenburg, William, 1 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 34 Levitan, George, 164 Lewis, David Levering, 71 Lewis, Ida, 201 Lewis, Sinclair, 18, 101, 106–7 Liberal Imagination, The (Trilling), 92 liberalism: ACE, 119–20; Adorno, Theodor, 131; American creed, 48; An American Dilemma (Myrdal), 52; antiracism, 27, 92, 109, 204; antisemitism, 126; Atlantic Charter, 64; Baldwin, James, 200, 202; Bell, Derrick, 203; Black culture, 50; Black damage, 150; Black literature, 234n12; Blackness, 20; Black Power, 201; BOMC, 103, 116; Clark, Kenneth, 142; colonialism, 4, 8; color blindness, 4; Erikson, Erik, 137; fascism, 17, 137, 206; Fukuyama, Francis, 203; Goldberg, David Theo, 212n36; human rights, 64, 65; intercultural education, 118–19; internationalism, 46–47; literature, 90– 93, 97, 106–7, 205; Mead, Margaret, 202; multiculturalism, 224n140; passing, 106–7; race, 8, 34, 140–41, 210n11; racial liberalism, 4, 8, 210n11; racial time, 4, 43, 187, 192–93, 214n55; racism, 4, 17, 28, 61, 187; Rosenwald Fund, 116; segregation, 17; time, 4, 20, 101, 200, 203; Truman, Harry, 69; US, 137; Warren, Earl, 146; white racial rule, 150. See also white liberalism Lie, Trygve, 66–67, 70, 79 “Life as a Negro” (Griffin), 154 literature, 89–120; antiracism, 89–98, 108, 110–11, 117, 205–6; antiracism as education, 10, 17–18, 89–95, 97, 98, 112–20; integration/segregation, 94– 95, 105, 106–7, 115; intercultural education, 118–20; liberalism, 90–93,

Darda-BK.indd 274

97, 106–7, 205; Motley, Willard, 115; prejudice, 119; race, 97, 205; racism, 89–95, 98, 109; southern literature, 108–9; time, 193. See also Black literature; readers Literature for Human Understanding, 118 Locke, Alain, 29, 31–32, 48, 119, 219n42 Logan, Rayford, 69 Lomax, Betty, 174 Los Angeles Times, 22 Lost Boundaries (Werker), 153, 250n7 Lost Boundaries (White, W. L.), 153, 158–59 Lott, Eric, 156, 253n59 Louis, Joe, 43, 45 Lowe, Lisa, 4, 15, 64, 210n11, 214nn55,56 MacIver, R. M., 18 Magnolia Jungle, The (East), 166 Mailer, Norman, 163, 175–76, 255n101 Mann, Thomas, 119, 130 Man’s Most Dangerous Myth (Montagu), 32–33, 49–50 Marable, Manning, 12 Marshall, Thurgood: Bell, Derrick, 203; de/segregation, 2, 57, 143, 147– 48; Du Bois, W. E. B., 70; Murray, Pauli, 12, 133–34, 245n55; Woodward, C. Vann, 2. See also Brown v. Board of Education Marx, Leo, 137 Masses and Mainstream, 82 May, Andrew, 24 McWilliams, Carey, 9 Mead, Margaret, 188–202; Baldwin, James, 15–16, 188–202; Benedict, Ruth, 30, 189–90; Black Panthers, 195; Black Power, 192, 194–96; Black women, 194; Boas, Franz, 188– 90, 191; children, 197; civil rights, 196; Coming of Age in Samoa, 189; cultures, 197; immigrants, 195– 96; integration, 194–96; liberalism, 202; race, 15–16, 194, 197–98;

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Index

racial liberalism, 188, 194, 197–98, 202; racism, 188–89, 190–91, 193, 197–98, 200; A Rap on Race (Baldwin and Mead), 198; time, 190–98; White House Conference on Children and Youth, 138; whiteness, 195– 96; white racial rule, 191, 197; WWII, 190–91 Me and White Supremacy (Saad), 205 Medovoi, Leerom, 137, 246n71 Melamed, Jodi, 8, 10, 20, 26–27, 90, 94, 235n22 Menand, Louis, 92 Metaphors We Live By (Johnson and Lakoff ), 13 Mexican Americans, 185–86 Michaels, Walter Benn, 178–80, 181, 224n140, 255n112, 256n113 Miller, Loren, 149 Mills, Charles, 4, 258n21 Montagu, Ashley, 11, 16, 27, 32–33, 34–35, 48, 49–50, 54 Moon, Bucklin, 107 Morrison, Toni, 174–75 Moses, Man of the Mountain (Hurston), 16 Moss, Carlton, 44–46 Motley, Willard, 93, 95, 97–98, 107, 112–16 MOWM (March on Washington Movement), 37–38 multiculturalism, 180–87; color blindness, 6, 168, 174, 181, 184, 187; Halsell, Grace, 186; racial liberalism, 6, 19, 187, 198; racial time, 6, 20, 27; racism, 27, 181; white/liberalism, 184, 224n140 Murakawa, Naomi, 8, 20, 75 Murray, Henry, 125, 127–29, 132, 149 Murray, Pauli, 12, 123–24, 133–34, 137, 146–47, 150–51, 245n55 Myrdal, Gunnar, 47–51; American creed, 10, 48; Benedict, Ruth, 25, 48; Boas, Franz, 48; Ellison, Ralph, 54; Halsell, Grace, 187; Montagu,

Darda-BK.indd 275

275

Ashley, 48; Native Son (Wright), 89– 90; race/racial biologism, 49–50; racial liberalism, 25, 187; racial time, 25; Rosenwald Fund, 99; Warren, Earl, 123; Woodward, C. Vann, 2; WWII, 10, 48–49. See also American Dilemma, An (Myrdal) Myth of the Negro Past, The (Herskovits), 31 NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People): anti/colonialism, 61, 70, 71– 72, 75; Bell, Derrick, 203; Black human rights, 80; Black soldiers, 36; Brown v. Board of Education, 2, 133– 34, 143–44; civil rights, 17, 56–61, 68; Crisis, 36, 41; desegregation, 36, 143, 147–48; Double V movement, 61; Du Bois, W. E. B., 57–60, 67–72, 75–76, 99; “The Effects of Segregation and the Consequences of Desegregation,” 143–44; genocide, 79, 81–82; human rights, 64; Johnson, James Weldon, 96; King, Martin Luther, 6; The Negro in American Life (USIS), 86; NNC, 67; passing, 152; To Secure These Rights (PCCR), 76; segregation, 2, 57, 121–22, 123, 148; Sprigle, Ray, 164; Supreme Court, 58; Truman, Harry, 56–60, 66, 72–74, 77; UN, 75–76; Von Eschen, Penny, 229n60; Woodward, C. Vann, 2. See also Appeal to the World!, An (NAACP); LDF (Legal Defense Fund) (NAACP); White, Walter Nash, Philleo, 74–75 Nation, 9, 28, 71 National Council of Teachers of English, 92–93, 93–94, 119 National Emergency Committee against Mob Violence, 73 nationalism, 24, 27, 31, 36, 45–46, 51, 143, 193 National Urban League, 39, 43, 86, 152

12/1/21 9:22 PM

276

Index

Native Son (Wright), 89–93, 100–106, 112–13, 116 Nature of Prejudice, The (Allport), 134– 35, 136 Nazism: AAA, 28; anthropology, 28; Arendt, Hannah, 63; Benedict, Ruth, 23–24, 117; Erikson, Erik, 129–30, 137; The Negro Soldier (Capra), 44– 45; Owen, Chandler on, 42–43; race, 47; race science, 28, 30, 170; racism, 31, 37, 38–39, 41, 44, 45, 86; Wirth, Louis, 104. See also Hitler, Adolf Negro and the Schools, The (Ashmore), 2 Negro Digest, 103, 152 Negroes and the War (OWI), 42–43, 44, 46 Negro History Bulletin, 120 Negro in American Life, The (USIS), 60, 85–87, 137, 233n142 Negro in the United States, The (Frazier), 2 Negro Soldier, The (Capra), 44–46 new abolitionists, 178–80, 255n112 New Deal, 46, 53, 60 New Negro, The (Locke), 31–32 New Republic, 115 Newsweek, 135 Newton, Huey, 154 New York Amsterdam, 46 New York Herald Tribune, 71, 73, 111–12, 159–60 New York Times: An Appeal to the World! (NAACP), 70–71; Baldwin, James, 199, 201; Buck, Pearl S., 7–8; genocide, 79–80; Halsell, Grace, 169–70; Lost Boundaries (Werker), 153; Lost Boundaries (White, W. L.), 159; Murray, Pauli, 146–47; Negroes and the War (OWI), 43; The Races of Mankind (Benedict and Weltfish), 24; A Rap on Race (Baldwin and Mead), 198; To Secure These Rights (PCCR), 76; segregation, 123; Strange Fruit (Smith, L.), 107 Nichols, Lee, 2

Darda-BK.indd 276

Nixon, Richard, 20 NNC (National Negro Congress), 17, 60, 66–69, 75, 80, 88 No Name in the Street (Baldwin, J.), 199, 201, 202, 206 North Georgia Review, 108 Notes of a Native Son (Baldwin, J.), 206 NOW (National Organization for Women), 134 Obama, Barack, 203, 214n57 Ogletree, Charles, 149, 243n21 One World (Willkie), 47 Origins of Totalitarianism, The (Arendt), 62–63 OSS (Office of Strategic Services), 128, 129–30 Owen, Chandler, 42–43, 45, 46 OWI (Office of War Information), 10, 42–44, 84 Pan-African Congress, 17, 57 Park, Robert, 53, 104, 105, 155 Partisan Review, 90, 91–92 passing, 152–56, 167–74; antiracism as color blindness, 19, 152–56, 167–74; Blackness, 153–55, 156; civil rights movement, 152; Hobbs, Allyson, 250n4; Hurston, Zora Neale, 106–7; integration/segregation, 106–7, 157– 58; Knock on Any Door (Motley), 113; liberalism, 106–7; Michaels, Walter Benn, 180, 255n112; race, 152, 155– 56, 160–61, 180; racial liberalism, 19, 155–56, 168; racial time, 155; racism, 161; readers, 106–7, 155; white liberalism, 157–58, 168. See also race novels Patterns of Culture (Benedict), 29–30 Patterson, William, 78–84, 86, 88, 232n117, 233n142 PCCR (President’s Committee on Civil Rights), 72–77; Black soldiers, 59– 60; civil rights, 17, 56, 59–60, 80; Daniels, Jonathan, 72; The Negro in American Life (USIS), 86; Patterson,

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Index

William, 79, 80–81; To Secure These Rights (PCCR), 71, 73–77; segregation, 140; state violence, 80–81; White, Walter, 230n79. See also Truman, Harry Peck, Raoul, 206 Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (Allport), 127 Personality in the Making (Witmer and Kotinsky), 138, 140, 141 personality psychology, 125, 126, 135 Petition to the United Nations on Behalf of Thirteen Million Oppressed Negro Citizens of the United States of America, A (NNC), 66–67, 68 Phylon, 91, 113, 114, 234n12 Pittsburgh Courier, 16, 26, 37–38, 80, 115, 160 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 159, 160 Plessy v. Ferguson, 12–13, 122, 123–24, 133–34, 145–46 “Portrait of the Antisemite” (Sartre), 126 Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr., 47 prejudice: Allport, Gordon, 125, 131– 33, 134–35, 136, 137; American Red Cross, 41; antiracism as education, 18; Buck, Pearl S., 7; children, 121, 138, 141–42, 188; Clark, Kenneth, 138, 141–42; Double V movement, 16, 37– 39, 41; Embree, Edwin, 98; literature, 119; Redding, J. Saunders, 77; Schlesinger, Arthur, 17; UNESCO, 10–11; US, 3, 77, 132–33, 141–42; Warren, Earl, 143 prejudiced personality, 125, 131–37 Primer for White Folks (Moon, ed.), 107 “Psychological Effects of Enforced Segregation, The” (Deutscher and Chein), 144 race: An American Dilemma (Myrdal), 51; anthropology, 8, 23–24, 27–28, 218n24; antiracism as education, 17– 18, 97, 140–41; Atanasoski, Neda on, 65; authoritarian personality, 131;

Darda-BK.indd 277

277

Bell, Derrick, 203; Benedict, Ruth, 15, 16, 23–24, 26, 31, 33–34, 117–18, 170; Boas, Franz, 23–24, 28–30, 196; Brown v. Board of Education, 147; Burkholder, Zoë, 140; capitalism, 232n117; Chicago school, 103–5; colonialism, 8; cultures, 28–29, 33–34, 34–35, 50, 118–19, 165, 171; Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, 122; DiAngelo, Robin, 205; Directory of Agencies in Race Relations (Rosenwald Fund), 98; Du Bois, W. E. B., 57; Embree, Edwin, 96–97; Fukuyama, Francis, 202; gender, 15–16; Goldberg, David Theo, 212n36; Halsell, Grace, 150, 170–71, 177–78, 186; Hanchard, Michael, 193; How to Be Less Stupid about Race (Fleming), 205; intercultural education, 118–19; liberalism, 8, 34, 140–41, 210n11; literature/readers, 19, 97, 111, 205; Lost Boundaries (White, W. L.), 158–59; Man’s Most Dangerous Myth (Montagu), 32–33; Mead, Margaret, 15– 16, 189, 194, 197–98; Melamed, Jodi, 235n22; Michaels, Walter Benn, 178– 80, 255n112; Montagu, Ashley, 32– 33, 34–35; Motley, Willard, 113–15; Myrdal, Gunnar, 49–50; Native Son (Wright), 106; Nazism, 47; OWI, 10; passing, 152, 155–56, 160–61, 180; racial liberalism, 12, 134, 150, 171, 187, 202, 204; racial theft, 29, 30; racism v., 30, 170–71; redistribution, 204; Reed, Adolph, 204; To Secure These Rights (PCCR), 73; Singh, Nikhil, 3, 49; Sprigle, Ray, 161–62, 252n43; state violence, 8, 80; Stegner, Wallace, 93; Superman’s Girl Friend, Lois Lane, 178–79; time, 7, 55, 142, 162, 187, 201, 214n56; UN, 48; UNESCO, 10–11, 34–36; US, 3–4, 5, 7–8, 9, 11, 48–51, 72, 85–86, 89, 96–97, 99, 112, 136, 147, 160, 202, 204, 212n36, 214n55;

12/1/21 9:22 PM

278

Index

race (continued) war, 68; Weltfish, Gene, 33–34; Winant, Howard, 211n12; WWII, 10, 27–28, 39, 49, 165, 198. See also Races of Mankind, The (Benedict and Weltfish) race novels, 95–100; antiracism as education, 18, 93–100, 105, 106, 108, 116– 17; Baldwin, James, 18, 91, 95; contemporary, 205–6; Embree, Edwin, 114–15; intercultural education, 118, 120; Motley, Willard, 114; passing, 106–7; racial liberalism, 94–95, 108, 114, 116–17; racial time, 116, 235n22; racism, 108, 156; Rosenwald Fund, 114–15; segregation, 93; social science, 105; WWII, 104. See also Black literature; literature “Race Question, The” (UNESCO), 11, 16, 34 “Race Relations in the United States, 1917–1947” (Du Bois), 99 race science, 27–29; AAA, 28–29; American Red Cross, 41–42; Benedict, Ruth, 30–31, 33, 170; Boas, Franz, 29, 218n24; Ellison, Ralph, 52, 53; fascism, 31; Locke, Alain, 29; Montagu, Ashley, 32–33, 35; Myrdal, Gunnar, 50; Nazism, 28, 30, 170; racial biologism, 204; racial liberalism, 55, 134, 218n24; racial theft, 29; racism, 28– 29, 35; WWII, 165 Race: Science and Politics (Benedict), 12, 23, 30–31, 49–50, 170 Races Congress (London), 29 Races of Mankind, The (Benedict and Weltfish), 23–26, 31, 33–34, 47, 50, 134 racial binaries, 12, 186, 257n129 racial biologism, 32–34; American Red Cross, 41–42; anthropology, 27–28; Benedict, Ruth, 30–31, 33–34, 49– 50, 117, 170; blackface/Blackness, 157; Black literature, 102–3; color blindness, 157, 178, 180; Herskovits, Melville, 33; intercultural education, 119;

Darda-BK.indd 278

Montagu, Ashley, 32–33; Myrdal, Gunnar, 49–50; race science/racial liberalism, 204; racial constructionism, 187; WWII, 165 racial liberalism, 162–67; American creed, 21; An American Dilemma (Myrdal), 10, 25, 50, 54, 69–70; anthropology, 54–55, 59–60; antiracism as civil rights, 61; antiracism as color blindness, 162–67, 188–89, 192; antiracism as education, 10–11, 17–18, 90–95, 134, 188–89, 192; antiracism as integration, 188–89, 192; antiracism as war, 16–17, 24, 26–27, 192; Baldwin, James, 188, 194, 197– 98, 202, 203, 206; Bell, Derrick, 203; Benedict, Ruth, 25, 30–31, 47, 54, 117– 18, 171, 187, 202, 218n38; blackface, 19, 155–56, 178; Blackness, 12; Black Power, 186, 257n129; Boas, Franz, 12, 54, 195, 202, 218n24; Brown v. Board of Education, 2–3; capitalism, 224n140; children, 198; civil rights, 12–13, 61; colonialism, 2–3, 11; color blindness, 6, 157, 177–78, 187, 198; desegregation/integration, 12, 126; DiAngelo, Robin, 205; ethnicities, 12, 134–35; frontlash, 19–22, 54, 61, 187; Geary, Daniel, 210n10; gender, 15–16, 139–40, 247n81; Griffin, John Howard, 165–68; Halsell, Grace, 168, 173, 177–78, 181, 182; human rights, 61, 65; Indigenous cultures, 3, 26; intercultural education, 119; Jim Crow, 7, 11; liberalism, 4, 8, 210n11; literature, 90–95; Mead, Margaret, 188, 194, 197–98, 202; Melamed, Jodi, 235n22; metaphors, 13, 22; Michaels, Walter Benn, 255n112; multiculturalism, 6, 19, 187, 198; Myrdal, Gunnar, 25, 187; The Negro in American Life (USIS), 87; passing, 19, 155–56, 168; race, 12, 134, 150, 171, 187, 202, 204; race novels, 94–95, 108, 114, 116–17; race science, 55, 134, 218n24; racial binaries,

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Index

11–12, 257n129; racial biologism, 204; racial theft, 11, 61; racial time, 6, 35– 36, 54; racism, 8, 11, 12, 150, 155, 171, 201; readers, 10, 92–94, 116–18; reform, 3–4, 9, 49, 61, 192; Rosenwald Fund, 9, 10, 100; segregation, 11, 12– 13, 157; Smith, Lillian, 10, 15; Sprigle, Ray, 159, 161–62, 168; as theory, 22; time, 3–7, 8, 13–22, 155, 167, 186, 191–93, 206, 214n57; US, 3, 11–12, 21; Weltfish, Gene, 54; White, Walter, 161; white liberalism, 19, 116–17; white minstrels, 186–87; whiteness, 26; white racial rule, 12; Willkie, Wendell, 47; Woodward, C. Vann, 2, 5–6; Wright, Richard, 10; WWII, 2–3, 7–11, 26–27 racial theft: antiracism as education, 10; Black human rights, 80–81, 99; colonialism, 68, 99, 182; CRC, 80; human rights, 64; Indigenous cultures, 70, 182, 185; race, 29, 30; race science, 29; racial liberalism, 11, 61; US, 39, 80; white racial rule, 3, 70, 232n117 racial time: antiracism as color blindness, 156; Baldwin, James, 19–20, 21, 195, 202; Black literature, 103; Clark, Kenneth, 142; color blindness, 6, 20, 27; gender, 15; gradualism, 150; Griffin, John Howard, 167; Hanchard, Michael, 258n21; liberalism, 4, 43, 187, 192–93, 214n55; Melamed, Jodi, 235n22; multiculturalism, 6, 20, 27; Murray, Pauli, 147; Myrdal, Gunnar, 25; OWI, 43; passing, 155; race novels, 116, 235n22; racial liberalism, 6, 35–36, 54; Smith, Lillian, 109; Truman, Harry, 79; US, 43, 142, 214n55; white liberalism, 8, 103; X, Malcolm, 202. See also time racism: Allport, Gordon, 134–35, 139; American creed, 8, 49, 124; anthropology, 27, 28–36; antisemitism, 126–27; Baldwin, James, 193, 200; Bell, Derrick, 203, 204; Benedict,

Darda-BK.indd 279

279

Ruth, 12, 23–28, 30–31, 33–34, 92– 93, 117–18, 170, 204, 216n4, 218n38; Black culture, 50–53; Black leadership, 214n57; Boas, Franz, 27, 28–31, 36; Brown v. Board of Education, 150; Buck, Pearl S. on, 7–8; capitalism, 38–39, 204, 224n140; children, 34, 118–19, 125, 131, 133, 135–36, 138, 139– 40, 151, 164, 166; civil rights, 17, 55, 58; Clark, Kenneth, 141–42; communism, 94; disabilities, 109, 110; Double V movement, 43, 45, 52; Du Bois, W. E. B., 69, 70; Ellison, Ralph, 52; Erikson, Erik, 135–36; fascism, 26, 27, 216n4; fi lms, 34, 44, 45; Griffi n, John Howard, 150, 162–63, 164; Halsell, Grace, 170–71, 177; In Henry’s Backyard (Benedict and Weltfish), 34; Herskovits, Melville, 33; immigrants, 124; India, 77–78; Indigenous cultures, 184; integration/segregation, 26, 125, 156; intercultural education, 118–20; liberalism, 4, 17, 28, 61, 187; literature, 89–95, 98, 109; Mead, Margaret, 188–89, 190– 91, 193, 197–98, 200; metaphors, 13; Montagu, Ashley, 33; multiculturalism, 27, 181; nationalism, 31, 36; Nazism, 31, 37, 38–39, 41, 44, 45, 86; One World (Willkie), 47; Owen, Chandler on, 42–43; pamphlets, 23–25, 87; passing, 156, 161; Phylon, 234n12; race novels, 108, 156; race science, 28–29, 35; race v., 30, 170–71; racial liberalism, 8, 11, 12, 150, 155, 171, 201; readers, 119, 161, 238n64; redistribution, 31, 116–17; Reed, Adolph, 204; reform, 125, 151, 188–89; To Secure These Rights (PCCR), 74, 76– 77; Smith, Lillian, 109–10; Sprigle, Ray, 161; as term, 12, 23–24, 30, 204, 216n4; time, 3–7, 48, 49, 53, 55, 90– 91, 155, 187, 190–91; Truman, Harry, 59–60, 125, 156; US, 3–4, 7–8, 11, 23– 28, 47–51, 52, 60, 69, 74, 77, 81–82,

12/1/21 9:22 PM

280

Index

racism (continued) 83, 86–88, 141–42, 212n36; USIS, 83; war, 36, 44, 59, 81, 88, 188–89, 225n13, 232n117; Weltfish, Gene, 34; white damage, 150; White Fragility (Di Angelo), 205; white liberalism, 45, 161, 178, 232n117; white racial rule/whiteness, 150; women, 139–40; WWII, 4, 23–28, 37–39, 48 Raisin in the Sun, A (Hansberry), 82, 88 Randolph, A. Philip, 36–37, 38–39 Rankin, J. Lee, 148 Rap on Race, A (Baldwin and Mead), 198 Rascoe, Burton, 102–3 readers: An American Dilemma (Myrdal), 25, 50; antiracism as education, 17–18, 92–94, 100–102, 112, 117–20; Black literature, 91, 94–95, 116, 205; BOMC, 100–101, 102, 238n64; Hurston, Zora Neale, 102–3; Lost Boundaries (White, W. L.), 159; Native Son (Wright), 101–2; pamphlets, 24, 25, 43, 111; passing, 106–7, 155; race, 19, 111; race books, 205–6; racial liberalism, 10, 92–94, 116–18; racism, 119, 161, 238n64; To Secure These Rights (PCCR), 73–74, 76; Smith, Lillian, 108, 110–11; Sprigle, Ray, 160; white liberalism, 10, 25, 101, 103, 106, 111, 161; Wright, Richard, 116. See also literature; race novels Reader’s Digest, 153, 158 Redbook, 188, 190, 198 Redding, J. Saunders, 77–78, 80, 85–86 Reddy, Chandan, 8, 20, 227n37 redistribution, 3, 4, 26–27, 31, 116–17, 124, 204, 256n113 Reed, Adolph, 203–4, 224n140 reform: antiracism, 13, 60; backlash, 20, 187; civil rights, 9; integration, 125; Klarman, Michael, 147; racial liberalism, 3–4, 9, 49, 61, 192; racism, 125, 151, 188–89; time, 192; Truman, Harry, 58, 60, 152, 156; US, 8, 26; Wright, Richard, 105

Darda-BK.indd 280

Reid, Ira De A., 103 Resolution of Intergroup Tensions, The (Allport), 134 Reston, James, 123 Robeson, Paul, 61, 72, 77, 79, 81, 82–83, 86 Robinson, Cedric, 94, 106 Robinson, Spottswood, 133–34, 143, 144 Rodríguez, Dylan, 80 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 50, 56–59, 64–65, 66, 72, 80, 98 Roosevelt, Franklin: antiracism, 9; Atlantic Charter, 63; Black culture, 53; Black soldiers, 9, 26, 36–38; Double V movement, 26, 37–38, 41; Du Bois, W. E. B., 57; Logan, Rayford, 69; MOWM, 37; NNC, 67; use of war as metaphor, 59; White House Conference on Children and Youth, 138; Willkie, Wendell, 47 Rosenwald, Julius, 93, 95–96, 99, 212n34 Rosenwald Fund, 95–100; An American Dilemma (Myrdal), 98; antiracism as education, 95–100, 112; Baldwin, James, 100; Black leadership, 98; Black literature, 93–94, 114–15; Blackness, 115; DiAngelo, Robin, 205; Directory of Agencies in Race Relations, 98; Du Bois, W. E. B., 98, 99–100; Hurston, Zora Neale, 94; integration, 115; Motley, Willard, 114– 16; Primer for White Folks (Moon, ed.), 107; race novels, 114–15; racial liberalism, 9, 10, 100; “Simple and the Rosenwald Fund” (Hughes), 95–96; Smith, Lillian, 93, 97, 99, 111; southern literature, 108–9, 111; white/liberalism, 112, 116; Wright, Richard, 102 Saad, Layla, 205 Sampson, Edith, 81–82 Sancton, Thomas, 107 Sanford, R. Nevitt, 143, 145 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 126, 130, 133

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Index

Schlesinger, Arthur, 17–18 Scott, Daryl Michael, 122 Seale, Bobby, 154 segregated personality, 142–47 segregation, 121–26; American creed, 123–24; antiracism as integration, 121–26; authoritarianism, 145; Black damage, 135; blackface, 157–58; Blackness, 125, 160; Black soldiers, 3, 26, 41–42, 114; Brown v. Board of Education, 25, 121–23, 124, 144, 147–48; children, 121–26, 135, 141, 143, 145–46; communism, 145; criminality, 20; disabilities, 109–10; “The Effects of Segregation and the Consequences of Desegregation,” 143–44; Griffin, John Howard, 162, 170; Halsell, Grace, 170; King, Martin Luther, 1, 151; liberalism, 17; literature, 93, 94– 95, 105, 106, 107; Marshall, Thurgood, 57, 143; Motley, Willard, 114; Murray, Pauli, 133–34; NAACP, 2, 57, 121–22, 123, 148; New York Times, 123; pamphlets, 85, 87; passing, 157– 58; PCCR, 140; personality psychology, 126; Plessy v. Ferguson, 146; “The Psychological Effects of Enforced Segregation” (Deutscher and Chein), 144; Race: Science and Politics (Benedict), 12; racial liberalism, 11, 12–13, 157; racism, 26; To Secure These Rights (PCCR), 74; Smith, Lillian on, 107–8, 109–11; Soviet Union, 139, 145; Sprigle, Ray, 160, 161–62; States’ Laws on Race and Color (Murray, P.), 12, 245n55; Stiles, Lindley, 125; This Is the Army (Curtiz), 44; time, 162; Truman, Harry, 59, 84, 125, 145–46; US, 25, 59, 85, 145; Warren, Earl, 25, 122–23, 135, 136, 142, 144, 148; Weaver, Vesla, 20; “What Are the Psychological Effects of Segregation under Conditions of Equal Facilities?” (Chein), 144; white damage, 122–23, 148; white liberalism/

Darda-BK.indd 281

281

white racial rule, 107–8; Woodward, C. Vann, 1–2, 5, 12–13; WWII, 3. See also desegregation; integration Selma march, 1, 6. See also King, Martin Luther Sepia, 153–54, 155, 162, 164 Shadow and Act (Ellison), 52 “Should the Civil Rights Cases and Plessy v. Ferguson Be Overruled?” (Murray, P.), 123–24, 133–34 Simone, Nina, 174–75 “Simple and the Rosenwald Fund” (Hughes), 95–96 Singh, Nikhil, 3, 49 Sloan, Harold, 24 Smith, Henry Nash, 136–37 Smith, Lillian: antiracism as education, 107–12; Black women, 15; Di Angelo, Robin, 205; Du Bois, W. E. B., 108; Griffin, John Howard, 166–67; Locke, Alain, 119; racial liberalism, 10, 15, 187; racial time/racism, 109–10; Rosenwald Fund, 93, 97, 99, 111; on segregation, 107–8, 109–11; Wright, Richard, 116 Snelling, Paula, 108–9 Soul!, 200, 201 Soul Sister (Halsell), 168, 170–71, 173–74, 176–78, 182, 187, 254n96 southern literature, 108–9 Soviet Union, 3, 57, 79–80, 82, 139, 145, 202 Spahr, Juliana, 101 Spillers, Hortense, 6–7, 46 Spock, Benjamin, 138 Sprigle, Ray, 19, 154–62, 164, 168, 180, 252n43 States’ Laws on Race and Color (Murray, P.), 12, 245n55 state violence, 8, 27, 53, 79, 80–81, 82 Stegner, Wallace, 93 Stiles, Lindley, 125 STJ (Sojourners for Truth and Justice), 83 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 90

12/1/21 9:22 PM

282

Index

Strange Career of Jim Crow, The (Woodward), 1–2, 5–6, 12–13, 72 Strange Fruit (Smith, L.), 93, 97, 99, 107, 109, 110–11 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 5–6, 88 Superman’s Girl Friend, Lois Lane, 178–79 Survey Graphic, 31–32 Taussig, Charles, 103 Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston), 94 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (Benjamin), 14–15 Thirteen against the Odds (Embree), 96–97 This Is the Army (Curtiz), 43–44, 46 time, 13–22, 188–206; America’s Town Meeting of the Air, 162; Anderson, Benedict, 192–93; antiracism as civil rights, 18; antiracism as color blindness, 3–4, 18, 192; antiracism as education, 3–4, 18, 90–91, 101, 192; antiracism as integration, 3–4, 192; antiracism as war, 3–4, 18, 27, 41, 59, 192; Baldwin, James, 19– 20, 21, 188, 192–203, 206; Bell, Derrick, 203; Black literature, 193; Black Power, 201; Brown v. Board of Education, 5, 18, 147–49, 243n21; Broyard, Anatole, 198; capitalism, 192; children, 197; colonialism, 15; cultures, 258n21; de/segregation, 147– 48, 162; Du Bois, W. E. B., 192; Dudziak, Mary, 213n52; Greenhouse, Carol, 213n52; Hanchard, Michael, 193; Hartman, Saidiya, 20; integration, 18; King, Martin Luther, 6–7; LDF, 147, 148; liberalism, 4, 20, 101, 200, 203; literature, 193; Lowe, Lisa, 214n55; Mead, Margaret, 190–98; The Negro in American Life (USIS), 87; race, 7, 55, 162, 187, 201, 214n56; racial liberalism, 3–7, 8, 13–22, 155,

Darda-BK.indd 282

167, 186, 191–93, 206, 214n57; racism, 3–7, 48, 49, 53, 55, 90–91, 155, 187, 190–91; reform, 192; US, 214n55; war, 59, 213n52; white liberalism, 176; whiteness, 258n21; white racial rule, 59; Woodward, C. Vann, 5–6; Zerubavel, Evitar, 200. See also racial time Time, 23 Tobias, Channing, 73, 81–82 To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee), 167–68 To Secure These Rights (PCCR), 71, 73–77 Toynbee, Arnold, 97 transgressive texts, 106–7, 113. See also literature; passing; race novels Trilling, Lionel, 91–92 Truman, Harry, 56–61, 72–77; antiracism, 58–61, 76–77; antiracism as civil rights, 16–17; Black human rights, 56, 58; Black leadership, 57– 58; civil rights, 10, 17, 56–61, 66, 72– 77, 82, 83; civil rights movement, 56–61, 75, 76–77, 226n21; Cold War, 57–58, 75; colonialism, 59, 77; Du Bois, W. E. B., 57–60, 66, 69, 71, 75, 76–77; genocide, 79; human rights, 65, 66, 82; Jim Crow, 146; Korean War, 138–39, 144; NAACP, 56–60, 66, 72–74, 77; NNC, 66–69; passing, 152; Plessy v. Ferguson, 145– 46; racial/liberalism, 69, 187; racial time, 79; racism, 59–60, 125, 156; reform, 58, 60, 152, 156; segregation, 59, 84, 125, 145–46; UN, 66, 67; war, 65, 139; White, Walter, 56, 58–59, 66, 73, 81–82, 230n79; White House Conference on Children and Youth, 138–40, 142; white racial rule, 26; Willkie, Wendell, 47; X, Malcolm, 62; Yergen, Max, 67. See also PCCR (President’s Committee on Civil Rights) Twain, Mark, 106, 136–37, 155 12 Million Black Voices (Wright), 103

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Index

UN (United Nations): Arendt, Hannah, 63; Black/human rights, 17, 66, 69; civil rights, 75–76; colonialism, 65– 66, 68; domestic jurisdiction clause, 228n47; Du Bois, W. E. B., 57, 59, 60, 65–66, 68–72, 75–76; genocide, 79, 84, 86; Hansberry, Lorraine, 82; NAACP, 75–76; NNC, 66–67; pamphlets, 77–79, 81, 86–87; Patterson, William, 88, 233n142; race, 48; To Secure These Rights (PCCR), 74; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 88; Truman, Harry, 66, 67; Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 57–58, 64–65, 78; US, 65, 68, 72–73, 81, 83; White, Walter, 68, 73; Woodward, C. Vann, 72; X, Malcolm, 62. See also Appeal to the World!, An (NAACP); Commission on Human Rights (UN) Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 90 Uncle Tom’s Children (Wright), 90, 116 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), 10–11, 34–36. See also “Race Question, The” (UNESCO) Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 57–58, 64–65, 78 Up from Slavery (Washington), 96 US (United States): antiracism, 8, 24, 65, 199, 201; antisemitism, 126–27; Benton, William, 84; Black culture, 32, 51; Black human rights, 62, 80, 82; Bowles, Chester, 84–85; civil rights, 17, 19, 56–61, 62, 74–76; colonialism, 26, 68, 71, 77, 82–83; Commission on Human Rights (UN), 72, 73–74; communism, 146; cultural relativism, 30; decolonization, 137; Du Bois, W. E. B., 69–70, 77, 99–100; Erikson, Erik, 136–37; genocide, 78–79, 80, 81, 88, 232n117; human rights, 63, 65, 66; internationalism, 49, 71; liberalism, 137; nationalism, 46; The Negro in American Life (USIS), 87;

Darda-BK.indd 283

283

New Deal, 46; One World (Willkie), 47; prejudice, 3, 77, 132–33, 141–42; race, 3–4, 5, 7–8, 9, 11, 48–51, 72, 85– 86, 89, 96–97, 99, 112, 136, 147, 160, 202, 204, 212n36, 214n55; racial binaries, 186; racial liberalism, 3, 11– 12, 21; racial theft, 39, 80; racial time, 43, 142, 214n55; racism, 3–4, 7–8, 11, 23–28, 47–51, 52, 60, 69, 74, 77, 81–82, 83, 86–88, 141–42, 212n36; reform, 8, 26; To Secure These Rights (PCCR), 76; segregation, 25, 59, 85, 145; UN, 65, 68, 72–73, 81, 83; Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 65; war, 59, 65, 81; Warren, Earl, 142–43; white racial rule, 26 USIS (US Information Service), 60, 83– 87, 233n142 USO (United Service Organizations), 24 Van Vechten, Carl, 107, 250n13 Vernon, W. H. D., 128, 130 Vials, Christopher, 232n117 Village Voice, 175, 255n101 Vinson, Fred M., 144 Virgin Land (Smith, H. N.), 136–37 Von Eschen, Penny, 229n60, 233n141 Voting Rights Act, 60 Wallace, Henry, 46–47, 71 Wall Street Journal, 154 war: capitalism, 65; colonialism, 68, 227n37; Dudziak, Mary, 225n13; genocide, 81; human rights, 65– 66; as metaphor, 59; race, 68; racism, 36, 44, 59, 81, 88, 188–89, 225n13, 232n117; Reddy, Chandan, 227n37; time, 59, 213n52; Truman, Harry, 65, 139; US, 59, 65, 81; white racial rule, 39–40. See also antiracism as war; Korean War; WWII (World War II) Ward, Jason, 45 Waring, Julius Waties, 125 Warner, W. Lloyd, 104–5 Warren, Constance, 24

12/1/21 9:22 PM

284

Index

Warren, Earl: Adorno, Theodor, 137; Allport, Gordon, 137, 143; anticolonialism/decolonization, 137, 142; Brown v. Board of Education, 2, 5, 18, 126, 134, 143, 147–48; Clark, Kenneth, 124, 137, 150; desegregation, 5, 18, 126, 145–47; Erikson, Erik, 137; footnote 11, 141, 145; Frazier, E. Franklin, 137; integration, 145, 146; King, Martin Luther, 150–51; liberalism, 146; Plessy v. Ferguson, 12–13, 146; prejudice, 143; segregation, 25, 122–23, 135, 136, 142, 144, 148; US, 142–43; Woodward, C. Vann, 12–13 Warren, Kenneth, 54–55, 224n140, 234n12 Warren, Robert Penn, 149 Washington, Booker T., 96 Washington Post, 76, 123 Watson, Marian Etoile, 174 Weaver, Vesla, 20 We Charge Genocide (CRC), 77–83, 86, 88, 233n142 “We Charge Genocide” (Hilliard), 88 We Fished All Night (Motley), 114 Weltfish, Gene, 23–26, 31, 33–34, 35, 47, 54, 134 What Are the Facts?, 85 “What Are the Psychological Effects of Segregation under Conditions of Equal Facilities?” (Chein), 144 “What Is Race?” (Boas), 28 “What White Publishers Won’t Print” (Hurston), 103 “What Will Happen to the Negro If Hitler Wins!” (Owen), 42–43 White, Walter: America’s Town Meeting of the Air, 161–62; Black human rights, 58; Cold War, 83; Du Bois, W. E. B., 57, 67–68, 70–72; Lost Boundaries (White, W. L.), 159; To Secure These Rights (PCCR), 76; Sprigle, Ray, 156, 161–62, 164; Truman, Harry, 56, 58–59, 66, 73, 81– 82, 230n79; UN, 68, 73; We Charge Genocide (CRC), 81–82

Darda-BK.indd 284

White, William Lindsay, 153, 158 white damage, 121–23, 125, 133–34, 135, 141–43, 148, 150 White Fragility (DiAngelo), 205 White House Conference on Children and Youth, 18, 124, 125, 138–42, 143, 144 white liberalism: “Addressed to White Liberals” (Smith, L.), 107; American creed, 48; American Indians, 185; antiracism, 20, 119, 158; Black culture, 53; blackface, 19, 157, 162, 169; Black leadership, 47; Black literature, 116; Blackness, 52, 53–54, 154–56; Double V movement, 45; Griffin, John Howard, 167; Halsell, Grace, 173, 175–77, 182, 185, 254n96; multiculturalism, 184; Native Son (Wright), 106; passing, 155, 157–58, 168; racial liberalism, 19, 116–17; racial/time, 8, 103, 176; racism, 45, 161, 178, 232n117; readers, 10, 25, 101, 103, 106, 111, 161; Rosenwald Fund, 112; segregation, 107–8; Wright, Richard, 101–3. See also racial liberalism white minstrels, 19, 156–57, 186–87. See also blackface “White Negro, The” (Mailer), 163 whiteness: American creed, 124; Brown v. Board of Education, 243n21; children, 124; Ellison, Ralph, 52–54; ethnicities, 34, 185–86; Halsell, Grace, 177, 180; HoSang, Daniel, 20; Hughes, Langston, 155; immigrants, 118, 124, 195–96, 218n38; intercultural education, 118–19; Jacobson, Matthew, 34; Kim, Claire Jean, 257n129; Knock on Any Door (Motley), 114; Mead, Margaret, 195–96; Melamed, Jodi, 10; multiculturalism, 185–86; new abolitionists, 180; passing, 155; racial liberalism, 26; racism, 150; time, 258n21; Willis, William, 190 white racial rule: American Red Cross, 41–42; Baldwin, James, 201;

12/1/21 9:22 PM

Index

Benedict, Ruth, 27; Buck, Pearl S., 7–8; civil rights, 58; colonialism, 26, 57; DiAngelo, Robin, 205; Du Bois, W. E. B., 69; genocide, 80; Goldberg, David Theo, 212n36; Griffin, John Howard, 253n59; Himes, Chester, 26, 39–40; intercultural education, 119; Kim, Claire Jean, 212n43; Mead, Margaret, 191, 197; Me and White Supremacy (Saad), 205; Michaels, Walter Benn, 180; Murray, Pauli, 123–24; Patterson, William on, 84; racial/liberalism, 12, 150; racial theft, 3, 70, 232n117; racism, 150; segregation, 107–8; time, 59; Truman, Harry, 26; US, 26; war, 39–40; Winant, Howard, 211n12; Woodward, C. Vann, 5 “Who’s Passing for Who?” (Hughes), 155, 250n13 Wilkins, Roy, 77, 82 Williams, Paul, 152–53 Willis, William, 190 Willkie, Wendell, 47 Winant, Howard, 26–27, 211n12 Wirth, Louis, 103–5 Witmer, Helen, 138, 140, 141 women, 109, 134, 139–40. See also Black women; gender Woodson, Charles, 120 Woodward, C. Vann: American creed, 4; An American Dilemma (Myrdal), 2; Brown v. Board of Education, 2, 5; civil rights movement, 1–2, 13; Jim Crow, 1–2, 5–6, 12–13, 22, 72; King, Martin Luther, 1–2, 5, 14; Marshall, Thurgood, 2; Myrdal, Gunnar, 2; NAACP, 2; racial liberalism, 2, 5–6, 187; segregation, 1–2, 5, 12–13; UN, 72; white racial rule, 5 World and Africa, The (Du Bois), 57 Wright, Richard, 100–106; antiracism as education, 89–91, 93, 97, 100–106,

Darda-BK.indd 285

285

118; Black literature, 234n6; Cayton, Horace, 115; Embree, Edwin, 97; Hurston, Zora Neale, 102–3; Motley, Willard, 114; The Negro Soldier (Capra), 46; Primer for White Folks (Moon, ed.), 107; racial liberalism, 10; readers, 116; Rosenwald Fund, 102; Smith, Lillian, 116; Town Meeting, 252n43; Wirth, Louis, 103–4 WWII (World War II): An American Dilemma (Myrdal), 25; American Red Cross, 41–42; antiracism, 4, 9, 27; antiracism as education, 9–11; Atlantic Charter/Winston, Churchill, 63–64; Baldwin, James, 39; Benedict, Ruth, 218n38; Black leadership, 36; Boas, Franz, 28; Broyard, Anatole, 198; civil rights/ movement, 9, 17, 27; colonialism, 2–3, 68; de/segregation, 3, 9; Mead, Margaret, 190–91; Myrdal, Gunnar, 10, 48–49; race, 10, 27–28, 39, 49, 165, 198; race novels, 104; race science/racial biologism, 165; racial liberalism, 2–3, 7–11, 26–27; racism, 4, 23–28, 37–39, 48; Truman, Harry, 139; Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 64; Von Eschen, Penny, 229n60; We Fished All Night (Motley), 114; Wirth, Louis, 104. See also antiracism as war; Double V movement; Hitler, Adolf; Nazism; OWI (Office of War Information); Roosevelt, Franklin X, Malcolm, 38, 62–63, 64, 88, 176–77, 201–2, 260n52 Yerby, Frank, 107 Yergen, Max, 67 Zerubavel, Evitar, 200 zoot suits, 38, 44, 221n93

12/1/21 9:22 PM

This page intentionally left blank

Mary Esteve, Incremental Realism: Postwar American Fiction, Happiness, and Welfare-State Liberalism Dorothy J. Hale, The Novel and the New Ethics Christine Hong, A Violent Peace: Race, U.S. Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific Sarah Brouillette, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary Sophie Seita, Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital Guy Davidson, Categorically Famous: Literary Celebrity and Sexual Liberation in 1960s America Joseph Jonghyun Jeon, Vicious Circuits: Korea’s IMF Cinema and the End of the American Century Lytle Shaw, Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research Stephen Schryer, Maximum Feasible Participation: American Literature and the War on Poverty Margaret Ronda, Remainders: American Poetry at Nature’s End Jasper Bernes, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization Annie McClanahan, Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture Amy Hungerford, Making Literature Now

Darda-BK.indd 287

12/1/21 9:22 PM

J. D. Connor, The Studios After the Studios: Neoclassical Hollywood (1970–2010) Michael Trask, Camp Sites: Sex, Politics, and Academic Style in Postwar America Loren Glass, Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde Michael Szalay, Hip Figures: A Literary History of the Democratic Party Jared Gardner, Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-FirstCentury Storytelling Jerome Christensen, America’s Corporate Art: The Studio Authorship of Hollywood Motion Pictures

Darda-BK.indd 288

12/1/21 9:22 PM