The Allure of Blackness Among Mixed-Race Americans, 1862-1916

The Allure of Blackness among Mixed-Race Americans, 1862–1916 Borderlands and Transcultural Studies

Series Editors:

Pekka Hämäläinen Paul Spickard Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly The Allure of Blackness among Mixed-Race Americans, 1862–1916

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dineen-Wimberly, Ingrid, author. Title: The Allure of Blackness Among Mixed-Race Americans, 1862–1916 / Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly. Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. | Series: Borderlands and Transcultural Studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers:lccn 2019005853 isbn 9781496205070 (hardback: alk. paper) isbn 9781496216793 (epub) isbn 9781496216809 (mobi) isbn 9781496216816 (pdf) Subjects: lcsh: Racially mixed people—Race identity— United States—History. | African Americans—Race identity—History. | Race awareness—United States— History. | United States—Race relations—History. | bisac: social science / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies. Classification:lcc e185.6 .d49 2019 | ddc 305.800973/09034—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019005853

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Contents

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction xv

1. “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful”: The Leadership of P. B. S. Pinchback 1 2. Postbellum Strategies to Retain Power and Status: From Political Appointments to Property Ownership 41 3. New Challenges and Opportunities for Leadership: From Domestic Immigration to “The Consul’s Burden” 87 4. “Lifting as We Climb”: The Other Side of Uplift 143 Conclusion 195

Notes 203 Bibliography 239 Index 263

Illustrations

Following page 142 1. Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback 2. Robert James Harlan 3. Josiah T. Settle 4. Richard T. Greener 5. Josephine Beall Willson Bruce 6. E. Azalia Hackley 7. Adella Hunt Logan 8. Victoria Earle Matthews 9. Henry A. Hunt 10. Mordecai Wyatt Johnson

Acknowledgments

I thank my mother, Brenda Dineen-Okonski, and father, John R. Dineen, who taught me how to love, think, and act beyond my circumstances and for loving me so fiercely and passionately. They modeled for me the freedom and power gained from education. My mother and father met as economic foundlings at Mount Loretto Catholic Orphan- age. They were determined for their only child to have far better. For their unconditional acceptance, the special place always held open for me to come share my thoughts, fears, aspirations, and joy, I am eternally grateful. The multifaceted support my mother provided in life, and now in death, continues to lift me as I carry her light. My father was the first person to show me a blue book. I am ever-mindful that it was his memory of shining shoes for a nickel at Coney Island that first sparked my love of history and led me to delve into his mother’s trunk of treasures, which would serve as my first trip to the archives. I thank my husband, Ritchie Wimberly, whose strength carried me when I needed it the most, and whose love, loyalty, and faith in my work inspires me. Thank you for listening, night after night, to the many versions of this project. To my mentor and friend, Paul Spickard, I would not have finished this book without your support, humility, dedication, and love. You escorted me to a door through which I would walk a stronger, wiser, and more-beloved woman. So I may better understand the rigors required for meaningful, intellectual endeavors, you challenged my convictions, while encouraging the development of my unique contribution to the field of history. The profound impact of your commitment to me, my work, and my family extends beyond measure. I will forever hear your voice as I research, write, teach, and help others. xii Acknowledgments For the insights, suggestions, and support offered by other colleagues and friends, I am grateful. Reginald G. Daniel, thank you for the many hours of conversation and counsel. Your brilliance, intellectual discernment, life experience, and humor served as a lifeline for me. Gary B. Nash, thank you for supporting my vision for years, and for reading my manuscript, which proved critical. Thank you Sarah Cline, Mario Garcia, John Majewski, Lily Y. Welty-Tamai, Rudy P. Guevarra, David Torres-Rouff, Monica Garcia, Angelica Chavez, and Darcy Ritzau. Special thanks to all the graduate students, staff, and archivists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, especially those at the history department. Thank you for the unwavering support I continue to receive from the University of La Verne, Point Mugu Cam- pus. Special thanks goes to Lilly Guerra, Jennifer Brace, and Jossette Yoro. My appreciation is sent to the Moorland -Spingarn Collection at Howard University; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Divi- sion at Yale University; the Schomburg Center for Black Studies at the New York Public Library; and to the staff at the Library of Congress and the National Archives in Washington dc. I offer a special thank- you to Joeth Zucco and the entire editorial team at the University of Nebraska Press. Also, to the various scholars who encouraged me, including Mary Furner, Elliot Brownlee, Sears McGee, Larry Man- son, Carla Roulfe, Ola Washington, Doug Daniels, and Farzeen Nasri, thank you. To my grand-mentor, Winthrop D. Jordan, I thank you for serving as the first historian to inspire in me the thrill of archival research and for helping to shape my professional choices. Thank you to Maurice Geraud Dineen, Louise Beverage Dineen, Inez Wilson Prince and George Prince Sr., John and Doris Prince, Edgar Prince Sr., Edgar Oliver Prince, Brian J. and Catherine Dineen, Lenora Prince, Sonja Prince, Rhoda Prince, Alice Wilson, Alice Prince, Aaron Prince, Sylvia Prince, David Prince, and to Ingrid and the entire Tay- lor family. To Grace’s godfather, Thomas O’Halloran, whose love, at a most crucial time in my life, helped me immensely and whose dedication to my daughter inspires my faith in humanity. Thank you to Acknowledgments xiii Louise and Martin Bosnak, Arlene “Big Ma” Maxwell, and the entire Wimberly family for their love. To all the “Mount” families including the Garcias, Milans, Ambrosinos, and many others, I thank you. Special thanks to Greg and Carmen Garcia for taking us in while we sojourned to Virginia, and to my godmother, Millie Garcia Irizarry. To my cousin-brother and intellectual sounding board, Raymond Joseph Prince, who traveled those many days back and forth from Staten Island, New York, to the Beinecke Library at Yale University so that I would not be alone while I achieved this dream—and for racing with me to find as much as I could before the library closed, I am eternally grateful. Thank you for your discerning ear and your unwavering moral core. You kept your promise to my mother. I am humbled by the loving care you provided to her, so that I may complete the original framework of this book. To the Children’s Defense Fund, Covenant House, St. Helena’s Girls’ Home of the Sisters of Good Shepherd, Sister Jacinta, Sister Lillian, and Eunice Kenney Radford who helped turn a tattered girl into a solid woman, I owe my life. To my friends in California and elsewhere, too many to comprehensively list, I thank you. Among them include LaR- ita Montgomery, Tom Hannon, Vadria Cooley, Robert Alumbaugh, Ellen Moore, George Rucker, Hattye Nesbit Wynn Knight, Mark Vie- ira, Tanya Cooper, Adam Page, David Schirtzer, Leah Davis, and Alea Wade, thank you. For enriching my life in so many ways, I thank Greg- ory Gray, Kevin Cook, Linda Marshall, and Rachel Aragon. To my students, you made me a better teacher, writer, and researcher. You inspired me to keep going when my health challenges seemed too hard to bare. I advise those future historians to not publish your disser- tation online. I undoubtedly neglected to include many people who I know supported this trek. Please know any omission is not purposeful. To my sons, Zachary and Landon, as I remained locked away in my office for days upon end, I thank you for your support. Your humor, patience, and love eased my worries. Zachary, thank you for being so proud of me. Finally, my eternal gratitude goes to my daughter, Grace, who went to college with me—first in my belly—and then to xiv Acknowledgments walk with me side by side. I thank you, my daughter, for all the lectures you sat through, for the many days and nights that I said, “Just one more blue book,” for all the times you fell asleep at my feet, as I sat writing through the night. Your love and trust has summoned the best of me. You will always be the amazing Grace, who “saved a wretch like me.” Introduction

I teach American history. There is a moment that takes place in every class, a moment unlike any other I have experienced while teaching history. It occurs when first I utter the word “race.” Heartbeats quicken, eyes meet, a nervous silence fills the room. No one, including me, knows where the conversation will lead. The quiet time that exists between my first mention of the word and the statement to follow is almost reverent. It is in this moment, as I look at the rows of squirm- ing students who sit before me, that I am stilled by a quiet anguish. My eyes connect with the exhausted, the resentful, or the hopeful student who believes that maybe this time he or she will have a chance to right some past injustice or indiscretion. It is a visceral snapshot of America’s inability to reconcile with its own racial past. The moment renders a historic discomfort, far older than the students who carry its burden. The suspense is intensified by the difficulty students experience while they search for any visual cues that might tell them something about my racial identity—for it may appear ambiguous. I must admit I have had this experience not only with students but with scholars as well. On one of the many trips I took to conduct research for this book I was asked by a brilliant archivist from a prestigious East Coast university, “Excuse me, may I ask what you are?” I knew she did not want to know about my profession, my gender, or my religion. Nor did she want to know about my country or state of origin, as we had covered that territory the previous day. Adorned with a smile, I said, “I’m Black.” To which she replied: “Really? Are you sure?” As if to get a better look, she tilted her head slightly. With the same smile, I said, “Yes, really.” Suddenly an older woman of Afri- can American descent, having overheard our conversation, came out xvi Introduction of her office. Her willingness to intercede was palpable, like a relative who might rescue one sibling from another. She stood between us and proclaimed, “See—I told you! I knew she was Black.” It was bizarre and yet quite moving. I saw in her eyes a grandmother who desired to protect me. One could feel the enormity of the moment. I handled the inquisition with the dignity and grace it called for, as I am particularly sensitive to the historic racial pathology out of which this type of conversation emerges. It was an amazing exchange. There we were, three generations of women all identified as Black, each having different experiences and looking different from the others. I felt empathy for each of us. The archivist, aware of the awkwardness her question produced, offered measured amends: “Well, no offense—I just wanted to know.” I opened my arms, lifted my voice, and assured her that I really didn’t mind. I pointed to the paintings that hung on a wall directly behind her. One was of Dr. Mordecai Johnson and the other, Frederick Douglass, both of whom shared a mixed-race ancestry similar to mine. I explained that my father was Irish and commented, “Our people have always been mixed to some degree or another; I suppose we have been having this conversation for some time.” I relish those awkward occasions because everyone, including me, is suddenly mindful of the limits on their understanding and even their misconceptions about how race functions in America.1 But when these types of conversations happen in the classroom, I usually offer a caveat about how to analyze race with integrity. If, for example, we are to discuss race relations during the nineteenth century, I often explain to students that we are not necessarily talking about ourselves. Rather we are learning about people who typically survive only as ghosts in the archives whom we then might study. I ask them to avoid carrying twenty-first-century ideals back into the past, and thereby to respect the dead. Interestingly, when I suggest that we study a particular period on its own terms, students tend to lower their own defenses, sit back with a sense of ease, and cease to hide their precon- ceptions. They begin to talk. The Black-White paradigm continues to dominate the study of U.S. race relations. The vast majority of college students in the U.S. have a Introduction xvii sense of the terror and tragic history of slavery; as such, they usually want to start the conversation there. Their comments echo the binary division of racial roles, which assigns authority to those who are White- identified and submission to those who are not. The conversation, if undirected, often results in any one of the following archetypes. The most common image is that of the White master in charge of defer- ent Black slaves. If the period under discussion is extended to include the twentieth century, students might describe sturdy, working-class Whites of various ethnicities who struggled to make it while they com- peted with the massed victims of Jim Crow. Without question, a discussion about Black Americans during the twentieth century will include mention of Black artists, singers, and athletes. They might recall icons of Black celebrity like Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway, or Hank Aaron. They might even remember a few beloved Harlem Renaissance writers like Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, or Zora Neal Hurston. But most assuredly they will round off the discussion with the coming of a King—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a man who would set the world straight in matters of race. It is shamefully apparent that within the American education system, public storytelling has taken the place of a thoughtful, in-depth understanding of American history. After twelve years of education, most students enter universities with, at most, an unsophisticated understanding of racial processes in the U.S. Their basic impression is that, in the beginning, which is defined as the early 1600s, poor White colonists came to America, killed Indians by either war or disease, enslaved Africans, and then eventually felt bad about those deeds. According to this narrative, since a commitment to freedom lay at the very basis of American identity, the master class imbued with such ideas felt compelled to make amends. Once the Africans were freed from the horrors and brutality of human bondage, their lives were gradually improved by a sort of noblesse oblige. Black American progress culminated with full equality as a result of the civil rights movement. A slightly different version of the same scenario may include some discussion of the embittered autonomy engendered by the Black Power movement and epitomized by Malcolm X. This reduction of xviii Introduction the African American experience to a few images is quite common. During any of these exchanges, one could almost hear the old Negro spiritual, made popular by Louis Armstrong in 1938, playing faintly in the background:

Nobody know the trouble I’ve seen Nobody knows my sorrow Nobody know the trouble I’ve seen Glory Hallelujah

It is all quite disconcerting. What concerns me most is how little highly educated and otherwise informed people know about the complexities of the racial formation process in the United States.2 There is a tendency to exaggerate the centrality of White people in all aspects of U.S. history and to cast Black people as without power, in a position merely one step above the so-called noble savage—the Indigenous American. Even more disturbing, Black Americans are often depicted as one-dimensional, passive victims who would have remained in chains had it not been for the goodwill of constitution- ally minded White men of compassion. Rarely does anyone question how we came to define people as Black or White. A middle ground, a mixed identity lying between the races, is rarely imagined.3

The Historical Challenge For the purposes of this study, I ask the reader to suppose that, at one time in U.S. history, the values and opportunities afforded to particular races were still contested. Consider that Black identity was not always detested, avoided, or loathed, and that White identity was not always prized, mimicked, and privileged. There is a rich, vast historiography dedicated to shedding light on the torture and annihila- tion endured by Black people at the hands of Whites. One can only imagine the archives yet to be discovered that will unveil still more gruesome acts of race hatred in American history. Yet this aspect of historical writing, in a reasoned effort to uncover America’s patho- logical past, unwittingly obscures times in U.S. history when the values of Black and White were less clearly defined.4 There have been Introduction xix times when Black people could work and get ahead, even assume the mantle of leadership in society. There have been times when it was a good thing to be Black. During recent decades hundreds of books have been written offering an alternative view of the African American experience. They include biographies about people like Amanda America Dickson, one of the wealthiest Black women in the U.S. during the post–Civil War period, and Madam C. J. Walker, the first female African American millionaire. Hundreds more have been written to showcase agency among Black Americans. James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom includes a thorough account of Black involvement during the Civil War.5 Leon Litwack, August Meier, and John Hope Franklin edited two separate books dedicated to showcasing Black leadership.6 The question is, then, why for the most part has such reductionism with respect to the Black experience remained constant in public memory? I believe that even the most thoughtful and scrupulous scholars have been blind to alternative visions of the Black experience during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The visual memory of the horrors of the Jim Crow era, with its “strange fruit” listlessly hanging from trees, the atrocities inflicted on Black people, and images from the civil rights movement itself—the pictures of attack dogs, water cannons, and children shot dead—often block out the vision of other times, when, for example, Black mobility was prevalent. My effort is an extension of the work produced by historians who have come before me to complicate the narrative of American race relations. I seek to introduce readers of race and ethnicity to an era in American history when the meanings of Black and White were dramatically different than they might have seemed from the vantage point of later years. W. E. B. Du Bois captured the angst that historians must endure either to critique current paradigms or to construct new ones: “I write then in a field devastated by passion and belief.” Never- theless Du Bois demanded, “Somebody in each era must make clear the facts with utter disregard to his own wish and desire and belief.”7 This study aims to join the work of that group of historians. I offer the reader other visions of what it was like to live as a Black-identified xx Introduction man or woman during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when race as a concept was still transforming. This work in no way displaces the horrors of Black-White relations throughout Amer- ican history. To the contrary, I record and interpret many of those horrors from the American past, with but one agenda: to recount accurately the stories of important people, now dead, who may or may not inspire the reader but whose lives will reveal how frequently and subtly values about race in America have changed. Instead of looking at the various ways in which Blackness as a sociological construct was linked to, for instance, a permanent condition of servitude or complete social and legal inequality, I am interested in how Black- ness as an identity was used to uplift and secure status. A useful way to track changes in racial thinking is not only to look at the victims of its construction but also to analyze its beneficiaries. As Litwack, Meier, and Franklin have shown, when we study the structure of leadership among Black Americans we are able to see Blackness as more than a mere reaction to Whiteness. In a similar tradition, The Allure of Blackness studies the middle, multiracial position—between Black and White—in order to provide a pulse of the relative value of either monoracial position. That is, if you follow the trajectory of the mixed- race people, you may track the changes that occurred in the meaning of Blackness and Whiteness. As it turns out, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many of those leaders were people of mixed-race heritage who identified as Black in order to gain or maintain their leadership status. That was the allure of Blackness. These were people who had racial options, and they chose to be Black. Choosing to be Black, when they might have chosen otherwise, was their way up, to social, political, and economic leadership positions. In fact, some may have passed as Black in order to lead. Mixed-race people who identified themselves as Black transformed the criteria for Black leadership. White authority had little impact on the matter.8 It was not a simple binary choice: Black or mixed race. The idea of multiraciality and Blackness coexist- ing in the same person was articulated by such luminaries as Charles W. Chesnutt and W. E. B. Du Bois. Many people in this era could see Introduction xxi themselves as Black at the same time they articulated their mixedness. Such people are the subjects of this book.9

The Roots of African-Descended American Leadership Many of the mixed-race activists included in this study, whether artists or politicians, benefited from an established tradition of Black leadership present in America since as early as the colonial period. To the extent that freedom and property ownership during the 1630s and 1640s represent a sign of leadership potential, Anthony Longoe and Anthony Johnson in Virginia represent early Black leadership, as they “were incontestably free” and had “accumulate[d] property of their own.” According to both Winthrop Jordan and Ira Berlin, Africans in America and their African American children enjoyed variable degrees of freedom, property ownership, and interracial marriage throughout what they both call the Genesis (ca. 1550–1700) and Provincial Decades (ca. 1700–1755). Both agree that moves toward revolution beginning in 1755 paralleled the idea that Whiteness as an identity increasingly meant free, while Blackness came to mean slave. Despite a measurable increase in Black antipathy, the revolutionary period provides a rich legacy of leadership from the ranks of Black Americans.10 During the American Revolution thousands of Black men fought for either the British or the Patriots. An estimated five thousand Black men served in the Continental Army, and an estimated twenty thousand served the British Crown.11 Despite the valor displayed at Lex- ington, Concord, and Bunker Hill, George Washington in 1775 put an end to the further recruitment of Black soldiers. By the war’s end, in 1782, while the British prepared for their final withdrawal, Black Loyalists fretted over their destiny. As promised, many Black men and their wives would realize their freedom as a result of service rendered to the Crown. Brig. Gen. Samuel Birch, British commandant of the city of New York, created a list of claimants known as The Book of Negroes. Boston King and his wife, Violet, were among the three thousand to four thousand Black Loyalists who boarded ships in New York bound for places like Nova Scotia, Jamaica, and Britain.12 xxii Introduction However, most African-descended veterans of the American Revolu- tion remained in the U.S. as slaves. The revolutionary period was not the only era to see Black Amer- icans serve in the military. During the War of 1812, when Americans fought the British again, Black Americans made significant contributions to U.S. victory, particularly in New Orleans. During the early 1800s Black Americans accounted for 10 to 20 percent of U.S. naval forces.13 Having military experience assured many of the men positions of leadership once they returned home. The tradition of gaining either freedom or status as a result of military service would continue throughout the nineteenth century. The Allure of Blackness takes an extensive look at Black involvement in the U.S. Civil War, with particular attention to the cadres of leaders who emerged to serve in their nation’s reconstruction. The early republic saw its share of leaders who achieved status and fame during their lifetime but who were not connected to military service. Benjamin Banneker—clock maker, astronomer, and author— was one of the most prominent Black Americans during the late eighteenth century and a man whom President Thomas Jefferson held in high esteem. Paul Cuffe (1759–1817), an extremely wealthy Black American commercial entrepreneur, a navigator, and an early leader of African colonization efforts, in 1815 led many African-descended Americans to Sierra Leone.14 Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784), an interna- tionally renowned author, the first published African American poet, inspired many African American writers to follow.15 Temperance efforts and education also provided pools of potential leaders in Black America. The Pennsylvanian William Whipper (1804– 1876) was another wealthy Black entrepreneur. In addition to amassing a large fortune from land investment and lumber sales in Pennsylvania and Canada, Whipper devoted his life to the betterment of the masses of Black people. He founded the American Moral Reform Society, which contended that if one improved the condition of Black men, specifically by reducing their alcohol consumption, their social condition would also improve. Increasing racial violence and emerging statutes in Pennsylvania and Ohio, which restricted Black freedom, Introduction xxiii stunted Whipper’s ambition. As a result, he supported another colonization movement, but instead of migration to Africa, he proposed a mass exodus to Canada.16 Teaching freed slaves before or after the Civil War was another major strategy Black leaders employed to uplift the race. Two such leaders, who sought to educate Black Americans long before the Freed- men’s Bureau took up the task during the 1870s, were Mary S. Peake and Charlotte L. Forten. Peake, despite the fact that her father was White and her mother was a Mulatta, is remembered as the Ameri- can Missionary Association’s first Black teacher. Forten, also of mixed race, was the known as the first Black woman to teach White children in Massachusetts, at the Epes Grammar School of Salem, Mas- sachusetts.17 The education of Black Americans accomplished many aims at the same time. It allowed the significant numbers of Black Americans the opportunity for upward mobility, but it also gave those teachers who taught them status in their own right. Most important, it enabled Black Americans to function better in society and to displace notions of innate inferiority. Opposition to slavery in the form of conventional abolitionist efforts or armed revolt also represents a legacy of active leadership within Black America. Denmark Vesey in 1822 planned a massive slave revolt built on an interethnic coalition of African-descended people from Gullah Island, off the coast of South Carolina, along with Senegam- bians. The revolt was to occur in South Carolina, but word spread before the plan was executed and Vesey and many of his followers, including some Whites, were hanged.18 Even though the revolt failed, rumor of the plot spread, which increased the potential for future rebellion. Nat Turner led another slave revolt, though on a smaller scale. In August 1831, Turner and his followers killed fifty-five White Vir- ginians and managed to escape, until he was caught in October 1831 by the Virginia militia, who hanged and skinned him. Lewis Leary, the uncle of Congressman John Mercer Langston and the great-uncle of Langston Hughes, was a Black abolitionist from Ohio who volunteered to assist in the siege of the federal government’s arsenal at Harpers Ferry. He was killed on the day of the raid, but his service to xxiv Introduction the abolitionist cause left a model of active citizenry and leadership for his family to follow. The historiography of late nineteenth-century Black leadership is rich. Several scholars have made fine studies of postbellum Black leaders. However, one finds that those studies pay more attention to the inner workings of the elite rather than their leadership of and service to the Black masses. Willard Gatewood’s Aristocrats of Color is among the most celebrated of this genre. In his profile of the elite, Gate- wood describes the habits, preferences, and lifestyles of elite African- descended Americans in the post-Reconstruction years. Strangely, he ignores a fundamental quality of these elite families—they are overwhelmingly of mixed race—and he fails to address them as such. This may be an artifact of the time in which Gatewood did his research and writing. The book did not appear until 1990, but much of his research seems to have been done in the 1970s, at the height of the Black Power movement, when no one was talking about racial mixedness. Instead Gatewood’s main emphasis is on class as the key determinant of the Mulatto elite’s elevated social position. Outlining the distinctions among Black people along lines of wealth and privilege is quite useful, as it displaces the essentialist picture often drawn about Black cultural life: of all Black people as poor and downtrodden.19 Certainly, in order to be comprehensive, studies about race need to include a class dimension (and a gender dimension as well). However, the fact that the heritage of these “aristocrats of color” often included less Black than White ancestry is significant, and Gatewood does not interrogate that situation. By contrast, Paul Spickard refers to these light-skinned African American leaders as the “beigeoisie,” highlight- ing both the class and the racial distinctiveness of the Black elite.20 To attend only to class is to tell an incomplete story. Mixed ancestry has been a prominent feature in the African Amer- ican experience throughout all of history, especially the history of Black leadership. White planters fathered many of African America’s most celebrated Reconstruction-era heroes: Frederick Douglass, P. B. S. Pinchback, Booker T. Washington, Blanche K. Bruce, and John Mercer Langston are among the many. Yet one half of their ancestry Introduction xxv is merely swept away by conventional accounts that treat them as uncomplicatedly Black. It is not a surprise to anyone that during slavery and beyond, White men often, but not always, denied their Black children. As we did during the nineteenth century, so today we historians either refuse to recognize White paternity or fail to integrate that knowledge into a historical analysis of the so-called Black elite. The subject of multiracialism is curiously absent from the historiography of the Black aristocracy, or of freemen, for that matter. Other than to describe the existence of colorism within Black communities or to define the values assigned to skin color as a mere extension of an economic strategy, the fact of mixed ancestry is awkwardly absent. What, then, prevents historians of this era from acknowledging their subjects’ complete racial lineage? This omission not only results in an illegitimacy of lineage, but it also has contributed to an inauthentic portrayal of Black leadership. Some of the above-mentioned leaders were not reared as Black children, but came to see themselves as Black only when a Black identity became beneficial as a means to amass wealth, power, or status. This is the key question: How did these individuals see themselves, and exactly when and for what purposes did they identify themselves as Black people? There needs to be an overhaul in the way we continue to classify historical figures according to the antiquated racial criteria developed by European scientists during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. An unforeseen consequence of showcasing mixed-race leaders as simply Black is that we obscure the view of other Black professionals, artists, writers, and politicians who are lesser known than their fairer-skinned kin. For example, Oscar J. Dunn, known as unmixed, was the first Black lieutenant governor of Louisiana from 1868 until his death in 1871, but he is usually eclipsed by the reputation of P. B. S. Pinchback, who replaced him and in 1872 became Louisiana’s acting governor (for less than forty days).21 The fact that Dunn is all but forgotten in historical memory may be a result of Pinchback’s more prominent later career, yet Pinchback’s prominence may have stemmed partly from advantages he enjoyed as a xxvi Introduction mixed-race, Black-identified man, over Dunn, who was an unmixed, Black-identified man. Pauline Hopkins, the editor of Colored Maga- zine from 1901 until 1904, is yet another example of a darker-skinned Black leader who is less frequently remembered than her mixed-race peers. Most readers will instead remember Booker T. Washington as Colored Magazine’s editor. The Mulatto “Wizard” of Tuskegee Insti- tute took over the magazine and replaced Hopkins with his nephew, Roscoe Simmons. Only recently have authors remembered her as its prominent early editor.22 Some may argue the point that many from the Black elite, despite their mixed ancestry, should continue to be considered only as Black because they dedicated their lives to the betterment of Black people. Do philanthropy, civil rights activism, and dedication to advancing the causes and needs of Black people in American history make one Black? William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown were not Black Amer- icans, yet their contributions to abolition are widely celebrated, while their White identity remains secure.23 The analogy may be heretical, but when one reviews the letters, memoirs, and contemporary descriptions of members of these elite circles, one finds that some leaders of Black America did not see themselves as always and unproblematically Black. Consider two of the foremost intellectuals of the generation who rose to prominence as the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth: W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles W. Chesnutt. In the third of his four autobiographies, Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois proclaims a different kind of twoness than is usually attributed to him—emphatically Black and also of mixed race:

My tie to Africa is strong. On this vast continent were born and lived a large portion of my direct ancestors going back a thousand years or more. . . . [Yet] living with my mother’s people I absorbed their culture patterns and these were not African so much as Dutch and New England. The speech was an idiomatic New England tongue with no African dialect; the family customs were New England, and the sex mores. My African racial feeling was then purely a matter of my own later learning and reaction; my recoil from the assumptions of Introduction xxvii

the whites; my experience in the South at Fisk. But it was non[e] the less real and a large determinent of my life and character.24

Du Bois in adulthood came to a political decision to stand with Black Americans, but he was always conscious of a more complicated racial story beneath the surface. Chesnutt, in his novels and stories, was attuned to racial contin- gency—to mixed people who might be taken as monoracially White in one setting and more or less Black in another, yet who possessed an element of choice, however circumscribed by social conventions, in the matter of their own racial positioning.25 In his speeches and articles in the popular press, Chesnutt positioned himself emphatically as a mixed-race person. He pronounced himself “revolted at the manifest absurdity of classifying men fifteen-sixteenths white as black men.” He refused to speak before segregated audiences and proclaimed:

Most of my blood is Anglo-Saxon, and I am not at all sore with God for giving me some of the blood of a race which produced Lincoln, Wendell Phillips, Garrison, Charles Sumner, John Brown, and whose blood flowed in the veins of Frederick Douglass and of Booker T. Washington. . . . I am neither proud nor ashamed of the colored blood in my veins. If it has brought me any good, as I think it has . . . I am duly thankful for it. If it has subjected me to any disabilities, as I am sure it has, as it has all of us who share it, I have tried to bear them with patience and to look upon the bright side of the shield.26

Du Bois and Chesnutt saw themselves as emphatically Black men, and also as men of mixed race. Yet history remembers them as monoracially Black. In the main, the historiography dedicated to the period from Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance characterizes mixed- race leaders in monoracial terms. The descriptions are unselfconscious, permanent, and assured. For example, Gatewood referred to Wash- ington dc aristocrats as “the Black 400.” The people about whom he referred did not refer to themselves as “the Black 400.” Instead they called themselves “the 400.” This is an important distinction. In a letter written by Clara Burill to her then fiancé, Roscoe Conklin Bruce, the xxviii Introduction son of Josephine and Blanche K. Bruce, Clara referred to their social group as “the 400” or “the tens.”27 Never did she refer to herself, or her circle of friends, as Black. In fact she poignantly described a group of “black students” as something separate from herself, and nowhere in the letter did she indicate that class distinctions explained the contrast. She had defined herself racially as something else than simply Black.

Organization Insofar as Black social mobility is concerned, The Allure of Blackness seeks to uncover the relevance or cause of a disproportionate percentage of mixed-race people in Black leadership positions. This study considers the possibility that, rather than their White ancestry accounting for their position of status, it was their Black identity that pulled them toward leadership. This was largely because of the new positions made available in Black leadership during the Civil War. Specifically, the years following 1862, which included the Reconstruction and Reform eras, were the apex of a powerful mixed-race consciousness that asserted its power from a base nestled in the insular grandeur made possible by their isolated communities and popularized during episodic swells of Black activism and cultural fetishism. Despite election losses to the Democratic Party and the rise of “Black Laws” during the 1870s and 1880s, many Reconstruction-era activists achieved and maintained their status during the years following Reconstruction. This book traces the development of a network of people who offered educational, religious, and financial support to facilitate the continuation of mixed-race leadership. Various institutions, such as Howard University, Fisk University, Tuskegee Institute, and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, cultivated and maintained a base from which Black-identified Reconstruction leaders would thrive. After Reconstruction, many leaders maintained their authority through federal appointments or through foreign consular appointments brokered by others within the mixed-race leadership circle. Booker T. Washington would prove crucial in landing federal appointments for several Reconstruction-era leaders. The Reconstruction- era civil rights activist Professor Richard T. Greener, after vigorous Introduction xxix lobbying efforts, received his appointment as a U.S. foreign diplomat to Vladivostok, Russia. John Mercer Langston’s appointment as U.S. minister to Haiti and Timothy Thomas Fortune’s appointment as special commissioner to the Philippines and envoy to Hawai’i occurred in much the same way.28 Many of them also maintained power, status, wealth, and influence— among Black Americans and also in the wider national community—by enhancing their business ventures or taking prominent positions at prestigious universities. For example, Congressman Langston was president of Howard University; Greener, the first Black American Har- vard graduate (1870), was a professor of metaphysics and logic at the University of South Carolina and taught law at Howard Law School until the school elected him as its dean.29 In terms of evaluating the potential career longevity of Reconstruction politicians, H. A. Wal- lace, a page in the South Carolina House of Representatives during Reconstruction, wrote in 1918, “All republican politicians . . . did not sink in obscurity or harmless inactivity after 1876.” In an effort to document the leadership of Black men in the House and Senate during Reconstruction, Wallace cataloged the names and achievements of several politicians, among them Judge William J. Whipper from Pennsyl- vania and John H. Rainy of South Carolina.30 Charles B. Purvis and Norris Wright-Cuney are other examples of leaders who could have passed as White but who remained Black-identified mainly because of the power and opportunity it afforded, as well as their own personal inclination. Because of their experience and leadership during Reconstruction, many were also able to create an environment of financial and social support for their children in terms of education and opportunity. In fact many of their children would later become progressive leaders during the reform era. Thus the end of the nineteenth century saw no shortage of potential Black leaders. When the work of charity became professionalized, people like Josephine B. Willson Bruce, the wife of Senator Blanche K. Bruce, writer, reformer, and lady principal of Tuskegee; Victoria Earle Mat- thews, a writer and the founder of the White Rose settlement house xxx Introduction for colored girls; and Adella Hunt Logan, a writer and teacher at Tus- kegee, were also lured into Black leadership. The matter of their White skin did not prove powerful enough to push them toward a White identity; rather the leadership potential inherent in choosing a Black identity pulled them toward Blackness. The irony here is that this was at the same time in U.S. history when lynching was at its height and racial violence was commonplace. The fact remained that for the masses, Black identification could get them killed. For a minority of Black leaders, who were disproportionately light to near-White, passing as Black secured their opportunity for fame, influence, and position, within the Black community and also in the wider American community. The Allure of Blackness provides several insights into the development and scope of Black leadership in both domestic and foreign policies of the United States, as well as in the movement for social reform. More- over this book displaces the paradigm of Black submission and White privilege by exploring the various ways by which mixed-race, Black- identified men and women from the Civil War era through the Pro- gressive era amassed power, influence, and wealth on account of their decisions to identify as Black rather than White. This was the allure of Blackness. This study also displaces the notion that most racially ambiguous-looking people overwhelmingly passed as White in order to subvert racial oppression or to overcome the limited opportunities Blackness afforded.31 My research finds that from the 1860s through the 1910s unique opportunities opened up for mixed-race, Black-identified leaders. As such, those opportunities pulled people toward Black rather than White identification. The detailed account, provided herein, of many of the mixed-race leaders, prominent during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, also serves as a historical precedent for the preponderance of consciously mixed-race, Black-identified politicians and artists in U.S. political and cultural history. This book is divided into four sections, which trace the racial identities of key mixed-race yet Black-identified leaders who championed the cause of Black civil rights. Chapter 1 looks at the record of mixed- race leadership during and after the Civil War. It surveys the different Introduction xxxi opportunities for leadership made available to people like Pinchback, remembered as Louisiana’s first Black governor. Chapter 2 extends the analysis of Reconstruction-era politicians and follows the methods employed by men like Pinchback, Robert Harlan of Virginia, and Theophile T. Allain of Louisiana, who managed to stay in positions of prominence by shifting their focus from political representation to property ownership. Chapter 3 analyzes the ways in which com- petitive pressures from foreign immigration, and a desire to assert a national rather than a racial identity, led many mixed-race leaders— among them, Josiah T. Settle, assistant attorney general in Tennessee; T. Thomas Fortune, editor of the New York Age; and Richard T. Greener, U.S. foreign diplomat to Vladivostok—to advocate for the development of Black colonies in places like Liberia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Hawai’i. Chapter 4 looks at the ways in which mixed- race women, as carriers of Americanization efforts, positioned themselves to lead the Black masses, while they reinforced a commitment to the eugenic aesthetic popular during the early twentieth century. In order to compare the impact that socially constructed gender distinctions had on Black leadership, Chapter 4 specifically traces both the public and the private lives of Josephine B. Willson Bruce, Victo- ria Earle Matthews, Adella Hunt Logan, and E. Azalia Hackley.

The Allure of Blackness among Mixed-Race Americans, 1862–1916

Chapter One

“As a Negro I Will Be Powerful”

The Leadership of P. B. S. Pinchback

There is massive literature on racial passing. Almost all of it is presented as passing from truly Black to inauthentically White. The idea that someone with racial options would want to pass as Black in order to raise his or her status in America is for most readers of American history absurd on its face.1 There is, however, significant evidence to support the notion that a vocal Black identity adopted during the late nineteenth century afforded many people of mixed-race ancestry in the U.S. access to increased economic, political, and social status. Civil rights agitation during the nineteenth century had become an avenue for Black-identified men and women to achieve status and power, as new positions of leadership opened up for Black leaders. To demon- strate the various ways and for what purposes racially ambiguous people shifted toward a Black identity, this chapter focuses on the years during the U.S. Civil War and the subsequent era of Reconstruction. I survey the life of a Reconstruction politician who was prominent in Louisiana, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback. Remembered as the first Black governor in the United States (elected in 1872), Pinch- back was a racially ambiguous-looking man whose heritage included mostly White ancestors. Throughout his life, however, Pinchback made a number of specific identity shifts that moved him steadily closer to a Black identity. In 1862, when Union general Benjamin Butler 2 “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” authorized the formation of an all-Black regiment, Pinchback finally “declared himself a Negro.” This chapter charts the course of his decision and reveals how Pinchback’s decision to be Black afforded him substantial social and political upward mobility.2 Pinchback’s specific life choices and the particular historical context in which he made them should not be understood as aberrational. There are many other such examples of mixed-race men who achieved power and prominence as Black leaders. John R. Lynch was a Reconstruction-era congressman from Mississippi and an army major who fought during the Spanish-American War and who, upon President William McKinley’s request, traveled to Haiti and the Philippines to represent U.S. interests. Lynch practiced law in Chicago until his death in 1939. Other men of similar distinction were John Mercer Langston, congressman of Virginia, U.S. foreign diplomat to Haiti, president of Howard University, and great-uncle to the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes; Norris Wright- Cuney, Republican delegate and political broker from Texas; Rich- ard T. Greener, Reconstruction politician and U.S. foreign diplomat to Vladivostok, Russia; and Theophile T. Allain, Louisiana Republi- can delegate, wealthy and active member of the Louisiana Chamber of Commerce, and close friend of Pinchback. Many of these mixed- race politicians remained prominent long after the Civil War and Reconstruction, but did so primarily as a result of their decision to identify as Black leaders rather than to remain racially ambiguous members of the wealthy elite.3 Aliya Saperstein and Aaron Gullickson studied U.S. census data for the period 1870–1920, when the census included a middle category, Mulatto, between Black and White, for people who were perceived to be racially mixed. They found that from one census to the next, a significant number of individuals moved between the Black and Mulatto categories. They attributed this to changes in occupa- tional and social standing: if one moved up in class and status, one moved from Black to Mulatto; if one moved down socially, one moved from Mulatto to Black.4 That may be an accurate portrayal of overall trends. However, my study concentrates on people who were making “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” 3 a different move: from mixed or White to Black, and moving up in social status because of it. William J. Simmons, an early Pinchback biographer and author of an anthology on Black leaders from the Reconstruction era, remarks on the prevalence of mixed-race men who entered Black leadership as a vocation of sorts, “Opposition calls forth resistance, and it may be . . . [that] scores of other noble men, would be quietly performing personal duties, letting the world surge in at their windows, but never going out to meet it.” Simmons’s observation addresses what I refer to as the allure of Blackness. It is likely that the pull of civil rights advocacy rescued such noble men from historical obscurity. Had it not been for the pressing needs of Black people, they might well have been forgotten among other wealthy, White or mixed-race planters in Louisiana.5 The prevalence of mixed-race people in the ranks of Black leadership has remained a fascination for students and scholars of African American history. Historians of the U.S. have dealt with mixed-race figures in several different ways. Typically, they are cast as midlevel brokers of “high culture.” As a class, commonly referred to as “the Mulatto elite,” they are usually charged with mimicking upper-class Whiteness and then carrying those values, mores, and temperaments from the Whites, who resided above them, to the Blacks, who were positioned below them. This interpretation renders various images of mixed-race persons, including that of the tragic or tortured Mulatto, to the opportunistic co-conspirator of White supremacy.6 Focusing on the preponderance of passing among mixed-race individuals—that is, passing as White—is another common way scholars frame this topic. In other cases, the historiography of race and ethnicity has ignored the topic altogether by identifying all people with any known African ancestry as simply Black.7 To the contrary, there is abundant evidence in the archival record for P. B. S. Pinchback, which reveals a very different set of options for racially mixed people. In short, the record demonstrates that Pinch- back was at one time in his life self-identified as White, and then at another, self-identified as Black. The latter move resulted in measurable 4 “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” personal gain for Pinchback and his family, as well as widespread political influence among the greater masses of African-descended Americans.8 His story not only offers insight into the history of miscegenation, “racial uplift,” or multiracial consciousness. It challenges the very paradigm in U.S. history of simple Black submission and White privilege. For Pinchback and many others, social Blackness was a way up rather than a way down, and “passing as Black” proved to be an alluring option.9

Pinckney Pinchback: Passing from Racially Ambiguous Boyhood to Negro Manhood Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback was the son of a White planter from Virginia, William Pinchback, and his former slave, Eliza Stewart. According to Jean Toomer, Pinchback’s grandson and famed Harlem Renaissance novelist, “unless you were looking for signs of colored blood you would see a white youth.” Toomer described his grandfather precisely: “His build was sturdy, his nerves strong. His well- informed head was on the massive side . . . his complexion fair, nose rather prominent.”10 The precise racial heritage of Eliza is today unknown—in fact it was unknown to her son more than a century ago. According to a biographical sketch written by William Simmons during Pinch- back’s lifetime, Eliza “was of mixed blood and known as Mulatto, though she claimed to have Indian blood in her veins.”11 Accord- ing to Toomer, the family believed Eliza to have some unknown combination of Black, American Indian, and White ancestry. In an unfinished draft of his autobiography, Toomer explained that his grandfather did not know with certainty whether his mother was indeed Black at all. Toomer recounted a time when Pinchback showed him a picture of Eliza. He admitted that it was quite difficult “to discern what bloods were in her.” As a fifteen-year-old boy, Toomer recalled, Pinchback tried very hard to detect her racial ancestry, since he was desperate “to know, as far as anyone did know, exactly what bloods were [within him].” With the picture in his hands, Pinchback “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” 5 asked for the boy’s impression: “What is your guess? Your guess is as good as anybody’s.” Toomer later wrote his impression of his great- grandmother’s racial ancestry: “It is clear at a glance that she’s not straight Anglo-Saxon or Nordic; some dark blood has entered in; but it is anyone’s guess as to what dark blood. Negro? Indian? Span- ish? All three, probably.” Apparently, Eliza during her lifetime was also unsure of her racial heritage, since the mixture had happened some generations before her birth in 1812. The fact that her condition of servitude alone did not suffice as evidence of African ancestry reveals the limited utility of slavery as an absolute criterion for racial identification in the United States.12 The tendency here is for scholars to use the one-drop rule for Black identification: one “drop of Black blood”—one known African- descended ancestor—makes one Black. This came to be the assumption of scholars and laypeople over the first half of the twentieth century. However, during the nineteenth century fractions of blood made a significant difference in many cases. The legal classification for Black identity during much of the nineteenth century varied from state to state, and in some states it changed several times during the century. Some states defined a Black person as anyone with one-eighth Afri- can blood; some states set one-sixteenth African blood, or even one- thirty-second, as the criterion for Black identity. In Virginia until 1850 a person who was “less than one-fourth African, was entitled to be white.” In South Carolina before the 1840s “both known and visible Mulattoes could be white . . . and could marry into white families.” By 1895 “a Negro [in South Carolina] was defined as a person with one-eighth African black ancestry.” In Louisiana all “persons of color” were forbidden to intermarry with Whites until 1870, when legal reform spurred by Reconstructionists temporarily amended the law. Not until after the first decade of the twentieth century would a person with any known African ancestry at all be classified unequivocally as Black.13 In another section of Toomer’s draft he wrote, “Pinckney himself and his mother and her children were largely white, if not all white.” Despite some evidence to the contrary, Eliza, on account of 6 “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” her condition of servitude, was publicly seen as Black and would be remembered in the historiography as Black.14 Pinckney, one of ten children born to the couple, “was always a favorite of his father.”15 The couple had seven children before Wil- liam took Eliza to Philadelphia in 1835 for the purpose of her manumission. The fact that the couple never married was not on account of an antimiscegenation law, since Pennsylvania had no such law.16 Rather it was as a result of William’s complicated personal life. He had maintained a parallel relationship, which developed into a marriage to Lavinia Rudd. He and Lavinia had five children who were indisputably White. “Pinky,” as his father referred to him, remembered as a child being treated much like the rest of his half-brothers and -sisters from this other relationship.17 It was not uncommon on Southern plantations to see playing together the children born from a legal wife and those from a slave mistress. This arrangement of con- cubinage or polygamy was often accepted with impunity. No doubt the rape of slave women by White masters and the vicious retaliation from White wives was even more common, but such plural arrange- ments did exist. P. B. S. Pinchback grew up in such a racially complicated multiple family.18 To whatever degree their relationship was based in love or coer- cion is important, but scanty records on the point force us to leave that judgment to the realm of conjecture. Toomer argues, “William Pinchback’s word was law, for more reasons than one. Besides, he held the purse-strings. Eliza Stewart had nothing and owned nothing, no property or anything else, except what he gave her.”19 Yet Toomer recognized that there was something more complicated about their relationship. Years before William took Eliza to Philadelphia he had arranged for her manumission upon his death. In a will that he kept with a friend at a neighboring plantation, he expressed his intention that Eliza and all her children be set free and ushered to a non-slave state in the event of his death.20 But William acted on this intention while still in life. After Eliza was freed in 1835 the couple headed to Mississippi to continue their life on a newly purchased plantation in Hancock County. At some point along the way they picked up Lavinia “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” 7 and her children. All were headed to Mississippi when the matter of Eliza’s eighth pregnancy necessitated a detour; Pinckney was born in Macon, Georgia, on May 10, 1837.21 The young Pinckney was raised on the same plantation with his full brothers and sisters and his half-brothers and -sisters born of two different women, one born White and free and the other, nearly as White, just recently freed. Toomer was not naïve to the tension that existed between the families. He wrote, “It is not likely that the proud and headstrong boy yielded to his father’s authority without protest, or viewed [his] mother’s maternal helplessness without bitterness, or felt the utter dependence of the whole family upon the father without some rebellion—that grew and deepened over the years.” Perhaps this is why William Pinchback in 1846 sent Pinckney and his elder brother, Napoleon, to the Gilmore School in Cincinnati, Ohio. The fact that the boys were sent away should not, however, be understood as puni- tive. The Gilmore School was a place “where other Mulatto sons of white fathers, including John Mercer Langston, were enrolled at one time or another.”22 The move might satisfy two ends: the education of two of Eliza’s sons and, perhaps, a reduction of the tensions experienced by both families. Nevertheless one ought not disregard the fact that, at one time, William owned Pinckney’s mother. Surprisingly, Pinchback “from his own words and feelings expressed [to Toomer] . . . was able to feel with his father, sympathize with him, and . . . though he [William] was the master of his plantation, there were forces within himself and circumstances outside of himself that pretty well mastered him.” For Pinchback, his father was “a man of quality and many human features, but almost as subject to his environment as his slaves were to theirs. . . . He was as considerate, decent and good to my mother and their children as he possibly could be.” Aware of the ironic quality of his assessment, he continued, “He could have done more for us. Many a man in his position would have done far less, without considering himself less a man. Had he continued living until I myself became a man, my life would have worked out quite differently. At heart he was a decent human being. I have much to thank him for.”23 8 “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” In a parenthetical citation, Toomer added that Pinchback felt “indebted” to his father.24 Toomer made an insightful observation when he interpreted their peculiar condition: “William . . . and Eliza . . . both had ‘master bloods’ and ‘serf bloods’ or ‘slave bloods.’ It is the same with me, their descendant. On the level of inheritance I am also compounded of master and slave, and middleman too. Is it any different with you? And on them both, as on you and me was the impress if [not] the process that was and still is moulding a new people in America.”25 In 1848 William Pinchback died of an illness whose name has been lost to history. Toomer described this time for Pinchback, and the rest of the Stewart family, as a “crisis year.” Prior to William’s death, “[the] two families, held apart by him during his life, and also somewhat harmonized all those years, came into headlong collision.” Because “both families had suffered under an arrangement galling to both . . . both had been oppressed by the same situation, now the oppression exploded in a form that oppressed one family still more, [and] . . . matters were made worse by the question of inheritance.” Eliza “felt some claim to a share in the plantation . . . it having been her home as well as the home of the other family.” Toomer didn’t know “whether she pressed the claim,” but the legal family’s wrath manifested in a threat to reenslave Eliza and all her children. Even Pinckney, born free, and the child in her belly were subject to the threat. Eliza and her children fled Mississippi and settled in Ohio as a White family.26 Choosing to be White did not afford them any special privilege in Ohio. Shortly after arriving they realized that “the work they [knew] how to do ha[d] place on a southern plantation, none whatever in a city.” The “pinch of hunger and poverty” set in. Napoleon, Pinch- back’s elder brother by seven years, temporarily “lost his mind.” With his father dead and his brother infirm, Pinckney, at the age of twelve, set out to find work as the primary source of support for his family. This act foreshadowed a headstrong impulse to lead others, an inclination that would later thrive in a political and social environment that called for leadership.27 In personal terms, the threat of his mother’s reenslavement, the “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” 9 biting poverty in Ohio, and the terror that accompanied their escape set Pinchback on a life course to right the wrongs done to his mother. He saw himself as his mother’s protector. He loved her dearly, and made “a vow . . . that . . . somehow . . . [he] would gain power and position so that such an experience would never again befall his mother, himself, his brother and sisters.”28 Soon after the family settled in Ohio, Pinchback secured a position in steamboating along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. He worked as a cabin boy, a barber, and a steward. According to George Devol, an infamous gambler and card sharp on the Mississippi River, when Pinchback was a boy, he became Devol’s protégé. However, there is no mention of this in Simmons’s approved biographical sketch of Pinchback. Toomer believed that Devol’s version of the relationship was overstated and that the description of Pinchback was unreliable. It was, however, on the steamboat Alonzo Childs that Pinchback would meet other mixed- race sons of White planters, such as Robert Reed Church, John Lewis, and Josiah T. Settle, who would also end up in Reconstruction politics. Pinchback’s lifelong friendship with Norris Wright-Cuney, a Recon- struction politician and entrepreneur from Texas, began during their youth while they worked along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.29 At this point in Pinchback’s life, it is unclear which race he claimed. Toomer suggests that his grandfather changed his identity several times, “between the ages of 12 and 21.” He concluded that Pinchback “swung from one to the other, being white at times, colored at others, according to circumstances, which suited his purpose best at the time.”30 His marriage to Nina Emily Hethorn in 1860, “a sixteen-year- old beauty of French and English descent,” marked a time of White- ness.31 John Chandler Griffin argues that Nina “assumed that the man she married was a white man, for so he seemed.”32 Toomer remembered that his grandmother Nina Emily was Catholic but that she was not a member of any particular church, which explains why church marriage records do not exist. Until 1870 Louisiana maintained a strict antimiscegenation statute, which forbade intermarriage between Whites and people of color.33 The fact that they were married in 1860 reinforces the claim that Nina 10 “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” Emily believed her husband to be White. Toomer recalls that he “never heard a thing to the effect that she had even a drop of dark blood.”34 While writing his autobiography, Toomer recognized the primacy of social Blackness. He concluded, despite all evidence to the contrary, that it was the power of social reputation that necessitated his grandmother’s Black identity. As soon as Pinchback claimed to be Negro— his White French and English wife would be assumed to be a Negro as well.35 Toomer’s emphasis on the power of social reputation in terms of racial identification is based in historical legal precedent. Judge Wil- liam Harper in 1831 lent his opinion on the social dimension of racial identity: “We cannot say what admixture of negro blood will make a colored person. . . . The condition of the individual is not to be determined solely by distinct and visible mixture of negro blood, but by reputation by his reception into society and his having commonly exercised the privileges of a white man. . . . It may be well and proper, that a man of worth, should have the rank of a white man while a vagabond, of the same degree of blood should be confined to the inferior cast.”36 As the couple managed their life in Louisiana, the Civil War loomed. Pinchback was still working on the Alonzo Childs when news of the war inspired him to volunteer for military service. For which side would he fight? He was Southern, and White. Here, then, we see yet another twist in the history of Pinchback’s racial identity. In May 1862 he joined the Union army as a White private.37 Just before Pinchback got the chance to serve he was “arrested . . . tried, [and] convicted [for] assault with attempt to murder.” A fight with John Keppard, his sister Mary’s husband, placed him in a world of trouble. Pinchback avoided the sentence thanks to his previously made commitment to military service.38 Arna Bontemps describes Pinchback’s entrance into the military as a White private, but suggests that he joined the military after he was released from a workhouse. Various historians, by way of an inconsequential reference within a larger project, have referenced Pinchback’s early military career. Bontemps’s interpretation of events suggests that it was actually after “three months [of serving time that] . . . he was released at his own request for the purpose of enlisting in the First Louisiana Volunteers, “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” 11 a white regiment of Union soldiers.”39 Stanley Turkel writes that, at this juncture, Pinchback was “passing for White.”40 James Haskins also believes that Pinchback was simply passing as White. He writes of Pinchback’s determination, “He would wear one of those blue uni- forms, he had decided, even if he had to pass as white to do so first.”41 According to Joseph T. Wilson, a member of the 2nd Louisiana Native Guard Infantry, who “was chosen by his comrades to be the historian of the Negro soldiers,” racial ambiguity within both Union and Confederate ranks was common. He wrote in The Black Phalanx, “Quite a number of Mulattoes served in white regiments, some as officers; they were so light in complexion that their true race connection could not be told.” Wilson claims that this was not simply a Louisi- anan phenomenon since Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts each had its share of racially ambiguous-looking troops.42 When Gen. Benjamin Butler authorized the use of Black regiments in his famous Order No. 62, Pinchback, at one time White enough to fight, became Black enough to lead. On October 12, 1862, the now Black Capt. P. B. S. Pinchback raised an all-Black regiment of the 2nd Louisiana Native Guard, known as the Corps de Afrique.43 Pinchback’s decision to identify as Black must have shocked Nina Emily. Toomer concludes that Pinchback had “certainly talked it over with his wife.” But since “there [was] no record about how she felt about it . . . it [stood] to reason, that she . . . was opposed. In the first place she did not want her husband to join the army.” This interpretation is suspect since Pinchback was facing two years in jail for the Keppard incident. Perhaps she didn’t know about the length of his sentence, which was suspended upon his agreement to serve on active- duty status. Toomer explains, “She did not want him to declare himself a Negro. She had no deep seated need of any such. . . . Nothing in her life had given her motive for championing the cause of Negroes and casting her lot with them.” When Pinchback accepted the “decision for himself . . . [he accepted] . . . a decision for [her] too.”44 Pinchback’s decision to be Black not only affected his wife but outraged his sister Adeline P. Saffold. In a four-page letter sent to Fort Pike, Louisiana, “Addie” wrote: 12 “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful”

Pink I really feel sorry for your sad situation yet at the same time I feel angry at you . . . angry to see you classing yourself among the despised race. [H]ave little to do with them as possible. I have received less sympathy among them than from whites. In all the wide world there is no safety for the Negro but Pink we are not negroes. . . . What need you care for their wrongs brother? You can never right them. . . . God forbid . . . that you should think I have no compassion for that totally oppressed race. For my heart sometimes aches. . . . If I were you Pink I would not let my ambition die. I would seek to rise and not in that class either but I would take my position in the world as a white man as you are and let the other go. . . . Try and keep brave Pink and have as little to do with the Negroes as you can. You will fare better in the end.45

As if that letter were not enough to express her concern and dis- approval of his Negro declaration, she wrote yet another to reinforce her position:

Pink you remember . . . my writing you that I had cause to shun the Negroes. Well I will tell you why. Reuben [Adeline’s husband] established himself here as a white man. Voted as one and volunteered in the service of his country as one. He was insulted by Negroes here right at the public hotel and called insulting names. The whites alone befriended him. He chased the Negro through the streets and gave him a tolerably good beating. My position here is this. I have nothing to do with the Negroes am not one of them. Take my advice dear brother and do the same.46

Adeline, too young to remember, was probably unaware that Pinch- back’s decision was, first, rooted in those assaults carried out upon his mother some fourteen years earlier and, second, based on the chance of upward mobility. He explained, “It was because we were classified as Negroes that we were powerless to prevent ourselves from being outraged, beaten down, and robbed and driven off [from Mississippi]. As a nigger I was insulted. So then, as a Negro I will be respected. As a nigger I was helpless. As a Negro I will be powerful.”47 “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” 13 Pinchback’s military career, however, would not provide him with the kind of power he sought. According to Toomer, “his vision of service became a pain.” He was indeed in a position of leadership “over his own men but set under his supervisors.” Toomer surmised, “[Those] white officers . . . took him at his word, and regarded him as a Negro. . . . The status of Captain, which he envisioned as elevating, turned out to be as degrading as the white officers could make it.”48 Although he was nominally in a position of leadership, the military did not offer Pinchback the level of federal support or racial protection for which he had hoped. Clearly the position in which Pinchback landed proved immobiliz- ing and demoralizing, but this is not where the story ends. Yet this is the precise point at which many scholars of the history of race render a picture of mixed-race men and women in prominent positions who were stymied by the social order of Black submission and White privilege. This conclusion ignores the chaotic political landscape that characterized the years during the Civil War and Reconstruction. It was in this period of U.S. history that an atmosphere of defiance embold- ened men and women to reframe the nation while they redefined themselves as citizens, whether as Black, White, or mixed. Widespread upheaval caused by not only the war but rapid industri- alization, negotiations as to what the proper role of the federal government was to be, and the final gasp of slavery dominated the American landscape. During this time of intensity, the idea of White power and Black submission was challenged. Even more contested was the scope of new leadership that would emerge to unite the country and begin its reconstruction. Only with this political instability in mind should the reader consider the complex options for leadership available to mixed-race and Black-identified Americans during the Civil War.

The Varied Impact of the Civil War on Mixed-Race and Black-Identified Americans Leadership opportunities for Black-identified Americans expanded as a result of the Civil War, just as they had during the American Revo- lution and the War of 1812.49 The ability to fight in their nation’s war 14 “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” provided freemen (that is, Black people who had long been free), freedmen (newly emancipated former slaves), and slaves a public, national identity as loyal soldiers. It also meant potential financial gain through pensions and land redistribution, while it served as a training ground for future political activism. Moreover the honor of leading troops, which men like Pinchback enjoyed, even if only briefly, created a foundation of status and power that would ready them for subsequent positions in the Reconstruction government. The experience gained during the war, specifically as it related to the recruitment of companies by Black officers, the subsequent organization of those troops, as well as bravery in battle, all helped to position Black-identified leaders on the front line of postwar civil rights activism. It is important, however, to avoid reducing the history of Black involvement in the Civil War to one unified image. Some Black- identified Americans in Confederate territory, particularly those of mixed-race ancestry, who owned land or slaves did not aid the cause of freedom. This was especially true for mixed-race slaveholders who believed they had more in common with Confederate White planters than with the Black masses they might have represented on account of race. Military historian Joseph T. Wilson points out the allure of the Confederacy for some troops: “Prejudice against the negro at the North was so strong that it required the arm of the public authority to protect him. . . . Not so at the South. . . . [In 1861,] the free negroes of New Orleans . . . held a public meeting and began the organization of a [Confederate] battalion, with officers of their own race.”50 It is easy to reduce this complicated phenomenon of Black slave ownership and Confederate allegiance to a matter of mixed-race opportunism. Historians all too often place mixed-race people in this unsavory position between White planters and enslaved Blacks. For example, in an otherwise thorough examination of Black officers’ participation in the Civil War, Manoj K. Joshi and Joseph P. Reidy argue that free Black Americans were “historically pulled . . . in contradictory directions.”51 This notion is quite common but loaded with false assumptions, which are rooted in the enduring quality of the monoracial ideal. “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” 15 It assumes that mixed-race people measured their values and associations against either racial group. The fact is that the attributes or qualities of neither Blacks nor Whites were so clearly defined. White- ness did not always mean wealthy, propertied, and educated. There were desperately poor, uneducated Whites, though they were formally free. Blackness likewise did not always mean slave. There were some people of color who owned slaves and possessed great wealth. Moreover the existence of Black blood neither ensured benevolence nor did it prevent slave ownership. In fact many mixed-raced Loui- sianans owned slaves. Francis E. Dumas, captain of the First Louisi- ana Native Guard, and major of the 2nd, owned just over a hundred slaves, which he mustered to supplement the First Native Guard (Con- federate), as well as the 2nd (Union).52 Positioning free people of color, especially those who were mixed race, in the middle of Whites and Blacks is a conceptual habit we have created in order to remedy the messy business of making sense from the contrary images of either privilege or hardship, which do not fit neatly into the paradigm of White oppression and Black submission. Here unexamined pseudoscientific understandings of human variation are most prominent. The idea that races are whole, distinguishable biological categories is used to measure not only physical differences but social qualities as well.53 Thus mixed-raced Americans are considered to lie somewhere between White terror and Black victimiza- tion. The logic is rather absurd. Even if social position, or attitude, could be predicted by the organic distribution of White and Black lineages, free people of color, many of whom had more White than Black ancestors, would have by this line of thinking more reason to align themselves with Whites of similar social and economic condition. In places like Louisiana and South Carolina, the prevalence of property ownership, long-term residence in the South, and elevated social status among free people of color also contributed to the presence of White and mixed-race alliances. Some scholars have assumed that free mixed-race people should have been “natural allies in the battle against prejudice” with Blacks. Despite the risk of appearing to ignore the later development of Black 16 “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” consciousness and solidarity, one might reconsider the viability of a natural alliance between freemen and slaves. It is more likely that free Louisianans of color aligned themselves more closely with other free, albeit White, Louisianans who had life experiences similar to their own. At this particular time in Louisiana history, experience rather than racial ancestry determined to a larger extent the formation of coalitions. I contend that condition of servitude, property ownership, including land and slaves, education, and comparative wealth should be considered the main criteria for identifying alliances. The assumption that mixed-race Americans with the least bit of African blood flowing through their veins should have a natural alliance with African slaves rather than with their French or Spanish cousins and neighbors tells us more about the state of racial determinism in scholarship during the twenty-first century than it does about nineteenth- century race relations.54 The fact is when compared to other mixed-race populations in the United States who were largely slaves during the nineteenth century, Louisiana’s free population constituted a unique representation of antebellum race relations.55 Many historians of the nineteenth century, including Joshi and Reidy, recognize that freemen in New Orleans prior to the Civil War owned millions of dollars’ worth of property, which included land, slaves, and business establishments. The wealthiest among them “owned large plantations and hundreds of slaves.” A prominent philanthropist, Thomy Lafon, was known to be worth in excess of $400,000.56 Wilson concludes that the New Orleans racial landscape was quite complicated:

New Orleans differs materially from . . . any other city on this side of the Atlantic. It has several classes of colored people: the English, French, Portuguese and Spanish,—all a mixture of the African,—and the American negro—Mulatto—[who were] numerically stronger than either of the others, but socially and politically less considered and privileged; the former, [European as opposed to American in orientation,] enjoyed distinctive rights, somewhat as did the Mulattoes in the West Indies. . . . Of these foreign classes, many were planters, “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” 17

and not a few merchants, all owning slaves. It was from these classes that 1,400 colored men, forming the Native Guard . . . came, and which recruited to 3,000 [before Gen. Benjamin Butler captured New Orleans in 1862].57

With the exception of the right to vote, colored freemen in Louisi- ana enjoyed many of the same rights and privileges afforded to White property-owning Louisianans. They could enter into contracts and testify against White defendants; they had for all intents and purposes no restrictions placed on their travel; and they did not need the patronage of White guardians, which was common in many other states. The vast majority of freemen, an estimated 85 percent, worked as artisans, professionals, and proprietors.58 Therefore, those differences or antagonisms could not be soothed or remedied by the “mere sharing of African ancestry.”59 This is an important clarification since years before the Civil War the freemen of Louisiana, largely of mixed race, had distinguished themselves apart from Black slaves. John N. Ingham and Lynne B. Feldman report, “The great majority of New Orleans’ free colored population had come to the city from [Saint Domingue], and were mostly French-speaking, slaveholding Mulat- toes who had fled during the Haitian revolution. By 1850 fully 81 percent of the free black population in the city was Mulatto, while very few slaves were of mixed blood. Skin color was an important badge of status in New Orleans.”60 Additionally the fact that so many of them—approximately one- third—were slave owners supports the claim that they tended to side with Whites rather than Blacks and, more germane to this study, with White Confederates. Ingham and Feldman explain, “They identified so strongly with the dominant White society that they repeatedly participated in catching runaway slaves, uncovering slave plots, and suppressing revolts.”61 This is very different from the Woodson interpretation of Black slave ownership, which is rationalized as a means to ease the condition of servitude for brothers in bonds.62 Another factor that influenced mixed-race freemen to align with Confederates is the fact that in Louisiana the freemen’s previous military 18 “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” service was recognized on the federal level. President Andrew Jackson lauded the efforts of free men of color in the War of 1812 and praised their service during the battles of New Orleans in 1814 and 1815. The state of Louisiana paid freemen pensions for their service, while other free Louisianans, in order to supplement their financial support, started a mutual aid society, known as the Association of Colored Veterans of 1814 and 1815. The flexibility of movement, the inclusion in various state institutions, and the wherewithal to create benevolent societies suggest that Louisiana’s free people of color had more in common, in terms of the right of civic participation, with free Whites than with the enslaved. It is not surprising, then, that at the beginning of the Civil War scores of freemen volunteered for Confederate service.63 Some White and Black Confederate alliances may have been motivated by a desire on the part of Black freemen to quell suspicions of disloyalty, while at the same time protecting their property. Accord- ing to the testimony given by General Butler to the American Freed- men’s Inquiry Commission on May 1, 1863, personal security and the protection of property were paramount. Butler’s testimony includes a report quoted from his “free black” assistant, who explained, “If we would have not volunteered they would have forced us into the ranks, and we would have been suspected. We have property and rights here, and there is every reason why we should take care of ourselves.”64 It is quite possible that a freeman talking to a Union commission during a particularly bloody phase of the war in 1863 would claim that he was forced to serve rather than risk looking like a Confederate sympathizer. Nevertheless his statement reveals the very complex social order in Louisiana.65 The fact remains: freemen recruited and formed companies of soldiers. Freemen of color served as officers under the leadership of White regimental colonels. Herein lies the confusion over Pinchback’s exact racial identity upon his entrance into military service. According to most accounts, Louisiana’s first guard was a White regiment.66 How- ever, Joshi and Reidy believe that the regiment was not White but Black. Both interpretations are true, as White and Black units developed simultaneously as the Confederate Native Guard.67 “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” 19 The job of tracing the evolution of Louisiana’s Guard is daunting because the ability of Blacks to serve in the Guard was contested several times over the course of eighteen months. The first group of men to enlist for military service in Louisiana included those who were Black, White, and mixed. This first group was called the Confeder- ate Native Guard. This regiment formed between November 1861 and March 1862, when “Confederate Governor Thomas O. Moore inducted them into the state militia, denominating it the ‘Native Guard.’” This guard had both Black and White Confederate units.68 Shortly thereafter, during the summer of 1862, when General But- ler called for the enlistment of free Blacks to serve the Union, some of those men who had previously fought for the Confederacy went over to the Union side. Some went out of fear of retaliation at the hands of Union soldiers, particularly since they were not given arms by their Confederate commanders. There is no doubt some men went over to the Union side for ideological reasons as well. In 1911, in his book Our People and Our History, Rudolphe Lucien Desdunes profiled many such individuals and claimed that “Creole people of color . . . [were among] the first to give the example of loyalty to the cause of the Union.” Des- dunes nevertheless warned that because of “conditions that existed in 1862, it is necessary to reject the pretense that every man of color stepped forward who was not a slave.”69 Desdunes’s important distinction asks observers to move away from an essentialist conclusion of Black homogeneity toward the recognition of competing loyalties, which voiced different plans for the fate of slaves. General Butler’s decision to use freemen of color was not made in haste. To the contrary, he had consistently denied the use of Black troops before the Union occupied New Orleans in April 1862. How- ever, his willingness to employ Black troops increased when he realized that Confederate rebels had regrouped and planned to lay siege to Baton Rouge. After Union troops attacked New Orleans, Black Con- federates did not flee Louisiana along with many White Confederates. Rather, many freemen of color “slipped back into the comparative anonymity of the French Quarter.” Their ability to blend in among French Louisianans was largely due to their light skin. To make an 20 “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” absolute assessment of the freemen’s loyalties is impossible. One must keep in mind that alliances, loyalties, and decisions changed quickly and were based on individual proclivities, interests, and experiences. In between incidents, like the Union attack on New Orleans and the siege of Baton Rouge, soldiers continued to calculate and recalculate their best interests, and some changed their minds in favor of supporting the Union cause.70 When General Butler first encountered the guardsmen, he was impressed by their ability and civility. He also commented on their skin tone as a collective group, saying, “The darkest of [them] was about the color of the late Mr. Webster.”71 Butler’s reference to the very White former U.S. secretary of state and senator from Massachusetts Daniel Webster illustrates the predominance of racially ambiguous-looking, Black-identified men in the Guard. Nonetheless tensions prevailed around the use of Black troops. Part of the reason Butler hesitated about using Black troops was that he did not yet have authority from the War Department to do so. He did receive pressure from other commanders, including Gen. John W. Phelps, who led a post several miles north of New Orleans. Butler received multiple requests from Phelps to let Black soldiers serve. Phelps had previously worked as an abolitionist in Vermont and as a result of this experience was much more sympathetic to the rights of Black men. Butler submitted each request to the secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, who in turn asked Presi- dent Abraham Lincoln to decide whether or not to permit Blacks to enter the Union army as soldiers. By late summer of 1862 Confeder- ates headed back to Louisiana and, just as General Butler anticipated, overtook Baton Rouge. It was as this point that Butler made the decision to allow the formation of a Black Native Guard and, according to Wilson, was “obliged to accept the policy of arming Negroes.”72 The process continued, and by fall of 1862 three Black regiments had been formed, with most companies commanded by Black captains.73 In December 1862 Butler relinquished his command to Gen. Nathan- iel P. Banks, who was deeply opposed to Black people serving in leadership positions. In February 1863 Banks began to dismantle the organization of Black leadership constructed under Butler’s command. “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” 21 He called the Black captains into his office for interviews, supposedly to survey their grievances. Once the Black officers levied complaints of racism against White officers, General Banks responded by asking the Black officers to resign. Pinchback’s military career ended in just this way. From Fort Pike, Louisiana, in 1863 he tendered his letter of resignation to General Banks, which emphasized his “discontent” and “dissatisfaction” with the military on account of White racism.74 Evidence taken from various Native Guard service records indicates that General Banks believed that Black officers were ill-equipped in terms of intelligence and training to be effective leaders. This was a baseless charge, particularly when compared to the mediocre performance of many of the White officers, who also had no formal military training. Moreover the population of free persons of color, from which these Black soldiers came, was one of the most privileged sections of society. Joseph Wilson describes them as “coming from the highest ranks of social life, [and] undeterred by the prevailing spirit of caste prejudice.”75 Many of them were literate, had been exposed to an array of cultures, had traveled extensively, and owned property. By contrast, many White officers in the Union had only the qualification of their White skin.76 Ironically General Banks’s position was challenged by a higher authority, a member of President Lincoln’s cabinet. Capt. George S. Denison, in a letter dated January 1863, wrote to Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, criticizing General Banks and his staff. Captain Denison complained, “I think Gen. Banks lacks decision. With one or two exceptions, his staff are not men of ability.” He continued, “I can hardly get him to express an opinion—or if he does, it does not seem to be an earnest conviction.” The general purpose of Denison’s letter to Chase was not merely to diminish General Banks’s reputation but to urge Chase to convince the general that the continued use of Black soldiers would win the war. Denison concluded, “The Govern- ment can finish the war in twelve months—in one way and in only one way. Arm the Negroes.” In the hope that he would convince Banks to keep the Black regiments, Denison asked Chase to write Banks a letter supporting the Black troops. Denison was aware that Banks was 22 “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” about to dismiss or instigate resignations from Black officers. Lobby- ing Chase was a logical move on Denison’s part, as Chase had influenced many of Lincoln’s war plans, and in fact had written the draft of Lincoln’s message to Congress concerning the abolition of slavery.77 Regardless of those efforts, by the spring of 1863 officers of the 2nd Louisiana Native Guard, out of frustration over unequal treatment and race-based antagonism, began to resign their posts. In the fall of 1863 Maj. Francis Dumas and with Pinchback also offered their letters of resignation. The intense prejudice levied against Black-identified officers, coupled with a general who forced the officers to take com- petency exams, led all but a few Black officers to resign. However, General Banks still had to manage recurring threats of Confederate attack. Despite his “hostility to negro officers,” Banks needed Black troops, both to reinforce the Union troops and to protect government plantations. By mid-summer of 1864, with Banks’s tacit approval, Black officers were permitted to recruit once again other Black regiments. Joshi and Reidy make the point that “while he [General Banks] considered them unqualified to command, he knew that no one could enlist black recruits as quickly as they.”78 Pinch- back attempted to muster yet another Black company in early 1865. He used a thousand dollars of his own money and reapplied to General Banks for a commission. Despite the need to recruit Black soldiers, and despite Pinchback’s personal efforts, he was denied the commission and immediately shifted his ambitions from being a war hero to becoming what today we would call a civil rights activist.79 This sort of transition proved to be politically, socially, and economically uplifting for Pinchback and for other men of his experience and background.80

The Post–Civil War Scramble to Lead Black People In the months and years that followed the Civil War hundreds— perhaps thousands—of Black-identified people volunteered in the effort to reconstruct the country. Some worked for the Freedmen’s Bureau; some twenty-two Black men served in Congress, in both the House and the Senate.81 The Civil War propelled many mixed-race members of the freemen class from a position of proprietary and “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” 23 educational privilege to an opportunity for political leadership and legislative power. Booker T. Washington described the leadership transition present during Reconstruction when he wrote, “Political agitation drew the attention away from . . . securing property . . . [toward] the temptation to enter political life.” Washington considered this move “alluring” but maintained that the transition to political life would result in unforeseen losses in industrial skills and a decreased rate of property ownership among the masses of Black Americans.82 According to an article written for the Republican in 1872, Pinch- back’s life followed a similar trajectory—that is, a shift from private interests to public service. The Republican also picked up on the trend when it reported that he had “followed various private avocations until the era of colored men in politics dawned.”83 After Pinchback resigned from the army he immediately sought to get into what he called the “political game.”84 As a Black-identified civil rights agitator he started giving speeches. He spoke to crowds of Black Americans about lynching, White-jury nullification, class prejudice, the right to vote, and the need for education.85 Pinchback recommended that newly freed Black Americans “be educated up to the requirements of the time.” He urged his fellows to “seek that information which will qualify us for a higher station.”86 He spent two years in Alabama advocating for the rights of Black Americans.87 Assisting newly freed slaves both during and after the Civil War developed into a vocation for many Americans. Elizabeth Keckley, a mixed-race former slave, a boutique owner in Washington dc, and the personal dressmaker of Mary Todd Lincoln, founded in 1862 the Contraband Relief Association. It assisted refugee slaves who fled Maryland and Virginia to seek aid in the nation’s capital. Many free middle-class, Black-identified Americans formed similar organizations because it was unclear the extent to which White Americans would assist in rehabilitating freed people from the horrors of bondage. In fact Whites were “in denial about their debt, [and they had] left the work of uplifting freed people to the free African Americans of the Contraband Relief Society [sic].”88 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, the most well-known African 24 “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” American woman novelist of the nineteenth century, who published books about Reconstruction like Iola Leroy and Trials and Triumph, also made the work of helping and leading freed people professional. Earlier, during the 1840s and 1850s, Harper had become active in the abolitionist movement and gained public attention from the release of her abolitionist poetry. In 1864, upon the death of her husband, Harper turned her advocacy efforts into a career. After the Civil War she traveled to the South in order to promote both education and the fulfillment of equal rights for newly emancipated slaves.89 However altruistic Harper’s motives may have been, the historian Carol Faulkner characterizes Harper’s mission as “overtly paternalistic” since “as an educated middle-class woman, she saw freemen’s aid as ‘a field for civilizing work.’” Frederick Douglass once voiced his concern over postwar paternalism perpetuated by middle-class freemen. He warned that free middle-class Blacks, including himself, should temper “all our schemes of benevolence” or risk fostering a depen- dency among the newly emancipated. The fact that Harper relied on funds raised at her speeches to support herself also attests to the economic incentives that accrued to Black leadership.90 Related to the topic of mixed-race paternalism or opportunism during Reconstruction is Pinchback’s assertion of a Black identity and the criticism that decision inspired among future scholars. Often missed by scholars of this era are the interlocking aspects of ambition and altruism. Toomer believed that a large part of Pinchback’s alliance with Black people had to do with his desire to avenge his mother’s mistreatment, and thereby the mistreatment of all people oppressed by an American racial order that labeled most of those who were Black- identified as slave, and those who were White-identified as free. One must ask, given the presumed racial order, why not meet those aims as a White man? Pinchback was clearly physically ambiguous enough to pass as White. In an interview with the New York Times, Pinchback recalled that his White appearance caused one policeman to remark, “[Are] you a white man . . . what are you?”91 Toomer also wondered why his grandfather didn’t help Black people as a White man. “Surely,” writes Toomer, “his ambition would be “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” 25 greatly advanced in the white world, [and] greatly retard[ed] in the colored. Could not even his desire to help Negroes be more effective if he had become an influential White man?” Toomer recognized that there was something more to be gained. He concludes, “The situation that developed in Louisiana after the Civil War was such that he could fulfill both urges in the same circumstances. His declaration of himself as a Negro was not to his personal disadvantage but was to the distinct advantage of his ambition. It had quite a bit to do with his rise to power; he was in a position to use it to help Negroes—not that he always invariably did so.”92 Indeed there was a link, not just in Louisiana but throughout the South, between the experiences gained by Black-identified veterans of the Civil War and civil rights activism during Reconstruction. For example, in 1871 Pinchback “threatened to sue the Pullman porter company for denying sleeping berths to blacks who held first-class tickets.”93 Others joined him in his efforts, and “after the war, the agitation [initiated by those Black officers of the Native Guard] spread and eventually succeeded in integrating the New Orleans streetcars for the rest of the nineteenth century”—that is, until Plessy v. Fergu- son in 1896 sanctioned “separate but equal.” Former officers also agitated for the right to vote. Unlike the poorest Whites, many freemen prior to the war owned land and thereby qualified in terms of property ownership for the right to vote.94

Governor Pinchback and the Power of Black Politics Just as many scholars have cast Reconstruction as an afterthought to the Civil War, the historiography of Pinchback’s political life has created an antiheroic image of ineffectual leadership. Scholars of Recon- struction history typically cast him as a peripheral figure. According to this interpretation, Pinchback’s legacy ends with the withdrawal in 1877 of the last federal troops to enforce Reconstruction in Louisi- ana.95 Another characterization of Pinchback’s career is as an oppor- tunist. John Chandler Griffin Jr. asserts that Pinchback merely “rode on the coattails of the black republican party.” The novelist Alice Walker is most condemning when she says, “Once having obtained 26 “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” power Pinchback did nothing of substance for the masses of black men who voted for him.”96 The evidence suggests that the sum of Pinchback’s achievements in business, education, and politics resulted in his amassing widespread influence to affect civil rights reform, national recognition, and personal wealth. Thus it is curious that he is generally considered a boastful, scurrilous figure. While he succeeded both personally and publicly, my research finds that he made significant civil rights strides for the benefit of Black people as a whole.97 On Pinchback’s return from Alabama to Louisiana in 1867, he quickly became the state’s first Black delegate of the Republican Party. On the Republican ticket, he ran for a seat in the state senate. In 1868 he won and served as senate president. In that capacity, he wrote Louisiana’s first Reconstruction Civil Rights Bill, which mainly addressed equal accommodations. During the same period, Pinchback served the city of New Orleans as its Board of Education school director. In Decem- ber 1871, while Pinchback had his eyes set on gaining a seat in the legislature, Lieutenant Governor Oscar J. Dunn, a highly respected Black medical doctor, died unexpectedly. Because Pinchback was the president of the state senate, he replaced Dunn and became lieutenant governor in the administration of Governor Henry Clay Warmoth.98 Governor Warmoth faced his own political problems. Claims of voting irregularities and fraud resulted in his impeachment, and in December 1872 Pinchback became the acting governor. The gover- nor’s seat was highly coveted. Pinchback held it until the inauguration of Governor William P. Kellogg in early 1873. Even before Warmoth’s impeachment was complete, a more radical splinter of the Republican Party, known as the Custom House Republicans, led by C. C. Antoine and Kellogg, had set their sights on the governorship. Pinchback considered a campaign to remain governor, but his devotion to the aims of the Republican Party trumped his personal ambition. He believed that he would have won the election, but in an eleventh-hour meeting the night before the Republican convention, all involved parties discussed their options. In a letter written to the Honorable James Lewis, Pinchback withdrew his name as a candidate for governor and formally “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” 27 clarified his intention “to subordinate [his] personal inclination.”99 He did not want to chance splitting the Republican ticket and thereby risk a Democratic win. Instead he ran on the Kellogg-Antoine ticket and, in return, was promised a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Pinchback did get elected to the House, but the win was contested by his opponent, Fusionist George A. Sheridan, and each party declared its man the winner.100 Allegations of voter fraud resulted in Pinch- back’s never being seated. In the very same election, in January 1873, Pinchback was simultaneously elected a U.S. senator of Louisiana. He immediately left for Washington dc. This was a rather precarious position, because he was actually a member-elect of both houses of Congress.101 James B. Beck of Kentucky remarked, “I know that many rights are accorded to men because of race, color or previous condition; but I never knew that even a Negro could be both a Representa- tive in Congress and a Senator at the same time.”102 Pinchback’s senatorial seat was also contested by both Democratic and Republican members of the Senate.103 He appealed his case to the Senate for several years but to no avail. The many drafts of appeal that he wrote to the U.S. Senate vibrate with a palpable sense of his utter disappointment.104 In 1875 he wrote a letter to the Senate, outlining his right to be seated. He recognized that the Senate had not acknowledged his win on account of alleged voting irregularities in 1873 and “on the alleged ground that the Returning Board that gave certificates to the numbers of the General Assembly of 1873 was unconstitutional, and the Legislature organized thereon illegal.” He argued, however, that “the Legislature of Louisiana, in its session of 1874, unanimously endorsed me as the choice of the people.” He also explained that in “January, 1875, the new Legislature re-elected me with great unanimity, as though in case of vacancy [his emphasis].”105 In 1876 the Senate “passed on [Pinch- back’s] credentials . . . and by a vote of twenty-nine to thirty-one ‘resolved that Pinchback be not seated as Senator.’” The Senate agreed by vote to pay Pinchback “an amount equal to the pay and mileage of a Senator for the term for which [he was] respectively [a] contestant . . . up to the period of the termination of [his] respective contest . . . by the Senate.”106 The matter was of national interest. In 1876 the New York Commercial 28 “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” Advisor reported the incident in a sympathetic yet condescending tone. The reporter concluded that the Senate’s inaction and the speed by which they handled the matter were akin to “a turtle in the mud.” He called the Senators “lazy” and suggested that they were no contest for the “trained politician” Pinchback. Regional prejudices underscored the reporter’s account: “In fact, the mad abstinancy [sic] and devilish cruelties of the White League in the South recently have made Pinch- back [quite popular]. . . . The North will assuredly accept the loyal Negro in preference to the possibility of the white rebel.” The reporter was also moved to include a physical description of Pinchback: “He is . . . not darker than an Arab, less so than Kanaka. Like Lord Tom- noddy, ‘his hair is straight but his whiskers curl. . . . His manner is reserved but polite, exhibiting a modesty rarely seen in a successful politician [my emphasis].” The news of his election to the Senate, and that body’s refusal to seat him, was covered nationally. From Oshkosh, Wisconsin, to Washington dc, newspapers were printing stories about him.107 During this time Pinchback remained active in Republican politics. In 1876 he served as delegate-at-large in Cincinnati, Ohio.108 The fact that he was never seated in either house of Congress did not in any way curb his ambition. He was not without a plan, nor was he without power, influence, or money. Several years earlier, in 1870, he had started publishing the New Orleans Louisianan, and he served as its owner and editor for eleven years. The paper proved lucrative. For a time, C. C. Antoine coedited the paper, which gave Pinchback the freedom to travel back and forth between Washington and Loui- siana. During that time he tested his hand in entrepreneurial endeavors and opened the Mississippi River Packet Company, which was only moderately successful.109 Throughout his life he would invest in a number of pursuits, including stocks, bonds, and real estate, which ultimately reinforced an image of corruption. There were just as many articles on Pinchback’s allegedly unscrupulous investments as there were on his future political appointments, which included U.S. post- master, marshal, and customs officer. Yet Pinchback did not seem to mind his scurrilous image. In a letter written to Senator Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi, Pinchback reminded his friend, “As I told you in “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” 29 the beginning, being a pioneer in the social revolution, you would have to be prepared to receive some hard knocks.”110

The Roots of Pinchback’s Corrupt Image It is useful at this juncture to explore how Pinchback came to be known as corrupt. Are the criticisms levied by Alice Walker and Chandler Griffin reasonable, or are they overstated? In this section I offer -sev eral sources for Pinchback’s antiheroic image, which led me to conclude that his critics did not completely mischaracterize him, but they failed to offer a complete picture. This is mainly because they did not address the interlocking aspects of altruism and ambition that defined his character and career. As indicated at the beginning of this chapter, as a young man Pinch- back was employed as a steward on a steamboat, the Alonzo Childs, where he was reported to be the “manservant” and gambling protégé of George Devol. Ingham and Feldman explain that during “the nineteenth century, the term ‘riverboat gambler’ was often used to characterize any shifty, dishonest person” and that “Pinchback was [indeed] a riverboat gambler, and his later critics never let him forget it.”111 However, the only source of evidence for Pinchback’s shifty image as a card sharp comes from Devol’s 1887 book, Forty Years a Gambler, wherein the author reminisces about his exploits with Pinchback. Devol depicts Pinchback as a child swindler who lured naïve card players to financial ruin. Toomer, in his draft autobiography, contests Devol’s depiction of Pinchback’s early years as the boastful memories of a swindler. Toomer did not remember his grandfather as a gambler. In fact, he did not recall his grandfather ever playing cards. He believed that if his grandfather were indeed the notorious card sharp that Devol made him out to be, there would have been some indication of that in his grandfather’s adult life. To the contrary, Toomer remembered that the only gambling Pinchback ever expressed an occasional fondness for was on the pony races.112 It is important to keep in mind that Devol’s Forty Years a Gam- bler was written well after Pinchback had gained notoriety and influence. Pinchback had already owned a cotton manufacturing business, 30 “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” a newspaper, and commercial real estate. He also co-owned Planters’ and Merchants’ Packet Company, an incorporated steamboat company created in 1885 from three separate companies. (Pinchback’s Mississippi River Packet Company, in operation since 1870, accounted for one of the three.) The merger helped all three companies avoid competition.113 Because of Pinchback’s financial success and influence in Loui- siana politics it makes sense to suspect Devol’s motives. Publishing such a scathing and patronizing version of events might have had the purpose of enhancing his own image by claiming some hand in raising Pinchback. He may have also emphasized his relationship with Pinchback in order to gain protection from the law for crimes of his own. Devol admitted in Forty Years to going to the governor’s man- sion while Pinchback was in office in order to avoid charges from local New Orleans police. This admission suggests an opportunistic, if not an extortive, relationship.114 Another source for Pinchback’s opportunistic image comes from his choice to identify as Black. Some conclude he did so only in order to serve as a captain in the 2nd Louisiana Native Guard. Since Pinchback initially volunteered as a White private in the 1st Louisiana Native Guard, his shift to a Black identity marked, according to Griffin, “personal ambition.”115 The conclusion is strong, yet my earlier analysis of the complicated record of the Native Guard tempers the accuracy of this conclusion. After delving into the record of the origins of the Louisiana Native Guard, it is possible, if not likely, that historians unwittingly mis- represented Pinchback’s actual record. One can hardly criticize the work of Pinchback scholars, since the establishment of the Louisiana Guard, and its subsequent evolution, are anything but predictable or clear. The first Guard mustered in Louisiana was not the 1st Louisi- ana Native Guard (Union), but instead was the Louisiana Confeder- ate Guard. Formed as a state militia in 1861, the Confederate Guard included both Whites and free men of color.116 The formation of Black companies for the Union did not commence until the summer of 1862, with the announcement of General But- ler’s Order No. 62. Despite their marked valor in battle at Port Hud- son and at Ship Island, their record of service during this period in “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” 31 Louisiana should be understood as a series of false starts and abrupt stops. Black officers from 1862 through 1864 in Louisiana did recruit free Black soldiers for Union service. However, those companies were then disbanded because of individual Union generals’ link to Banks, who struggled over contested visions of the proper role of freemen and freedmen in the Civil War. More important to the fate of the use of Black soldiers was the Lincoln administration’s stalled judgment on the matter. Eventually, as Union victories were repelled by Con- federate advances, military necessity trumped political and racial concerns, and Black regiments were recruited again.117 Even Toomer was hesitant to commit to a specific history of the events surrounding Pinchback’s early military career. He offered two versions of the story. In one, Pinchback volunteered for service out of a desire to help the Union, while also saving himself from serving a two-year jail sentence for an assault conviction; in the other, he was compelled to serve in the Union. Toomer wondered whether recruit- ing prisoners was not a quasi-conscription method employed by the Union. It is likely that Pinchback volunteered before his arrest, because just after local police arrested and released him he was re-arrested by military authorities and tried and convicted. This supports the notion that he had previously committed to military service. How- ever, Toomer’s suspicion that the military scoured workhouses for recruits makes sense. Toomer writes, “After these several compulsory steps . . . Pinchback by some situations not clear to me had a chance to volunteer. . . . But I am sure, from things he said to me as well as by certain records . . . that he had already made up his mind to offer his services . . . before he was given the choice of remaining in jail or enlisting in the army.”118 Regardless, the record is clear that Pinchback was enlisted in the 1st Louisiana Native Guard, a White regiment. The fact that Butler’s Order No. 62 had yet to be declared further suggests that he entered as a White man. Perhaps he initially chose to serve as a Negro but then realized when he arrived in New Orleans that the army was not yet ready to enlist Black soldiers. When the opportunity presented itself he jumped at the chance to advance as a Black captain for the 2nd Louisiana Guard (Union). 32 “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” Toomer was also sure that Pinchback did not publicly declare himself a Negro until he was twenty-one years of age, a declaration that amounted to social mobility in the context of the Civil War and Recon- struction. Toomer concludes, “His declaration of himself as a Negro was not to his personal disadvantage but was to the distinct advantage of his ambition. It had quite a bit to do with his rise to power.”119 Despite Pinchback’s distinct desire to amass power during the Civil War, his donation of $1,000 to finance the formation of yet another company belies the charge of sheer opportunism. Lest we underesti- mate the contribution, $1,000 in 1863 was the approximate equivalent of $20,000 at the beginning of the twenty-first century.120 The fact that Pinchback was arrested twice also contributes to his scandalous image. One might recall that the first arrest, in 1862, was on account of a fight with his brother-in-law. Pinchback’s second arrest, six years later, in September 1868, was also as a result of a fight. M. C. Morgan, a political opponent of Governor Warmoth, shot at Pinch- back for an undetermined reason, and Pinchback returned fire. Both men were wounded minimally and both were arrested. Pinchback was released the next day. Pinchback’s Democratic opponents made use of the debacle and published defamatory editorials in local newspapers. Infuriated by what he considered to be a Democratic attempt to slander his reputation, Pinchback fought back. In a speech given in the state legislature shortly after the incident, on September 3, 1868, Pinchback expressed the need for “retribution” and threatened that on the next occasion of such slander his widespread retaliation would “lay the city in ashes.”121 The Galveston (Texas) Daily News picked up the story by telegraph and framed the growing antagonisms in Louisiana around not party differences but racial ones. They reported “exciting” news from New Orleans that “indicates that a war of the races is rapidly approaching.” In another article, the paper surmised that conditions were deteriorat- ing and that government officials had “ordered a company of infantry to march down the river.”122 The public handling of Pinchback’s 1868 fight sullied his political image and cast him as a troublemaker. Pinchback’s record in real estate investment while he served as “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” 33 Louisiana’s park commissioner is the most often cited point of evidence used to support his corrupt image. In 1870, in his official capacity as park commissioner, Pinchback purchased land on the city’s behalf that could be turned into a public park. Instead of seeking the lowest price for the city, however, Pinchback acted as both real estate inves- tor and public servant simultaneously. Along with others, including Antoine, Louisiana’s lieutenant governor and co-owner of the Louisi- anian, Pinchback paid $60,000 in a down payment on a $600,000 loan. After they received the title, they retained half the land and sold the other half to the city at a much higher price. Pinchback made an untold amount of money on the deal, but it cost him his friendship with Antoine, who claimed that Pinchback cheated him out of $40,000.123 Pinchback’s relationship with Louisiana’s Creole aristocracy of color, who took pride in their French ancestry and considered themselves a level above other freemen, also contributed to his questionable reputation. The fact that Pinchback was not a native Louisianan was an important distinction. He had no common history or shared experience with Creoles of color. In the Civil War, Creoles of color were more apt to volunteer alongside Louisiana White planters, as the two groups formed the basis of the Louisiana slaveholding class. They had common experiences and in some cases shared ancestral lines. The only thing Pinchback had in common with them was that he appeared to be as White as they did.124 Pinchback’s record of helping Black people was well established by 1879, when he cosponsored a bill in the Louisiana state legislature with Theophile T. Allain, which granted access to higher education for the masses of African-descended Americans. By 1880 Pinchback and Allain’s bill had established Southern University. The public reaction was mixed and is yet another, albeit lesser known example of the attack on Pinchback’s character. David C. Rankin argues that Loui- siana’s Creoles of color regarded Pinchback as a dishonest man and did not consider him devoted to the cause of Black people. Rankin points out that Louis Andre Martinet, a Creole attorney, was outraged by the creation of a separate institution of higher learning for Black people in general, and Creoles in particular. Martinet believed that a 34 “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” college that was designated for Black students only would unwittingly thwart attempts at civil equality by its acquiescence to segregationist aims. Martinet minced no words when he remarked on Pinchback’s and other Reconstruction politicians’ exploits: “What have they ever done that has not been of more profit to them than their race? They have grown rich fighting the race’s battles.”125 Martinet, a very light-skinned Creole of color, saw himself as racially distinct from other Black freemen. He was not alone in his condem- nation of Pinchback and those of his ilk. Thomy Lafon, a famous Cre- ole philanthropist and one of the wealthiest men in New Orleans, also considered Pinchback a newcomer who had usurped the cause of Black leadership from its rightful Creole leaders. It is safe to conclude that the Creoles of color in Louisiana, for the most part, ridiculed non- French Black politicians in the harshest manner. Several Creole newspapers during the 1860s and 1870s featured anti-Black poems, which illustrated their disdain for Black leadership. Editorial contributors to Le Carillon characterized Antoine, Pinchback’s business partner, as “that monkey [who] once was a dirty nigger; he’s better than all the whites now. . . . It is he who is our governor.”126 The record of some of the events and decisions Pinchback made is testimony to seemingly divergent motives—unbridled ambition and benevolent service—intertwined. Other than from Democratic opponents, often supported by Democratic-leaning newspapers and Louisiana Creoles of color, there were very few attacks on Pinch- back’s record and character. With respect to the cotton manufacturing company opened in 1869 by Antoine and Pinchback, there were no criticisms or charges of corruption. No accusations of unlawful or corrupt practices were made against the New Orleans Louisianian either. In 1872 Pinchback took over complete ownership and management of the paper. It was known for its longevity compared to other papers of that era, and ran until 1881.127 There is no doubt that Pinchback’s business acumen and savvy accounted for his profitable years. Despite the various concerns in which he chose to invest—real estate, corporate mergers, and a newspaper—he seemed to embrace both private gain and personal service “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” 35 with equal ease. Toomer made a similar observation of his grandfather’s ethical temperament: “His drive to power and his urge to service never came into serious conflict.” Perhaps Pinchback thought that his private wealth would not only benefit him personally but in some way enhance his ability to help the Black masses around him. Until the 1890s, when the civil rights and Reconstruction acts were overturned in rapid succession, finally culminating in Plessy v. Fer- guson, money could buy access to decision-makers, protection from violence, and the opportunity to effect change. W. E. B. Du Bois por- trayed Pinchback as a leader “with limits.” He wrote in Black Recon- struction, “He was intelligent and capable, but a leader of a different caliber from [Lieutenant Governor] Dunn. He was a practical politician [who] played the political game. . . . Yet, there were limits beyond which he would not go. . . . With but a few drops of Negro blood . . . he did not stoop to deny [them], as so many of his fellow whites did.”128

Pinchback’s Activism: Paternalistic or Politically Radical? Pinchback’s antiheroic image is tempered by his record of activism for greater Black America. His part in creating an opportunity for Black people to receive higher education at Southern University cultivated many Black intellectuals for generations to come. Pinchback also furthered his own education. In 1886 he earned a law degree from Straight University Law School and subsequently passed the state bar exam, although he rarely practiced. By this time, political freedom and civil liberties had deteriorated in many Southern states. The situation in Louisiana had completely unraveled. In 1890 the state enacted bills to restrict accommodations for Black people. Among his many efforts to promote civil rights for Black Americans, Pinchback’s creation of the American Citizens Equal Rights Association (acera) in 1890 was a direct response to the new restrictions. Its main object was to agitate for the political rights of all Americans, including women. In a letter sent to members of acera’s National Executive Committee Pinchback outlined the organization’s key goals and methods: “Let the subject of our equal rights as American Citizens be constantly agitated. In the family circles, in 36 “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” public meetings, in the pulpits, and in the press, until Public sentiment is thoroughly aroused against the organized lawlessness, that Prevails especially in the Southern States, where our people are constantly outraged and murdered for attempting to exercise their rights as American citizens.”129 Aside from Pinchback’s commitment to civil rights activism, one can read the underlying nativist agenda employed by many civil rights activists and reformers at the end of the nineteenth century, as growing anti-immigration hostilities caused them to shape their demand for rights in more nationalistic terms than during the Civil War and Reconstruction. To bolster the power of his organization, Pinchback made sure to clarify the direct inclusion of women: “It is deemed very important that women and young persons of both sexes should be especially interested and encouraged to become members of these associations, for they will be an effective element of success in the grand movement to secure equality of Citizens’ Rights for the Colored Amer- ican.”130 Despite previous antagonisms between Pinchback and the Creoles of color in Louisiana, acera joined forces with the Citizens’ Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law. The Citizens’ Committee was composed of members of the mixed-race Creole aristocracy in Louisiana. “The association sponsored a series of lawsuits against the railroads, which eventually led to the landmark 1896 Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson.”131 It is important to note that the Citizens’ Committee was less committed to the rights and needs of the mass of Black Americans than one might assume. They were mainly concerned with the restrictions placed upon the light-skinned Creole aristocracy by Louisiana’s new laws, which restricted access on the basis of race—determined according to the one-drop rule. Although the Creole community organized the Comite des Citoyens in 1891, “their complaint, rather significantly, was not so much that blacks were forced to sit in separate cars, but that, under the new law, Mulattoes, who had enjoyed an elevated status in the city and state since the early nineteenth century, were now being classified with blacks and forced to sit in separate black cars.” The committee placed Homer Plessy at the forefront of its strategy to “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” 37 undo new segregation restrictions, which was to sue the railway company. Eventually they argued and financed several segregation cases, to no avail. But no case was more devastating to the cause of Black equality than the outcome of Plessy v. Ferguson, which sanctioned “separate but equal” in all public accommodations.132 Pinchback’s life exhibited not only contradictory images and varied racial identity choices but contradictory sentiments as well. While publicly committed to the support of Negro improvement and a staunch advocate for full citizenship for Blacks, Pinchback in private could appear quite crude and insensitive to the needs and opinions of his fellow Black people. Late in life, angry that so many Blacks were lend- ing their support to President Theodore Roosevelt’s “lily white policy” (an all-White Republican Party hierarchy), Pinchback remarked to his lifelong friend Whitfield McKinlay, “Lincoln made a great mistake when he freed the mass of niggers. Quite a number of them up this way are still shouting for Roosevelt.”133 One can only imagine the political fallout had a letter like that got out during the height of his political career. This racist language was not new for Pinchback. In a letter written some years earlier to his friend “Beakie” (Senator Bruce), Pinchback expressed a similar separation from Black identity and outright racism. While traveling throughout the South, having for so many years been accustomed to an urbane life in Washington dc, he expressed his readiness to come home, as he was tired of all those “darkies.” He wrote, “I must confess it is all I can bear to remain here. The fleas, Mosquitoes, Nigs, Carpetbaggers, and scalawags are determined to ‘make it warm’ for me.”134 In direct contrast, Toomer recalled that his grandfather was quite “egalitarian” and without “color prejudice.” Of Pinchback he remembered that “he made his home in the desirable sections of the town and his doors were open to all men of all color; white whites, creoles of whatever group, people of color, black blacks. There was utterly no caste or color prejudice in him, no social snobbery.” Toomer’s effort to explain his grandfather’s position on racial matters unconsciously demonstrates color distinctions within African America. Toomer nevertheless insisted that Pinchback “never turned his back on somebody 38 “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” because of race.” Toomer believed that for Pinchback, discrimination was on account of political party membership rather than race.135 When asked by the New Orleans Times, “Of which are you the proud- est, the African or the Anglo-Saxon blood in your veins?,” Pinchback responded, “I don’t think the question a legitimate one, as I have no control over the matter. A man’s pride I regard as born of his associations, and mine is, perhaps no exception to the rule.”136 We are left with contrasting images of Pinchback. On the one hand, he used inflammatory, racist language when he wrote to his friends McKinlay and Bruce in private. On the other hand, Toomer’s willingness to challenge his grandfather’s ideas about race makes Toomer’s recollection reliable. That is, in matters of race he did not fail to ask his grandfather tough questions. Nor did he fail to tell the world that it was, in part, “personal ambition” that motivated Pinchback’s Black identity. For example, in a poem written about Pinchback that was published in the New Mexico Sentinel, Toomer criticizes his grandfather’s choice to identify as Black. He describes Pinchback’s method for racial categorization as something born in an “insane asylum.” Toomer believed that no matter how chivalrous Pinchback’s motives might have been, complying with what Toomer believed to be a false identification as Black, when one’s ancestry overwhelmingly suggested otherwise, rendered a man “no longer in the position to help” because he would remain a victim to the “very illness that ha[d] reduced . . . [him to his] . . . wretched condition.” For Toomer, the medicine of a strong Black identity was not the cure, but merely a symptom of the prevalence of White domination. He recognized that, according to his grandfather, “one must take off [his] coat, roll up [his] sleeves and get into the [civil rights] fight.” Perhaps this translated into Pinch- back de-emphasizing his “coat” of White skin by asserting a Black identity. For Toomer, the act of passing was particularly confusing in the Pinchback family. He explained in a handwritten version of his autobiographical draft that Pinchback had nine brothers and sisters, of whom three had died. Two of the brothers lived as White. Accord- ing to Toomer’s recollection, they “had left home . . . and were thereafter known as white. They had discarded a reputation less true to the “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” 39 racial facts for a reputation more true to the racial facts. They became in social fact what they so largely were in racial fact. Such an act, curiously enough, is called ‘passing.’ Speaking correctly, it would be much more accurate to say that my grandfather passed for a Negro, than to say that these brothers of his passed for white.”137 Toomer also recalled that Pinchback mentioned the two White brothers in conversation with his grandson. He asked his grandfather why he had not “done as they did.” Pinchback replied, “They had every right to be white. I have every right to be colored. They saw it to their advantage to do what they did. I saw it to my advantage to do what I did.” Pinchback further explained, “I realized [after emancipation and suffrage for Black men] I could make more head way if I were known as colored. . . . Besides . . . I was more attached to our mother.”138 Pinchback remained Black-identified for the majority of his public life. A few years before his death in 1921, a committee composed of several key members of the Washington dc Black elite honored him for his years of service to the cause of racial uplift. The Cleveland Advocate reported on the evening and described it as a “most felici- tous one.” Pinchback received a “handsome loving cup and an ebony gold headed cane.”139 Ironically, in death he was identified as White. He is buried in the Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans, which is an exclusive, all-White, segregated cemetery. Let us revel in the remaining racial ambiguity.

The events of Pinchback’s life reveal three important features in the history of the racial formation of Blackness in the U.S. First, as illustrated by Pinchback’s several shifts in racial identification, a mixed- race person “passing for a Negro” was possible and in fact probable. Second, for many people of mixed-race ancestry, Blackness was a way up in social status rather than a way down, particularly in terms of the leadership opportunities it afforded. Third, the allure of social Black- ness was not aberrational. Circumstances that cultivated the allure of Blackness were present in the years following Reconstruction. Evidence taken from Pinchback’s personal papers, those of his grandson, and contemporary newspaper accounts shows that his Black racial 40 “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” identity was more of a process—a position to which he would come after years of trying on various roles, meeting disappointment, engaging in family debate, and introspection. He eventually wore his Black identity as a badge of honor: the regalia of the racial uplift movement.140 The process by which he would hold and maintain a Black identity reveals race as a social construction in the most vivid terms. Once one is informed that Pinchback was Black, all markers, either social or physical, that suggest otherwise are obscured. With all that we now know about the fallacious reasoning of so-called racial types, we still cast people in much the same way we did when ownership of a person generally rested upon evidence of Black blood. We can extend this observation to include the permanence of racial values. That is, if Blackness meant debasement, the probability of a lifetime of compelled servitude, sustained violence (including rape, lynching, and murder), segregation, and the denial of full citizenship, then Blackness must have been an identity in America that one, if one’s looks permitted, would shun. For many leaders of Reconstruction, however, their Blackness initiated their activism, and that activism brought them social power and prestige. Yet historical interpreters of race and ethnicity are still blinded by visual cues and received categories and are locked into to a set of social assumptions about Black identity, which then make it impossible to see that a Black or Negro identity would be desired, if not manufactured. It then becomes inconceivable to recognize the long-standing custom of passing as Black. It is not considered in the realm of possible racial moves that people could make in order to better their lives. In light of the considerable evidence to the contrary I have examined in this chapter, the idea of a mixed person passing for Black should enter our minds. The irony here is that Pinchback and others made this Blackness move at the same time in U.S. history when lynching was at its height and racial violence was commonplace. The fact remained that, for the masses, Black identification could get them killed; for the minority of Black leaders, who were disproportionately light, even near-white, “passing for a Negro” secured their opportunity for fame, influence, and position. Chapter Two

Postbellum Strategies to Retain Power and Status

From Political Appointments to Property Ownership

P. B. S. Pinchback’s story is not an aberration to Reconstruction. To the contrary, despite the loss of Republican seats in Congress during the mid-1870s and the rise of “Black Laws” that followed, many other mixed-race politicians maintained their status by relying on the support provided by a network of educational, religious, and financial organizations. Howard University, Fisk University, Tuskegee Institute, Oberlin College, Phillips Exeter Academy, Radcliffe College, the Afri- can Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Afro-American Business League flourished and formed a base from which Black-identified Reconstruction leaders would continue to thrive. In an effort to catalog Reconstruction-era, Black-identified men in the House and the Senate, H. A. Wallace, a page in the South Caro- lina House of Representatives during Reconstruction, wrote in 1918, “All republican politicians . . . did not sink into obscurity or harmless inactivity after 1876.” He then proceeded to record the names and achievements of scores of politicians. His list includes the former abolitionist Judge William J. Whipper, whose later appointments included special agent to the treasury and customs house inspector in Charles- ton, South Carolina. After five terms as South Carolina’s congressman, Joseph H. Rainey worked as his state’s internal revenue agent 42 Postbellum Strategies until 1881, then found moderate success in commercial pursuits until his death in 1887.1 Wallace’s effort was to mark for posterity’s sake the accomplishments of extraordinary men. His study highlights the notion that the success of Reconstruction-era, mixed-race men was not exclusively tied to opportunities available in Washington dc. Rather, Pinchback and others like him garnered prestige and authority from their positions as Black leaders, which stretched beyond the limits of electoral politics. Theophile Tarence Allain, a Republican delegate, Louisiana plantation owner, and grocer; Robert Harlan, an Ohio Republican delegate and entrepreneur; and Josiah T. Settle, a Republican delegate and assistant attorney general of Shelby County, Tennessee—all remained politically connected and economically successful during the years following Reconstruction. Like Pinchback, all of these men shared a skin color that was light enough to have passed as White, had they chosen to do so. Motivated in part perhaps by personal preference, they all remained Black-identified—an inclination that yielded opportunity and influence. The task of identifying mixed-race members of African America is not necessarily new to scholars of race and ethnicity. Particularly since the nineteenth century, historians, politicians, and statisticians have endeavored to record, survey, and catalog mixed-race populations residing in the United States and elsewhere.2 A certain continuity of research regarding racial ambiguity in the U.S. has remained. The topic of race mixing, amalgamation, or miscegenation represents in U.S. history an unchanged fascination with race and sex. What have changed over the decades are the motives and assumptions that have shaped such investigations. My research starts with the assumption that race is an artifice of power negotiations. In order to advance social status, individuals and groups have over time and in various places manipulated the concept of race. In this chapter I seek to evaluate the social meaning of race during Reconstruction and the immediate decades that followed. Essentially this chapter reveals the various ways mixed-raced people of African descent used a postbellum meaning of Blackness to their Postbellum Strategies 43 advantage. However, it is vital first to understand how pseudoscientific explanations of race came to dominate historical interpretations of the Black American experience. Like the scholars who came before them, early twentieth-century specialists of race and ethnicity started with a different set of assumptions and motives than do scholars today. The prevailing eugenic understanding of race during the early twentieth century produced many works that promoted racial determinism, while purporting the scientific sanction of White superiority. Armchair anthropolo- gists, such as John James Holm (1910) and Madison Grant (1916) and the sociologist Edward Byron Reuter (1918) produced works that interpreted the impact of race mixing in the United States in ways that were plagued with a pseudoscientific understanding of race.3 All three studies, to varied degrees, shared a common analytical flaw. That is, their commitment to the biological certainty of so-called racial difference and their use of Mendelian interpretations of heredity and hybridization limited their ability to understand the social function of racial identification. Rooted in racial theories developed by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century naturalists like Johann Friedrich Blu- menbach and Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, they stood on the premise that success should be measured by an individual’s or a group’s proximity to Whiteness.4 For example, Holm wrote, “A real Ameri- can (smart) Negro is not imported stock. . . . He is a new creation . . . the result of years of intimate relations with his white superiors; and he is not a real Negro. The ‘smart nigger’ is ninety per cent a man of marked Caucasian characteristics and not a Negro at all, in the true sense of the word: but a man of color, a true Colored Caucasian, the son or grandson of a white parent.”5 However offensive and retrogressive, this description does offer some insight into the public identity of people of mixed African and European descent, as well as to the greater malleability of racial meaning in the turn-of-the-century decades than what had previously been concluded by people like Gobineau. The way Holm came to assess so-called qualities of mixed-race people was first to assume the existence of distinct varieties or races of humankind, to each of which 44 Postbellum Strategies one could then ascribe indelible social traits. His descriptions, which differed slightly from Blumenbach’s five races or types, ranged from the “Aryan Branch (Japhetic),” which he characterized as the “com- petitive” and “strong race,” to the “Hamitic,” who were depicted as the natural “builders,” while the “Kinky Haired Hamites” were dismissed for having attributed no great contribution to civilization.6 “White blood,” which was at one time pure and superior, according to Holm, became, after years of racial mixing, permanently stained. Convinced that it was too late to achieve real segregation of the races, he wrote, “To our mind the ‘absolute separation’ of the races . . . should have been absolute before so many hundreds of thousands of Mulat- toes and quadroons were born.” He explained that the people he called “Colored Caucasians” should not have been permitted to intermix with Black people. As if to claim utter defeat, he lamented, “Let us get out from behind the mask of deceit.” His prescription for the race problem was to eradicate the “undesirable element” of Blackness by “legal amalgamation.” With this aim, Holm was convinced that the only solution was the intrusion of “the white man’s blood in his [black] veins” since, he insisted, “the Negro cannot be deported.” Holm concluded, “that assimilation by amalgamation will prove the only ultimate settlement of the race question in this country.”7 Despite Holm’s acquiescence to the idea of White superiority, he recognized cases where the inverse was true, as he described social phenomena, which were to the detriment or contradiction of contemporary beliefs in Black inferiority: “In many parts of the South thirty-five per cent of white natives are illiterates. Many of them are semi-barbarous, and live in the most degraded and poverty-stricken condition imaginable. The educated and prosperous Negro looks down upon these helpless creatures, and believes that they are inferior to him, intellectually and socially, which is a sad fact.”8 This description suggests that a White identity did not necessarily represent or secure higher status. Of even more significance, Holm suggested that the social meanings of Whiteness and Blackness were not absolute. He listed scores of Reconstruction-era leaders who were, as he put it, “Colored Caucasians.” Included within the list were several Postbellum Strategies 45 of the subjects presented in this study: Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Theophile T. Allain, P. B. S. Pinchback, Robert Harlan, and Josiah T. Settle. These were men of mixed ancestry who had achieved in political, economic, and social spheres. Their class achievements, in Holm’s view, confirmed their special, partly elevated racial status. Holm argued that observers should not view such men as simply Black. He was not alone in his criticism of identifying those of mixed ancestry in strictly monoracial terms. W. H. Ferris, a Black-identified sociologist from Harvard, during the same year also insisted that leaders like the Grimké brothers and W. E. B. Du Bois, “who have more Caucasian than Negro blood in their veins,” should not be described as simply Negro. For example, Ferris went so far as to describe Du Bois as “an Anglo-Saxon of the bluest blood.” In terms of the appropriate racial nomenclature, he believed that Du Bois, despite his position as the “brave champion of black folk,” should be more accurately referred to as a “Negrosaxon.”9 Holm, writing just after Ferris, extended the inquiry into the public maintenance of a Black identity among mixed-race people. He castigated “Negro writers [who] often misplace in lauding men and women who have some Negro blood in them and who have achieved success in life; attributing that success or intellectual ability entirely to the race.”10 It made sense for Holm to call into question the rationale and legitimacy of single-race identification among people who were conspicuously recognized as mixed. However, the more important point—that is, the social power gained from such a designation— Holm completely missed. He included visual images to illustrate his observations of racial meaning in the U.S. during the nineteenth century. The key difference between his book and my work, among a host of other issues, lies in the utility of those images. That is, in my analysis, visual images are useful only to the extent that they reveal the distance between what is physically observed and what is socially claimed—which then reveals the ineffaceable feature or imprint of a social Blackness. In contrast, Holm’s use of images left the reader with his intended thesis: the inevitability of biological amalgamation and the disappearance of the Black race. 46 Postbellum Strategies On the subject of amalgamation, the lawyer, eugenicist, and ama- teur anthropologist Madison Grant took an entirely different position. In a book that would later help rationalize legislative aims to reduce the influx of “darker races” into the United States, Grant proclaimed, “The laws against miscegenation must be greatly extended if the higher races are to be maintained.” In contrast to Holm, Grant’s belief in the fixed quality of Black inferiority informed his assertion that “the intermixing of Whites with Blacks would improve the lives of [n]either.” He wrote, “Whenever the incentive . . . to imitate the dominant race is removed, the Negro . . . reverts shortly to his ancestral grade. . . . Negroes have demonstrated throughout recorded time that they are a stationary species, and that they do not possess the potentiality of progress or initiative from within.”11 Edward Byron Reuter’s The Mulatto in the United States, written in 1918, was cut from the same eugenic cloth as works by Grant, Ferris, and Holm. Reuter also identified African and European lineages as strictly “diverse racial elements.” However, he concluded that because of years “of illicit relations between men of the superior and women of the inferior race” widespread, mixed-race populations resulted in the U.S. and elsewhere. For Reuter, the act of amalgamation, as a historical phenomenon, had gone on too long to maintain race purity. He wrote, “The best and bluest blood in the South has crossed with the Negro race ever since the beginning of slavery.”12 Reuter’s analysis of mixed-race people in the United States had several methodological problems. Chief among them was the criterion he used to identify so-called Mulattoes. His characterization of Mulattoes was erratic and most often supported by visual impressions alone rather than a study of his subjects’ actual ancestry or social position. Nonetheless his study called attention to inconsistencies in the degree to which both White and Black people agreed to the idea of White superiority. Moreover, he recognized the phenomenon of Black self-identification among mixed-race people who maintained a Black identity despite the other choices available, which were both physically and socially possible. Reuter could not reconcile this sustained Black identity among mixed-race people and failed to analyze the Postbellum Strategies 47 significance of two very different observations. On the one hand, he believed that “the desire of the mixed-blood man is always and everywhere to be a white man; to be classed with and become a part of the superior race.” By his logic, the Mulatto was “an unstable type,” who “env[ied] the whites, [and] aspire[d] to equality with them.” On the other hand, Reuter recognized that when given the choice, mixed- race leaders in African America often chose to identify as Black. This realization was to the detriment of his own assessment that the state of “white envy” dominated Black Americans’ mentality.13 According to Reuter, “ninety percent of all the leaders of the race are the offspring of the Caucasian.” Despite their ancestry, he observed that they continued to choose a Black identity: “The great majority of those individuals in whom Negro blood predominates pass as Negroes of pure blood.” He concluded, “The Negro race in America has produced a number of individuals who in spite of, or because of their black blood have reached a level of achievement well above the average of either race.”14 Governor Pinchback’s grandson described Pinchback’s identity in a similar fashion: Jean Toomer stated quite succinctly that his grandfather “passed for a Negro.”15 In search of a motive for Black identification, Reuter measured mixed-race achievement against the individual averages of both Whites and Blacks. In so doing, he exposed an important class dimension of mixed-race experiences and leadership. During the nineteenth century the aim of class security among the Black-identified elite proved more a motivator of identification than any imagined “White envy.” He illuminated this point when he suggested that “in many instances a prudent negro mother finds it wise to send her good-looking yellow daughter to some institution to save her from the temptation of association with the lowest grade of white boys in the neighborhood.”16 Reuter also focused on the disproportionate numbers of mixed- race individuals represented in Black leadership, and in this way his work is akin to my own inquiry into the subject. His study is quite useful simply because he asked the question: Why was Black leadership of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries composed mainly of lighter-skinned Americans of African descent, many of 48 Postbellum Strategies whom, had they opted to, could have passed for White? Preferen- tial treatment toward lighter-skinned African Americans by White Americans, and the related opportunities those relationships afforded, is typically offered as the cause for such prevalence of mixed-race people within the highest ranks of Black leadership. However, this conclusion presumes that only White persons during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shaped Black identity. More- over it suggests that White ancestry primarily accounted for their rise to leadership. Likewise Reuter recognized that “leaders of the race are almost invariably persons of mixed blood and the qualities which have made them leaders are derived certainly in part and perhaps mainly from their white ancestry.”17 The habit of attributing success to White heritage was a dangerous, unselfconscious assumption made by investigators of racial identity in the postbellum era. During the early twentieth century a scientific consensus on the meaning of race led Reuter to conclude that Whiteness accounted for their leadership position. The eugenic ideal so permeated scholarship during that time that Reu- ter didn’t recognize the inconsistencies his own work revealed about dominant eugenic race theory.18 For example, he wrote, in contrast to his idea of prevalent White envy, that for a light-skinned, Black- identified man, “his color has given him a prestige not enjoyed by his white competitors.” He went on to explain, “Southern Mulatto leaders, however are men, at least outwardly, [who] consider themselves Negroes. They do not openly flaunt their superiority because of their white blood, and they find their life and their work among their darker and more backward fellows.”19 Du Bois, a contemporary of Reuter, was quick to recognize that “the colored people of America have produced as many remarkable black men as Mulattoes.”20 But are Reuter’s conclusions about mixed-race leadership that different from Du Bois’s request to muster a “talented tenth” or an “advanced guard” to lead the masses of Black Americans? In his well-known essay “The Talented Tenth,” Du Bois does, in fact, go to great lengths to describe “a race of educated Mulattoes [who] sprang up to plead for black men’s rights.”21 According to Reuter, Postbellum Strategies 49 the names included in Du Bois’s list of leaders, with the exception of Phillis Wheatley and Alexander Crummel, were exclusively Mulatto. What Reuter tapped into, and what Holm, Grant, and most later historians missed, was the elevating qualities of social Blackness during Reconstruction and beyond. Reuter measured the degree of Black self- identification among mixed-race people from both the North and the South and found a similar pull toward a Black identity in both places. In particular, for Southern, mixed-race, Black-identified men, the institution of segregation and sprawling Jim Crow statutes created a leadership vacuum:

To the extent that the races became separated and the Negroes gained in independence and developed a sense of racial pride and self-reliance, there was a need for teachers and preachers, for phy- sicians and lawyers, for business men and entertainers, and for all the host of other parasitic and semi-parasitic classes that go to make up a modern community. With the rise of the middle class, the race was able to support a professional and leisure class. . . . The isolation of the race forced the Negroes to depend upon their own educated men and so made a place for such men.22

Reuter understood the leadership of mixed-race men in the South to be a “new adjustment of the races” and concluded that they found their place “as the real and natural leaders of the race.”23 Again, the notion that mixed-race men should be the natural leaders of Black America is an outright racist declaration. However, it does emphasize the social uplift mixed-race leaders gained by identifying as Black. It is at this point that one should consider that a Black identity did not lift all Americans of African descent. Appearance did make a difference. I do not believe, for example, that a Black identity among conspicuously Black people necessarily provided upward mobility. A Black identity did, however, enable those who could pass for White to enter into the ranks of Black leadership under the guise of racial uplift. For racially ambiguous-looking people, the crucial group identification was neither Black nor White. Rather the vital consideration was whether they were identified as members of the masses or as members 50 Postbellum Strategies of a leadership class. A White identity relegated an educated, propertied, mixed-race person of moderate means into a sea of anonymous White Southerners whose roles were not yet settled. For the same mixed-race person, a Black identity meant prospects of power, prominence, wealth, and social connections. The interpretations offered by Reuter, Grant, and Holm are strik- ingly different from those previously offered by Black-identified record- ers of Black leadership. In Men of Mark William J. Simmons pointed out in 1887 that if Theophile T. Allain and other mixed-race leaders hadn’t identified as Black, readers of history would never have known who they were. In essence, had they identified as White, they might have drifted into obscurity with other successful, Republican-oriented White men of the day.24 Simmons suggested that had it not been for the needs of Black people, Allain, for example, might well have been classified with all the other wealthy White planters in Louisiana. Sim- mons argued, “Opposition calls forth resistance, and it may be Allain, with scores of other noble men, would be quietly performing personal duties, letting the world surge in at their window, but never going out to meet it.”25 Reuter’s focus on Black self-identification in the North also revealed some of the incentives for racially mixed people living during the postbellum period. He characterized Mulattoes in the North as essentially less sympathetic to the masses of Black Americans and described them, in contrast to their Southern equivalents, as particularly pride- ful of their European heritage. He observed that they did not live among other “Negroes” but rather chose to live among themselves. He found that Northern mixed-raced families often “attend[ed] white churches” and were “frequently without much acquaintance with the real Negroes.” But in terms of leadership opportunities, Reuter concluded, “They appear as champions of the Negro race at all times there is profit or notoriety to be gained by so doing.”26 Reuter was not alone in this observation. Booker T. Washington, who was himself of mixed ancestry, commented in 1909 on similar opportunities present during the postbellum years.27 Washington explained, “For a long time after freedom came, and the same is not Postbellum Strategies 51 infrequently true at the present time, any black man who was willing, either in print or in public speech, to curse and abuse the white man, easily gained for himself a reputation of courage.”28 Washington also admitted that for him, the years that followed the war through to the twentieth century constituted a time of great “temptations to enter political life.” He admitted that the temptations were “so alluring that I came very near yielding to them.” Yet Washington believed that “general political agitation drew the attention of our people away from the more fundamental matters, [which primarily included] property ownership.” He chose to focus on the goal of wealth accumulation over political representation. It was his belief that he “would be helping in a more substantial way by assisting in the laying of the foundation of the race through . . . education of the hand, head and heart.”29 Scholars of mixed-race consciousness since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have come a long way in their interpretations of the meaning of Whiteness and Blackness during the postbellum years. As such, the inspiration of this study is owed to the historians who years before me dared to conceptualize beyond racially deterministic categories of White terror on the one hand and Black benevolence on the other. Joel Williamson in New People helped make the study of mixed-race people a rich venue of investigation. From New People we learned that, indeed, at one time mixed-race people enjoyed a certain amount of privilege that was different from the greater African Amer- ican experience. However, Williamson concluded that as a result of increasing White resentment and the maturation of Jim Crow laws, this exclusive, privileged group would shortly, after the turn of the twentieth century, be pushed legally and violently into greater Black- ness. Perhaps this is true in part, but what of those who, out of personal inclination, wanted to be Black? We credit C. Vann Woodward for developing the idea that White attitudes toward Blackness were not static or uniform. Even more critical was Woodward’s suggestion that fluid race relations in some parts of the South meant that Blackness was not unequivocally a loathed position. Nevertheless Woodward, like Williamson, described changing circumstances, almost inevitable forces, that led to an increasingly fixed racial order. Both Williamson’s 52 Postbellum Strategies and Woodward’s arguments did reveal a more complicated vision of Whiteness and Blackness in the postwar years, but they also unwittingly cemented the idea that it was primarily White racism rather than personal inclination that pushed Mulattoes into Blackness.30 Paul Spickard in Mixed Blood stunned scholars of race and ethnicity by displacing the tragic Mulatto motif, which social scientists, historians, and literary scholars had long perpetuated. Instead he cast mixed- race people as functioning Americans. His work elevated the study of mixed-race history by providing a narrative that would oppose the characterization of mixed-race people as unstable, tortured, neurotic souls who were symbols of all that was wrong with American ideas about race. His work disproved Holm’s assessment that “the entire race problem [in the United States] was the Mulatto.” By tracing the evolution of intermarriage patterns in the United States he clarified their frequency and put to rest the notion that antimiscegenation policy in the U.S. was universal. Moreover one could glean from his findings about intermarriage the more subtle contours of racial identity. Spickard then expanded the study of Black identification among people of multiracial descent when he laid out the fundamental assertion that a Black identity, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, might mean power and status. In “The Power of Blackness” he dared to suggest that when mixed-race people had choices in racial identification, they often chose to be Black.31 This chapter is informed by Spickard’s interpretation of the utility of Blackness. The remainder of the chapter reveals that a Black identity among mixed-race men during the postbellum years amounted to real social currency. Washington in The Story of the Negro recognized the leadership vacuum, which would directly benefit mixed-race men during Reconstruction and after: “One of the surprising results of the Reconstruction period was that there should spring from among the members of a race that had been held so long in slavery . . . political leaders of the newly enfranchised race. Among them were sons of white planters by coloured mothers, like John M. Langston, P. B. S. Pinchback, and Josiah T. Settle, who had given their children the advantages of education in the Northern States.”32 Postbellum Strategies 53 I include in this chapter some of the men Washington cited and provide a more pointed examination of their racial identities, qualities of political leadership, business acumen, and social reputation. The key figures included are Hon. Robert Harlan, Hon. Theophile T. Allain, and, to a lesser extent, Professor Henry A. Hunt. All of these men shared a physical appearance that would have enabled them to pass as White. They each owed at least half or more of their heritage to White ancestry but still chose to identify as Black and thereby rev- eled in the benefits that decision provided.

Robert James Harlan William J. Simmons was Robert Harlan’s first biographer and described him as a “life-long Republican and . . . a man of whom his race should feel proud.” This laudatory description seems logical since Harlan, as a Black-identified Republican politician, maintained both appointed and elected positions until as late as 1886—more than twenty years after emancipation and well past Reconstruction. However, the record of Harlan’s heritage and racial experiences complicates the exclusivity with which his Black identity is maintained. He was born in Harrods- burg, Kentucky, on December 12, 1816, to James Harlan, a White man, and Mary Harlan, a slave who was reported to be “three parts white.”33 James Harlan also fathered the White Supreme Court associate justice Marshall Harlan, who wrote the dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Simmons described Harlan’s childhood in terms not very different from Pinchback’s early plantation life.34 According to Simmons, Rob- ert Harlan, “although a slave under the law . . . was allowed unusual freedom.” The Cleveland Gazette published a profile of Harlan in 1886, a year before Simmons published his biography. The article reported that since Harlan was “bright, intelligent and ambitious, he was allowed special privileges.” Because Black schools were not established in Ken- tucky until the 1840s, the Gazette pointed out that Harlan received the “advantages of education” from the “sons of his master,” who were his half-brothers. The article emphasized Harlan’s “ambition” several times, calling it a tenacity that allowed him, “like many of the intelligent slaves of Kentucky . . . to hire his own time and to go and come 54 Postbellum Strategies as occasion required.” Simmons’s account supports the Gazette’s interpretation, and from this we might glean the conclusion that Harlan did as well, particularly since Men of Mark was published during Har- lan’s lifetime with his permission.35 While Harlan was still officially a slave, he was exposed to the barber’s trade, which led him to open his own shop in Harrodsburg. Success at this first venture inspired his next project, and in 1848 he opened a grocery business in Lexington, Kentucky. In 1849, with news of a gold rush in the West, he headed for California. Essentially he functioned as a free person. In a relatively short period of time he amassed up to $90,000, which he then invested in Cincinnati, Ohio, buying land, building rentable estates, and opening a photographic and daguerreotype gallery, all of which brought him real financial success.36 In 1851 he returned briefly to Kentucky to purchase his official freedom in the amount of $500.37 Considering that most of his initial investments occurred while he was still legally enslaved, Harlan’s business success in Ohio is remarkable. Yet the proprietary privilege he experienced was not enough; he sought political leadership as well. This shift from proprietary privilege to the goal of political representation, and in some cases in reverse order, characterizes a pattern of moves Black leaders made in order to maintain power regardless of the country’s racial mood. Years before the Civil War, Harlan got involved in the racial uplift movement. He acted as a trustee of Black schools in Ohio and was also elected and served as a trustee of the Colored Orphan Asylum. One has to question if, as others have suggested, social Whiteness was uniformly desired or mimicked, why then didn’t Harlan pass as White? The Ohio Supreme Court had already ruled in Gray v. Ohio (1831) that “persons with over 50 percent white blood were entitled to the privileges of whites.”38 He had enough money and enough White ancestors (he was legally classified as a quadroon) to affect a racial shift of that sort. Could he not have helped Black orphans more effectively as a White philanthropist? His wealth and lifestyle would have supported the transition to the White bourgeoisie. In fact in 1858 Harlan married Josephine Floyd, the White daughter of John B. Floyd, who, among Postbellum Strategies 55 other positions, was variously the governor of Virginia, secretary of war under President Buchanan, and a Confederate major general.39 Arguably, had Harlan passed as a White man, which he easily could have done, he would have avoided, as Simmons wrote, the “prejudice existing against men of color in 1858.”40 Instead Harlan, as a Black man, took his family to England in 1859 and remained there until 1868. Curiously, Simmons claims that Harlan’s ten-year stint in England was to “escape prejudice.” In my estimation this conclusion suggests the impact of social Blackness. Anyone looking at Harlan would be hard-pressed to find any discernable evidence of Black ancestry. But Simmons’s account suggests that, regardless of how wide the gulf between self-identification and physical appearance, the impact of social Blackness was indelible. By the time he returned to the U.S., Harlan had become aware of the vacuum of Black leadership that had opened up as a result of the war. He immediately became the “first and only colored man that ever was a member of the Republican State Central Committee of Ohio.” He also served as a Republican delegate-at-large to the presidential convention that in 1872 nominated Ulysses S. Grant. In 1875 Gover- nor Rutherford B. Hayes commissioned Harlan as a colonel in command of a battalion of four hundred men. In 1876 Harlan acted as the chairman of the Republican National Convention, held in Nashville, Tennessee. He also served as a special mail agent-at-large during Pres- ident Grant’s final years in office.41 Harlan’s leadership matured as he developed into a veritable civil rights agitator. In 1879 he attended the National Conference of Col- ored Men of the United States, held in Nashville. Many of the men referred to in this study attended the conference, including Pinch- back, who served as its secretary. The conference lasted for five days and covered a host of topics, including education, civil rights, sanitation and health, migration from the South, Black women’s right to vote, landownership, racial identity, and race unity. At the convention’s first session, Ferdinand L. Barnett of Illinois called on the Black press to be mindful of the manner in which it referred to Black Americans: “We believe the American custom of 56 Postbellum Strategies spelling the word ‘Negro’ without a capital, is [the] outgrowth of prejudice toward the race.” C. O. H. Thomas urged the conference to see the connection between Black women’s and men’s rights: “We furthermore avow our earnest hope . . . that women of our country who are seeking to lift up their sister to a [state] of womanhood [get] a larger scope in the activities and respect of life by means of the ballot.” Thomas suggested that if the postbellum Black agenda did not include the “complete freedom and exultation of women,” the conference’s efforts would be a hypocritical waste.42 Harlan spoke about his outrage over the successive losses of political rights and ever-increasing violence against Black Americans. As a solution to emerging Jim Crow laws, Harlan advocated for Black migration out of the South. In a speech entitled “Migration Is the Only Solu- tion,” he urged his fellow Black Americans to demand rights afforded to them, as citizens, by the U.S. Constitution: “The blood of the colored man has fertilized the land and has cemented the Union. . . . We are Americans, and let us act as Americans have ever done when denied their rights . . . cry aloud and spare not until our injuries are known and our wrongs are redressed and our demands granted. . . . The Republic owes to every citizen protection for his home and security for his rights.”43 Harlan directly advocated for Black migration to the “Western states and territories.” His position mirrored a movement which had already begun in places like Louisiana and Mississippi. For example, between 1877 and 1881 six thousand Black “Exodusters” left the Deep South headed for Kansas, which they believed was more amenable to their needs.44 But Harlan’s suggestion differed somewhat from what was happening in Kansas. He urged Black Southerners to migrate farther, to the so-called frontier, “where the people are at peace and the soil is free, and where everyone may secure an income for himself and family.” He used the term “settler” to describe Black migrants and in this way joined the westward colonial march, which resulted in a large-scale “racial replacement” of native peoples in the North American West.45 There was not agreement on the recommendation of mass migration. In fact Secretary Pinchback was completely opposed to “systematic Postbellum Strategies 57 emigration.” His opposition rested mainly on a concern about property ownership among Blacks. He believed that Black Americans should do as they pleased, as long as “[they could] sell [their] property, for anything like its value.” He urged them to “not sacrifice or give it away— and go with sufficient [funds] to establish [them]selves in [their] new homes.” Harlan understood the “objection on the part of landown- ers,” but he believed migration to be the only “practicable remedy for our wrongs.” Pinchback fervently disagreed and argued that to favor “indiscriminate emigration” would “mislead the ignorant masses,” which would “be not only a mistake but a crime.” The debate over migration represented the combustion of several different factors at once. While Black people, particularly in the South, began to experience increased hostility, restriction, and violence from Whites, a larger number of European immigrants were simultaneously finding their way into the United States. Moreover the idea that Americans could pursue peace and prosperity in the country’s western territories was at this time still quite popular. As one conference attendee, Judge M. Gibbs, put it, “The colored men were going out of the South and Ger- mans, and Northern and Northwestern people were coming to it.”46 Theo. I. Greene of Mississippi also referred to a confluence of issues, including foreign immigration and White antipathy, when he evaluated the impact that a Black exodus would have on the South. However, in terms of immigration, Greene’s opposition centered on Chinese laborers instead of Europeans. He cited the New Orleans Picayune, which in 1879 argued, “They [Chinese immigrants] would suffocate European civilization and all those elements of the progressive evolution of science and art and industry. . . . [If] the Negro laborers leave us, let us see to it that Louisiana becomes not a State composed of Asiatic hea- then, although they may work for ten cents a day.”47

Public Concerns over Black Political Activism in Exchange for Political Favor Harlan continued his work of racial uplift while he a sought political career. In 1881 he was appointed special agent of the Treasury Depart- ment by President Chester A. Arthur, a position he held until 1885, 58 Postbellum Strategies when a new administration took office. Incoming president Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, accused Harlan of “offensive partisanship.”48 After his post in the Treasury Department ended, he quickly turned his attention back to electoral politics. In 1886 he was elected to the Ohio state legislature, where, according to Simmons, he played an active role in repealing Ohio’s “Black Laws.”49 However, contemporary accounts of the process of dismantling Ohio’s Black Laws, specifically those regarding school segregation, offer mixed reviews of Harlan’s position. The history of Ohio’s Black Laws dates to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Enacted in 1803, the laws essentially made life in Ohio miserable for the free Black population. It required freedmen and -women to carry passes and to maintain White sponsors. It also forbade Blacks and Mulattoes from offering testimony in court. Of utmost importance to the supporters of these laws was the reduction of migration of free Blacks from the Lower South to Ohio. That is, they sought to make life so difficult that Blacks might reconsider moving out of Ohio. Another key aim was to maintain the strict segregation of both Blacks and Mulattoes from Whites.50 The Ohio legislature, of which Harlan was a member, repealed most of the Black Laws in 1849, but school segregation remained.51 The historian Henry Howe explained in 1888 that despite the repeal, the habit of segregation, which had been sanctioned by law, remained a practical matter. He wrote, “There were in a certain sense Black Laws, inasmuch as a distinction was thereby shown between the races.”52 By the late 1880s, in an effort to deliver the death blow to Ohio race laws, Benjamin W. Arnett and Jere A. Brown, two members of the Ohio legislature, wrote a bill to end school segregation. The Arnett Bill, as it was called, struck up intense debate among Black teachers and leaders over the merits of school segregation. At the center of the debate was Colonel Harlan.53 The Arnett bill became a source of contention for Cleveland’s Black press. Some of the newspapers criticized Harlan’s position on the bill, and in 1887 the Cleveland Gazette called attention to his support of school segregation. However, one might consider Harlan’s position on Postbellum Strategies 59 segregation as soft because he did cosponsor the 1849 bill to overturn Ohio’s Black Laws, which consisted mainly of segregation statutes. If given the benefit of the doubt, Harlan’s reasoning was ostensibly to support the employment of Black teachers. One article quoted Har- lan on the matter: “Knowing the wiping out of colored schools would necessarily throw a majority of colored teachers out of employment, I did not desire to see those who are as well-educated and have as much experience as any teachers in this city compelled to pass another examination for appointment under the new order of things.” In direct opposition, the Gazette concluded that Harlan’s true motive was simply “to be returned to the legislature.” The article concluded that “the Colo- nel” had “surprised” them. The following week the Gazette featured another critique of Black leadership in general, and of Harlan specifically: “The colored people of this city, as a mass, are woefully indiffer- ent to their constitutional rights. Men of intelligence and wealth who are able to assist materially in advancing the interest of their race are so filled with prejudice and deceit that they are practically of no benefit to the community in which they exist.” The Gazette reported that Ohio teachers considered Harlan’s rationale for the continuation of separate schools “a shoddy pretext” and that he simply did not recognize, nor did he understand, by virtue of “a depth of ignorance that would discredit the intellect of a wild hottentot,” the equality of skills between Black and White teachers.54 Out of the same concern Harlan voiced—the loss of employment for Black teachers—many Black teachers lobbied against the closing of Black schools in Ohio.55 Adah Ward Randolph pointed out that many of the Black schools that were opened during the 1840s because of segregation now had to close as a result of the Arnett law. Thus, in the wake of school integration efforts, problems mounted for Black teachers (e.g., more direct contact with racism and loss of employment). In 1899 the Ohio Board of Education called for a return to segregated schools.56 Randolph cited President of the Board of Edu- cation Charles E. Morris’s interpretation of integration’s effect on Ohio’s Black teachers: “The abolishment several years ago of schools for colored youth has had the effect of keeping out of employment 60 Postbellum Strategies many intelligent colored people who were fully competent to manage or instruct any school.”57 Harlan’s concern for the future employment of Black teachers is logical and hardly representative of the opinions of hardline White seg- regationists of his day. The fact that he did lead the repeal of the Ohio Black Laws in 1849 attests to his overall position against the inequality segregation reinforced. However, his position as a political leader did, to a certain extent, depend upon segregation remaining in some fashion. Simmons’s observation, that “opposition calls forth resistance,” is convincing. Essentially, the withholding of rights created a space for some persons to lead the fight to secure those rights. Frederick Dou- glass also recognized the uplift potential that resistance engendered, arguing, “For practical benefit we are often about as much indebted to our enemies, as to our friends.” Douglass understood that oppression, if resisted, calls forth leaders who then are elevated by their activist positions.58 Harlan got his political start—in just the same way—as a trustee for segregated schools. Both Washington and Reu- ter in 1910 made similar observations of increased opportunities for leadership that segregation unwittingly created.59 Finally, this correla- tion between racial segregation and access into the ranks of political leadership provides yet another explanation of the circumstances that motivated mixed-race men to identify as Black.

Theophile Tarence Allain Theophile T. Allain, another mixed-race contemporary of Pinchback, who served in the Louisiana legislature from 1872 to 1874 and from 1876 to 1890, also remained powerful during the post-Reconstruction years.60 Like Pinchback and Harlan, Allain shared the same biographer, William J. Simmons, who featured Allain, among many other Reconstruction- era leaders, in his book Men of Mark. Simmons expressed his particular admiration for Allain’s success as a Louisiana sugar plantation owner, politician, and entrepreneur. He wrote that if it were his task “to pick from the ranks of Louisiana’s sons . . . who . . . towered head and shoulders above their fellow men, shedding luster on the name of the sons of Ham, the subject of my sketch would take front rank.”61 Postbellum Strategies 61 Allain, like Pinchback and Harlan, was also known as a Mulatto. Simmons referred to him as a French-speaking “Colored Creole.” He was born on October 1, 1845, to a “pretty brown woman,” the slave of his White father, Sosthene Allain.62 Nowhere have I been able to locate the name of Allain’s mother. Simmons’s account is devoid of that information, as are the Allain Family Papers.63 Holm, in his book Holm’s Race Assimilation, describes the relationship between Allain’s mother and father as a married union and suggests that Sosthene treated Allain’s mother “with the greatest respect, surrounding her with all the comforts and pleasures at his command.”64 The absence of biographical information for Allain’s mother is not simply an investigative dilemma but reveals the relative power and status held by mixed-race men when compared to mixed-race women of the same era. The feminine, as a relegated caste during the nineteenth century, when comingled with Black ancestry did not necessarily result in elevated status, as it often did for men of mixed-race heritage.65 A notable exception resides in the degree to which some Black-identified women owned property. Theophile’s wife, Aline Coleman Allain, for example, was known to have “had properties of her own.”66 Women who were recognized as either mixed race or Black found that property ownership proved easier for them to achieve than for White women. White men often forbade, and in some cases outlawed White women from entering into legal contracts. This exclusion from the business world did not uniformly include Black women, nor did it prevent Black women from starting lucrative enterprises.67 The conflation of mixed-race ancestry and gender roles during the nineteenth century is a topic to which I shall return in chapter 4. What is clear is that Theophile had a very close relationship with his father, and as a result he did not experience life as a slave. Father and son frequently ate meals together. Holm reports that Sosthene “loved his son Theophile so intensely that he often refused to dine without him at the table, and when traveling abroad he accompanied [him].”68 Theophile benefited from a private teacher from 1859 until 1868, when he enrolled in a private school in New Brunswick, New Jersey.69 62 Postbellum Strategies At the age of twenty-three, in 1869, Allain returned to Louisiana to open a grocery business. His success at shipping sugar and rice, along with syrup and molasses, from his family-owned plantation, named Hard Times, made him a leading and respected man in both Baton Rouge and Iberville Parish. After he inherited some of his family’s land in 1870 his wealth grew. At that time he earned approximately $15,000 per year and employed some thirty-five laborers on his 790- acre plantation.70 The fact that Allain had a wealthy White father was clearly to his social and economic advantage. The land he inherited placed him in a position to care for and eventually send each of his six children to Straight University. However, his rising wealth as a result of the trade of sugar, molasses, and rice was not unique to him. His life parallels the lives of other mixed-race, Black-identified men who benefited financially because of their paternal lineage. There were many others in Louisiana who had a story similar to Allain’s and who formed a significant portion of Louisiana’s middle class. John Blassingame observes that, in Louisiana before the Civil War, “the style of life of the Negro upper-middle and upper class was comparable to that of the same class of whites.”71 Alice Dunbar-Nelson also writes of the middle- and upper-class status of mixed-race men and women in Louisiana, but she sees a distinction between mixed-race Louisianans and “pure-blooded African[s].” The divide between the mixed-race and so-called pure African became so fixed that it permeated every part of Louisiana social life, including language. For Dun- bar the discussion of the “Negro in Louisiana” was difficult because “there [was] no such word as Negro permissible in speaking of the state.” She argues that, prior to 1865, the term “Negro” came to mean slave. After the war, the term was exclusively used to describe “those whose complexions were . . . dark.” Those who were of mixed blood were referred to as “colored”; they were understood as “a class apart, separated and superior to the Negroes.”72 Along the same line of thought, James Weldon Johnson, the author, attorney, and songwriter of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” remarked in 1902, “There is no ‘Negroes’ in the unit sense. Since its freedom the Postbellum Strategies 63 colored race has classified itself into almost as many grades, as regards ability and capacity, as there are to be found among the whites.”73 In “The Talented Tenth” Du Bois admits to a similar pattern, whereby mixed-race sons, in particular, gained some advantage because of their White fathers: “Some were the natural sons of unnatural fathers and were given often a liberal training and thus a race of educated Mulat- toes sprang up.”74 Washington observes a similar trend in The Story of the Negro, where he describes many members of the new group of leaders as “the sons of white fathers and coloured mothers.”75 Loren Schweninger in his study of Black property ownership concludes that during the same period the wealthiest “urban Negroes . . . were of mixed race ancestry”; “65 percent were partially white . . . [while] 29 percent . . . had white fathers.”76 The distinctions between Black, White, and mixed in Louisiana were largely based in property holding. Because Louisiana’s Black Codes during the slave period legally separated free from slave rather than Black from White, that inherited style of the division caused distinctions after emancipation to be based on property holding more than on race.77 Lest we conclude that only a handful of rare men enjoyed prosperity at this time, consider a comprehensive overview of property holding among Black-identified people during the nineteenth century. This will provide a more complete picture of the scope and breadth of Black wealth accumulation and will show that the aim of property ownership was yet another strategy that mixed-race, Black-identified men and women used to keep power.

The Relationship between Black Property Ownership in the South and Leadership Opportunities In Black Property Owners in the South Schweninger outlines and analyzes the phenomena of landownership, private investment, and entrepreneurial endeavors among Black Southerners. In a very clever assessment he finds that the record of success or social mobility for Black Amer- ica was historically confined to the narrow study of the so-called elite. He argues that this term had become an umbrella under which stood both propertyless and property-owning, both light- and dark-skinned 64 Postbellum Strategies Americans of African descent, with and without higher education, who may or may not have been socially connected to high society. The term “elite” had become so inclusive that it obscured a coherent vision of real status and wealth.78 By studying the so-called Black elite, such authors as Daniel Wayne Culp illuminated a part of African American history known to only a small number of specialists. In 1902 Culp edited an anthology of Black achievement, which chronicled the lifestyles and pursuits of the Black masses, along with those of the middle and upper classes. Culp’s collection of essays, written by “one hundred of America’s greatest Negroes,” is an encyclopedia of a sort, a literary genre that became popular in the early years of the twentieth century. The book covers a wide span of topics: Black wealth, morality, health, education, politics, racial identity, and more. The aim of property ownership and its relationship to political representation reverberates throughout the essays. Reverend Dr. J. W. E. Bowen of New Orleans, who received his Ph.D. from Boston University in 1887 and became a professor of Latin and Greek, an ame pastor, and a prolific writer, offers his opinion on Black achievement in terms of wealth, morality, and education in relationship to opportunity. Bowen concludes that Black Ameri- cans had progressed far beyond what most people expected of them when first they met freedom. He applies, however, a hefty emphasis on property ownership, business investment, and wealth accumulation as a way to continue progress. Bowen warns that “achievements in the world of letters, admirable as they are . . . are secondary . . . and valueless . . . if there is no . . . social power.” Thus his solution— wealth accumulation—was a means to an end, a strategy for maintaining Black uplift.79 Throughout the twentieth century a few select intellectuals, like Carter G. Woodson, John Hope Franklin, E. Franklin Frazier, Joel Wil- liamson, and Willard B. Gatewood, also provided Black historiography with a counternarrative. That is, for the first three-quarters of the twentieth century most historians of African America focused on a few dominant themes in Black history. Among the most common were the supposed characteristic of Black passivity, the attendant horrors of Postbellum Strategies 65 slavery, and the brave efforts of abolitionists. We are indebted to Frank- lin, Woodson, and the rest for expanding the research. Thus Culp, Woodson, and Gatewood, for instance, moved the narrative, which characterized Black leadership as the isolated incidents of extraordinary Black transcendence from slavery to freedom, toward other stories of agency and achievement. We learned from these scholars about Black tenacity and surprising degrees of wealth, education, and mobility.80 In contrast, some works, like Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie (and the work of Reuter and Helm), doubted the real wealth of the Black elite and continued to measure social mobility by the degree of White blood an individual had.81 Schweninger’s work incorporated the advantage of transformations in information technology. By employing the use of advanced data collection systems, historians like Schweninger could more accurately interpret the amount of wealth Black people possessed. Schweninger used census returns, state tax assessment lists, county tax assessment books, wills, and probate records to ascertain a clear record of property ownership among the Black-identified. His evaluation of property ownership reveals racial and regional variations between the Upper, Middle, and Lower South. He also found distinctions between the Black-, White-, and Mulatto-identified people. For example, “The average real estate holdings of $1,479 for [Black Louisianans in 1860] compared favorably with the average of $1,492 for white males in the nation as a whole. Though they were less likely than whites in the nation to own at least some real estate (34 percent to 43 percent), and though they owned less realty on average . . . [than White] Southerners, Louisiana’s free people of color were slightly better off in economic terms than white adult males in the Northeast (mean real estate = $1,461) and the Northwest ($1,284) and twice as well off as foreign born Americans ($833).” He also found that in the greater Deep South in 1870 approximately 11,000 Black people had acquired at least $1,000 worth of real estate, personal holdings, or investments. Another “157,000 [Black Americans] . . . had managed to move out of the property-less group. A total of 43,268 had become land owners. By 1910 . . . 426,449 Negroes in the South own[ed] their own farms . . . houses [or] other . . . tracts of rural land.”82 66 Postbellum Strategies Although slave ownership should not represent Black economic mobility in the sense that it didn’t amount to uplift of the race as a whole, I must point out that Black property ownership included slaves.83 According to Schweninger, slave ownership among Black Southern- ers was more prevalent than one might imagine. By 1830 “1,556 Negro Masters in the Deep South owned a total of 7,188 slaves. . . . [They] represented about 42 percent of the Negro owners in the entire South; they owned 60 percent of the black-owned slaves.” This means that “approximately 1 free Negro family in 4 in the region was a slaveholder.”84 However, his findings must be tempered by the relatively low number of free Blacks, which was approximately 6 to 7 percent of all Black-identified people in the South in 1830 and 3 to 4 percent of the entire population in the North.85 Rates of property ownership among the Black-identified, however, did not remain constant. The percentage of free people and the amount of property they owned fluctuated between regions. Moreover these features were directly responsive to outside political, economic, and social forces. Thus the ability to own land did not move along a never- ending, upward trajectory. Between the years 1830 and 1850 the chance for Black people to own property slowly declined in response to an overall deterioration in race relations. A major reason for this was that the 1830s saw a sharp increase in White fear over the potential for future slave rebellions. The end of the Haitian Revolution in 1804, Denmark Vesey’s attempted insurrection in 1822, Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831, and the successful hijacking of the uss Creole in 1841 (when 135 slaves while in transport from Virginia to the port of New Orleans redirected their ship to the Bahamas) contributed to the rise of White fear. In the case of the uss Creole, the slaves were not forced to return to the U.S. (The Bahamas were a British colony where the U.S. had no jurisdiction and where slavery had already been abolished.) As a consequence of these developments, racial animosity intensified. This hindered credit relationships between Whites and Blacks and also temporary reduced Whites’ willingness to sell property to Blacks.86 But another series of events would once again raise the levels of Black property ownership. In the 1850s Black property ownership began to Postbellum Strategies 67 increase as Whites left the South in order to move west (for the Cal- ifornia Gold Rush and farmsteads in Oregon Territory). In 1868 the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment granting U.S. citizenship to formerly enslaved people meant that the Homestead Act now applied to all Black Americans. It made cheaper land more available to Blacks, who then moved into the regions that west-bound migrants had vacated. Westward migration also affected the Upper South, as “one out of five [free] Negro head of families had become real property owners.”87 The years that followed the midpoint of the nineteenth century saw a continued ebb and flow of Black property ownership rates. The Civil War marked a time of significant property loss, while Reconstruction and the Freedmen’s Bureau’s efforts at land redistribution resulted in the rise of Black property ownership. For example, Washington found that, in Georgia alone, landholding among Black-identified Southern- ers since the Civil War had by 1876 increased at a rate of “45 times, for a total of 457,636 acres.”88 Rate changes also reflected the differences between urban and rural mobility. Schweninger notes that “Black- owned businesses rose in excess of 1,000 percent between 1870 and 1910 in the upper [South] states.”89 During the 1880s urban, mixed-race men who were Black-identified “found themselves wedded to the idea of landownership.” Among the names Schweninger includes are Whitefield McKinlay, a close confident of Pinchback; Reverend Archibald Grimké; Judge Robert H. Ter- rell; Dr. Charles Purvis; and Robert R. Church, an entrepreneur and the father of clubwoman Mary Church Terrell. These men together owned approximately “$200,000 worth of real estate.”90 After the Civil War all of the men just listed served in either the state or federal government. Black leaders took a two-pronged approach: either political advancement through elected and appointed positions, or upward mobility through property ownership. John Mercer Langston and Norris Wright-Cuney were among the most prosperous businessmen, or “politician entrepreneurs,” who engaged in politics. Schweninger argues that “some [of these] were opportunistic men” who entered the political arena to advance their own cause, but did work to improve the conditions of their fellow Black people.91 68 Postbellum Strategies Clearly, each focus offered advantages to the other. That is, one’s prestige gained by political experience could help one to secure credit or smooth contract negotiations.92 Likewise, the relationships built upon one’s wealth, or the prestige gained from it, eased access into the political arena. These parallel efforts often provoked criticism. The words of Thomas Nelson Page suggest the suspicion surrounding wealthy Black-identified politicians and the merits of increased industry over legislative aims:

They were seduced . . . into believing that they could be legislated into immediate equality with a race. . . . They were made to believe that their only salvation lay in aligning themselves against the other race, and following blindly the adventurers who came to lead them to a new promised land. For nearly a generation they have been pushed along the wrong road. But now, in place of political leaders, who were simply firebrands, is arising a new class of leaders, which, with a wider horizon, a deeper sagacity and a truer patriotism, are endeav- oring to establish a foundation of morality, industry and knowledge and to build upon them a race that shall be capable.93

A new class of leaders had indeed emerged, yet the previous generation of Reconstruction politicians didn’t just disappear. These entrepreneurs sustained wealth long after retiring from the political arena. This is a crucial point, because it displaces the idea that Reconstruction- era leaders just drifted into invisible misery by the late 1880s. Eric Foner gives this impression when he concludes that during the 1880s Reconstruction-era leaders “sank into obscurity.” Foner also makes the point that if the “descendants [of Reconstruction-era leaders] moved ahead, it was through business, the arts, or the professions, not politics.”94 Gatewood came to a similar conclusion when he suggested that Allain disappeared from public life.95 In my estimation, the shift from politics to private interests did not constitute failure or disappearance “from the historical record.” Rather, it suggested different routes Black leaders took to retain power and influence. Nevertheless the postbellum period through the early 1900s saw a symbiotic relationship between property ownership, political positions, Postbellum Strategies 69 and race. An article by an author who referred to himself simply as Oglethorpe, published by the New York Sun in 1883, reveals in detail the connection between property ownership, political power, race, and color. In the article, Oglethorpe (or as he refers to himself, the “Southern Observer”) articulates the effect of Black property ownership on the self-image of Whites in general, and of the status of mixed- race proprietors. He described a Mulatto family, a Mr. and Mrs. Calhoun and their children, who owned a local restaurant in Atlanta, called Calhoun’s Restaurant. The family “own[ed] a good home in [the] suburbs, and [paid] taxes on about $20,000.” The Calhouns served mainly White customers and were so successful that “many whites might envy their position.” The family’s financial success spread into other areas of civic life. Within their home resided the office of the Atlanta Defiance, a Black newspaper that boasted a modest circulation of approximately seven hundred readers.96 Oglethorpe refers to the unnamed owner of the paper, who was likely William A. Pledger, as a “quadroon.”97 Oglethorpe emphasizes the same color distinctions employed in the South as Dunbar-Nelson and Blassingame did. He points out that Mr. Calhoun and the owner of the Defiance “represent[ed] two important classes—the colored property holders, the colored men of education— among . . . the Southern mixed blood, Mulattoes, quadroons, [and] octoroons.” He characterizes the relationship between “Mulattoes and negroes” as one in which the Mulattoes were “forced, in an effort to rise, to carry the latter with them.” Oglethorpe also describes these mixed-race men as both resentful toward Whites because of their exclusion from White society and destructive toward Blacks, as evidenced by their tendency to side with Whites over disputes. His conclusion of White loyalty among mixed- race people may or may not have been correct. He would not necessarily have been able to conceptualize that these mixed-race men garnered power and prestige from the tint of Blackness. Regardless, he found these men to be “better educated than many Whites,” which, he believed, hindered the aim of smooth race relations. He notes that the most educated of mixed-race men were usually the most radical 70 Postbellum Strategies (in terms of advocating for civil rights) and were typically propertyless. This particular insight is quite useful in that it unwittingly reveals a dimension within the criteria for Black leadership. In terms of the White view of Black property holders, the writer concludes, “One man who becomes a property holder by industry and economy, like Mr. Calhoun, is worth as a citizen a dozen educated Mulattoes, like the editor of the Defiance.” The primary reason for the writer’s dismissal of educated Mulattoes was the fear that it was this radical group that spurred activism among the Black laboring class. He explains that it was the ultimate focus of the “acute politician of the South” to prevent White and Black laborers from ever uniting. The article concludes with the argument that Mulattoes would never be able to create “a separate social class equal to that of the whites.” Thus, he argues, if Whites were to support landownership among mixed-race men, then at least those men would have a stake in maintaining a passive Black labor force to work the land. The effort to secure Black wealth via landownership or business ownership was written about extensively in the later nineteenth century. The Colored American in 1894 described Black entrepreneurial interests in Upper South cities like Baltimore and Richmond as having “business fever.” The magazine pointed out that those proprietors truly believed “that business ownership [would] solve the race question.”98 Schweninger referred to Allain and some of his peers, including Blanche K. Bruce and John R. Lynch, as “planter politicians” of “substantial business acumen.” The skills they honed in politics had in fact prepared them for forthcoming business negotiations.99 Periodic economic downturns in the U.S. during the 1890s resulted in financial losses for most Americans, regardless of race. Mixed-race property owners, in order to maintain their status, reset their sights on remaining in positions of power and influence by once again seeking political positions. For many of these men the act of leading other Black men was a strategy to maintain power, influence, and social status. They realized that their “future was in large measure tied to the future of the Black Masses.” Allain, Harlan, and Pinchback all held elected or appointed positions at this time. By the early twentieth Postbellum Strategies 71 century, as the economic climate shifted once again toward prosperity, Black-identified Americans in the South started to obtain land at a more rapid rate than did Whites.100

The Importance of Property Ownership According to Booker T. Washington Booker T. Washington argued that during the difficult transition from sharecropping (which in most cases meant debt peonage) to landholding a man longed for “a place . . . where if he drove a nail or planted a tree it would stay there and could be handed down to his children.” Proprietary privilege became the paramount goal, as it was dramatically linked to freedom, and subsequently to leadership.101 At Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, Washington witnessed the link between property ownership and freedom. At the Tuskegee Negro Conference, which he held annually, he listened to hundreds of farmers tell their stories of the struggle from serfdom to ownership. They would articulate their memories of saving money in local banks in order to become landholders, shareholders, and owners of small businesses. Washington concluded that these men “made an impression upon the communities in which they lived by the success which they [had] achieved.”102 They became the new leaders of Black communities when the Republican Party in the South went into eclipse. Washington favored mass industrial training, writing, “I have always believed that [the degree to which] . . . the industrial, not omitting the intellectual, condition [of] my race was improved, in the same degree would their moral and religious life improve.” He went further and suggested that, for those who did gain a higher education, their success would not be on account of their education but would depend on whether or not they owned property. He said, for example, that the Black teachers of Gloucester County who taught at Hampton Institute were not special because of their intellectual superiority but because “most of them own property in the county.” It was property ownership rather than higher education that made them “superior examples to their black students.”103 72 Postbellum Strategies Washington also celebrated the work Tuskegee did for the neighborhoods that surrounded the school. According to the 1880 U.S. Cen- sus, one year before the school opened in Macon County 593 farms surrounded the institute. At that time, fewer than 10 percent were Black-owned. By 1890 there were 1,409 farms, 30 percent of which were Black-owned. Washington boasted, “At the present time I think that every coloured man and woman in the South ‘not only feels proud’ of what Tuskegee has accomplished . . . but that he feels, also a little more alive, a little more able to go ahead and do something in the world than he did before.”104 Washington dedicated a significant portion of his book The Story of the Negro to showcasing the increasing wealth of Black farmers nationally. By 1901, he showed, Black people owned 30,000 square miles of southern land. He suggested that the bulk of this property acquisition had occurred during the short time since emancipation: “I should say that Negroes in the United States own at the present time not less than $550,000,000 worth of taxable property.” Since “free coloured people in this country owned before the War something like $25,000,000 worth of property, it is safe to say that $525,000,000 has been acquired by the coloured people of the United States since freedom.”105

“Georgia as ‘Parallel’ to the Rest of the South” Washington’s excitement over the accumulation of wealth inspired him to investigate Georgia’s economic situation. In his estimation, progress made by Black property owners in Georgia ran parallel to the rest of the South. He was very detailed in his observation, calculating that in 1866 Blacks in Georgia owned 20,000 acres of land valued at $22,500. By 1876 landownership had “increased by 45 times, [which totaled] 457,635 acres worth $1,234,104.” The growth of landownership was largely on account of Civil War veterans who were paid by the Freedmen’s Bureau, which enabled them to invest their money in southern land. Here we can see the connection between public service and property ownership. The years from 1876 to 1886 saw a rise of Black-owned farms; Washing- ton estimated the increase at approximately 100 percent—to a total of 802,939 acres of land, worth $2,508,198. From 1886 to 1896 the rate of Postbellum Strategies 73 Black-owned farm land rose again, to 1,043,847 acres, worth $4,234,848. From 1896 to 1906, the worth rose to $7 million.106 Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch in One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation did not find the financial success that Washington boasted about. According to their estimates, roughly 65.5 percent of all farms in Georgia were White-owned, compared to only 30.5 percent that were Black-owned.107 The problem with Ran- som and Sutch’s thesis is that it focuses strictly on the cotton industry in 1876–80. The wealth made from cotton cultivation during this time was dramatically reduced on account of international competition. Moreover their research doesn’t say anything about landownership in general. In fact Allain and others were dead-set against cotton growing. In a letter written to T. Thomas Fortune, editor of the New York Age, Allain made a strong, poignant case against cotton cultivation in favor of sugar growing. He explained that the cotton industry was distinctly harsh on labor and that it yielded less financial success than did the sugar industry.108

Henry A. Hunt Traditionally, historians tout Washington as the metaphorical drum major who stressed the goal of economic success among Black people as a means to achieve social mobility. But Washington was not alone in his fervor for an economic emphasis on Black landownership. Henry A. Hunt, professor of agriculture, social reformer, farm labor organizer, and head of Fort Valley High and Industrial School (1904– 38), declared that it didn’t take long for “ex-slaves to see the importance of not only knowing something, but owning something.” Hunt was convinced that “cheap land, with easy payments, [a] ready market and previous training of the Negro” offered Black Americans in the South a unique opportunity for uplift. This opportunity, he said, would allow Blacks “to come out from the condition of a landless tenant—that may grow into serfdom worse than slavery—to that of worthy, independent and self-respecting land owners.”109 Underlying Hunt’s support for landownership was an urgent caveat. He warned that the ability to buy land would not continue indefinitely. 74 Postbellum Strategies He sensed new competition, not from American-born Whites but from an influx of foreign immigrants. He wrote in 1902, “Let the tide of European immigration once turn southward and competition immediately becomes sharper, and . . . progress of the Negro decidedly more difficult.” With the greatest intensity and purpose he exclaimed, “The most solemn obligations [rest] upon those who stand as leaders of the Negroes, viz: The duty of impressing upon the masses the absolute necessity for purchasing land, and the great need, yes, the absolute necessity of doing so now.”110 During the 1920s, for his efforts to represent and organize Black farmers in Georgia, Hunt gained “state and national prominence,” as his actions were frequently published in various newspapers.111 Hunt’s emphasis on landownership was framed within the larger goal of attaining a more just life for Black Americans, particularly Black farmers. However, he placed himself atop the masses as their leader. Donnie B. Bellamy opined that Hunt “became the patriarch of the rural masses.”112 Hunt was quite vocal about what he considered to be the solution for Black uplift. The problem, he said, was “not altogether a matter of race, but it is largely a matter of condition.” He was critical of Black leaders who believed that, regardless of which class an individual achieved, one’s race would invariably remain an impediment to full equality. In one sense, Hunt’s belief that industrial training would ultimately lead to landownership and upward mobility challenged the belief in racial determinism so popular in nineteenth-century America. But in another sense, he relegated the masses of Black Southerners to a limited, almost fatalistic future when he proposed that “members of his race . . . be taught those things that have a close relation to the life they will live,” like farming and black- smithing.113 Hunt was so fixated on agricultural development over liberal arts education that he used his power with Fort Valley’s board of trustees “to remove all Black trustees who opposed [his] educational blueprint.” His vision succeeded, and in 1909 he completed weeded “out Black teachers who opposed his . . . plan.”114 Despite opposition from Du Boisian–minded intellectuals who favored wider-ranging education opportunities for Black Americans, Hunt structured the Postbellum Strategies 75 school after the Hampton and Tuskegee models and added an elementary and middle school to the industrial campus. Whether Hunt’s commitment to Black uplift was genuine or paternalistic is up for debate. However, one must consider the proverbial elephant in the room. Here was a liberally educated man, unequivocally White in appearance, creating policy for the trajectory of Black labor. As indicated in an earlier section, there are limits, even risks, associated with the use of visual evidence. However, when one looks at Hunt, who came from a wealthy quadroon family, went to college, and lived a privileged life, it is difficult to reconcile his leadership position over the masses of agricultural workers in Georgia. To advocate solely for industrial education when one has benefited from a liberal education oneself was in many ways a formula for a manufactured, permanent Black underclass structure determined by the racial marker of skin color. Whatever his intentions, one can’t help but recognize a privileged, White-looking man who believed that darker Blacks in the Deep South should remain toilers of the soil.

White Support of Mixed-Race Men as a Way to Control the Black Masses On the topic of Black leadership, mixed-race men of means were not alone in their desire to take the helm. There were, according to contemporary accounts, plenty of White philanthropists who offered their services to lead Black America. For example, Richard Carroll, the founder of a Black orphanage in South Carolina, said that the White segregationist politician Benjamin Tillman, who had a severe reputation “as the most bitter [White] opponent of the Negro,” had helped him more than anyone.115 According to Carroll, this was especially true during his ultimately unsuccessful effort to open the University of South Carolina to Black students.116 Reverend Carroll, however, also said that the only means to secure the Negro’s survival in the South was to ensure that “he become a good servant.” Thus Carroll’s tribute to White philanthropy is somewhat shadowed by his suggestion of servility.117 John Merrick, who in 1898 founded an insurance company, the North Carolina Mutual and Provident Association, provides another 76 Postbellum Strategies example of Black success by means of White support. Merrick’s business covered 160,000 people and paid $500,000 in benefits. According to Washington, Merrick got his start from borrowing money from a White patron. Washington inferred that this association, and the subsequent credit the relationship afforded, was due to a connection that Merrick’s mother had with a Judge McCord’s house servant. The relationship between White philanthropists and Black businessmen continued to yield mutual benefits. Later the owners of Duke Tobacco Company, who had employed over two thousand African Ameri- cans in North Carolina, also helped Merrick financially, and he in turn helped them keep their employees tractable. Washington argued that these examples were more characteristic of the South than one might suppose.118 Friendly relations, according to Washington, were the result of “the success that the Negro has made in the South in getting property.” And vice versa: Washington insisted that the prevalence of property ownership among Black Southerners would not have been possible without those interracial connections. He cited Deal Jackson of Albany, Georgia, who owned two thousand acres of land and employed forty- six families. Another, John J. Benson, owned three thousand acres in Elmore County, Alabama. The land was a plantation on which Benson had formerly lived as a slave. Washington exclaimed, “He is famous throughout the country not only for his success in raising cotton but quite as much for his success in breeding horses and raising cattle.”119 The grandeur of Washington’s account is anecdotal, but it reveals important shifts in the criteria Black Americans employed to pick their leaders as Reconstruction receded. Washington offered a poignant interpretation of what he believed to be the lack of confidence many Black Americans had in their leadership. He suggested that Blacks had a difficult time believing in self-determination, arguing that often, as a result of slavery, they believed they needed to be led by others. They also found it difficult to believe that leadership would come from their own race. Washington learned this while he traveled in Alabama before he opened Tuskegee in 1881. For the most part, he recalled, the people believed that he could accomplish what he set out to do only Postbellum Strategies 77 with the help and “guidance of white people.” He lamented, “[They] doubted my ability and their own, to carry out the plans I proposed to them.” After Washington erected the first building at Tuskegee he recalled the amazement local Blacks expressed when they first visited. He described them as “bewildered . . . as if they were not quite sure whether what they saw was real. . . . It was difficult for them to believe. . . . It seemed impossible to them that all this could have been brought into existence [by Negroes] for the benefit of the Negroes.”120 Washington also observed the public notoriety that came from property ownership. He mentions several Black-identified people who were well-known as a result of their wealth. Among the most famous was Alfred Smith, formerly a slave born in Georgia who migrated to Kansas and then to Oklahoma after the war. Known as “the ‘cotton King,’ of Oklahoma,” Smith won several state awards for growing the best cotton. But it was his wining first prize at the World’s Exhibition in Paris that accounted for his celebrity. Washington contended that Black people had more opportunities of economic uplift than many people believed. He observed that many successful Black men in South Carolina attributed their success “in large part” to the friendships they held with White men.121

Notoriety and Its Connection to Black Identity Washington referred to men like Allain as “prominent and successful coloured men who were at the time the leaders of their race in the United States . . . [and] . . . whose names were household words among the masses of the coloured people at that time.”122 Similarly, Simmons’s account of Allain observes the connection between public notoriety and the pull toward Black identification among mixed-race leaders. He believed that the need for civil rights advocacy on the part of Black people propelled Allain toward public prominence. Had it not been for the needs of Black people, Simmons argues, Allain would simply have been classified with all the other wealthy planters in Louisiana, about whom we care to know little. This understanding provides another rationale for people choosing to identify as Black when other choices were available, and seemingly less dangerous. Thus Allain as 78 Postbellum Strategies a Black-identified, Reconstruction-era man of power and wealth also made his name by the service he lent specifically to Black America.123 Allain’s role in rebuilding levees along the Mississippi River demonstrates the connection between public prominence, Black identification, and economic gain. The Cleveland Gazette in a biographical essay in 1889 suggested that “his greatest notoriety” came because of his “connection with the levees of Louisiana.”124 As a respected member of the Louisiana Chamber of Commerce, Allain acted as its representative in Washington dc. The Chamber of Commerce, along with other Louisiana businesses, sent him to Washington in 1882 to testify about the dangerous condition of the Mississippi levees. In front of a congressional committee, which was set up to investigate the episodic overflow of the Mississippi River, Allain argued that thousands of people’s lives, along with their property, were at risk. Emphasizing the need to fix the levees, he passionately described the scene: “There are a million of acres of the richest and most productive sugar, cotton and rice lands under water. There are a hundred and twenty thousand human beings driven from their homes to seek shelter anywhere from the ravages of the flood. Conjure up the picture, sir, if you can; look down the river as far as the eye can reach, every curve, every bend straightened; look on the right hand and then on the left as far as the eye can reach, and see the vast and apparently illimitable ocean of water. Water, water, everywhere.”125 Allain’s testimony created a vivid impression, and he did not exaggerate. The recurring overflow of the Mississippi River was nationally covered. E. W. Gould in Fifty Years on the Mississippi outlines the history of river overflow and the damage caused to people, property, and crops during the nineteenth century. The Mississippi River Commis- sion estimated that the nation should expect a high-water overflow at least once each decade. The flood of 1882 had preceded Allain’s trip to Congress, but his testimony was not some prophetic vision. The recent flood gravely affected Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas. In Loui- siana alone, the flood caused a 32 percent loss in cotton, a 20 percent loss in corn, and a 90 percent loss to the sugar and molasses industry. No doubt, the significant loss to sugar inspired Allain’s leadership on Postbellum Strategies 79 the issue. For all Louisianans the flood cost $15,004,000.126 President Arthur commented on Allain’s testimony, “It is no small matter that this colored man should be selected by the most prominent business men [including Whites] of the section.”127 As a result of his standing in the Louisiana business community and his convincing testimony, Allain received the lion’s share of the contracts to fix the levees. He employed “colored and white labor . . . [who] work[ed] . . . side by side.” The Cleveland Gazette reported that his interracial approach to labor was “one of the ways of solving the ‘Southern Problem.’”128 The Gazette essentially outlined the connection between a public identity, racial uplift, and wealth. In 1890, in a letter to Washington, Allain expressed how his success in business would provide him a legacy for his own family. At the time Allain was about to send his son, Theophile Jr., to Tuskegee Insti- tute and decided to explain his choice of that school: “I believe that my present work in building 1000s and hundreds of thousands cubic yards of Levees on the banks of the Mississippi River, in this day and time—will compare favorably with the record of any colored man in the Republic—and therefore I propose to leave a business record behind my boys, if, and I do hope that they will have brains enough to appreciate that fact. Now, I would like for you to get credit of training my son Theophile.”129 Here we witness Allain wanting recognition as a result of prosperity, for himself, and perhaps Tuskegee, which might then translate into political currency for Tuskegee. In another letter sent to Washington the following year, Allain wrote that he was happy to have accepted an invitation to give an address at Tuskegee: “I made the address to build up your school, and it will do more in that way than anything that has taken place in the South. I will send my son and 3 other boys in Sept.”130 His children ended up transferring to Straight University, but this letter revealed yet another method of racial uplift.

Allain’s Attitude toward Labor and Property T. Thomas Fortune, editor of the nation’s most popular Black newspaper during the 1880s and 1890s, the New York Age, in 1884 wrote a 80 Postbellum Strategies letter to Allain for the purpose of getting “an authentic statement” about the condition of Black Americans in Louisiana. Allain’s response spoke directly to the gains Black people made in private ownership after Reconstruction. He described to Fortune the parallel conditions that existed for Black people in the South. For example, in the cotton- growing industry “Negroes are kept in subjugation,” but those who labored in growing sugar enjoyed prosperity and interracial “friendship and cordiality.” According to Allain, living and working within sugar-growing districts of Louisiana were men “who before the war were slaves, who now pay taxes upon property, assessed in their own names, ranging in value from five hundred to fifty thousand dollars,” and so they secured a better life. In comparison, cotton-growing laborers “as a rule . . . make fortunes for . . . landlords and die in poverty because of no fault of their own.” Allain’s summation of the idiosyn- crasies of sugar- and cotton-growing districts portrays a life in which work was prevalent and tax-paying, “well informed” residents, Black and White, lived in relative harmony because of their “mutual interests.” The more labor-intensive work associated with cotton cultivation probably accounted for Allain’s assessment. Undoubtedly his personal stake in the sugar industry swayed his opinion.131 Never was Allain’s focus on private enterprise or ownership more evident than when he told Fortune that conditions for both Blacks and Whites were more stable in places “where material prosperity is the first and political bickering [is] the secondary consideration. Because of the mutual interests at stake, colored men in the sugar district are often protected by their bitterest political opponents.”132 In 1883 the historian George W. Williams also emphasized property ownership over political representation. He described several Louisiana politicians, among them P. P. Delinde, Antoine Debuclet, and Allain, as “men, although taking a lively interest in politics, [who] have accu- mulated property and saved it.”133 Connected to Allain’s vision of racial uplift through property ownership was his support of education. Allain and Pinchback cosponsored a bill to open a Black college in Louisiana. The men successfully secured $20,000 to start the project. On May 9, 1886, the day after Allain and Postbellum Strategies 81 Pinchback, along with other board members, opened Southern Uni- versity in Baton Rouge, the Times-Democrat covered a speech Allain gave concerning the role of wealth, education, and racial uplift. He spoke specifically about education for both Black and White children from ages six through eighteen. Convinced that wealth from Loui- siana’s various industries, including lumber, sugar, rice, and cotton, was the solution to the state’s declining school enrollment, he could not wait until the day that “white and colored schoolhouse[s] dott[ed] every nook and corner of the state.” Only then would “peace and good will to man be . . . practiced in every family.”134

Contrasting Public Images of Allain Despite Allain’s established business acumen he was mindful of the interests of “the laboring class.”135 At a sugar planters’ convention in New Orleans in 1884 he was quick to voice his concern for laborers. The convention met with the express purpose of maximizing profits. Among their chief interests was to devise a plan for reducing the cost of labor. Allain warned the convention attendees, “I tell you gentle- men, that when you cultivate any spirit of animosity between the til- lers of the soil on one hand and the proprietors on the other, you cut your own throats.” His sentiments are in stark contrast to the descriptions provided by some historians, like Thomas Holt, who typically characterize Black Republican politicians in the South as those who often dismissed the Black “proletariat” or, at worst, “dominated it.”136 Perhaps it was his maternal connection to slavery that encouraged Allain’s support for laborers. Charles Vincent describes Allain as an “extremely profitable” businessman who made resourceful contacts “with some of the leading men of the south” and who never forgot his slave past. Vincent understands Allain to be a successful lawmaker but seems most impressed with his role as a “humanitarian.”137 In direct contrast to the image of the compassionate politician- entrepreneurs of racial uplift, the Cleveland Gazette published an article about men who, like Allain, used racial uplift efforts to their own advantage. The article, “Using the Race for Personal Gains,” accuses Black leaders like Bruce and Douglass of seeking and maintaining 82 Postbellum Strategies their leadership out of sheer ambition rather than altruistic motives: “The colored press is beginning to see that Bruce, Douglass and a few other of our chronic office-seekers, use their connection with the race for the sole purpose of getting office and dollars. Their interest (?) in our people increases or decreases as the possibility of getting honor, office and money increases or decreases.”138 Despite the rancor toward Black leaders that the article projects, the author homed in on the shifts Black leaders made to stay in power. Harlan, Allain, Washington, and others believed that wealth accumulation might guard against the incoming tide of Jim Crow statutes during the 1880s. As anti-Black sentiment worsened, the possibility of winning public elections diminished. When the economy plummeted in 1893, Allain shifted once again and returned to his political vocation, but this time he sought political appointments rather than elec- tive office. These appointments were brokered largely by Washington, via his connection to President Theodore Roosevelt. From the aim of proprietary privilege, Allain turned once again to seeking political power. In a letter written to Washington in 1899, he wasted no words in his effort to lobby for a political position: “I am getting old, I will be 53 on Oct. 1st 1899—and I want Mr. McKinley, to help my friend Sen- ator Cullom to secure for me when the Senate will organize anew in Dec. Asst. Doorkeeper—or Asst. Sergeant at Arms of the Senate and I want you to write to Mr. McKinley—and tell him that he has a letter from you in March 1897, recommending me for Fourth Auditor.” These positions may seem minor compared to the public success he had enjoyed in the 1880s. However, as a strategy to survive, he maintained official positions within the U.S government, which allowed him to support the education of all six of his children at Straight Uni- versity. By today’s standards one might consider the ability to send six children to college evidence of success.139 To conclude, as some historians have, that men like Allain, who suffered financial losses in the 1890s, underwent a social death of sorts, is to see a distorted picture. For example, Gatewood’s assessment that “the downward mobility of certain aristocrats of color was no where more dramatic” than at the end of Allain’s life, is incomplete, particularly Postbellum Strategies 83 when one considers that older age brought about a reduction of public activities for many people, regardless of race. When we recall that he owned his home; that, for a while, he maintained a federal position with the Conservation Commission in Chicago; and that he secured those patronage positions for which he lobbied Washington, one might regard the judgment of failure as overstated. Allain died in Louisiana as a member in good standing of the M. W. Eureka Lodge (Free Mason) at age seventy in 1917.140

The Legal Legacy of Reconstruction, Prosperity, and a Vocal Black Identity In “Reconstruction and Its Benefits,” Du Bois shows that despite increasing violence and injustice on account of race, the era of Reconstruc- tion dealt a swift blow to the framework of a racial order based on Black submission and White privilege. For Du Bois this was particularly true because of the indelible mark Reconstruction left on the legislative record concerning property ownership. In 1910 he wrote, “In legislation concerning property, the wider functions of the state . . . it is sufficient to say that the laws on these points established by Recon- struction legislatures were not only different from and even revolutionary to the law in the old South, but they were so wise and so well suited to the needs of the new South that in spite of a retrogressive movement following the overthrow of the Negro governments, the mass of this legislation, with elaboration and development, still stands on the statute books of the South.”141 For Du Bois, the circumstances that followed Reconstruction also inspired a call for monoracial Black identity. In “The Conservation of Races” he stresses the maintenance of a Black identity as a means of “Negro survival.” He writes, “We believe it the duty of the Ameri- can of Negro descent, as a body, to maintain their racial identity until this mission of the Negro people is accomplished, and the ideal of human brotherhood has become a practical possibility.”142 Du Bois linked Black identification with civic duty or obligation. The very act of reminding one’s fellows of their racial duty to identify as Black suggests that other racial choices were available. Passing as White was one 84 Postbellum Strategies option with which most readers are familiar; passing as Black was yet another. Later, when Du Bois wrote “The Talented Tenth,” in 1903, he gathered mixed-race, Black-identified leaders around the common cause of gaining full civil rights as U.S. citizens. By this we should not conclude that he argued that all leaders of the race were mixed. Instead an available pool of leaders existed within a specific historical context, and the racial criteria for leadership changed as the values of Black and White in America changed.143

Foreign Focus Within the range of methods Black leaders employed to achieve racial uplift existed concerns that went beyond domestic race relations. Black leaders, as Hunt suggested, were fixed upon potential competitors. Allain’s consideration of international issues was present even while he testified in Washington about the Mississippi River. Allain not only drew attention to the financial importance of the Louisiana, on account of its international trade stemming from the port of New Orleans, but also described his rationale for more attention to Loui- siana in nationalistic terms. He stressed that U.S. citizens were more deserving of national aid than foreign interests or foreigners within the United States. He told the congressional committee, “When we see the interest taken in projects to check the influx of Chinese . . . when we see Congress . . . regulating the polygamists . . . , [providing] . . . education [to] the aboriginal Indians of our country, these are all regarded as duties of the United Sates Government, I wonder whether the interests of a million people in Louisiana, a people who feel that by every just patriotic consideration should—are entitled to have their ‘welfare’ considered by the government to the extent we are seeking.”144 Just as Black leaders shifted their focus from proprietary privilege to the goal of political representation, they also, when leadership positions on the domestic front proved slim, campaigned for positions that would extend American interests overseas or provide them with actual positions outside of the United States. This was particularly true during the Spanish-American War (1898–1902), when yet another strategy for Postbellum Strategies 85 Black-identified, mixed-race leaders emerged. Allain weighed in on the possibility of U.S. annexation of the Philippines. In an editorial published in the Chicago Inter-Ocean, he pushed for the movement of Black troops to newly acquired territories, such as the Philippines. He also suggested that Black men should fight in the Philippines in order to “make every white mother in the land our friend.” Allain believed that “colored men [were] fitted by nature for service in tropical climate[s].”145 The next chapter is devoted fully to the exploits of mixed- race, Black-identified leaders like Josiah T. Settle, T. Thomas Fortune, and Richard T. Greener, who helped lead America’s new colonial project while they lifted themselves and, to a lesser extent, Black America.

William E. Nelson Jr. argued that the wealth property ownership provided created Black interest in politics. He concluded that Black political power atrophied largely because of the blow to the foundation of financial power sustained in the late nineteenth century, which could no longer support political organization.146 By contrast, I suggest that the quest for power (political, economic, social, or otherwise) was always present. To judge that interest and engagement in civic life is limited to those with wealth is absurd. I argue that Black leaders always took a multipronged approach. During the Civil War and after, property ownership or wealth through family connections placed those people in a position where they could exercise political leadership. In turn, it was their political leadership or party affiliation that nurtured their relationships with other people in power, regardless of race. This then allowed them to secure credit and engage in further business activity. When economic downturns came, as in 1873 and in 1893, they still had the networks and affiliations to once again secure elected or appointed positions as delegates, as political party convention chairs, or in local, state, and federal offices. Their interest didn’t waver; it was the route they took that changed.

Chapter Three

New Challenges and Opportunities for Leadership

From Domestic Immigration to “The Consul’s Burden”

The United States at the end of the nineteenth century underwent dramatic economic and demographic changes of the sort that transformed the nation’s institutions, infrastructure, population, and, ultimately, its own self-image.1 Situated within the larger global economy, which included both extractive and productive sectors, the United States saw huge financial gains as a result of industrial capitalism. However, along with prosperity came other effects of capitalistic growth: urban decay, poor sanitation measures, disease, labor abuses, and an influx of millions of migrants in search of work paralleled the economic growth of the era. For laborers already in the U.S. the migration of people mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe also meant new competi- tive pressures. For the masses of Black Americans, this new competi- tive pressure was amplified by the spread of Jim Crow statutes across the South, which sought to exclude, reduce, and restrict Black liberty. As a consequence, the new race legislation stimulated a movement of Black workers to leave the South—not unlike the exodus to Kansas just decades earlier. Thus Black leaders, often those of mixed- race ancestry, confronted several different threats to Black social and 88 New Challenges and Opportunities economic mobility, while they also considered how best to respond to the opportunities and challenges introduced by industrial capitalism. In public conversations Americans had long grappled with the potential effects of immigration on the U.S. For Black Americans specifically, anxieties over immigrant competition inspired various schemes to maintain power and position as the nation’s favored labor force. Some leaders emphasized a natural alliance between Black and White American citizens on account of a legal personality afforded by the Fourteenth Amendment, shared social history, national loyalty, religion, and language. In an editorial published by Wisconsin’s Waukesha Plain Dealer on October 16, 1866, one “Southern loyalist” captured the comparisons made between Black Americans and Euro- pean immigrants. In a speech given in Chicago he claimed, “When commenting on the ‘negro ballot’ the negro has shown that he hates Treason, and is not that one of the best qualifications for withholding the ballot? Germans and Irishmen come to America with no intellectual qualification and are allowed to vote.”2 Some eighteen years later, in “The Future of the Negro,” Freder- ick Douglass advocated the same kind of alliance between Black and White Americans on account of citizenship, especially when compared to “the Indians and Chinese our own country.” Douglass suggested that the African American had a “moral and political hold upon this country, deep and firm, one which in some measure destroys the analogy between him and other weak people and classes.” Shared religious beliefs also influenced this alliance. Douglass warned that a mass of foreign immigration to the U.S would “drive out the negro . . . drive out Christ, and the Bible, and American liberty with him.”3 Other leaders, both Black and White, advocated for a mass “exodus” of Black Americans from the South because immigrants were bound to displace Black workers there. By the close of the century, mixed-race leaders contemplated mass Black migration, not only within the U.S. but beyond its borders as well. Leaving the South was not a new option for Black Americans, who, in relatively small numbers, had already begun to migrate to Canada, Mexico, Russia, Africa, and Europe. Later, in the early decades of the new century, first hundreds, New Challenges and Opportunities 89 then thousands, then hundreds of thousands of Southern Black workers would stream from country to city in the South, and then north and west across the United States, transforming cities like Chicago, Cleveland, and New York.4 Even before that mass migration within the United States, some elite African Americans, many of them mixed-race people, began to consider seeking their fortunes abroad and to advocate that working- class Blacks join them. Partly this was a reaction to the increasing restrictions on Black freedom and economic and political opportunities in the South. Partly it was an attempt to claim a place in the American imperial adventure for African Americans and leadership positions for themselves. As American intentions of empire developed over the last decades of the nineteenth century, so did Black desires to become colonial administrators. Most dramatically, the Spanish- American War in 1898 shifted the motivation for Black migration from a means to escape competition and racial antipathy to the aim of Black colonialism. Black intellectuals, religious leaders, and politicians evaluated the uplift potential American imperialism promised Black America. Mixed-race leaders like Josiah T. Settle, T. Thomas For- tune, and Richard T. Greener supported the colonization of not only other Black Americans (usually from the laboring class) but Indigenous populations in Latin America, Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands. The words uttered by the Reverend J. H. Morgan reveal the ways some Black leaders linked their own success, and that of their community, to America’s new imperial posture. In a compilation of essays on various topics related to Black America, which were aimed at a Black audience, Morgan in 1902 exclaimed, “Hawaii, Porto Rico, and the Philippines are absolutely ours.”5 Diplomatic historians have studied Black involvement in U.S. foreign affairs, but too often they have limited their focus to the consulate or minister positions held in predominantly Black-populated countries like Haiti and Liberia. For example, they have written about the service of Frederick Douglass and John Mercer Langston (a congressman from Virginia) as U.S. diplomats in Haiti, as well as Owen Lun West in Liberia and Mifflin Wistar Gibbs in Madagascar.6 90 New Challenges and Opportunities Recently, however, some historians have shifted their focus beyond Africa and Haiti. Christopher Teal in Hero of Hispaniola surveys the life of Ebenezer D. Bassett, a mixed-race educator and abolitionist of African descent who served a critical role in extending nineteenth- century U.S. interests in Latin America and the Caribbean. Michele Mitchell in Righteous Propagation includes a measured interpretation of Black diplomats in the Philippines. Historians are resurrecting from obscurity the record of Black participation in foreign service. Yet most still interpret these appointments as atypical examples of Black diplomacy, unique to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The era is characterized as a veritable surge of appointments offered by Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, who had supposedly fallen victim to the pressure of Booker T. Washington’s strong-armed broker- ing. Another common interpretation is to conclude that consul posts were essentially consolation prizes given to Black Republicans so that other, more powerful White Republicans could manage both the party and domestic issues unfettered, while they offered a measured appreciation for years of loyal Black Republican support.7 However, none has managed to analyze the disproportionate representation of mixed-race consuls, who may or may not have had the same agendas as their darker Black American counterparts. This chapter proposes that some Black leaders of mixed ancestry saw themselves as separate from (if connected to) darker-skinned Black Americans. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this rift sparked intense debate among African American intellectuals, while it also emerged as a point of contention over Foreign Service appointments. The New York Times in 1902 reported that, when the prominent mixed- race editor of the New York Age, T. Thomas Fortune, was appointed special commissioner agent to the Philippines and envoy to Hawai’i, “the negro leaders were up in arms.” A political contemporary of For- tune, Reverend Dr. L. W. L Roundtree, was said to be “very much put out over the announcement of Fortune’s appointment.” Roundtree reportedly believed that giving the appointment to a conspicuously mixed-race man over qualified darker-skinned African Americans would “discourage negroes who have worked so hard.”8 New Challenges and Opportunities 91 Despite squabbles over who was more deserving of foreign posts, many members of the old guard, or those who either had served as elected officials or maintained federal appointments, lobbied for and received diplomatic positions when domestic opportunities in the federal government diminished. The pursuit of foreign appointments became yet another strategy mixed-race, Black-identified leaders employed to stay in power. Ideologically, the temper of immigration debates among Black intellectuals and their varied positions on U.S. imperialistic intentions show that the early decades of the twentieth century were a time when Blackness, as an identity, was still contested. Moreover the complexion and scope of their status was yet to be defined. That is, mixed-race Black leaders attempted to position themselves and their communities as members of a potential master class in colonized spaces. They sought to accomplish this by emphasizing their U.S. citizenship, while they perpetuated eugenically inspired understandings of racial hierarchy. For a time it looked as if Black Amer- ica would help colonize the Indigenous populations of places like the Philippines, Cuba, Liberia, and many other nations within Africa.

Anti-Immigration Voices and Black American Citizenship Not only did Black-identified leaders emphasize what they projected as a natural alliance between Black and White Americans; some Whites did as well. For example, an analysis of White South- ern Methodist efforts to improve Black education reveals motives other than racial uplift. Help from White Methodists was not simply based on Christian brotherhood; in addition, their assistance should be understood as a move to support Black American interests over immigrant needs. John O. Fish points out that “South- ern Methodists, like other southerners, became concerned over the possibility of the Negro being displaced by the Italian immigrant.” According to Fish, White Southern Methodists considered Blacks to be the “lesser of the two evils when compared with the Roman Catholic Italians who were accused of disregarding the Sabbath, of bringing in criminal attitudes and the Mafia, and of being willing to strike.”9 The record of antipathy toward Italians in the South 92 New Challenges and Opportunities was never more evident than during the infamous mass lynching in 1891, when a mob killed eleven Italians in New Orleans.10 Alex- ander Gross, editor of the Methodist Review, warned that if immigrants replaced Black labor, millions of unemployed Blacks would leave the South and drift into vagrancy, while the South would have to withstand millions of foreigners.11 W. A. Freeman, a Black activist and the author of The Devil between the White Man and the Negro, also weighed in on the impending threat of “millions of immigrants” aiming for the South. He believed that White and Black American citizens shared a more natural alliance on account of their history, interests, and religion. Any difference that stood between White and Black Southerners was far less than that which lay between U.S. citizens (either Black or White) and foreign immigrants. A lithograph he included illustrates Freeman’s belief that the fate of the country (in terms of both public and private interests) was shouldered by both Black and White laborers. Of the new immigrants heading southward, Freeman claimed, “These foreign throngs all belong to secret societies into which native [White] Americans cannot come. In these orders they teach doctrines that form no part of an American’s education. They bring with them the art of assassina- tion, the way of civil subversion, and the defeat of sensible religion. It is this people who make bombs and infernal machines, and have always ready a fanatic to throw them.”12 Freeman believed that the only way the South would survive the flow of foreign laborers was to ensure that Blacks remained in the South to block their entry and thereby limit immigrant opportunities for work. He argued that if Whites in the South did not maintain an alliance with Blacks against foreigners, they risked facing a new coalition between the “dark races upon the globe” and Black Americans. Freeman included a lithograph that represented his forewarning of immigrant unification to the detriment of America. He warned, “They are piling upon us by the thousands. Here they find another man of color—already mad, and waiting for an opportunity.” He insisted, however, that “there is neither mutual interest, nor special fellowship between the foreigner and the negro from a social or political point New Challenges and Opportunities 93 of view.” However, if a plan was not devised to reinforce the national bond between White and Black American citizens, then those who once had “neither sympathy nor affinity for one another . . . [would] soon . . . have.”13 Despite racial antipathy between Black and White Southerners, Freeman believed American national interests should trump racial differences. The “Devil,” Freeman asserted, was not Jim Crow; the “Devil” was the immigrant. He appealed to both Whites, who did not want to live with Blacks, and Blacks, who feared loss of employment. He warned that any move to get rid of the so-called Negro Problem would create a labor vacuum, which would attract foreign immigration into the South. These other “dark races” would flood the South and would instigate new problems based in questions of national loyalty and political ideology. Thus Freeman recommended that Blacks and Whites settle the problem by living in self-segregated communities, which would appease racial antipathy while it discouraged foreign migration. In his book The African Abroad, William H. Ferris, a Black intellectual, journalist, teacher, and pastor, also traced the impact of foreign immigration on Black people, particularly in the South. His book, a compilation of lectures and papers, was published in 1913, after years of travel along the East Coast of the United States. As a graduate of Yale University and having earned a master’s degree in journalism from Harvard University, Ferris used his research skills to create a comprehensive picture of the African experience in the U.S. His observations of European immigration to the South, and the relationship it had with Black economic mobility, provided a record of the concern Black leaders experienced over potential losses to Black labor. According to Ferris, Black Southern laborers for much of their history faced little competition, which made employment opportunities in freedom more secure. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century, “many immigrants, especially Italians, ha[d] come to Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, and Arkansas,” and as a result had displaced Black agricultural workers. Borrowing from the nationalistic rhetoric surrounding immigration 94 New Challenges and Opportunities policy, he described the immigrants as a threat, a dangerous “agricultural wave.” He estimated that by 1906, twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand European immigrants were coming to the South each year, and he projected that within twenty-five years one million more would come to the South.14 Ferris tapped into the general anxiety Black leaders experienced as they witnessed an increase of wealth accumulation among immigrants. In the cotton industry in Louisiana, he noted, Italians were considered hard workers and “quick pickers” who effi- ciently saved enough money to rent their own land.15 This was a dramatic departure from the favored position Black Southerners held in the labor market in the late nineteenth century. For example, Ferris contended that during the 1880s, “the Chinaman rattled his tin God and bowed to it. The Italian worked as he chose, the German wanted to be his own boss. Each German thought he was an emperor in himself and that he could evolve a god out of his own consciousness. The Negro was the best workman.”16 Worried over the potential impact of Italian laborers, Black leaders debated the threat of their presence. One among them, Dr. E. W. Lampton, believed that the Italians were a “dangerous industrial competitor” of Black labor, but he was comforted by his observation that Italians were merely temporary threats to Black labor, since they had a propensity for running away after their transportation costs were paid off.17 Nevertheless Ferris remained anxious over Italian labor competition. His research uncovered the public conversations that assessed the comparative worth of Italian labor when measured against Black labor. He believed that a preference for Italian labor over Black was growing—so much so that he feared it had reached the White House. Ferris warned that President Roosevelt’s “Panama Canal message seemed to regard the Italian and Spaniard as superior to the Negro laborer,” which only intensified his concern over the future vitality of Black labor.18 Concern over labor competition was not limited to the South. Northern trade unions often discriminated against Black labor in favor of some European immigrants. Ferris lamented, “Negro waiters, bellm[e]n, cooks, butlers, coachmen, footmen and servant girls [were New Challenges and Opportunities 95 steadily] . . . supplanted by foreigners.” Overall his work failed to por- tray the quality of ethnically diverse experiences of European immigrants. Northern Italians, Sicilians, Irish, Russian Jews, and Polish immigrants, for example, all had very different experiences in terms of access to employment.19 However, his focus on the competition that immigration in general caused Black America revealed the source of anti-immigration positions that many mixed-race, Black-identified leaders of the early twentieth century would take.20

Booker T. Washington’s Position on Immigration Washington’s biographer Louis Harlan argued that Washington “had no particular love for the immigrants who poured into the US during his life time, [but rather] regard[ed] them as labor competitors of blacks.” Washington also remained suspicious of “foreign-born anarchist[s] [who he believed were] ready to pull down the temple of American business.”21 Washington did, however, empathize with the struggles Southern Europeans faced in their home countries and believed them similar to the experiences of Black laborers in the U.S. In The Story of the Negro, he wrote, “In comparing the Negro with the immigrants now coming into the U.S. in such large numbers from the South of Europe, we are comparing him with races which in Europe have been, and still in America [are], living in the conditions that are in many respects comparable to those in which the masses of the Negro live now. Yet Washington maintained that immigrants generally were less advanced in education “than the majority of the colored people in the Southern States.”22 Despite Washington’s rhetoric, the historians Lawrence W. Levine, David J. Hellwig, and Arnold Shankman conclude that his anti- immigration tone was less dubious in its intent. Levine believes that anti-immigration rhetoric was a way for American Blacks to bolster their national identity, at the same time they could more safely convey contempt for Whiteness. Hellwig and Shankman both believe that, in order to appease Whites, Washington pandered to White nativism.23 When one considers that Washington actually stood at an intersection of interests—his own interests, the interests of capital, and 96 New Challenges and Opportunities the interests of Black labor—his anti-immigration position, although prejudicial, made sense. His rapport with Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt placed him in a prime position to affect policy. His connection to captains of industry, such as the steel magnate Andrew Carn- egie, and his position as the founder and head of an industrial school allowed him to supply capitalists with industrially trained workers, while he helped satisfy the employment needs of Black America. For Washington, the immigrant was not only a labor competitor but a potential wrench in the works of the Tuskegee machine. The competition brought by immigrants not only threatened to displace Black workers but might also have weakened his leadership as a broker of Black labor. Washington also abhorred the idea of Black emigration from the South. He believed that Black Americans needed to profit from the land on which they were born, and he discouraged White Southerners from hiring immigrants over Black citizens. In 1895 he stood before a crowd in Atlanta and said:

To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South . . . I say . . . “Cast down your bucket where you are.” Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested . . . among these people who have, without strikes and labour wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, buil[t] your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South.24

Richard T. Greener’s Solution to Immigration In contrast to Washington, some other leaders of mixed ancestry favored emigration from the South as a way to overcome competition from foreign labor, racial violence, and social exclusion.25 Rich- ard T. Greener, a mixed-race intellectual, educator, politician, attorney, and U.S. foreign diplomat prominent during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, fully supported Black emigration from the South. New Challenges and Opportunities 97 Greener’s position sheds light on the role both immigration and rising imperialistic aims played in affecting the migration of Black people from the South. In an essay published by the Journal of Social Science in 1879, Greener argued that oppression was universal. He suggested that the same problems that existed in the U.S. appeared in Ireland, England, Scotland, and India. He firmly believed that the universality of class oppression made the role of leadership essential to reform. He wrote, “As a rule, capital takes advantage of the needs of labor.” Moreover “any change . . . occurs . . . only . . . after a fierce outbreak of pent-up passion . . . or because some bold champion of the people rises to denounce oppression and demand redress.” In terms of “black citizens” of the U.S., Greener believed that after the Civil War the condition of tenant farmers had deteriorated “worse than at any period since slavery.” As such, Greener was a strong advocate of emigration from the South to either Africa or the American West since, in his estimation, “the North [was] not wholly innocent.” He did acknowledge that the North provided more access for Blacks to civic life than did the South, but commented that the North’s cool temper toward Black Americans would unsatisfactorily affect the race: “The Northern people do not love us so well as you did, and hence the intermixture of races is not so pro- miscuous there as here. This we shall try to endure . . . with patience and Christian resignation.” Greener’s inference that race mixing signified racial equality or progress revealed a mind-set not uncommon among mixed-race, Black-identified leaders.26 Overall, Greener characterized the South in quite pessimistic terms. Lack of Black landownership, unfair rental agreements, inflationary prices, overproduction of cotton, loss of Black political representation, and an underfunded Black education system dominated his description of the Southern condition. Furthermore, Greener hoped that emigration would move Black people away from agricultural production: “The exclusive devotion of the negro to the culture of cotton and rice is demoralizing to him.” Like Washington, he saw that political agitation was better suited as a secondary aim for racial uplift. Greener believed that emigration to Kansas, for example, would “remove the 98 New Challenges and Opportunities negro from the incessant whirl of politics, in which, like all dark races, he is governed more by feeling than selfish interest.” In 1879 he predicted that Black political representation was “gone for a generation at least.” If Blacks were to get interested in politics again, he argued, they should do so in their own country: “Let it come when the children of the present black colonists go back to the mother land, improved in all that makes good citizens by a sojourn in the West.”27 In an essay published by the North American Review in 1884 Greener defended his proposal to slow political development. He insisted that a focus on representation instead of education and property ownership was actually responsible for the decline of Black political agency. “Wealth, superior intelligence, and a more vigorous demonstration of the absurdity of race-prejudice” was the right way to uplift Black Americans. Greener talked in terms of “assertion and concession,” yet throughout the essay he distinguished the Black masses from the educated, wealthier top tier. He also projected that the Black race would thrive in the U.S. because of its “indisposition to be carried and cared for.” Greener described the assistance of philanthropists and politicians who aided in the cause of racial uplift as almost parasitical rather than helpful to or indicative of Black progress. He wrote, “It is not [the Black man’s] fault that he cannot rid himself of the professed philanthropist and professed politician. They will insist, despite the negro’s protest, upon praying, thinking, preaching, voting and caring for him.”28 It is unclear if Greener’s suspicion fell mainly on White patrons, Black leaders, or both. Greener’s position in some ways highlighted the “silent power” of Black labor.29 Most White planters were against the Black exodus because they feared that finding replacements from a foreign labor pool would be too costly.30 Greener’s position was starkly opposed to Douglass’s anti-emigration stance.31 Douglass didn’t want to leave the race problem unresolved in the South. On September 12, 1879, he gave a speech on the matter to the American Social Science Association, as did Greener. The New York Times and the Baltimore Sun covered the event. Douglass exclaimed, “Our people in the South have a monopoly of the labor market.” Black laborers could effectively threaten, “‘Give New Challenges and Opportunities 99 us fair wages or your fields will go untilled.’” In other parts of the country, Douglass warned, “they will have no such advantage. They will be confronted by Irishmen, Germans, and Chinese, who can do all kinds of labor.”32 Aside from wanting to maintain dominance in the Southern labor market, Douglass opposed Black emigration from the South because he feared it would remove the government’s obligation to protect its citizens, either Black or White.33 To Greener, Douglass’s opposition to emigration was rooted in imperialistic aims. He chastised Douglass for insisting that if Black Ameri- cans should migrate to the “West, [they should go] as a civilizer, or not go at all.” Greener saw Black emigration in terms of the many colonial migrations that had occurred throughout history. He compared Black emigrants to the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Dutch, and the English who successfully “penetrate[ed] far away from the latitudes in which they were born.” He observed that as the “western land” was “being rapidly filled up by Swedes, Norwegians, Mennonites, Icelanders and Poles, why should not the negro participate?” He didn’t understand why those various ethnic groups, represented and funded by their respective “associations,” jumped at the chance to move west, while Black advocates for the same move were denounced.34 By the end of the nineteenth century several different forces con- verged that would affect Black migration, mobility, and leadership alike. New immigrants pushed into the South. Blacks either fled or were pushed out of the South on account of Jim Crow and increased racial violence. Some Black leaders used anti-immigration rhetoric and pro-Americanization talk to support racial uplift. Others pleaded for a major exodus from the South in order to start anew. While leaders contemplated whether Blacks should go or stay in the South, some focused their sights abroad.

Colonial Endeavors of Tuskegee Administrators According to Harlan, Washington “so thoroughly subscribed to the ‘white man’s burden’ of leadership and authority that, in seeming forgetfulness that he was black, he actually took up the burden himself.” Washington’s commitment to the White Man’s Burden was 100 New Challenges and Opportunities never clearer than when he lent his full support to a colonial agenda in Africa. In 1900, at the request of a private German organization, Kolonial-Wirtschaftiches Komitte kwk( ), three Tuskegee graduates went to German-held Togo in Africa ostensibly to help “train Afri- cans in cotton culture.” In order to maximize colonial profits the kwk wanted to bring to Togo instruments of modern technology, like the steam-powered cotton gin and cotton press. These innova- tions, they believed, would help jump-start an efficient cotton industry in Togo. The kwk looked to Washington’s Tuskegee Institute for advice on colonial and agricultural management in “Morocco and East Africa” as well.35 Esteemed faculty members like George Washington Carver, under the auspices of Tuskegee, supervised the development of cotton industrial schools in many parts of Africa. In Togo, Tuskegee proved to have a major impact on cotton production. In short order, Togo went from having no cotton production to the manufacture of three thousand bales per year. This improvement was an impressive gain for kwk. Inspired by Togo’s cotton success, Germany looked to maximize profits by also cutting into the U.S. market for cotton gin manufacture and in 1908 started to manufacture its own gins and presses to send to its colonies.36 Washington was quite supportive of German colonial policies in Africa. While in Berlin in 1910 he complimented Germans’ “policies and plans” regarding “the natives of Africa.” He explained that Ger- mans “helped [the Africans] . . . be more useful to themselves and to the German people. Their manner of handling Negroes in Africa might be taken as a pattern for other nations.”37 This laudatory description of Germany’s impact on Africa was quite popular during the early twentieth century. Since then historians have displaced such characterizations of colonialism. Deforesting the continent, depleting its arable soil, depopulation, dismantling social organization, extract- ing natural resources, and the utter loss of life and freedom for an insurmountable number of people were some of the ultimate effects of European colonialism to Africa. What is not discussed is the service that mixed-race, Black-identified New Challenges and Opportunities 101 American leaders provided Europeans to colonize Africa, or the support they lent to the U.S. to colonize other parts of the world. For example, with a similar agenda to train Africans in modern industrial techniques, some Tuskegee students and graduates went to places like Nigeria, when it was under British rule, to the Belgian Congo, and to the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. In Sudan the British even toyed with the idea of developing an American Black colony from the U.S. to train the Sudanese in modern cotton manufacture.38 South African colonial officials also looked to Washington’s Tuske- gee model of Black education. Lord Grey of the British South African Company, which controlled Rhodesia, sought Washington’s expertise to help “raise, educate and civilize the black man” of Africa. The Brit- ish were prepared to pay Washington’s expenses to South Africa and support his position for up to nine months. Washington declined the offer, saying that he was more responsible to Black America and its own institutions, though he agreed to reconsider the offer at a different time. In fact when the New Union of South Africa emerged out of the Orange Free State and Transvaal, Washington did consult for colonial administrators. He explained, “[There is] no very great difference between the native problem there and the Negro problem in Amer- ica.” He offered his commonly known prescription—accommodation, economic and cultural subordination, and self-help—as a remedy for colonial management of racially diverse peoples. He also stressed that “they should be taught to love and revere that government better than any other institution.”39 It was also vital, according to Washington, to replace Africans’ tribal system of government. These recommendations were as stiff as any eugenically minded, White anthropologist of the early twentieth century could have offered. The ideas were in some instances more rigid than some of the methods employed by missionaries during the same time.40 Washington recommended that Africans be taught English and receive industrial education and that civil equality with Europeans might be left for the “educated classes of African men.”41 Washington was less supportive of King Leopold’s treatment of Africans in the Congo Free State. With news of massive killings and 102 New Challenges and Opportunities torture, including pervasive hand mutilation, Washington used his influence with President Theodore Roosevelt to try to quell the violence. He gave speeches to awaken interest in the Congo and joined the Congo Reform Association to combat the violence. It is unclear how much Washington, or the U.S., for that matter, influenced reform in Congo. It was not until the Belgian government took control of the Congo that the violence began to cease.42 Washington’s assistance to Africa was, at best, inconsistent. As Libe- ria stood at the brink of financial collapse at the dawn of the twentieth century, Washington again used his relationship with President Roosevelt and later with President Taft to try to turn Liberia into a semicolonized American protectorate ruled by Black American colonists (otherwise known as Americo-Liberians).43 Just as his country’s power and influence had expanded, Washington’s support for Amer- ican imperialism and the opportunity it provided for Black Amer- icans did as well. He wrote, “I think, with the experience we have gained in the Philippines, we could administer and self-develop Libe- ria in practical ways, with the aid of trained African mestizos from Puerto Rico and persons some Philippinos [sic] and send some fine full-blooded South Africans. . . . To do that, however, we would have to assume an administrative protectorate, in short a colonial control in all but the name.”44

Greener’s Vision of Black American Redemption by Way of Imperialism Washington was not alone in his support of African colonization. In fact he had a predecessor. In 1884, the same year that European diplomats made a plan to divide up Africa at the Berlin Conference, Greener wrote an essay for the North American Review titled “The Future of the Negro.” Douglass and many other leading Black-identified men also contributed to the journal. Greener believed that a “Negro-American civilization redeeming Africa” would result in “poetic justice.” He argued, “To civilize Africa is to exalt the Negro race.” He further believed that the aversion to “Negro-American” colonization had “passed away,” and he recommended that the United States, “through its Department New Challenges and Opportunities 103 of State, could aid in this, by appointing every diplomatic and consular officer on the African continent from among the large number of ambitious and able colored men.”45 Greener saw emigration from the U.S. South to Africa as a way to displace White Southern fears of Black domination and also as an economic strategy for Black American laborers and entrepreneurs. Even more distinctive was Greener’s evaluation of the mixed-race dimension of colonization. He divided the impact of colonization on those whom he called “pure blacks” and “mixed-bloods” and wrote that the “tendency at the South will be toward the predominance of pure blacks. This is already observable.” Greener explained, as did Douglass, how mixed-race persons would factor into the trajectory of Black progress. He argued that the number of mixed-race people who remained in the South would decrease, since “only isolated cases” would “seek to marry with white people” and that the desire of Black Southern- ers who remained to intermarry with Whites would continue only for those who were without “any real race pride.” For the remaining “mixed bloods,” Greener recommended that “they must be absorbed into the white society, where they actually belong.”46 Essentially, he argued that the South would become Blacker and mixed-race people would become Whites. This was a particularly odd position for Greener to take. According to this logic, his own lineage, and that of his wife, would categorize them as White, yet the evidence of his life suggests that he tried diligently to avoid even the rumor of passing for White. Moreover when the rumor that he was passing for White became viable it resulted in job losses and decreased social status for Greener. Greener continued, “But for caste prejudice, [mixed- race people] would long since have disappeared [into Whiteness].”47 The full extent of his racial identity is considered more thoroughly later in this chapter.

Imperialism and Racial Uplift Michele Mitchell in Righteous Propagation observed the link between American imperialism and opportunities for Black American leadership. She argued that “black men swept up in the rhetoric of empire 104 New Challenges and Opportunities overlooked how their own desires for domination had the potential to oppress other people of color.” Mitchell’s focus on the role Black leaders played in developing American empire was exactly right. She concluded that for Black leaders emigration movements, like those to Liberia, were essentially colonial ventures.48 Mitchell reinvigorated inquiry into the relationship between imperialism, Black masculinity, and upward mobility. Black Americans imbued with imperialistic ideals considered colonization a potential framework out of which they might secure upward mobility, while they would also subvert domestic racism. In an article written for the Christian Recorder John Edward Bruce, a Black American journalist also known as Bruce Grit, captured the imperialistic intentions of some of America’s Black leaders: “Africa offer[s] untold treasures to the adventurer who may go there. . . . It is our duty to carry to those benighted, darkened minds a light to guide them in the march of civilization.”49 In contrast, the working masses tended to favor emigration as a means of escape from growing Jim Crow restrictions and violence.50 Willard B. Gatewood in “Black Americans and the Quest for Empire” argued a position similar to Mitchell’s. By the end of the nineteenth century, he concluded, “Black Americans, like other citizens, manifested an extraordinary interest in the imperialistic ventures of the United States.” However, support for American expansionism, defined as an extension of American financial interests, never was consistent. Black attitudes toward imperialism, where the new territories and protectorates Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba, and the Philippines were consumed and transformed by force, cultural domination, and American immigration, waxed and waned according to the presence of conspicuous opportunity for Black Americans.51 The Black debate over imperialism made sense. On one hand, exploit- ing the newly acquired islands might provide a venue for social mobility not available for the mass of Black Americans in the U.S. On the other hand, the goal of imperialism was anathema to the civil equality and freedom Blacks so desired in America. For example, Senator Albert J. Beveridge argued fervently in favor of the annexation of the Philippines in racialist terms, while he supported Black migration to New Challenges and Opportunities 105 the islands. He believed that Americans, “English speaking and Teu- tonic peoples,” were destined “to become the master organizers of the world.”52 Standing before Congress in 1900, Senator Beveridge rationalized his support for annexation in economic terms: “Our largest trade henceforth must be with Asia. The Pacific is our ocean. More and more Europe will manufacture most of its needs, secure from its colonies the most it consumes. Where shall we turn for consumers of our surplus? Geography answers the question. China is our natural customer. She is nearer to us than to England, Germany, or Rus- sia, the commercial powers of the present and the future. They have moved nearer to China by securing permanent bases on her borders. The Philippines give us a base at the door of all the East.”53 The formation of new Black institutions reinforced the ideological divide over imperialism. Organizations like the National Negro Anti- Imperial, Anti-Expansion, and Anti-Trust League and the Black Man’s Burden Association emerged to officially oppose U.S. imperialism. By 1899 Black support for annexation, according to Gatewood, had shifted from “reluctant acceptance” to “belligerent opposition.” Yet the following year Black protest of American imperialism retreated into simple acquiescence to an American colonial order.54 Gatewood’s interpretation seems plausible in light of growing concern over immigrant labor competition, which might have trumped anti-imperialistic commitments. However, Gatewood’s contention that, from the beginning, Black Americans sympathized with Cubans, Filipinos, and Puerto Ricans is unsubstantiated. Although Black Americans supported Cuban and Filipino independence, they took pride in the service Black soldiers provided in the Spanish-American War.55 For example, the Los Ange- les Times on May 18, 1898, pointed out that “a delegation of prominent negroes” had urged Secretary of War Russell Alger to send ten regiments to Cuba. Among those in the delegation were former governor P. B. S. Pinchback, Col. James Lewis, and Capt. Judson W. Lyons. They argued that Black troops were “bred in the southern climate and most of them used to conditions similar to those . . . in Cuba.” Here we see the same mixed-race, Black-identified leaders who, as a result of the Spanish-American War, saw yet another opportunity for leadership for 106 New Challenges and Opportunities the mixed-race few, and possible labor positions for the Black masses. The delegation also called for the appointment of Capt. Thomas S. Kelly of Louisiana as colonel to one of the Black regiments.56 W. T. Anderson, a chaplain in the 10th Cavalry stationed in Man- zanillo, Cuba, wrote about the lucrative gains Black investment in Cuba could yield. In a letter to George A. Myers, an Ohio Republi- can delegate and entrepreneur, Anderson suggested, “Anyone [who] had sufficient capital to buy up land such as sugar, coffee, coconut, banana plantations . . . would be rich in a few years. Now is the time to buy these things or places.” Anderson told Myers that he enjoyed being in a “strange land” and that he had “made good friends among the Cubans and Spaniards.” He also commented on the potential for American colonization. He thought that the poverty ordinary Cubans endured would encourage their openness to U.S. governance. While on a day tour through Santiago, Anderson met an old woman who exemplified the patron-client relationship he envisioned between the U.S. and Cuba: “You could see upon her bare back that she had been beaten with many stripes; it was a pitiable sight.” Anderson gave the woman money, and in response she fell to her knees and kissed the ground beneath his feet while she sent “blessings.” Anderson’s description conveys both the sympathy and the condescension that the U.S., including its Black soldiers, felt toward Cubans. He seemed quite settled there. Upon receiving news that he might be ordered to go the Philippines, he commented, “I don’t want to go . . . but as a servant of Uncle Sam I must go when and where ordered.”57 Theophile T. Allain, profiled in chapter 2, supported a similar position. In an editorial published by the Chicago Inter-Ocean in 1899 concerning the use of Black troops in the Philippines, he wrote, “Let us make every white mother in the land our friend by offering our services.”58 According to some speakers for the race, Black support for Amer- ican imperialism would help showcase Black patriotism and, in the eyes of some of its Black leaders, might bridge the gap between Black and White. Some believed that defeating a common enemy as national patriots, rather than as members of a racial group, could more successfully bind the country while lifting Black Americans.59 Lena Mason, New Challenges and Opportunities 107 a poet and well-known evangelist of the early twentieth century, captured the pride some Black Americans felt as a result of their involvement in American imperialism. In 1902 her poem “The Negro in It” captured the national pride many Black Americans felt on account of their participation in U.S. military efforts at home and abroad:

In the last civil war, The white folks, they began it, But before it could close, The Negro had to be in it.

At the battle of San Juan Hill, The rough-riders they began it; But before victory could be won The Negro had to be in it.60

However, both Gatewood and Mitchell interpreted Black attitudes toward American imperialism not only in strict class terms but in racially monolithic terms as well. For example, Gatewood argued that “manifestations of anti-Negro sentiment both in military and civilian circles . . . quickened the black man’s interest in emigration schemes.”61 The question is, then, to whom was Gatewood referring: mixed-race elites, the Black masses, the Black elite, Black property owners, land- owners, unskilled laborers, intellectuals, or perhaps someone else? As indicated in chapter 2, the rate of Black landownership in any given location in the South weighed heavily on the decision to support or oppose a massive move out of the South to newly acquired U.S. territories. These distinctions made a difference. Mitchell did indeed address the lack of uniformity, which prevented a single Black position, writing, “At no time between 1890 and 1910 were all U.S. blacks of one mind about imperialism.”62 However, both Gatewood and Mitchell recognized class distinctions as the final arbiter of opinions toward imperialism. Thus a purely class-based interpretation would suggest that the masses supported emigration within the United States and opposed expansion to the newly acquired territories on account of class sympathy, while the upper classes tended to oppose emigration from the 108 New Challenges and Opportunities South (on account of their own landownership) and favored expansion for a chance to dominate Indigenous populations. However, I argue that the significant distinction lay not only in class position but in perceived racial composition. That is, mixed-race, Black-identified leaders supported neither expansion nor emigration as an escape from the American racial order, but rather looked to the new opportunities to rule over island inhabitants, while they positioned Black American laborers in a sort of intermediary tier. In a new Black American colony, mixed-race leaders would rule from the top, with Black Americans positioned just below them in order to manage the Indigenous people who would reside at the bottom.63 Among scholars who study mixed-race identity and social status there is a tendency to place mixed-race populations into a tertiary position between the Whites who ruled from above and the so-called pure Blacks who resided below, dominated by both. In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. case, imperialism could remove Whites from this equation and give mixed-race people a chance at social mobility. After the Spanish-American War mixed-race leaders like Josiah T. Settle voiced these very sentiments. Settle, another Black-identified Republican politician and the assistant attorney general of Tennes- see, gave the opening address for Adm. George Dewey’s visit to Ten- nessee, proudly proclaiming, “Through bravery . . . our flag has been planted in the Orient, and the inhabitants of the Philippine archipel- ago awakened from a semi-civilized lethargy. . . . These islands will . . . become a market for our fleecy staples. . . . They will become our store- house of the east.” Settle also spoke to the loyalty that Black Amer- icans exhibited: “We will treasure this hour as a bright . . . epoch in the history of our race. . . . We assure you that nowhere in this patriotic land of ours and among no element of our composite nationality, will you find a more loyal devotion to the flag, a broader, deeper or more genuine patriot, that among colored citizens.”64 The mixed-race dimension of Black leadership, which favored Amer- ican imperialism, is an important feature of the racial uplift movement because it reveals yet another strategy Black leaders employed to secure economic opportunities, while they hoped to secure positions New Challenges and Opportunities 109 of leadership. Those leaders who supported imperialistic ventures were mostly from the same pool of mixed-race politicians, university professors, and writers who led after Reconstruction.65 They favored emigration and American imperialism, not as escapees but as potential colonial administrators. Bolstered by the popular eugenic aesthetic of the early twentieth century, which associated Whiteness with civility and progress, they identified themselves and were recognized as Black America’s most natural leaders, both at home and in imperial adven- tures abroad.66

T. Thomas Fortune and the Philippine Proposal The New York Times in 1903 revealed another imperial strategy that might benefit Black Americans and those of mixed-race ancestry still more: “Negro labor with American capital . . . [would] make a success of our occupation of the islands.” Fortune found himself in the position of solving the “Negro Problem” in the U.S. while having to assess the feasibility of colonizing the Philippines and Hawai’i.67 While on a trip to analyze conditions in Luzon, Fortune explained how Black migration to the Philippines would help Black Americans specifically, and capital interests in general. He wrote:

The land is rich, producing the finest tobacco in the world. [O]ther valuable crops can be produced; but the natives have no knowledge of farming, and do not seem to care to work. . . . There is industrial prostration everywhere. . . . The Negro and Filipino get along splen- didly together, and I am convinced that if, under proper arrangement, 5,000,000 Negroes could be located in the island, taken out of the Southern States, where they are wronged and robbed, and where the white man claims that they are in the way. It would be good for them, good for the Filipinos, who badly need rejuvenation of blood, and good for the United States. . . . The Philippines [need] . . . a competent labor population, and naturally the Negro should be placed in position to supply it, as the Republic owes him a . . . chance to enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.68

President McKinley, along with mixed-race leaders, considered 110 New Challenges and Opportunities sending Black Americans en masse to its “new island possessions.” However, the utility of Black labor was still undecided. For example, Senator Joseph R. Burton of Kansas offered an alternative to Black labor. He proposed the “bonded importation of Chinese [laborers] into Hawaii for use on sugar plantations . . . [since in his view] the negro had too long a taste of independence, and [was] not as docile and abject as the coolie.” He argued that because Blacks were U.S. citizens they were likely to be less manageable than “the Chinese [who did] not possess the boon of citizenship, and [were] not likely to have it conferred on them.”69 Fortune expressed his reluctance to employ Chinese laborers in the Philippines primarily “because Amer- ican sentiment is against it and the Filipino people will have none of it.” He believed that the “American Negro [needed] a chance . . . if he want[ed] to go there.”70 As a spokesperson for Black American interests, Fortune’s tenure as special agent to the Philippines and envoy to Hawai’i (1902–3) exemplified how mixed-race leaders, in particular, saw imperialism from the vantage point of self-interest. Fortune was the mixed-race son of Reconstruction-era congressman Emanuel Fortune of Florida, the editor of the New York Age, an activist writer, and the founder of the Afro-American Business League. As special agent to the Philippines and envoy to Hawai’i he fully supported Black American emigration to the newly acquired territories. In his official capacity, he completed an ethnographic study to assess the feasibility of maintaining a Black-led colony. His description of a Black American medical doctor already living in the Philippines offers insight into the unique motive of some of these mixed-race leaders. Fortune’s observation of the doctor’s darker complexion reveals the distinction he made between himself and other darker-skinned Black Americans. He wrote, “Like all the Negroes we had so far met in our journey, he was coal black, and seemed to be perfectly at home. He was happy and making money and never expected to return to the United States.” Fortune also believed that Filipinos favored Blacks over Whites and that Filipinos would “never learn to love” the White man. He endorsed a scenario whereby Black emigrationists would serve as middlemen between the U.S. and New Challenges and Opportunities 111 the Filipinos, while mixed-race leaders administered over both Indige- nous Filipinos and Black American emigrants. Thus Black Americans in the Philippines would receive a “respite from their oppression” in the U.S., while they assisted “the natives in developing the resources of their county.”71 Fortune contended that “if the American flag remained in the Phil- ippines, ‘the Afro-American will have to be drafted to hold it up in civil and military establishments and in labor necessary to develop resources of the country and put it on a paying basis.’”72 This propo- sition was quite different from the usual anti-imperialistic portrayals of sympathetic Black soldiers who identified with “their darker brothers.”73 Indeed Black soldiers did not fail to notice the parallel between their oppression and that of the Filipinos, nor did they escape the sting of racist rhetoric spit from the mouths of old Confederates now serving in Admiral Dewey’s navy.74 Just as they had on domestic issues, Americans of African descent maintained diverse interests when it came to foreign ventures. In fact Black writers produced varied responses to Rudyard Kipling’s infamous poem on American imperialism, “The White Man’s Burden.” There were many different responses in the years immediately following the original poem’s publication in February 1899. H. T. Johnson, a Black clergyman and editor of the Christian Recorder, published his response to Kipling just two months after the original:

Pile on the Black Man’s Burden. ’Tis nearest at your door; Why heed long bleeding Cuba, or dark Hawaii’s shore? Hail ye your fearless armies, Which menace feeble folks Who fight with clubs and arrows and brook your rifle’s smoke.

Pile on the Black Man’s Burden His wail with laughter drown You’ve sealed the Red Man’s problem, 112 New Challenges and Opportunities

And will take up the Brown, In vain ye seek to end it, With bullets, blood or death Better by far defend it With honor’s holy breath.75

By the end of 1903 the Roosevelt administration had all but abandoned the idea of Black emigration, and Fortune’s proposal would be supplanted by the use of pensionados—Indigenous Filipinos who were educated in the U.S. and returned home to carry U.S. education, culture, and mores back to Indigenous Filipinos.76 However, a flow of Black educators who went to the Philippines to teach English did continue. The most prominent among them was Carter G. Woodson, the father of Black history, who taught English and health in the provinces of Nueva Ecija and Pangasinan from 1903 to 1906.77 In 1906 and 1907 the potential of Black emigration to the Philippines resurfaced temporarily, as a rebellion in Mindanao brought large numbers of U.S. troops back to the Philippines. A mixed-race, former Reconstruction- era congressman from Mississippi, John R. Lynch, then an army major, served a two-year tour in the Philippines, from 1906 to 1908. While he supported the American position in the Philippines, Lynch was against Black emigration because of his desire for Black Americans to achieve full citizenship rights within the United States.78

Who Will Lead Black America at Home and Abroad? Despite the vast differences of opinion that existed among Black- identified leaders at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, members of the leadership stratum often shared a heritage that included both White and Black ancestors from the recent past. One may argue that virtually all Americans of African descent are of mixed ancestry; however, these men bore little visual evidence of any Black heritage. Many of them could have passed for White, but instead they maintained their Black identity at a time when one might assume the former to be a safer choice. The question is, then, what does this tell us about the meaning of Whiteness New Challenges and Opportunities 113 and Blackness in U.S. history at the turn of the century? What does it reveal about the criteria for Black leadership at that time? The stories I tell in the remainder of this chapter suggest that, for some people of mixed ancestry, one’s racial identity was not necessarily predetermined in those years. Despite the formal existence of the one-drop rule, and despite the salience of that rule in the minds of Whites, these people had racial options. And these particular people chose to be Black and became leaders of Black America in the process. William Sanders Scarborough in 1882 said of Richard T. Greener, for example, “This is a gentleman we . . . commend to the consideration of the President. We take pride in such men as Greener, [Senator Blanche K.] Bruce, Douglass, [Congressman John Mercer] Langston, as representative men of the race.” Scarborough hoped that President Arthur would consider Greener for an official presidential appointment. In an effort to avoid placing “ignorant men at the helm of institutions of higher instruction,” Scarborough insisted that men like Greener, who were educated in Ivy League schools and who had political experience, should “steer” Black America. If “representative men” not of Greener’s caliber were chosen, Scarborough warned, “we are all wrecked.”79 I. Garland Penn, the editor of a late nineteenth-century compen- dium of life stories of distinguished African Americans, like many other editors who followed (e.g., William Simmons, D. W. Culp, and Hallie Q. Brown), recorded Black achievement in an effort to redefine the Black image as distinguished.80 Editors often chose to profile leaders who were of mixed-race parentage. That fact alone does not help us understand the criteria for Black leadership, but the ways these books described Black leaders’ mixed-race ancestry does. For example, Penn’s key subjects included Settle, Pinchback, Fortune, and Victoria Earle Matthews, who all shared a White physical appearance while they vehemently professed their Black identity. Simmons in Men of Mark went to great lengths to showcase a Black person’s White heritage while he pursued an agenda of Black racial uplift. In the works produced at the beginning of the twentieth century, editors made a point to include, in biographical descriptions of their contributors, 114 New Challenges and Opportunities evidence of White ancestry, yet each person described made a delib- erate, unambiguous commitment to a Black public identity that out- weighed evidence of his or her portion of White ancestry. The efforts made by both editors and contributors resulted in racial promotion, if not racial construction. That is, despite all evidence to the contrary, mixed-race, Black-identified leaders would be the voice and face of Black America. This would serve two functions: it would lift Black America as a whole, and it would promote the status of these mixed- race leaders within Black America. The aim to construct a productive Black image became a prominent theme in Black periodicals and biography. In Penn’s book, Settle, the mixed-race assistant attorney general of Shelby County, Tennes- see, asserted that the “Negro . . . demonstrated to the world that he does not represent a race of mere imitators, but a race, which under the same conditions, is capable of doing all the Anglo-Saxon race can accomplish.” Settle lauded the efforts of the Black press and argued that Black writers made the Negro “part of the body politic, and [gave] him a power for good and evil.” In the same book, Pinchback also spoke to the ways in which the press conveyed the Black image. He advised the Black press to show “leniency in criticizing the faults of the Afro- American, because their enemies never fail to criticize them.” In order to reinforce a cohesive Black identity, Matthews—a mixed-race progressive, clubwoman, novelist, and teacher—in the same book argued for the proliferation of Black literature.81 James T. Haley, editor of the Afro-American Encyclopedia, considered the role editors would play in shaping the image of Black citizens amid an influx of foreign immigrants. He opened the book with a lithograph of the Statue of Lib- erty clutching an “Afro-American encyclopedia.”82 Associating the symbolic icon of U.S. immigration with the literary efforts made to record Black achievement illustrated the impulse to convey an official Black American national narrative in response to the perceived pressure of foreign immigration. D. W. Culp, in his anthology of twentieth-century Black literature, also featured the opinions of Black artists, politicians, and intellectuals. His effort to stress the complexity and discontinuity of Black New Challenges and Opportunities 115 thought contrasted with Penn’s and Haley’s presentations. For example, in a biographical summary written about Fortune, Culp reinforces Fortune’s mixed-race heritage by showcasing the ancestry of Fortune’s “Mulatto” grandmother and “his grandfather, a Seminole Indian.” However, Culp’s biographical summary contrasts with the tone of Fortune’s editorial contribution, “What Should Be the Negro’s Attitude in Politics,” which de-emphasizes mixed-race identity by urging the maintenance of a unified Black “self-interest.”83 These books did, in fact, present eminent, Black-identified people of all hues. Yet the Black-identified individuals whose appearance looked the whitest were among the most committed to a strict monoracial Black identity, while they were elevated as Black America’s perfect leaders. During the same period, the White San Antonio Daily Light described Fortune as a mixed-race agitator, the mouthpiece for Black resistance, who “engaged in inciting the Negroes . . . to revolt.” The paper suggested that mixed-race leaders, when compared to “pure Blacks,” employed more radical methods for Black advocacy that constituted a “danger” to the country. For all intents and purposes the paper characterized Black Americans of unmixed ancestry as impotent and mixed-race members of Black America as disingenuous in their advocacy:

Mr. Fortune is advising his brethren to resort to the rifle and the dynamite bomb to preserve the liberties which he claims are threatened by the whites. He grew wildly enthusiastic at a meeting held in celebration of the birthday of John Brown, and apparently wished to give the impression [that Brown] ha[s] an able successor in T. Thomas Fortune. [Mr. Fortune represents the] evils of miscegenation. The pure blood Negro is never a serious element of disturbance save in a petty police sort of way. The saddle-colored man is always a menace. The . . . admixture of white blood makes him despise his own race to a certain extent, and yet desire power and authority among them. Because of his white blood he hates the whites.84

The San Antonio Daily Light published this article on June 13, 1900, which was two years before Fortune’s sojourn as special agent to the Philippines. Curiously, the article claimed that Fortune was a fervent 116 New Challenges and Opportunities supporter of “Agninaldo and other dark-skinned rebels against the authority of the United States.” As suggested earlier in this chapter, by 1902 Fortune was clearly in favor of securing in the Philippines a Black American colony that would rule over Filipinos. However, the article revealed the rancor toward mixed-race leaders, particularly because of their supposedly more radical positions: “He is never dangerous of himself, but because of his influence. He is never placing a bomb or leading a riot, but by word of mouth or through columns of some negro organ he excites the passions of his foolish, wisdom- lacking fellows. Fortune [does] not suffer in any manner.” The article was particularly pernicious in its accusation that Fortune led “from the rear,” only to lead “poor blacks . . . astray.” By contrast, Penn never mentioned Fortune’s mixed ancestry. He described Fortune as “an excellent specimen of what the Afro-American may do.”85 It should not be missed that Fortune in 1884 was first to coin the term “Afro-American.” His rhetorical creation served to unify the Black image irrespective of skin color. Given Fortune’s near-White appearance, it follows that if he were to position himself as a Black leader, it would behoove him to de-emphasize his White ancestry by constructing a term that would describe Americans of African descent at the same time it overlooked other ancestries. The term he chose did so quite effectively, especially when compared to other proposals floated at the end of the nineteenth century. The reader should recall from the previous chapter that William Ferris recommended the use of the term “Negrosaxon,” which did emphasize their White heritage.86 By the late nineteenth century, W. E. B. Du Bois also called for all African-descended Americans to emphasize their Black identity. In “The Conservation of Races,” he outlined a master plan for the civic development of a redefined group of African-descended people in the United States: Negro Americans. For Du Bois, Black-identified leaders, though they be largely of mixed-race heritage, would represent the interests of Black America during the Progressive Era, just as they had during Reconstruction. Chief among the core beliefs he outlined for a sustained Negro race was a vocal Negro identity. He recommended that African-descended people not pass as White, explaining, “Their New Challenges and Opportunities 117 destiny is not the absorption by white Americans. Their destiny is not a servile imitation of Anglo-Saxon culture, but a stalwart originality which shall unswervingly follow Negro ideals.”87 W. D. Weatherford, a White student of Southern race relations, Christian reformer, and educator, in 1912 also wrote about the necessity of Black consciousness and spoke of it in those terms directly.88 He argued that “race consciousness” and “race pride” must be a central principle in successful Black leadership. If Black Americans continued to measure their successes against those of White Americans there would be for them “no hope.” He suggested that Black Americans “find a larger life within [their] own race.” This was not an endorsement of segregation. Rather Weatherford urged Blacks to rise to the heights of Black potential rather than emulate Whites; only then, he argued, would they make progress. He insisted that improved race consciousness—that is, a firm Black identity—was “the badge” or the regalia of “self-sufficiency.”89

Josiah T. Settle Settle was among the multitude of Black leaders, nearly White in appearance, who maintained a distinct Black identity. Like William Scarborough, who in 1882 recognized Greener as the best choice for Black American leadership, Washington also characterized many of the mixed-race men he presented as the “prominent . . . leaders of my race.” In 1911 he listed Congressman Langston, Senator Bruce, Gov- ernor Pinchback, and Congressman Lynch as leaders “whose names were household words among the masses of the coloured people at that time.”90 Of Settle, Washington wrote that he was one among the many men who would spring up during Reconstruction, whose authority and achievement granted them lasting status and influence. Washing- ton explained that Settle as an attorney for thirty years had met “with no discrimination on account of his color either from judges, lawyers or juries. There are other communities, like New Orleans and Little Rock, where Negro lawyers are accorded the same fair treatment. . . . Almost [without] exception, Negro lawyers tell me they are treated fairly by white judges and white lawyers.”91 118 New Challenges and Opportunities Curiously, Washington’s account doesn’t mention Settle’s conspicuously White appearance. Is it possible that Settle’s White skin accounted for the fair treatment Washington described? That is to say, perhaps White skin provided privilege even if it adorned the body of a Black- identified man. The leadership and status he garnered as a result of his social identification as a Black man was enjoyed within Black Amer- ica. His Whiteness allowed him to practice his trade with impunity, while his Blackness provided him a public position of leadership.

Settle’s Family History Simmons, Pinchback’s biographer, also profiled Settle in Men of Mark. Like Pinchback, Josiah, whom his parents called “Joe,” was born while his parents, Josiah Settle, a White planter from Mississippi, and his slave Nancy, were en route from Rockingham County, North Caro- lina, to Mississippi. Joe, the couple’s first child, was born on September 30, 1850, in the Cumberland Mountains in East Tennessee.92 Simmons does not indicate Nancy’s racial heritage, nor does he describe her temperament or interests. Here again a woman’s identity is completely obscured. (Chapter 4 considers thoroughly how gender shaped mixed- race privilege differently for women than for men.) Simmons does, however, characterize the elder Josiah as unique in his devotion to “his children and their mother.”93 The biographer Green Polonius Hamilton in 1911 drew a similar picture of Josiah and Nancy’s relationship. Their union produced eight children, some of whom were born before the marriage and some afterward.94 After a few years in Mississippi, Josiah freed Nancy and their children.95 Since at that time Mississippi forbade “Free Negroes” to reside within the state, Josiah took his family to Hamilton, Ohio, in 1856. Interestingly, the Pinchbacks also relocated to Ohio after the elder Pinchback died in Mississippi. As for the Settles, they lived in Ohio as a family for two years—that is, until “Northern neighbors” castigated Settle for living with a woman while out of wedlock. In 1858 Settle married Nancy. Between 1858 and 1861 he spent summers with his family in Ohio, while he lived for the remainder of the year on his Mississippi plantation. At the outbreak of the Civil War, New Challenges and Opportunities 119 Settle, who remained loyal to the Union, left the South to live permanently in Ohio.96 Because of Ohio’s dearth of “colored schools,” Joe attended an all- White school in Hamilton. George A. Sewell and Margaret L. Dwight argue that young Joe had “to defend himself against the racism of white students and his white instructors,” but they offer no evidence to back up that claim.97 Given Settle’s physically White appearance, there is something troubling about this conclusion. It is either an indication of the power of social Blackness during the nineteenth century or the lasting impact of social Blackness on historical interpretation during the twentieth century. On the topic of Settle’s experience with racism, Washington wrote in The Story of the Negro that Settle told him directly “that he [met] with no discrimination on account of color.”98 Though Washington was referring to Settle’s adult life, the point is nonetheless germane. Washington displaced the notion that there existed some form of uniformity insofar as interracial relations were concerned. He chastised those who would “generalize . . . the ‘race question’ in the South.” He argued that “each one of the 1300 coun- ties in the Southern States is a law unto itself. . . . The negro may have a fair chance in one county, and have no chance at all in [another].”99 Despite Sewell and Dwight’s contention that Josiah struggled with racial prejudice in Ohio’s schools, he thrived there and entered Ober- lin College in 1868. At the end of his freshman year, however, he left Ohio to transfer to Howard University in Washington dc. His father’s death in 1869 may have hastened the move. During his senior year at Howard, Settle worked in the educational division of the Freedmen’s Bureau, taught preparatory courses at Howard, and was elected “reading clerk” for the House of Delegates in the District of Columbia.100 Immediately after graduation from Howard in 1872, Settle entered Howard’s Law School under the supervision of Hon. John Mercer Langston, who was at the time head of the law department.101 At this stage in his career, Settle held several public positions.102 While in dc he became active in public service, clerking for the Board of Public Works and becoming a trustee of the District schools. His assistance to Ulysses S. Grant’s rigorous 1872 presidential campaign stirred his 120 New Challenges and Opportunities appetite for Republican politics. He graduated from Howard Law School in 1875 and was admitted during the same year to the Wash- ington Bar Association. Settle then set his sights on the South, but just before he left dc he married Theresa T. Vogelsang of Maryland. The couple moved to Mississippi, where he formed a law practice, Settle and Matthews, with Hon. D. T. G. Matthews.103 While in Mississippi, he also followed entrepreneurial pursuits, including as the director of the all-Black, moderately lucrative Solvent Savings Bank.104

Settle’s Tenure in Republican Politics Like other leaders before him, Settle attempted to unify Black Amer- ica and looked to the Republican Party to accomplish this goal. His political leadership experience started like that of many other mixed race-men during Reconstruction. In 1913 John W. Kyle, a Confederate sympathizer, who no doubt was influenced by the Dunning school of Reconstruction, wrote a history of Reconstruction in Panola County, Mississippi. In his discussion he included the efforts of Loyalty Leagues and, more specific to this chapter, the role Black men played in establishing and maintaining the Leagues. Typically the leaders of Loyalty Leagues just after the war were White carpetbaggers who organized in an effort to maintain loyalty to the Union. Kyle was no fan of the Leagues. He charged them with causing “strained relationships” between Whites and Blacks in the aftermath of the war and with arousing hostility and bitterness toward Southern Whites. He even blamed the Leagues for the development of the Ku Klux Klan, which, to his thinking, was created in direct response to the rise of the Leagues. Regardless of Kyle’s redeemer-like assessment of the Leagues, he did speak to the role “leading Negroes” played in their establishment. He insisted that “white aliens” within the Leagues required the help of Black leaders, “chief among [them] Josiah T. Settle.” His discussion of “leading” Black men “in the Republican ranks” is useful in that it reveals another aspect of the Black agenda, which was to “solidify and unite the Negro . . . under the standard of Republicanism.”105 Between 1875 and 1882 Settle served as a Republican delegate and New Challenges and Opportunities 121 remained active in Republican politics. In 1883, in response to the emergence of a fusion ticket created by the Democratic and Repub- lican parties, Settle ran for Congress and won as an independent. This was a drastic change for Settle, since just one year earlier his loyalty to the Republican Party was paramount. Out of concern that he might split the Republican ticket in 1882, he refused to run against the Republican Gen. James R. Chambers for a seat in the state legislature. This was not unlike Pinchback’s refusal to run against Kellogg for governor of Louisiana. Like Pinchback, Settle chose the health of the Republican Party over his own chances for a win.106 However, by 1883 Settle opposed the fusion ticket so completely he was willing to change parties temporarily.107 Like many other Reconstruction-era politicians who shifted their focus from political representation to private pursuits or government appointments, Settle by 1885 looked to get out of politics. He moved once again, but this time to Memphis. Simmons suggests that, because Settle was highly regarded by his colleagues, he quickly rose within the ranks of Memphis politics. In the same year, Democratic gover- nor William B. Bate appointed Settle assistant attorney general of the Criminal Court of Shelby County, Memphis.108 Much of this study is about individuals, but it is important to keep in mind that there is a limit to what individual actions can reveal about a particular historical moment or event. Yet these people were popular; they were among a selective few whose public image magnified their influence. Their notoriety allowed them to influence Black America in more significant ways than any single individual could. They were covered by the press, included in encyclopedias and anthologies, and recognized for their public service. According to the historian Linda McMurry, they amounted to a “national network” of aristocrats about whom the Black press frequently wrote.109 Leadership by its very definition assumes a limited number of individuals. Individual leaders are often part of a subgroup—a class, if you will—that rises from the ranks to move a larger group toward some objective. The fact remains that Black leaders, regardless of how White they may have appeared, chose to be politically active as Black 122 New Challenges and Opportunities rather than as White. That decision kept their names in the public eye and in the historical record for future generations to assess. More- over they knew each other. In the personal papers of various leaders held in library collections throughout the U.S. are an abundance of letters to and from each other. All of the key figures discussed in The Allure of Blackness—Pinchback, Langston, George A. Myers, Harlan, Robert R. Church, Josephine Wilson Bruce, Booker T. Washington, Olivia Davidson Washington, Matthews, Fortune, Greener, Settle, E. Azalia Hackley, and several others—knew each other. Some of them formed mentor relationships with those who were younger or less experienced. For example, Ida B. Wells, the teacher, orator, antilynching crusader, and close associate of Mary Church Ter- rell, considered Settle a father figure.110 While she lived with the Set- tles in 1886 and 1887, she kept track of her experiences in a personal diary.111 According to the statements she made in her diary, it seems that Wells, as a young woman of twenty-five years, enjoyed her introduction into Memphis’s “black aristocracy,” to which she was no stranger. As the daughter of a “privileged son” whose father was White, she was “decidedly Mulatto,” though she is typically not referred to racially on account of her darker-brown skin tone. As a young professional, Wells benefited from the patron-recipient relationship she developed with the Settles.112 She also wrote about the course of her friendship with Theresa Settle, whom she initially revered. As much as she enjoyed the numerous social gatherings she attended with the Settles, Wells not only had difficulty in paying for the type of attire one would need to fit into Memphis high society, but she also resisted the cultural restrictions placed on Victorian women. She wrestled with the popular ideals laid out for women of the nineteenth century. The boundaries of Republican virtue, chastity, piety, and domesticity offended her sensibilities. She wanted to be more than someone’s aristocratic wife.113 By the end of her stay in Tennessee, she had become irritated with The- resa’s domestic expectations and “parsimony,” and she complained of being charged too much for her room and board.114 (The impact of “the cult of true womanhood” on mixed-race, Black-identified women leaders at the turn of the century is discussed fully in chapter 4.) New Challenges and Opportunities 123 The relationship between Wells and Josiah Settle cooled as well. After observing the Settles’ way of life, which included their membership in an exclusive Episcopal church maintained “under white supervision long after the lower class, more nationalist churches had declared their religious independence,” Wells began to admire him less.115 By 1892 Settle and Wells’s relationship had completely deteriorated. The ending of their friendship was made public by Wells in an article she wrote as editor of the Memphis Free Speech, where she criticized Settle’s limited assistance to her antilynching campaign.116 In a letter to Albion Tourgee, a Republican activist and jurist and the attorney for the plaintiff in Plessy v. Ferguson, Wells indicated her bitter assessment of Settle’s worth as an attorney when she referred to him as “a sycophant . . . [who did] not half defend . . . [his] clients.”117

Richard Theodore Greener Greener was another accomplished mixed-race, Reconstruction-era leader who did not drift into obscurity as a result of shrinking opportunities for Black Republicans. For much of his career he enjoyed fame, influence, and respect as a professor, an attorney, and a U.S. foreign diplomat. He garnered public interest from both Black and White Americans as the first Black Harvard graduate, in 1870.118 Often as the keynote speaker, Greener addressed conferences pertaining to Black migration, imperialism, education, and civil rights.119 As with the other mixed-race persons discussed in this study, so with Greener: his Black identity provided many opportunities for leadership. However, by the end of his life, Greener did eventually drift out of public view. He did not lose prominence because of shrinking positions available to Black men, however; to the contrary, it was his associations with Whites, his residences within exclusively White neighborhoods, his service to White employers, and his family’s well-known reputation for passing as White that cost him jobs, status, and respect within Black organizations and politics in the later part of his life.120 Beginning in 1907, shamed by the unyielding rumors that he passed as White, Greener lived the end of his life in veritable exile from Black politics.121 Greener’s physical appearance was racially ambiguous. During his 124 New Challenges and Opportunities senior year at Harvard, census takers in 1870 listed him as a White man.122 He could have passed as White indefinitely but vehemently denied ever doing so.123 The fact that he accomplished so much as a Black rather than a White man speaks to the power of social Black- ness, not as a curse but as a badge of entry into activist leadership. Had Greener passed for White we probably would know little about him, for it is likely that the events of his life would be lost among the cadre of other White, middle-class men who graduated from Harvard and went into public service. Greener was born free in Philadelphia on January 30, 1844, to Mary Ann La Brune and Richard Wesley Greener. According to Heidi Ardiz- zone, the biographer of Greener’s daughter Belle da Costa Greene, Greener’s maternal lineage included Spanish descent, “by way of Puerto Rico.” It was his mother’s father who was thought to be Puerto Rican.124 Greener’s father actively participated in the abolitionist movement with William Lloyd Garrison, and he worked for the Liberator during the 1830s.125 George W. Williams describes both Greener’s father and his grandfather as “men of unusual intelligence, social energy and public spirit.”126 During the 1840s the elder Greener worked as a seaman, which frequently necessitated long trips away from his family. Shortly after the family relocated to Boston in 1853 the father disappeared, never to return. Ardizzone concludes that Richard Wesley Greener abandoned the family after leaving Boston to join the gold rush in Cal- ifornia.127 Werner Sollors, Caldwell Titcomb, and Thomas A. Under- wood describe the father’s disappearance differently; they claim that after the Greener family did not hear from the father for some time, they believed he had taken ill and presumed him dead.128 Williams, a nineteenth-century American biographer of African descent, suggests that the younger Richard enjoyed a higher standard of living and that he was “accustomed to hear[ing] English correctly spoke.” This says little about Greener’s racial consciousness since diction and grammar cannot be measured along racial lines; however, it was important enough for Williams to point out his early academic environment in an effort to showcase Black achievement.129 Regardless of Williams’s assessment of Greener’s somewhat privileged New Challenges and Opportunities 125 early life, the Greeners began to struggle when they became a father- less family. The fact that Mary could not find a local school in Bos- ton that would accept Black children compounded the isolation and hardships they faced. For the sake of her son, she relocated to Cam- bridge to find an “unproscriptive school.” Her decision temporarily paid off as the Broadway Grammar School accepted young Richard. However, financial strain caused him to leave school at the age of fourteen in order to support his mother financially.130 This is not unlike Pinchback’s effort, at the age of twelve, to support his mother in Ohio. As a teenager, Greener took on various jobs, which included working in a shoe store and as a wood engraver. Hit by his employer while working for the wood engraving company D. J. Smith and Co., Greener stormed out of the establishment and never returned. As a porter at the Pavillion Hotel, he met an esteemed guest, Judge Thomas Rus- sell, who offered Greener access to his private library and thus began Greener’s love of classical rhetoric in the Greco-Roman tradition.131 Greener also at this time met Maria S. Cook, who would teach him to speak French. The young man developed a diverse portfolio as soon as possible. While working as a porter for Messrs. Palmer and Batch- elder, Greener opened a fruit business and entered into the newspaper trade.132 Also as a teenager, Greener joined the Boston-based abolitionist movement. It was at these and other political meetings that he would meet influential activists like Senator Charles Sumner. Sumner and Greener retained their relationship for much of their lives.133 By the outbreak of the Civil War, Greener yearned for a formal education, so in 1861 he left Boston and entered Oberlin College in Ohio, where he remained for two years.134 In 1863 he returned to Boston and entered Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts, where he was the only Black student.135 In 1865 Harvard College accepted Greener, at the age of twenty-one, as its first African American student. The course work proved quite challenging, which resulted in his having to repeat his freshman year.136 Despite his difficult start at Harvard, Greener was driven to get a good education and to “make all the reputation he could.”137 While 126 New Challenges and Opportunities at Harvard, he studied a multitude of topics, ranging from classical literature and philology to Latin. His final thesis was titled “The Ten- ure of Land in Ireland.”138 The research he conducted on the condition of Irish peasants had a lasting impact on him; for much of his life he would champion the cause of Irish independence and poverty.139 Many years later, in 1885, as secretary of the Irish Parliamentary Fund, Greener raised $150,000 to help elect Parnell and Gladstone.140 In the following year the New York Times reported Greener and Fortune marching in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.141 Greener graduated from Harvard in 1870, after which he worked as principal of the Male Department of the Institute for the Colored Youth of Philadelphia.142 In 1872 he moved to Washington dc to join the staff of the New National Era. In order to supplement his income from writing, Greener landed the position of principal of Prepara- tory School. He was, however, fired for demanding a more rigorous curriculum, which caused trouble with his colleagues. Soon after he left Preparatory he secured a position as principal of Sumner High School, where he stayed until 1873.143 When the New National Era expanded into the New National Era and Citizen, Greener became its associate editor.144 In 1873 the University of South Carolina offered him a position as professor of metaphysics and logic. While there he also assisted in the Latin and Greek departments, taught international and constitutional law, and worked as one of the school’s librarians. While maintaining his teaching load, Greener pursued his law degree. On December 20, 1876, he was admitted to the South Carolina Bar. He remained at the University of South Carolina until 1877, when the Democratic legislature, led by Wade Hampton, closed the school because of its integra- tionist policy.145 Later that same year the school reopened for White students only and without Greener. Thoroughly prepared to relocate, Greener had already passed the bar exam for the District of Columbia in April 1877, and he began teaching at Howard Law School. Shortly thereafter he went into practice with John H. Cook, a prominent dc attorney.146 In 1877 Howard Law School elected Greener its dean. After serving in that capacity until 1880, he resigned in order to work New Challenges and Opportunities 127 for the first U.S. Treasury comptroller, William Lawrence. It is likely that rumors of Howard Law School’s impending closure influenced his decision. Despite all these changes, Greener remained quite indus- trious. During those years he also opened an insurance company, the National Benefit and Relief Association.147 In 1882 he started to practice law privately with A. K. Brown.148 Greener’s rise was dramatic. Nineteenth-century observers like Sim- mons considered him the next great Black leader. In terms of prominence and influence, Simmons positioned him between Douglass and Langston. However, rumors that he and his family passed as White quickly tarnished Greener’s reputation as a Black leader. Whether or not Greener actually passed as White is unclear; the record is filled with innuendo and inference. What is absolutely clear from the evidence is that his wife and daughter did pass as White. That reality, coupled with his choice of White associates, was enough to crush his legacy as a Black leader. Greener married Genevieve Ida Fleet on September 24, 1874. She was from a very prominent family in Washington.149 In fact her family was considered part of Gatewood’s free “aristocrats of color.” Her father, James H. Fleet, was a physician in Washington who provided his daughter with an even higher status than Greener could boast.150 Upon their marriage Greener relocated his new wife to South Caro- lina. Genevieve struggled with the transition, as she had come from the nation’s capital, where segregation had yet to be codified and where Black-identified people had not yet lost suffrage.151 In comparison to Washington, race relations between Whites and Blacks in South Carolina were severely strained. When the South Car- olina legislature closed the University of South Carolina because of its integrated student body and its employ of a Black professor, the Greeners were ready to move back to dc, where Greener would work as a professor.152 By 1880 the Greeners had three children: Mary Louise, Belle Mar- ion, and Russell. While the family enjoyed a privileged status among the upper-class Washington Black elite, it is curious that the U.S. Cen- sus in 1880 recorded the family as White. Perhaps the census taker 128 New Challenges and Opportunities mistook their identity based upon their physical appearance. Wash- ington dc at the time had no legal definition of race, nor had the one-drop rule of African descent become universal.153 Greener was, in fact, enjoying his reputation as a Black leader. In 1882 Scarborough wrote an article for the Christian Recorder urging the Arthur administration to appoint Greener to some federal position that might serve the needs of Black America. Scarborough stressed, “We can not afford to have such a man as Professor Greener ignored.” As “part of the American body politic we present his name to the consideration of the administration.” Scarborough warned, “We must have such men steer our little bark or else we are all wrecked.” The Recorder emphasized Greener’s education, long-standing Republican political loyalty, which was sustained during the trying years after Reconstruction, and his legal acumen as extraordinary credentials for leadership. The article concluded, “We take pride in such men as Greener, Bruce, Douglass, and Langston, as representative men of the race” (emphasis added). One should note that each of these men was known to be of mixed race.154 However, the alternating recognition of the Greener family as White instead of Black would cast a shadow on Greener’s professional career for years to come. Although Greener ardently denied ever passing as White, Ardizzone contends that, at some point, he chose to pass as White. Her conclusion is based on a quote taken from an editorial printed in the New York Times, as well as a reference she found in his papers, which suggests that he passed periodically while taking public transportation.155 Ardizzone believes that Greener’s editorial comments in the Times emphasized his White heritage and highlighted his effort to attribute all his personal advantages to his relationships with White people. In the 1881 article Greener was reported to say, “All that I am I owe to privilege and advantages enjoyed from free association with the better class of white people.” Ardizzone left out much of her excerpt of the article, and she changed the context of Greener’s statement entirely. Foremost, his comments to the New York Times were in response to critics who believed that, in his frequent criticism of Whites, he was trying to divide the races. In the same New Challenges and Opportunities 129 article he explained that he was not a divider of the races; rather he worked to bring the races together. He also recognized the assistance he received from White patrons, tutors, employers, and others. How- ever, he insisted, “My work is to look at politics from the Negro’s point of view, and to answer his defamers.”156 The remainder of the article presents Greener’s very public commitment to his Black identity and to Black racial uplift and offers a very different view than Ardizzone’s skewed interpretation. By the mid-1880s Genevieve and Richard’s marriage had begun to fall apart. His frequent travels to civil rights conventions and his work as an attorney and a professor may have strained the relationship. Or perhaps he was frustrated over emerging Jim Crow legislation. Regard- less of his motives, Greener left Washington and his family in 1885 to accept a position in New York. The Grant Memorial Association, charged with erecting a monument to the recently deceased president and wanting to include a Black American on the committee, hired Greener as secretary. He served on the board, along with J. P. Mor- gan as its treasurer, until 1892, when he resigned over a pay dispute.157 Upon his arrival in New York, Greener lived on Long Island, in a predominantly White neighborhood. He lived a bachelor life with the exception of a few trips he took back to Washington. Then, in 1887, when he and his wife lost a three-month-old son, Genevieve and her remaining children relocated to New York to live with Greener. The family moved to Manhattan, and soon, according to Ardizzone, “rumors . . . spread that the Greeners were now avoiding former friends—at least those who were not white.”158 It seems that the choices the Green- ers were making enflamed the rumors. Not only did he live in an all- White community on Long Island, but when the family moved to the city they did not live in the predominantly Black Tenderloin district on the West Side, between 24th and 40 streets, nor did they live north of Central Park in Harlem. They instead lived on the Upper West Side, at 29 West 90th Street, just across the street from Central Park; it was, at the time, an all-White neighborhood.159 New York Black society became suspicious of the Greeners. The belief that they were passing for White was so complete that when Francis and Charlotte 130 New Challenges and Opportunities Grimké (members of the Greeners’ church while they lived in Wash- ington) came to New York, they decided not to visit with their once close friends on account of what they presumed was the Greeners’ new racial identity.160 Greener denied that either he or his family passed as White; however, his employment didn’t help to squash the story. He worked for the Municipal Service Examination Board to supplement his salary from the Grant Association. According to Greener, his work in “civil service . . . forbade [him from having] active participation in politics.”161 Thus from 1885 until 1892 Greener had virtually no role in Black politics—specifically, civil rights activism. This fact reinforced the rumors. As editor of the New York Age, Fortune addressed Greener’s absence from New York Black affairs in an editorial, writing, “[Greener] has not mingled much with his race, but has kept close watch of race affairs.” Fortune gave Greener the benefit of the doubt, and argued that he was “one of the best . . . scholars the race . . . produced.”162 Less forgiving, the editor of the Washington Bee, Calvin Chase, accused Greener, as well as Judge Robert Terrell (Harvard’s second Black graduate), of being the “typical example of fair-skinned, well- educated blacks” who would essentially “abandon their race to associate with whites.”163 Local gossip purported that Terrell and Greener were denied access to the Harvard Club in Washington on account of their race, which inspired Chase’s editorial. The two were indeed denied access on account of race, but by the time the rumor got back to New York, Greener and Terrell were accused of trying to gain entry into the club as Whites. There is little likelihood that either man tried such an act, particularly because they were publicly known as the first and second Black Harvard graduates.164 Greener’s own writings also aroused innuendo and suspicion about his race loyalty. In 1886 he suggested that mixed-race individuals were in a better position to lead Black Americans than were their “blacker brethren.” According to Greener, mixed-race people, those whose heritage included “superior stock on both sides,” were in a better position to lobby on behalf of Black Americans mainly because, when compared to “pure blacks,” they fared better in matters of economic and New Challenges and Opportunities 131 social importance. Greener hoped that his “blacker brethren” would meet with increased opportunities, but in the meantime he believed that “mixed-bloods” should employ their advantages by appealing to Whites and by inspiring Blacks.165 When Greener resigned from the Grant Association in 1892, he was separated from his wife and children, who by then were thought to be passing as White. In order to earn a living, he sought a return to Republican politics, civil rights activism, or a federal appointment in Washington. His efforts met with little success. His reputation became tarnished as rumors of his family passing as White undercut his influence in Black politics. In the hope of securing some work for Greener, an associate of his, Ellen Collins, wrote to Booker T. Wash- ington on his behalf:

I want to ask a favor. . . . A colored (nearly white) gentleman, a Har- vard graduate and lawyer, made the . . . mistake of seeking a position in Washington. He has lost that and others since, and have a wife and family, and is hard pressed for a living. He has all the ability and education that ought to secure competence, but political influence being against him, has suffered severely. Is your staff full, or do you need a man, and have you means to pay him? This man has also been a teacher. [H]e looks white, his wife also. Your school is not to be in any sense a shelter for unfortunates or incapable people. . . . He does not know that I ask this of you.166

Washington passed on the recommendation. In 1894, in response to an inquiry from Washington dc, Thomas Junius Calloway, the manager of the Colored Teachers’ Agency, which endeavored to find work for Black teachers, described the reputation of the Greener family. Calloway wrote, “In regard to Prof. Greener’s family I have ascertained that Mrs. Greener . . . never passed [as White] while here [in Washington]. It is understood, however, that she associates only with whites in New York. They are poor and in very straightened circumstances.”167 Greener decided to relocate once again, and in 1896 the Republican Western Colored Bureau in Chicago hired him. While in Chicago he 132 New Challenges and Opportunities campaigned vigorously for President McKinley. He wanted to stay in Chicago, but his reputation for passing followed him, so he solicited his friends for recommendations. In a letter sent from the Colored American Bureau of the National Republican Committee for the West- ern States, Greener asked George A. Myers, an Ohio entrepreneur and politician, to write letters of recommendation for him for positions in Washington. Unfortunately no opportunities surfaced. After the McKinley election Greener returned to New York, only to be blocked from yet another position on account of the rumor of race passing.168 Alexander Crummell, a Black activist, missionary, and Cambridge University graduate, also suspected Greener’s allegiance to Blackness. In a letter to writer John E. Bruce, Crummell wrote, “[Greener] has been for years a white man in New York and turned his back upon all his colored acquaintances.”169 Greener’s loyalty came into question because his name was submitted to the American Negro Acad- emy for membership. Crummell, as the cofounder of the Academy, which was designed to publish Black scholarship, was in a position to block Greener’s participation in the organization. Crummell’s opposition was so strong that the selection committee withdrew Greener’s name from consideration.170 Greener was quite frustrated over the constant assertion that he passed as White. In a letter to George A. Myers, Greener defended his reputation: “My record as a race man is so strong that I challenge any man, to produce an instance, one, where during my residence in New York I failed to act, or use my influence for the race.” In the letter Greener further defended his commitment to the well-being of Black America when he reminded Myers that “every Negro on the Grant general Com, was put there by me alone.” He declared that those who insisted that he didn’t attend enough Black meetings or that he didn’t do enough for the Republican Party during this period were unaware of the fact that he served between the years 1885 and 1890 but that the “civil service board . . . forbade an active participation in politics.” Greener’s defensive posture turned to utter dismissal of his critics. He continued, “I had and still have the advantage of most so-called Negro leaders, I have prepared my self for public life, on the broadest New Challenges and Opportunities 133 lines.” He found solace in his belief that he still had social, political, and financial connections with people who knew he was “competent” and who were convinced of his great “loyalty.” Thus, he concluded, “I have no fear of the malevolent parties of my own race.”171 New York no longer held promise for Greener. By 1897 he and Genevieve were separated for good, and her reputation for passing as White resulted in his presumed guilt by White association. Greener had moved away from his family on Central Park West to live in downtown Manhattan at 27 Chambers Street. He sought an “endorsement . . . for a political position” from Booker T. Washington. Hoping to secure a letter of recommendation, he wrote to Washington after being “shown a letter of Washington’s endorse[ment of] Mr. [Theoph- ile] Allain, of La.”: “I concluded it would not be unreasonable for me to make my first draft on our friendship since 1884.”172 There is no evidence to suggest that Washington ever wrote the recommendation. Without help from either Washington or Myers, Greener’s efforts in the McKinley campaign finally paid off. In 1898 he went to Wash- ington and lobbied the McKinley administration for a foreign diplomatic position, and the president offered him a post in Bombay. Some accounts suggest that he declined the offer because of widespread bubonic plague there; other accounts maintain he actually went and then returned because of the heat.173 Whatever the case, the McKinley administration reassigned Greener to Vladivostok, the chief Russian port in Eastern Siberia. Although appointed as consul, he was instead referred to as “Commercial Agent Greener” since, at that time, Rus- sia did not recognize the position of U.S. consul.174 Greener extended U.S. interests in East Asia while he lived in Siberia from 1898 to 1905. One observer in 1902 noted Greener’s work in Vladivostok and wrote, “The city is a very important commercial point for the United States, and it is fortunate that our country is represented by such a loyal, capable, enthusiastic, and obliging official as Mr. Greener.”175 134 New Challenges and Opportunities

Greener’s Public Record While Abroad Gaining an appointment to Vladivostok, Russia’s most important Pacific port, was for Greener an escape from his troubled reputation in the U.S.; it also served as a vehicle for patriotic performance.176 As I indicated earlier, Black-identified, mixed-race leaders, in the hope that they might subvert civic restrictions on account of race, used the notion of patriotism, or decorated nationalism, to help reinforce their American identity. Greener gave a speech at a dinner at the Har- vard Club in New York in 1880 that emphasized his esteem for Black military service. He referenced Crispus Attucks, who “died a patriot martyr. . . . I thanked God, with patriotic pleasure, that the first con- tingent of Negro troops from the North should have been led to death and fame.”177 Military service was a major source of pride for many Black Amer- icans, who believed that they were exercising their duty as citizens while they proved their loyalty to American interests. Being in the Foreign Service functioned in much the same way for Greener. He advanced U.S. economic interests abroad from 1898 until 1906 and was decorated and honored for his service.178 The events of Greener’s early personal life, in some ways, readied him for his international endeavors. His ability to speak and write in French, Latin, and Greek surely intensified his desire to go abroad. Perhaps leaving the United States for a period would also serve to sweep aside some of the racial boundaries he had bumped into— not only as a Black-identified man but as a mixed-race man. Doug- lass described a similar experience when he first traveled to Europe. Of his journey to Ireland, Douglass wrote about the change in racial temperament he observed: “Behold the change! Eleven days and a half gone. Instead of a democratic government, I am under a monarchi- cal government. Instead of the bright, blue sky of America, I am covered with the soft, grey fog of the Emerald Isle. I breathe, and lo! the chattel becomes a man.”179 Greener had never proposed strict criteria for which traits should characterize Blackness. In fact during the late nineteenth century, New Challenges and Opportunities 135 his ideas about Blackness frequently changed. For example, for much of the century, a Christian identity was a primary requirement for a role in Black leadership. During the 1880s, however, Greener was not convinced that a Christian identity was the most advantageous for Black America. In an address before a literary society in Washington dc he suggested that “Mohammedanism [Islam] was better for the indigenous races of Africa than Christianity.” The historian George W. Williams in 1883 criticized Greener for such a position and suggested that Greener could not “afford to . . . exalt Mohammedanism above the cross of our dear Redeemer, and expect to have leadership in the Negro race in America.”180 The key point here is that Greener exhibited flexibility in his criteria for identity and Black leadership. In his appointment to the U.S. Foreign Service, the reader may observe yet another vehicle mixed-race leaders used to maintain positions of power and status, even if they had to go abroad. Mixed-race, Black-identified diplomats such as Greener were, at times, carriers of the U.S. colonial project. For example, Douglass was part of a commission to Santo Domingo when then-General Grant expressed interest in annexing it to the U.S.181 As discussed earlier, For- tune went to the Philippines to assess the feasibility of locating a Black colony there. President Arthur selected historian Williams as minister and consul general to Haiti. W. T. Anderson, a military officer stationed in Cuba, wrote letters to Black American leaders recommending immediate private investment in Cuba.182 Booker T. Washington supported the colonization of Liberia.183 Mixed-race U.S. consuls also held positions in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela; Corinto, Nicaragua; Bahia, Brazil; and Paraguay. Greener’s post in Vladivostok, near the Man- churian markets and the eastern terminus of the Tran-Siberian Rail- way, helped to extend U.S. interests in East Asia. To varying degrees, they all gained personal status and notoriety by such positions, while they advanced American interests (both militarily and economically) beyond the United States.184 After reading some of his consular reports, newspaper accounts of his tenure as a commercial agent, and his personal papers, I found that Greener did benefit from leaving the U.S. racial order, which was 136 New Challenges and Opportunities increasingly drawing a sharp line between who was Black and who was White. But he also played a crucial role in securing U.S. commercial interests in China through surplus-capital investment and the encouragement of U.S. land grabs and trade.185 This double effect uncovers the influence Orientalism had on the quest for Black social mobility. Williams picks up on Greener’s prejudice toward the Chinese specifically and chastises him for his “support [of] the detestable ideas and execrable philosophy . . . which seeks to shut out the Chinaman from free America. The negro must stand by the weak in a fight like this, remembering the pit from which he was dug.”186 Racist assumptions about Asian peoples had long shaped U.S. policy, both domestic and foreign. More traditional interpretations of U.S. interests in Asia emphasize the commercial rather than racial aspects of U.S. intervention.187 However, recent historians have shown that Orientalism played a major role in shaping U.S. intentions of empire.188 Gordon H. Chang, in his study of the U.S.-Korean War in 1871, concludes that it was the “bloodiest use of military forces overseas by the United States in the fifty years between . . . 1848 . . . and . . . 1898.” Chang explains that American images of Koreans were shaped by ideas about race and the “oriental character.” More than just an economic endeavor, “American assumptions about races and civilization” spurred the invasion of Korea.189 It should not be a surprise that anti-Asian sentiments influenced U.S. foreign policy. However, Greener, as a mixed-race, Black-identified American, carried those same sorts of racist assumptions to Vladivostok. In a daily report to the U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, he recorded his observations and linked race to ability. He explained that in the Siberian stone quarries “Russian laborers [are] compelled to remain idle. . . . Chinese laborers are preferred . . . on account of their steady habits.”190 One White contemporary observer, Nicholas Senn, came to similar conclusions. In 1902 Senn wrote that within Vladivostok lived 30,000 people, of whom “15,000 [were] Chinese and Koreans.” Senn observed that along with being hired to do all the “cooking and baking” in the city’s public establishments, such as hotels and hospitals, of which there were several, “all hard manual labor in [the city was] performed New Challenges and Opportunities 137 by Chinese and Koreans.” Senn, however, specified that the Koreans lived apart from the Chinese in separate parts of the city. He described them as “exceedingly filthy” and claimed that “the men . . . act[ed] as substitutes for mules.”191 This is not unlike the racist language that White Americans used to describe Black Americans. In light of Green- er’s official recognition from China and Japan during his tenure as a U.S. diplomat, perhaps he saw Asians in paternalistic terms, much the same way White Americans saw former Black slaves in the South. Despite Greener’s tendency for condescension toward Asians, he did remain focused on U.S. economic pursuits while in Vladivostok. On the subject of his enthusiasm for American expansion, Allison Blakely wrote, “Greener . . . saw that Siberia was a region of tremendous economic potential,” and Greener saw himself as the “principal agent for the expansion of American business into Siberia, [and would] take full advantage of this chance to advance American interests and of course, his own.”192 While in Siberia, Greener kept track of the most diverse sectors of business. He recorded prolific observations in his monthly and daily consular reports: he described the progress of Sibe- rian asbestos development and reported that the fur trade was “in critical condition” because of “inflated” prices and that the Manchurian flour industry was so vibrant that it was “controlling the market.” Of major importance to him were the different routes tea traders from China would take to deliver their product to Russia. He also assessed the total revenue of the Russian liquor trade and concluded that the sale of liquor in Siberia would soon become a “government monopoly.” He kept track of who was buying and selling land in Siberia and Manchuria, counted exactly the number of savings banks located in Siberia, and reported on the level of coal consumption and the rate of trade between various countries.193 Greener kept track of social and cultural aspects of Russia and what they might offer Americans. On February 15, 1903, he wrote to the Medico-Legal Society of New York that Russian charitable organizations were providing medical doctors who could perform eye surgeries, free of charge. On October 8, 1902, in a letter to the same organization, he described a small lake near his post that was known to have “curative properties.”194 138 New Challenges and Opportunities Aside from promoting U.S. commercial interests, Greener was deeply involved in local political events. In 1902, while representing Amer- ican interests during the Boxer Rebellion, he received the “Order of Double Dragon for services rendered to Chinese merchants and for aid in succoring the Shansi famine sufferers.”195 The U.S. government also entrusted Greener with protecting Japanese interests during the Russo-Japanese War, which essentially amounted to a face-off between the two empires over Manchuria.196 Because there was not an English consul in Siberia Greener found himself representing Britain’s interests as well as American.197 During the war Greener stayed in Vladivo- stok for as long as he could. It was not until May 18, 1905, that he cabled the State Department that “all foreign commercial agents there had been asked to leave [because] Vladivostok [was] expected to become a centre of the seat of war.”198

Greener’s Personal Life While Abroad Along with the record of Greener’s public service to the United States in Vladivostok he left some traces of his private life. While in Russia he had a common-law Japanese wife named Mishiyo Kawashima, with whom he had three children. According to Michael Robert Mounter, Greener left Mishiyo and their children behind when he returned to the United States. Mishiyo migrated to China with her children, who eventually immigrated to the United States.199 Greener’s choice to couple with a Japanese woman does not tell us much about his racial consciousness. His identity at that time is still open to conjecture. In 1899, while in Vladivostok, he translated Alexander Pushkin’s poem “My Portrait”; perhaps he identified with Pushkin’s near-White appearance and Black ancestry.200 What is clear is that Greener withstood personal trials while at his post. He was accused of drunkenness and criticized for an illicit affair with an unnamed Chinese woman. Per- haps the charge of an affair was really a criticism of his common-law marriage. Whatever the cause, Greener was dismissed from the For- eign Service in 1905. When Greener returned to Washington from Siberia he briefly tried to reenter the Black fold, but instead found himself caught in the New Challenges and Opportunities 139 middle between Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist agenda and W. E. B. Du Bois’s demand for immediate and full civil rights.201 Hungry for an opportunity, he reached out to Washington for a position. Greener was desperate; he was in the middle of an investigation of the charges levied against him in Siberia. According to Harlan, Greener was “down on his luck.” Emmett J. Scott, Washington’s right- hand man, scrawled in pen on a letter from Greener to Washington, “Here is a good chance to get a good friend into the inner portals of the Niagara meeting.”202 At this point, Washington was quite paranoid about Du Bois’s Niagara movement and asked Greener to spy for him at the upcoming event at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Washington believed that the purpose “of the Niagara Movement was to . . . defeat and oppose everything I do.” He wanted Greener “to get inside everything.” In the hope that Washington would broker a deal with Presi- dent Roosevelt to secure him another appointment, Greener agreed to be a spy, and also attended the National Negro Business League meeting in Atlanta for the same purpose. As it turned out, Washing- ton did not secure for Greener any appointments, but as a result of Washington’s help Greener was “exonerated of [all] charges” pending from the Vladivostok investigation.203 However, Greener’s duplicitous role at the Niagara Convention became public.204 Shamed by unyielding rumors that he passed as White and the public awareness of his duplicity at Niagara, Greener moved to Chicago in 1907 to board with his three cousins (who were sometimes listed in the U.S. Census as White). He lived in veritable exile from Black politics, Black education, Black print media, and Black business ventures. Although living in near-anonymity in Chicago, he did finally gain access to the Harvard Club there.205 Greener died on May 2, 1922, in Chicago without much public notice. He was seventy-eight.206

General Attitudes about the Scope of Black Leadership Toward the end of the nineteenth century Black intellectuals, authors, politicians, officeholders, judges, educators, and reformers concerned themselves with the future trajectory of Black leadership. Three key figures stood out as the most recognizable Black voices: Booker T. 140 New Challenges and Opportunities Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Frederick Douglass. These mixed- race men enjoyed substantial power and influence in American public life, especially among African Americans. Each had a different approach to racial uplift. Washington’s assimilationist position earned him a reputation as a negotiator for White capital interests. Du Bois’s plan to have his “talented tenth” agitate for immediate civil rights resulted in his reputation as an elitist intellectual who was preoccu- pied with the opportunities that might be missed for his own educated cadre of peers. Douglass, a longtime representative of the race, straddled the two positions. The criticism launched against each of the three reveals anxiety among African Americans over the future scope and complexion of Black leadership. William Ferris, an author and Black intellectual, voiced his concern over the future of Black leadership. In The African Abroad he uncovered the rancor surrounding Washington’s leadership. Writing in 1913, Ferris sharply criticized Washington’s habit of encouraging Black laborers to remain in both agricultural and industrial sectors. He considered Washington an influential leader who was the “best known American” in the world next to President Roosevelt. However, Ferris resented Washington’s role as the “education and political boss and dictator of the Negro race,” and he opposed Washington’s accommodationist position, declaring that when Blacks supported Washing- ton they didn’t realize they were supporting their “own social, civil, and political damnation.” Particularly because of his position as an advisor to President Roosevelt, Washington’s control was so wide and thorough that it became “necessary to endorse Mr. Washington in order to get and hold a government job, secure and retain positions in Southern high schools and colleges, or solicit money from North- ern philanthropists for colored schools or get a hearing in white news papers and magazines or white publishing houses that handle colored books.” Ferris believed Du Bois’s agitation for full civil rights and access to higher education was the more effective route for Black uplift. He argued, “We ought to regard men who represent the brains and scholarship . . . as the real leaders.”207 This debate over the proper direction Black America should take New Challenges and Opportunities 141 occurred amid the rise of eugenics, a product of the scientific racial- ism of the previous century, which rendered a false understanding of heredity. Many social activists of all races believed mixed-race people to be the tangible result of natural selection—a move forward in biological progress, an improvement of the Black race.208 In another strain of eugenic thinking, race mixing resulted in a dysgenic stock. Just as eugenics found its way into U.S. law and policy around citizenship, civic development, civil rights, and public health, it found its way into the debate over who should lead Black America. In 1884, in an essay written for the North American Review, Douglass presented race mixing as a positive measure of progress for African Americans. In the opening of his essay he indicated that “as a permanent element of the population . . . the negro . . . is now seven millions.” At the close of his essay, Douglass concluded that the Negro would fail to become more “distinct”: “Ignorant, degraded, and repul- sive as he was during his two hundred years of slavery, he was suffi- ciently attractive to make possible an intermediate race of a million, more or less.”209 Douglass’s use of the term “intermediate” is unclear. It might suggest a middle class in terms of education, wealth, and political access, but he may have intended to speak of a middle group of racially mixed people. His use of the same term in a speech given two years later implies a middle race, in the biological rather than the class sense. In the 1886 speech, “The Future of the Colored Race,” Douglass declared, “As to the future of the negro . . . he will not be expatriated nor annihilated, nor will he forever remain a separate and distinct race from the people around him. . . . He will be absorbed, assimi- lated, and will only appear finally, as the Phoenicians now appear on the shores of the Shannon, in the features of a blended race. . . . Now, between these two extremes, an intermediate race has arisen, which is neither white nor black, neither Caucasian nor Ethiopian, and this intermediate race is constantly increasing.”210 Douglass couched his description of who would represent Black America in the popular eugenic interpretations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He essentially argued that the Negro 142 New Challenges and Opportunities would not only cease to exist as a distinct race but would disappear from the language of race altogether:

They will not pervert and sin against the verity of language as they now do by calling a man of mixed blood, a negro; they will tell the truth. . . . Men of mixed blood in this country apply the name ‘negro’ to themselves, not because it is a correct ethnological description, but to seem especially devoted to the black side of their parentage. Hence in some cases they are more noisily opposed to the conclusion to which I have come, than either the white or the honestly black race. The opposition to amalgamation . . . on the part of colored people, is for most part the merest affectation, and, will never form an impassable barrier to the union of the two varieties.211

The era of eugenics was also the Progressive Era, the era of reform. It found scores of Black women leaders, not just the men in this chapter. Many of them were also of mixed parentage. As reformers, educators, social workers, writers, settlement house managers, spiritual advisors, intellectuals, and clubwomen they served their country and the African American people, and they also conveyed the ideology of race hierarchy both at home and abroad. Women like Josephine Wil- son Bruce, E. Azalia Hackley, Victoria Earle Matthews, and Adella Hunt Logan traveled a path that was distinct in function but similar in trajectory to that taken by their mixed-race, Black-identified male contemporaries. It is to their story that we turn in chapter 4. Chapter Four

“Lifting as We Climb”

The Other Side of Uplift

This chapter explores Black women’s leadership in the U.S. during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is focused, specifically, on their participation in the women’s club movement, their advocacy of industrial education, their efforts to shape national and racial identity, and their construction of the cult of true “colored womanhood.”1 By evaluating the lives and work of Victoria Earle Matthews, writer, founder of White Rose Settlement House, and clubwoman; Josephine Beall Willson Bruce, writer, clubwoman, plantation owner, and the wife of Senator Blanche Kelso Bruce; E. Azalia Hackley, concert performer, music teacher, writer, and lecturer; and Adella Hunt Logan, teacher, author, and clubwoman, this chapter reveals the uplift potential (in matters social and economic) of a strong, vocal Black identity among women of conspicuous mixed-race ancestry.

“Lifting as We Climb” The lyrics to the National Association of Colored Women (nacw) official anthem, “Lifting as We Climb,” exemplify a key theme prevalent throughout this study: the racial uplift potential club work had for those who offered service, as well for those who benefited from service.2 The nacw was founded in 1896 by the joining of two prominent women’s clubs, the Federation of Afro-American Women Clubs 144 “Lifting as We Climb” and the Colored Women’s League of Washington dc. It offered many American women of African descent a venue to help other Black people, while they gained or maintained their own status in so doing. Many Black women leaders who participated in the club movement were in fact of mixed ancestry. In an effort to inspire young attendees at a conference held in Oak- land, California, in 1926, Marie (Mollie) Fines of Wichita, Kansas, wrote the nacw anthem. The organization’s motto, “Lifting as We Climb,” inspired the title of the song. The following verses emphasize how important it was to the club movement to cultivate leadership. The words also reflect the nationalistic tone espoused by Black women leaders at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.

Lifting as we climb, Is the National Command; To educate, and graduate all over the land: Hold your banner high, is the National cry, For the motto is lifting as we climb. . . . Train the Junior girls all over the world, For as we step out they will step in, For the things we do will go to prove Lifting as we climb, we’ll win.3

The Black women’s club movement reached its apex during the Progressive Era (1880s–1910s). The efforts of Black clubwomen are typically characterized by historians as benevolent, as they promoted the goal of racial advancement for Black Americans. They are in fact celebrated, for the assistance they provided to the poor. This assistance is commonly characterized as the work of uplift, specifically as it related to combating poverty, increasing education and work opportunities, and providing refuge from mounting racial violence to people of Afri- can descent.4 At other times, historians have considered the combined efforts of Black clubwomen as a peripheral movement that was small in size and ineffective when compared to other reform associations of the time.5 The former assessment, although true, is incomplete; “Lifting as We Climb” 145 the latter is simply ill-conceived. Black clubwomen during the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth offered to Black women in need temporary lodging and more permanent housing, as well as travel assistance to women who migrated from the South to the North. They also provided chaperones for young women in search of work, who arrived daily at docks in Louisiana, Virginia, and New York. Some clubs offered classes to improve a variety of skills, including reading, elocution, writing, sewing, cooking, child rearing, and industrial trades. These skills or trades were taught by Black women in service to other free Black women. However, there is another side of the Black women’s club movement. Many practitioners of racial uplift espoused the same sort of rhetoric of superiority toward poor Black women migrating from Southern states as their White middle-class counterparts did. This was particularly true when compared to the White progressives who worked to make Indigenous Americans and immigrants coming from Asia, Mex- ico, and Southern and Eastern Europe more American.6 Central to this study is the fact that many of the clubwomen who emerged as Black leaders were of mixed-race heritage. They often were ambiguous, if not near-White in their racial appearance and benefited socially and economically from their decision to emphasize their Afri- can over their European ancestry. For these American women of mixed- race ancestry a vocal Black identity housed in active leadership raised their status more than had they chosen to pass as White. Charles Har- ris Wesley, a biographer of the nacw, recognized the uplift potential to the leaders of the uplift or club movement. He explained the symbiotic aspects of service: “During the last decades of the nineteenth century . . . [women of African descent] caught a vision of higher status for themselves and were leading others toward that goal.”7

Before the nacw The nacw had both formal and informal predecessors long before its founding in 1896. Women in the U.S., irrespective of race, had organized their efforts around several issues during the nineteenth century. The cause of abolition was a significant point around which women in 146 “Lifting as We Climb” the U.S. began to structure their organizational efforts toward more permanent goals. During the 1830s and 1840s, many women in the U.S., to the exclusion of recent women immigrants, began to redefine their life’s duty.8 Certain virtues and ideas, like republicanism, Chris- tianity, temperance, thrift, submissiveness, and purity, were believed to be best transmitted by wives and mothers to their husbands and children. The home, for most middle-class women, became the base from which this process would flow. Republican mothers employed their “sphere of influence” and sought power with this newly defined authority.9 According to scholars of U.S. gender history, the “cult of domesticity” was not only a nineteenth-century understanding of true womanhood; it symbolized a means by which women, by way of performance, could achieve class mobility. As the nineteenth century progressed, the work of charity increasingly allowed women to extend their influence outside of the home. Women were seen to be the more appropriate of the sexes to attend to issues such as morality, education, health care, child rearing, patriotism, and religious education. Robyn Muncy argues that White men found it easier to concede this sector of public life because women’s organizational efforts remained within a limited purview.10 This measure of womanhood remained popular in the U.S. throughout much of the Victorian Era.11 Women’s efforts to gain influence outside the home spurred a parallel movement among women who were impassioned to achieve civil rights nationally.12 In 1848 the first women’s conference in the U.S. took place in Seneca Falls, New York, where Sojourner Truth and Freder- ick Douglass joined the efforts of many middle-class White women, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, to secure civil equality for all women. During the nineteenth century, higher education also became more available to some women. From the late 1870s through the early 1890s, colleges like Radcliffe at Harvard and Barnard at Columbia began to open doors to White women that were previously firmly shut. Ober- lin College, Spelman College, Howard University, Fisk University, and Shaw University not only admitted women but opened their doors to “Lifting as We Climb” 147 Black women as well. The struggle to achieve women’s suffrage was a key issue around which women organized their collective power.13

Changes in the Historiography of Women in the U.S. A brief exploration of the various directions that the history of women in the U.S. has taken over the past few decades will reveal the complexity of interpretations regarding the role of women in U.S. history. Such an overview will also situate the Black women’s club movement in the larger context of gender history. Some historians of nineteenth-century women in the U.S. have focused on what they call “separate spheres” of existence: one that was private, family-centered, and female, and one that was public, economically productive, and male. Barbara Welter first articulated the notion of separate spheres, and she showed how this arrangement would later develop into the cult of domesticity, whereby women could achieve moral authority by this definition of womanhood. Nancy Cott in 1977 also looked at the distinct spheres men and women were purported to occupy, and suggested that domestic ideology was a claim for moral authority but was also an oppositional campaign against capitalism. That is, it provided a way for women to organize and to become authoritative critics of society under capitalism. Paula Baker, in “The Domestication of American Politics,” showed how women’s political efforts were so powerful that they successfully shaped Amer- ican policy on the issue of reform.14 As a challenge to the pedagogical dominance of a domestic sphere framework in women’s history, Joan Jensen called attention to women as laborers, and thereby complicated this vision of separate, exclusive female and male spheres.15 Christine Stansell in City of Women also displaced the primacy of domestic authority in women’s history by sug- gesting that, for many nineteenth-century women in New York City, the cult of domesticity was not necessarily appealing. Since women participated as laborers, consumers, mothers, and wives in New York, Stansell concluded that work and home were always intertwined. Elsa Barkley Brown in “Womanist Consciousness” distinguished the experiences of White and Black women on the basis that Black women 148 “Lifting as We Climb” did not elevate their efforts to achieve gender equality over their loyalty to Black men. According to Brown, this was in direct contrast to what White middle-class women were advocating at the end of the nineteenth century. Linda Gordon approached women’s history in a comparative fashion, particularly as it related to reform. She compared the differences between White and Black women’s ideas about reform and welfare and found that they differed in three key areas: how entitlement should be designated (universal or means-tested), the role of mothers’ employment, and the commitment to protect women from sexual exploitation. Gordon found that White women’s organizations tended to support the supervision of entitlement by means-testing. They had a less supportive position toward mothers’ work outside the home and didn’t feel as compelled to include the protection for women from sexual exploitation as did Black women’s organizations. Black women, in contrast, saw entitlement as universal, were more in favor of mothers’ employment, and felt strongly about protecting women from rape. Gordon also discovered that White women tended to associate welfare activism as an urban phenomenon. In contrast, in order to include more women, Black women focused their attention on South- ern rural areas. A crucial difference Gordon observed between the two groups was that White women expected the government to play a role in social reform, whereas Black women developed private institutions in an attempt “to provide what the White state would not.”16 Since this study focuses mainly on the upper class, it is important to recognize the limits intrinsic to studying the history of the upper classes exclusively. Unfortunately, many of the archives available for Black women’s history during the late nineteenth century are dedicated mainly to the upper strata of Black society. Some scholars of nineteenth-century Black women’s history, such as Dorothy Sterling, Charles Nero, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Shirley Wilson Logan, and Francis Smith Foster, have suggested that because of the dearth of archives on Black women of all classes, especially those from the working class, our vision of Black women’s history is obscured, and we are left with a historical record that is mainly about the upper class. “Lifting as We Climb” 149 Thus Black ideas about nineteenth-century reform, oratory, and literature are to a large extent shaped by the visions of a limited section of Black life.17 However, what the available archives do help us see is how women of the upper class, most of whom were conspicuously of mixed race, reinforced the lower status of working Black women in racial terms. That is, many women leaders helped keep darker-skinned Black American women in a lower-class status than themselves, even as they engaged in activities of uplift. By increasing their own status, these mixed-race women replicated racist and class-based oppression.

When and When Not to Collaborate Interracially Interracial efforts of women were not uncommon during the nineteenth century. During the antebellum period there were occasions when women, regardless of race, worked together for a common cause. They cooperated in clandestine, informal efforts to assist escaped slaves. Both Black and White women joined their efforts to educate enslaved children. After the Civil War, they helped new freedmen and freed- women to survive, while they helped reconstruct the South through their efforts at the Freedmen’s Bureau. And there were times when racially distinct activities emerged in response to a particular event or problem.18 For nineteenth-century women, gender was not always the primary source of identification. For many Black women, the notion that race often trumped gender led to the development of racially exclusive activism. In fact the nacw purportedly got its start because the National Federation of Afro-American Women’s Clubs president, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, was refused the right to speak at the all-White Fed- eration of Women Clubs on account of her race (she had both Black and White ancestors).19 Paula Giddings eloquently articulates the goal that many Black women maintained while they struggled for gender equality. She argues that Black women’s primary aim, aside from gender equality, was to “define and proclaim the virtues of Black womanhood and to serve the needs of their families and their community.” Giddings makes the point that a Black woman had constantly to weigh the impact that her gender-oriented activism had on her striving for 150 “Lifting as We Climb” racial equality. This was quite evident in the struggle for women’s suffrage. When Black men gained the vote in 1872, some Black women were enraged by their exclusion, but the Fifteenth Amendment outraged White women suffragists still more, and caused some White women to break away from the cause of racial uplift altogether.20 Black women also participated in activities that were necessitated by specific events within Black America. For example, Black-identified women joined the “Exoduster” movement during the 1870s in order to help refugees of racial violence search for free land and a new beginning in Kansas.21 Some women, notably E. Azalia Hackley (along with her husband, Edwin Hackley), opened fraternal societies. The Hackleys founded the Imperial Order of Libyans to combat “racial prejudice [and] equalization of citizenship” and to promote “the cultivation of patriotism.”22 During this time many settlement houses were opened by Black women for Black women. Janie Porter Barrett founded the Locust Street Settlement in Hampton, Virginia, in 1890; Victoria Earle Matthews opened the White Rose Mission House in 1897; Black nurses in New York, led by Ida Morgan, opened the Still- man Settlement House in 1906; and in 1908 Verina Morton-Jones and Mary White Ovington opened the Lincoln Settlement House.23

Considering Women, Race, and Power Laura F. Edwards suggests that despite the many turns that gender history has taken, when it comes to looking at distinctions based on race and ethnicity, “all women may have faced barriers . . . but they were far greater for [non-White] women, and in particular, African- American women.”24 While to make this argument is to tell an accurate story, it is an incomplete one. Moreover, to interpret the position and treatment of White women, regardless of class, as always superior to Black women, regardless of class, reinforces the idea of White superiority. It is as if historians are afraid that if we recognize the inferior social status some White women held in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we might unwittingly reduce or displace the real horrors of racial oppression that have plagued many women of color throughout U.S. history. “Lifting as We Climb” 151 A Black identity did not always mark or lead to an inferior condition for women during the nineteenth century. For example, in many states, if Black freewomen remained unmarried, they often were better able to retain legal control over the property they owned.25 In this sense a free, unmarried, Black-identified woman had more power economically than a married White woman. Loren Schweninger calls attention to the higher economic status some Black freewomen enjoyed over White women. In Black Property Owners in the South, 1790–1915, Loren argues “that white men sometimes deemed it inappropriate for white women to enter the business world (and in some instances passed laws to this effect), but [they] did not forbid black women from establishing enterprises.”26 More than a few White women increased their business and financial activities during the Civil War, as men went off to fight. Then, when they married in the postbellum era, they lost authority over their own property.27 Moreover when individual states began to change laws granting married women’s property rights, not all married White women acted on those new rights. Angela Boswell argues that many women, when it came to property rights, particularly in the South, did not exercise their ability to act on their own behalf.28 In contrast, Sally Gregory McMillen points to the increased independence Black women experienced when she compares the impact of Black women’s support networks to the isolation many White women experienced in the South during the nineteenth century. In terms of women’s power, some historians have observed a regional dynamic and found that Southern women did not derive the same authority from the cult of domesticity as did Northern women. Rather the separate realm of domesticity in its Southern manifestation reinforced patriarchal roles, as Southern women didn’t yet have the reform institutions Northern women created in order to bolster their power.29

Class Dimensions of Women’s Leadership For many Black-identified women in the U.S., the goal of redefin- ing the meaning of Blackness from slave to free and from inferior to equal became their life’s mission. Women’s clubs became a means by 152 “Lifting as We Climb” which they could accomplish these goals and pass on racial pride to other Black women. Marilyn Dell Brady explains that Black-identified women in the women’s club movement were “committed to passing on their own pride, values, and achievement to those whom they considered the best of the next generation . . . and to encouraging . . . girls of their own social position to follow in their footsteps.”30 Brady’s point speaks to Black women’s philanthropic efforts, but it also suggests that the help Black-identified women offered to other women was not always equitably disseminated. Deborah Gray White’s conclusion that the philosophy of women’s racial uplift “presumed race and sex sameness, but social and cultural distance” supports the assertion that racial uplift reinforced social divisions within African America.31 There was a certain snobbery or condescension that went along with club work. Constance Green, in her book Secret City, describes the Black upper class as “jealous,” racially exclusive, and elite.32 This attitude of superiority, whether directly or indirectly expressed, reveals the ways in which classism shaped the racial uplift movement. There is no doubt that there existed countless Black-identified women who helped members of their community without class or color prejudice. For example, the Cleveland Gazette stood by the nawc’s motives for racial uplift and concluded that “most of the women stood for a cause, and not their own attainments and ambitions.”33 However, there is also another story. Educated Black women, often of conspicuous mixed-race heritage, elevated their status by lifting those around them, who were often darker, less well educated, and Southern. In addition, because club work was a collective effort, Black women leaders amassed more social power than they would have had as individuals. This move toward collective action positively influenced the class mobility of Black women leaders as a group. Claudia Tate argues that the club movement allowed individual acts of achievement to be exercised as a group, which thereby resulted in an increase of the women’s collective public power.34 Crucial to the argument that racial uplift reinforced social divisions within African America, Jacqueline M. Moore concludes that Black upper-class women were strictly concerned with the goal of “Lifting as We Climb” 153 assimilation. She asserts that the group to which Bruce, Matthews, Hackley, and Hunt Logan belonged wanted to “distinguish itself from the black masses.”35 Kevin Gaines also emphasizes the distance between leaders and masses, but he insists that the leaders were truly committed to uplift.36 Audrey Elisa Kerr puts the discussion in more explicit racial terms; she writes, “At various points in history fairer-hued Wash- ingtonians have, as a collective subculture contributed to the com- promised social status of some darker blacks in ways that paralleled white American racism.”37 The work of racial uplift increased mixed-race women’s status in terms of positions of authority, but it also served as a means of economic survival. The cause of racial uplift, as benevolent as it may have been, also became a cottage industry. For example, most settlement houses, both Black and White, were run by women for profit. The experience women gained in those settlement houses often led them to positions as teachers in places like Tuskegee Institute, Fisk, and How- ard University. Uplift activities also helped women secure positions in government when the field of social services became professionalized. The network formed by women’s clubs, settlement houses, and schools allowed many Black women to benefit economically. Experi- enced clubwomen also found it easier to land jobs as writers for various Black periodicals that became popular at the turn of the century. Wilson Jeremiah Moses adds an important interpretation of the women’s club movement: that in the hope of achieving “race recognition [middle- to upper-class Black women often] betrayed black peas- ant women [by the] civilizationist element” of their uplift or self-help work. Moses argues that the impulse of some Black women to serve in benevolent societies came in response to accusations that “colored women of education and refinement had not sympathetic interest in their own race.” Moses also criticizes clubwomen for their narrow focus on setting a “standard of genteel Victorian domesticity.” His most virulent criticism is based on the idea that institutions like the nacw, the American Negro Academy, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association all romanticized the “culture of folk” and campaigned for a two-tiered system of Jim Crow. This system might, 154 “Lifting as We Climb” for example, separate in travel refined Black-identified women from Southern Black workers, male or female. This two-class system was, according to Moses, an extension of Tuskegee’s policy of industrial education for the masses.38

Americanization and the Women’s Club Movement Aside from the role clubwomen played in perpetuating class distinctions, they also reinforced the culture of racial determinism, which had both domestic and foreign implications during the early twentieth century. Within women’s clubs and schools throughout the U.S., key members of the Black women’s leadership class—Terrell, Bruce, Hunt Logan, and Hackley—perpetuated pseudoscientific ideas about race. The early twentieth century was also a time when American patriotism and the development of a strong national identity among Black Americans was used as a strategy to present the Black American citizen as more legitimate than recent immigrants to the U.S.39 These two factors, the belief in racial determinism and efforts to increase Black patriotism, also helped create a culture of support among Black Amer- icans for U.S. imperialistic interests. Black and mixed-race women were not alone in this cause. White middle-class women and men participated in the cause to link race and citizenship. This particular intersection of identity formation came to be called the American- ization movement. The Americanization movement at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth was a cultural and educational campaign to define and limit American identity. Proponents of the movement sought to reinforce and accelerate immigrant assimilation. They employed settlement houses, schools, visiting nurse associations, and various charitable organizations to reshape the ethnic identities of recent immigrants and to strengthen their loyalty toward the U.S. These methods resulted in greater control over immigrant populations, and Indigenous American populations as well.40 Many middle-class White women directly contributed to the Amer- icanization of immigrant women. “The Free Vacation House,” written in 1915 by Anzia Yezierska, who had migrated from a Polish shtetl “Lifting as We Climb” 155 in 1890, showed the humiliation immigrant women suffered at the hands of White women charity workers. Her account revealed that organizations like the Social Betterment Society had motives that were neither innocent nor rooted primarily in philanthropy. Yezier- ska observed that these women’s benevolent groups were not founded on humanitarian impulses, but rather they sought to impose Ameri- can social control while erasing an immigrant’s ethnic identification. Yezierska poignantly described the humiliation and condescension she experienced when a charity worker scolded her. Under the guise of transmitting proper hygiene techniques and notions of American motherhood, which emphasized separation of a mother from her child, the charity worker offered her opinion. The worker came to Yezier- ska’s home, “[wearing] a white starched dress like a nurse and carr[y- ing] a black satchel. . . . [She said,] ‘I am from the Social Betterment Society. . . . You want to go to the country?’ Before I had a chance to say anything, she goes over to the baby and pulls out the rubber nip- ple from her mouth, and to me she says, ‘You must not get the child used to sucking this, it is very unsanitary.’”41

Uplift Workers, Missionaries, and Imperialism Constructing and maintaining an American identity was just as important to some Black women as it was to White women. However, for some Black women, foreign migration was the way to racial advancement, and so they joined Black men in their colonization efforts. A group of Black women in Kansas, for example, founded the Sierra Leone Club of Lawrence in order to assist Black migration to Africa. At the turn of the century, some women relocated to Africa, not simply to escape racial exclusion and violence in the U.S. but because they believed it was their duty to bring Protestant Christianity and West- ern mores to Africa.42 In 1902 Fannie J. Coppin, an Oberlin College graduate, teacher, and clubwoman, went with her husband, Reverend Levi Jenkins Coppin, to Cape Town, South Africa.43 As missionaries from the African Meth- odist Episcopal Church, they constructed Bethel Institute, and Fannie devoted her energies to organizing Mite Societies, whose members 156 “Lifting as We Climb” would train the “Native and Colored women for Christian work.” She traveled far into the interior of Africa, some 1,360 miles from Cape Town to Rhodesia and as far as Bulawayo. According to Bishop Cop- pin, “The natives and colored women of Africa were delighted to have one of their sisters from America . . . come over and be with them in the formative period of their church work.” For the Coppins, the work of civilizing Africa, or spreading Christianity to Africa, meant freedom, especially to women. Fannie wrote, “Africa is not unlike other portions of the world in its habit of holding the women back. The coming of Christianity everywhere marks the beginning of woman’s emancipation. Christianity in Africa must not mean less.” The colonial assistance that clubwomen offered the U.S. and Europe was based in the desire to be of Christian service; however, their missionary work reinforced colonial relationships like the ones they had themselves fought to overcome.44 Fannie wrote of her experiences in South Africa, “It was . . . a fortunate incident to finish my active work right in Africa, the home of the ancestors of those whose lives I had endeavored to direct.” Despite what she recognized as the ostentatious show of “civilization,” she observed the grave needs of the Indigenous people of South Africa. She also differentiated the experiences of mixed-race South Africans: “The colored people are the mixed bloods, a condition that obtains wherever a stronger people force their way into a country and take possession.” She concluded that mixed-race children had, for the most part, experienced an advantage as a result of their partially White parentage; they received a better education and were provided employment. She warned, however, that a “much larger portion of ‘Cape coloured’ people were left to live their lives as best they might, and rear their children in or out of wedlock.” Coppin recognized the various groups that coexisted in Africa and viewed them as distinct: “The native people—those of unmixed African blood— who came down from the country beyond, and found employment principally as loaders and unloaders of ships, and the heavier work along the railroads, would be quartered in ‘Locations’ a mile or two beyond the city limits. The cabins, or huts, provided for them by the “Lifting as We Climb” 157 government at Cape Town, are very inferior for comfort to those built by the natives in their rural habitat before being brought into contact with our so-called civilization.”45 Committed to the goals of American-style reform efforts, Coppin also emphasized the importance of temperance: “The drink habit would soon be learned by those raw natives.” She not only spread the values of temperance and Christianity but erected a permanent structure on their land. Bethel Institute became a place where Coppin “called the women together, the women who had risen above their environments, really noble, faithful, Christian women, and began [her] temperance work.” She was convinced that the African women would easily give up their native religion because they regarded the Bethel missionaries as “superior in matters religious.” Throughout her notes one gets a sense that Coppin believed fervently in the missionary cause but resented the racial arrangement in South Africa. She was not accustomed to inferior treatment and complained that in “matters social” the Coppins were beginning to be treated quite poorly, not unlike the native population.46 It should be noted that not all clubwomen favored colonialism. Nannie Helen Burroughs (1879– 1961), an outspoken critic of the colonization of Africa, helped found the nacw in 1896. She served as an uplift worker alongside her peer group, which included Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Mary McLeod Bethune. However, she departed from an uplift ideology, which might (perhaps unwittingly) advance the subjugation of any part of the pan-Africa diaspora. Aside from her success as the president of the National Association of Wage Earners, a businesswoman, and a labor advocate, she served as the editorial secretary of the For- eign Mission Board of the National Baptist Convention. In the capacity (1907), she denounced “lynching, segregation, employment discrimination, and the European colonization of Africa.”47

Woman’s Activism in the Context of the Progressive Era The women’s activism discussed thus far took place in a larger political context. The notion that an individual or a representative institution, whether private or public, could control and change the quality 158 “Lifting as We Climb” of people’s lives in a systematic way defined the Progressive or Reform Era. The decades from roughly the 1880s to the 1910s mark the transition to an industrial capitalist economy that started to yield economic growth. Along with growth came the effects of unbridled capitalism: poverty, disease, overpopulation, illiteracy, labor disputes, and unsanitary and unsafe living and working conditions. Many people believed these were problems that government and private charitable organizations could remedy. While the work of charity and service became professionalized, the field of social science gained prominence, and social engineering became a national cause. There were many competing visions of how best to address social ills. Along with helping those in need, the country was also in the process of defining itself socially, culturally, and racially, as immigrants from all over the world continued to enter the U.S. each year by the hundreds of thousands. Initially, privately funded poorhouses like Jane Addams’s Hull House in Chicago and Matthews’s White Rose Settlement in Brooklyn dominated the cause of helping migrants from the South as well as those from foreign countries. Politicians, charity workers, pastors, union organizers, and social scientists developed competing visions for reform. Over the first three decades of the twentieth century, government agencies gradually displaced private charitable organizations, which were in the main run by women; the government agencies often were run by men.

Common Critique of the Progressives Critics of the Progressive Era often point out that, despite attempts at reform, great inequality still defined the period. Despite efforts to restructure government and create a new institutional infrastructure of support services, the Progressives failed to attend to the needs of African-descended Americans. Most Southern Blacks, for example, continued to live in extreme poverty. However, I contend that there existed a class of African-descended Americans who did greatly benefit from the Progressive Era. Black-identified, often mixed-race, middle- class women found themselves in positions of authority over the masses of Black women, who were usually darker-skinned.48 “Lifting as We Climb” 159

Recounting the Benefits of Black Women’s Reform Too often the U.S. historical narrative recounts the Reform Era by applying broad generalizations. In terms of Black America, the history is often oversimplified and represented by a few images meant to imply the downtrodden conditions of all Black people during the entire period. For example, Iris B. Carlton-LaNey edited an infor- mative and meaningful collection of essays dedicated to early Black American pioneers in social work. Yet the book joins the condition and status of both pioneer activists and the recipients of services in the same category. She writes, “The African American pioneers discussed in this book were themselves members of the same stigmatized social category as the people whom they served.”49 To the contrary, most Black women leaders did not stand on the same economic, educational, or experiential foundation as the masses of Black women. Moreover many of the women saw themselves as distinct from (and often superior to) the people they assisted. This distinction manifested itself in the attention paid to variations of skin color, facial features, and hair texture. Had these Black women pioneers (most of mixed ancestry) not chosen to help Black people, many would have been lost to the anonymous position of other middle-class White women of the period (who did not yet have the right to vote and in some cases did not enjoy the freedom to enter into legal contracts). To those Black-identified women who were willing to resist the injustice, disease, poverty, illiteracy, and homelessness suffered by the Black masses, positions of leadership were now possible. The ability to achieve power within oppressive parameters is evident in the power historically wielded by Catholic nuns. Nuns are often characterized as the epitome of cloistered women who live constrained by a male-dominated hierarchy. However, Linda Gordon points out that Catholic nuns, particularly in the Progressive Era, had the unique freedom to develop professional skills and to exercise authority over hospitals, schools, orphanages, and reformatories. In contrast, married White middle-class women had few opportunities to choose a 160 “Lifting as We Climb” profession outside of the home. Black-identified women leaders took a cue from women of the orders and realized that service and social justice work could afford women reformers their own freedom.50

Black Women Leaders and the Eugenic Aesthetic The increase of women’s participation (regardless of race) in reform occurred within the greater social context of the eugenics movement. Eugenics, a term first coined in 1883 by Francis Galton, proposed that its practitioners could scientifically intervene or improve upon human development. The belief that scientists could manipulate so-called racial traits also became prominent during the early twentieth century. Eugenicists like Herbert Spencer, Madison Grant, and Earnest Hooton popularized the movement to such an extent that its impact pervaded every facet of American life. Marriage laws, immigration restriction, segregation statutes, education, medical practices, and the arts were all informed and developed by eugenic ideals.51 Black-identified women leaders, who represented the very individuals upon whom eugenicists based their inferiority theories, espoused similar eugenic ideals. In fact the social scientists who constructed these theories were not universally White. In 1929 a Black-identified anthropologist named Caroline Bond Day wrote her Harvard master’s thesis, “A Study of Some Negro-White Families in the United States,” under the supervision of the eugenicist Hooton. Reifying pseudoscientific explanations of racial variation, Day employed the tools of anthropometry (the study of human measurements), using calipers to measure skull size, nose width, and jaw lines. She created a nomenclature to describe variations in skin color, hair texture, and blood- type proportions. Thus Day, using the accepted scientific principles of her era (now much discredited), reinforced the myth that racial difference is based on biology. According to Day, her intent was to “com- pil[e] statistics about the better class of Colored Americans of mixed blood.”52 As Heidi Ardizzone points out, Day was a member of the Black-identified progressives whose aim it was to represent African America in ways that would stress “accomplishments, character and behavior.” From Day’s perspective, her work might lift the reputation “Lifting as We Climb” 161 of the entire race by concentrating on the supposed superior qualities of mixed-race people.53 Included in Day’s thesis were hundreds of pictures of conspicuously mixed-race people, many of whom appeared to be White. Day’s work, however, not only perpetuated the notion of racial determinism, but also, insofar as citizenship qualifications were concerned, placed Black Americans, especially those of mixed race, in positions above immigrants coming into the U.S. from Eastern and Southern Europe and Asia. She essentially argued that American Blacks, when compared to immigrants, were more fit for U.S. citizenship:

In place of the acquisitiveness of the Jew [Black Americans have] sub- stituted a generosity supposed to border on prodigality, the desire for dominance as revealed by the exponents of German Kulture, by humility, the bolshevik spirit of some . . . Russians by a patient [for]bearance, the implacable persistency of the Chinese by a ready adaptability, the fierce revengeful lust of the American Indian by a sense of humor. [T]he low standards of living for which some Ital- ians and other immigrants are criticized are not found among colored Americans. They maintain as high a standard of living as their wages and salaries will permit. Generally a Negro never lives in a hovel and hoards money so long as he can find a better place to live and improve himself by spending it. The figures here show that here is a group who buy homes, send their children to school, patronize whatever civic life they are allowed to, and on the whole are law- abiding citizens.54

Day was not the only Black woman scholar to contribute to twentieth- century eugenic research. Zora Neale Hurston, a student of anthropology at Columbia University, collected anthropometric data on Black people in Harlem.55 Columbia University Press published her mentor Melville Herskovits’s book based on Hurston’s research, Anthro- pometry of the American Negro, in 1930. Tuskegee Institute also hosted several race-based experiments well before the scandalous syphilis experiment conducted there and, in this way, was also a contributor to the study of eugenics.56 162 “Lifting as We Climb”

Women Leaders of the Race The women featured in this section were all members of individual clubs located within their own local communities, and they were also all members of the nacw during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They shared the vision of racial advancement by the work of uplift, but each contributed her own ideas and service in unique ways. Bruce was the wealthiest of the four, and she was also a staunch supporter of industrial education. Matthews represents the efforts Black women made in the settlement house movement, where her leadership helped to sustain a working class among young Black women. She also advocated for the development of race literature in order to construct a positive image for Black people. An analysis of some of Hunt Logan’s work as a writer and teacher at Tus- kegee reveals the continuity of eugenic education in both the Black and White institutions of education. Hackley, a concert singer, music teacher, and lecturer, also promoted a eugenic aesthetic among young Black women at Tuskegee. All four women were, to one degree or another, near White in racial appearance. However, none chose to pass as White, and, in so doing, they gained public prominence and positions in Black leadership.

Josephine Beall Willson Bruce Bruce is remembered as the wife of Senator Blanche Kelso Bruce of Mississippi, but she was also a force in her own right. Senator Bruce married Josephine Beall Wilson in 1878. The couple produced one child, Roscoe Conklin Bruce.57 The senator and his wife were both known as people of mixed race. Blanche was the “son of a ‘house slave’ and a white slave owner.”58 In 1874 he was elected as the first Black senator in the state of Mississippi, and he was the only Black senator to serve a full term in office. He is typically characterized as a conservative politician because, according to his critics, he did not consistently agitate for Black civil rights.59 After his six-year term ended, the senator held many other positions in the government. In 1881 Presi- dent James Garfield appointed him registrar of the Treasury, making “Lifting as We Climb” 163 him the first Black man to adorn U.S. currency with his signature. At the Republican National Convention, which nominated Benjamin Harrison for a presidential run, Bruce received eleven votes as a vice presidential candidate. Once in office, President Harrison appointed him recorder of deeds for Washington dc. In 1897 Bruce was once again appointed registrar of the Treasury, this time by the McKinley administration, a position he held until his death on March 17, 1898. When Senator Bruce died, Booker T. Washington sent to Josephine his condolences: “Your husband was great, good and true. May God give you strength to bear your sorrow.”60 Josephine Beall Willson was born on October 29, 1853, in Phila- delphia. Her parents, Joseph Willson and Elizabeth Harnell Will- son, raised her in a relatively affluent part of Philadelphia composed mainly of Black freemen and freewomen. While the Willsons lived among other Black-identified people, they belonged to the Cleve- land Episcopal Church, which was known as a White congregation. Josephine graduated from Cleveland High School in 1871 and completed teacher training courses in Ohio. She was lauded as the first Black woman to join the faculty at an integrated elementary school in Cleveland.61 In the 1990s Lawrence Otis Graham’s book The Senator and the Socialite brought Josephine Bruce back into public consciousness. Gra- ham presents a detail-rich, entertaining account of the Bruce family “dynasty,” as he called it. However, the book is short on documenta- tion and casts Josephine as not much more than a “socialite.” In reality, she was much more than that. In fact much of her life, particularly after her husband’s death, was spent traveling, giving lectures, managing her properties, and participating in club activities. Graham’s account emphasizes the conspicuous wealth and status the Bruce family enjoyed at the turn of the century, and many authors have likewise looked to Josephine as a representative figure for the study of elite Black culture. For instance, in order to observe the class dimension of Black nineteenth-century womanhood, Claudia Tate researched the prevalence of Black women in nineteenth-century literature. She argues that the insular quality of the Black elite, established 164 “Lifting as We Climb” by Gatewood some years earlier, could be better illustrated by interpreting the archetype of the Mulatta in art and literature. She uses an image of Josephine Bruce to illustrate what the typical Black heroine in nineteenth-century Black literature looked like. Regardless of Bruce’s self-image or her ancestry, Tate concludes, “Despite all the hoopla, Mrs. Bruce was a Negro, no matter how fair of skin or how much she embodied the attributes of the ideal Victorian lady.” Tate’s conclusion is anachronistic in that it doesn’t take into account Bruce’s self-conceived racial identity. Nor does it consider the more fluid criteria for racial identity that obtained during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. External evidence of that fluidity is provided by the existence of a Mulatto category in the U.S. Census from 1870 to 1910. Not only does Tate define Bruce by twentieth-century monoracialist standards as simply Black, but she does so in spite of Bruce’s complicated racial heritage, which consisted of both Black and White ancestors, and Bruce’s own social positioning, which was elite and mixed.62 Noliwe M. Rooks, in her study of women’s magazines, portrays Bruce as overly concerned with her image, specifically as it related to a fashion sense that would prove her refinement and eligibility for upper-class status. Rooks’s interpretation of women’s magazines at the end of the nineteenth century is quite useful because it reveals the central role Mulatta iconography played in U.S. advertising. Yet her assessment still suggests that Bruce was mimicking Victorian (White) ideals. According to Rooks, for Bruce and others like her, fashion functioned as a “signal” to ameliorate “dominant cultural narratives” about Black women’s supposed inferiority.63 As Deborah Gray White explains, fashion did indeed mark social status among women.64 I am not convinced, however, that, as Rooks argues, elite Black women were trying to signal their worth or legitimacy of status to Whites; nor were they mimicking Whiteness. They were, more likely, performing the traditions that they learned within their own mixed-race elite families and communities and signaling status to members of their own circle of Black-identified, racially complicated women and men. “Lifting as We Climb” 165 Herein lies another major problem in evaluating the identity of racially ambiguous-looking Black women: we insist on interpreting the Victorian style of dress in completely racial terms. That is, when Bruce, who was born in the U.S. and was propertied, famous, and wealthy, appears in Victorian clothing, we interpret that as her attempting to perform Whiteness. If a Jewish immigrant woman in the U.S. wore a similar type of attire, we might interpret that choice as a cultural or class move rather than a racial one. The immigrant woman’s choice in dress is not necessarily considered mimicry of mainstream White- ness but is usually considered a tactic on the part of immigrants to assimilate in a national sense. The same choice among Black women is interpreted as simply racial, and therefore as less noble. Yet while historians may recognize a Black woman’s elite life, they typically offer a caveat about her lower position in the larger Amer- ican society on account of her race. It is as if we are held hostage to interpreting Black womanhood as continuously residing in an inferior position. This tendency, I believe, is rooted in the concern that investigators might displace or downplay the real horrors that most Black-identified women in the U.S. underwent. The other worry is that others might compare the successful assimilation of European immigrants with the social standing of Americans of African descent and attempt to displace the role of race in shaping opportunities and obstacles in American society. I do agree that to compare the assimilation of, for example, the Irish or Italians to the mobility of Black Americans is a fallacious analogy. However, I argue that, particularly among the Black women leadership class, a Black identity held more privilege than a White identity. Moreover, when we measure race and class in order to ascertain privilege, we should recognize the limits of making cross-racial comparisons. That is, presuming all factors are equal except race, is it reasonable to conclude that, for example, upper-class White women had more status than Black-identified women? Perhaps this is true if we assess the status of White and Black women within only one sphere, a White public sphere. But if we assess Black women’s status or privilege exclusively within a Black public sphere, then the wealthy Black 166 “Lifting as We Climb” women would represent the epitome of class within their community. This approach to assessing privilege offers a different vision of status and is particularly useful when considering status during the Jim Crow era. During that time, Black-identified elite women often lived in Black communities; were patrons of Black hairdressers, doctors, grocery stores; worshipped at Black churches; read Black newspapers; studied and taught at Black colleges; and organized their efforts as members of Black women’s clubs. This approach to looking at privilege is not meant to rationalize the separate-but-equal doctrine. Rather it merely takes into account the parallel societies in which White and Black America resided at the turn of the century. Historians have also uncritically identified Josephine Bruce as a member of an oppressed class or race. The matter of her White racial appearance is not seriously considered when evaluating her experiences or her relative privilege. Consider for a moment the images of Bruce, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, a nineteenth-century poet and suffragist who was a contemporary of Bruce, and Frances Folsom Cleveland, wife of President Grover Cleveland. Look at the pictures in two ways. First, assess difference in racial terms. I argue that no differences are evident. Then look for markers of class difference. Again, I contend that none is present. One woman among these three could claim a higher status than the other two, since she was the nation’s first lady. Bruce and Wilcox arguably maintained a similar economic standing. Wilcox achieved public prominence as a poet. Bruce achieved public prominence as the wife of a senator but also achieved prominence on account of her wealth and family history. Her father was popular among Philadel- phia readers for his 1841 account of Philadelphia’s “colored society.”65 Should we then compare class privilege across racial lines? That is, did Wilcox have more privilege than Bruce? Or do we compare class privilege within racial groups? That is, Bruce had the most privilege in her own group, and she maintained higher status above a large portion of White women who were working class, lower class, and, in particular, immigrant. I believe the latter is a more accurate way to measure privilege. “Lifting as We Climb” 167 In 1899 Mary Church Terrell won a third term as president of the nacw. Some controversy surrounded her election, particularly in regard to who would follow in her footsteps. Suspicious club members accused Terrell of handpicking Josephine Bruce as her successor, but Bruce won anyway. There had always been tension within Black institutions around the topic of skin color. Deborah Gray White explains that middle- and upper-class Blacks were usually “lighter [in skin color] than black working and lower classes. . . . The groups sel- dom mingled socially.” In subsequent years, women within the organization began to clamor over the nearly White appearance of their presidents (Terrell as well as Bruce). By 1906, when Bruce ran for nacw president for the second time, she lost the election to a darker-skinned woman named Lucy Thurman. Skin color had influenced the election; as one woman explained, “We prefer a woman [like Thurman] who is altogether Negro.”66 In contrast to Margaret Murray Washington, who didn’t believe that women’s suffrage was crucial to Black women’s causes, Bruce was in direct support of Black women’s suffrage. Washington was nacw president in 1915, and Bruce served as her vice president.67 As an editor of the nacw’s magazine, the Notes, Bruce often wrote editorials on the subject of suffrage, and she predicted that just as women were voting in some states in the U.S., they would soon win suffrage nationally. In 1916 the nacw pledged support (rhetorical and financial) for the passage of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, which would provide universal suffrage to all women. Bruce was not alone in her support of women’s suffrage. Hunt Logan, a member of the Tuskegee Women’s Club and a teacher at the Institute, led the women’s suffrage division of the nacw. Her commitment to the cause of suffrage was so strong that it was rumored she passed as White for just one day in order to attend the exclusively White National American Women’s Suffrage Association.68 Gatewood writes of Bruce’s “strong [commitment to] industrial education for the Black masses.”69 That commitment was never more apparent than when she addressed the nacw conference held in Chicago in late August 1899 (just one month prior to her joining the faculty at 168 “Lifting as We Climb” Tuskegee).70 The Chicago Times-Herald covered her address, “One Phase of the Labor Question,” in which she advocated for the further development of industrial education, and in so doing expressed her commitment to Booker T. Washington’s vision of racial uplift. She felt it “fitting [to call] attention . . . to the position of the negro workmen in the world of industry.” Bruce, despite her commitment to universal suffrage, argued that the issue had dominated the public discourse to such an extent that the matter of employment had taken second place. Since “the possibility of negro political supremacy ha[d] become a thing of the past,” efforts needed to be redirected toward the question of labor: “In the wake of free industry comes the trade union.” She worried that the “powerful combinations of labor” had begun to dominate the industrial landscape. The influence of unions included “the dangerous principle of [the] exclusion” of Black laborers. Bruce pointed out that since the Civil War, large populations of the “serving class” had migrated into urban areas. As a result of all the changes that took place after the war, “the power of the great families was broken; white overseers, foremen, etc., in large numbers entered the field of free industrial competition.” Competition from White (mainly immigrant) labor, particularly organized White labor, had driven “the negro artisan” out of industry. Bruce also recognized the varied impact unions had on the availability of jobs for Black Americans. She averred that, in the South, unions excluded Black labor completely. In the North “the union [was] perceptively hesitant on the question of the color line.”71 Bruce did recognize that many Black Americans did not seek industrial or “artisan” employment. She acknowledged the need and the right that Black preachers, lawyers, medical doctors, and teachers had to toil in the field of their choosing, but she challenged them to consider that they also needed “a great industrial class upon which to base their professional activity.”72 These words underscore the sometimes contradictory role clubwomen played in lifting Black people, while they perpetuated divisions within African America along social, economic, and color lines. During the early twentieth century, much was written about Bruce’s ambiguous racial appearance. Members of the nacw felt she was too “Lifting as We Climb” 169 light to represent them as president after the 1906 election. In her youth, a new arrival to Washington dc, many newspapers commented on her looks. They described her as appearing “Spanish” and claimed she looked so White in appearance that it would be hard to prove “Afri- can blood.”73 Graham suggests that Bruce’s appearance caused the couple problems. According to Graham, Blanche’s appearance was too Black for Josephine’s family, who were among the most elite in Phil- adelphia. Graham contends that “his complexion and features [were] considered too Negroid for the light-complexioned, straight-haired” people with whom the Willson family chose to associate.74 The evidence Graham uses to support this interpretation is from the Balti- more American in 1879 describing Blanche’s skin tone as “the color designated in the South as ‘nigger-colored.”75 I found many descriptions of Blanche that were made by his contemporaries and that con- tradicted Graham’s findings. For example, the Washington Bee, a Black periodical, described his appearance in detail, including that he was “tall and stout” and that his skin “color [was] strong clear yellow.” The Bee emphasized the observation by stating, “Many Cubans are darker than he.”76 The Kansas City Times was also fascinated with the senator’s appearance. An article entitled “Blanche K. Bruce and Other Celebrities, Dead and Alive,” described his appearance as “reasonably portly” and suggested that he had a “quite a taking presence.” It continued, “His color is light, and it is the tradition that he is the offspring of one [of] the most distinguished of Virginia’s [White] sons.” The article also boasted of his wealth, which was estimated at $100,000, and made note of his generosity in helping White Mississippi families, whose now “impoverished” daughters held “clerical positions” in Washing- ton as a result of the senator’s “intercession.”77 A few years later the Washington Bee once again commented on Bruce’s physical appearance, but added another dimension. It suggested that he was more African in orientation than his appearance might suggest: “While he is lighter in color than either Douglass, Langston or Lynch, he is less like a white man than either of the others. They are really colored white men, while he is really a whitened African. It 170 “Lifting as We Climb” is not so much that his features are more negro-like nor that his hair curls more tightly. It is rather in his mental attitude, which is reflected in his deferential manner. His very manners, elegant though elabo- rate, are characteristic of the graceful and courteous African. He is the peacemaker.”78 Josephine Bruce not only busied herself with the work of uplift; she was quite knowledgeable about financial and business matters. She maintained control over her own money while she was married, and as a widow she continued to manage her entire estate, which was estimated to be worth $250,000 (equivalent to more than $2 million in the twenty-first century). The Bruce family held vast property in Mis- souri, Washington dc, New Mexico, and Mississippi, which included a six-hundred-acre cotton plantation in Bolivar County.79 They kept accounts in several different banks in different states for reasons still obscure; perhaps it was their intent to keep money in banks near the properties they owned. The average balance in the accounts ranged from $2,000 to $4,000. The record of their mortgage loans and bank notes, which are held in the Blanche Kelso Bruce Papers at How- ard University, suggest that their credit was in very good standing. I purposely employ the terms “they” and “their” because many of the financial records were signed by both Bruces. For example, one bank note, promised to Blanche in the amount of $1,200 from the Colum- bia National Bank of Washington, indicated that it was for the “benefit and improvement of my [wife’s] separate estate.”80 After Blanche died, Josephine managed every aspect of the estate. She lived with her mother in Indianapolis immediately following Blanche’s death, then returned to Bolivar County, Mississippi, to manage her cotton plantation directly. She was quite active after her husband’s death. She was a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the World Purity Federation, and the Nation Association for the Advance- ment of Colored People. She gave public lectures on racial uplift, held speaking engagements at various ame churches, and attended many conferences on behalf of the nacw, which were held at various locations throughout the country and overseas. As such, she often lived out of a suitcase.81 She traveled and moved frequently from the 1880s to “Lifting as We Climb” 171 the 1920s. For example, during the 1880s she lived in Washington dc, while she traveled back and forth to visit her mother in Indianapolis. From 1899 until 1902 she lived in Alabama to serve as lady principal at Tuskegee Institute. After she left Tuskegee, she returned to Missis- sippi to run her plantation. In 1906 she returned to Washington dc. From the late 1890s through the early 1900s, in order to visit and care for her mother, she continued to travel back and forth to Indianapo- lis.82 During the 1920s she resided with her son, Roscoe, and his wife, Clara, in Kimball, West Virginia.83 Bruce generated a profit from the Bolivar plantation by renting sections to sharecroppers. On the occasions of her absence, she used representatives to act on her behalf. In terms of coming into contract with obstructive forces on account of her gender, she enlisted the help of her esteemed men friends. One among them was the wealthy attorney Roy Church, father of Mary Church Terrell. As her attorney, he would often update her on the state of her plantation. The level of detail in his letters to her attests to the specificity of her inquiries. For example, he was very specific in his attempts to report the result of his efforts to negotiate interest rates that she requested. In one letter he promised to use his connections to achieve her goals: “I will take up the matter with some banker of my acquaintance, see what they will do and report [back].” Church also reported that her plantation manager had the land “in fairly good shape. . . . He has plenty of feed, including 100 tons of pea hay, and seems to have plenty of labor in sight, as there were two new families applying yesterday.”84 During the early 1900s Bruce secured loans in order to buy more property.85 Her son often consulted her about finances. In the many letters they wrote back and forth to each other while he was away studying at Exeter Academy and then at Harvard, or while teaching at Tuskegee or managing the plantation himself, he never failed to ask her advice. She supported him financially through school, and also supported Roscoe’s fiancée, Clara Burrell, while she attended Rad- cliffe College.86 Bruce maintained her wealth throughout her life. As per her final wishes, all of her money went to fund the higher education of all three of Roscoe’s children.87 172 “Lifting as We Climb” In the many letters Bruce wrote to her son, one can sense the deep commitment she had as his mother. Perhaps the commitment was made even stronger after the loss of her husband. She wanted to know about his grades and was quite affectionate in her tone. She usually ended her letters with the salutation “bushel of love” or “barrel of kisses.”88 Roscoe’s love for her was just as apparent. When writing to his fiancée, he said it was imperative that she love his mother, since he loved his mother so much.89 In one letter he pleaded that Clara write to his mother.90 I do not mean to imply a gendered distinction of parental commitment. The senator was just as affectionate. In the many letters he wrote to his son, particularly during 1896 and 1897, it is obvious that he cher- ished his only child. During this time, Blanche, Josephine, and Ros- coe were apart a lot, as Blanche was in Washington, Josephine often spent time in Indianapolis with her mother, who suffered from rheu- matism, and Roscoe was in preparatory school. While Roscoe studied at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, Blanche wrote to his son more often than Josephine did. Blanche was proud of him and made the fact that he missed him abundantly clear.91 Josephine’s correspondence with her son and daughter-in-law also reflected the presence of racial and class distinctions within African America. In a letter written to his mother, Roscoe described his desire for her presence at a recent conference of the Social Science Associ- ation in Washington dc. His description of the attendees speaks to the way he viewed his peers, as well as the familiar candor he used with his mother to describe class distinctions. He wrote, “I wish we had insisted on you coming. Next time we really must. No more talented and exquisite 400 can be gathered together anywhere in Amer- ica than the folk at that wonderful dinner.”92 As I mentioned earlier, the term “400” was used to refer to Black America’s most elite families.93 Within these letters from mother to son one sees that the source of their racial pride came from members of their own elite, lighter- skinned social group. In no letter did I find evidence that their esteem came from the matter of their White ancestry. In fact in one letter Roscoe conveys his disgust for “cheap white women.”94 “Lifting as We Climb” 173

Victoria Earle Matthews Before Matthews became a staunch civil rights activist and settlement house founder, she was Victoria Smith, a slave girl born in Fort Valley, Georgia, to a White father, William Smith, and Caroline Smith, Wil- liam’s slave. Since Victoria was born on May 27, 1861, it is unclear the extent to which she actually lived as a slave.95 The conditions were at least brutal enough to cause her mother to attempt to escape on several occasions. Eventually she escaped successfully to New York; she did not return for Victoria or her siblings until eight years later. Caroline was able to regain custody of two of her children. Of the six remaining, two had died, and the other two remained with the Smith family.96 Caroline and her two daughters relocated to Virginia, where Vic- toria attended grammar school. By the early 1870s, the family had moved to New York. For a while Victoria attended school in the city, but she was forced to withdraw in order to help support her family. She worked as a servant and took every opportunity she could to read the books stacked in her employer’s library. At eighteen she married Wil- liam E. Matthews, a mixed-race man who had worked as a coachman. Matthews got her start in journalism in the Black press, writing under the pen name “Victoria Earle.” During the late 1880s she wrote several articles for T. Thomas Fortune’s New York Globe, which was later renamed the New York Age.97 She also wrote for the New York Times, the Herald, the Chicago Defender, the Southern Christian Recorder, the Women’s Era, the Washington Bee, and the Detroit Plain Dealer.98 Matthews’s most celebrated work is Aunt Lindy: A Story Founded on Real Life. It is a postbellum account of the process of racial justice and reconciliation. The protagonist, “Aunt Lindy,” nurses back to health a victim of a massive fire. She learns that the mystery man she helped is, in fact, her previous owner. The amnesty she provides the man not only heals him but in some ways heals her.99 Aside from writing, Matthews pursued a life of political activism with the goal of reconstructing the image of Black America. She was able to interweave her love of writing with her goal of racial uplift by engaging with people like Arthur Schomburg, the historian who 174 “Lifting as We Climb” established a clearinghouse for Black historical archives. Like Bruce and Hackley, Matthews strongly advocated the teaching of race history.100 Matthews also became active in the women’s club movement. Sup- porting Ida B. Wells’s antilynching campaign inspired her initial involvement with club work. Along with Maritcha Lyons, she organized an association to fund Wells’s research on lynching. In the hopes of spreading the antilynching cause nationally, in 1892 she cofounded the Wom- en’s Loyal Union. Her desire to collaborate with other women, and to spread her cause further than New York, led her to join Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin’s National Federation of Afro-American Women. Mat- thews helped to organize the first women’s convention in Boston, and it was there that she would give her speech “The Value of Race Litera- ture.” But before presenting an analysis of Matthews’s call for “race literature,” it will be useful to discuss the role literature played in racial uplift. According to Claudia Tate, Black women’s literature had various applications. Tate argues that Black women writers showcased the “genteel domestic feminism” of Black women in order to establish their fitness for full U.S. citizenry. Moreover Black women’s choice to write about their preference for “bourgeois decorum” allowed them to enter public life through literature and intellectual endeavor.101 In addition, the role of Black literature allowed authors to advertise, if you will, the refined and alluring qualities of Blackness. Tate explains, “The aesthetic value of [black literature] initially resided in their ability to gratify a distinct audience of ambitious black Americans who sought to live fully.”102 I am not sure that Tate’s interpretation fits women like Matthews, Bruce, St. Pierre Ruffin, Lyons, Hunt Logan, and Hackley, because I don’t believe they were performing. Tate’s implication is that “genteel domestic feminism” is synonymous with the attributes of White middle-class women. This interpretation suggests that genteel performance is really mimicry of Whiteness. When do genteel cultural habits, including style of dress, religious beliefs, gender roles, home decor, and manner of speech cease to belong to White women exclusively? I contend that many of these women were themselves born into this cultural norm. Moreover, for most Black women, domestic performance “Lifting as We Climb” 175 was not an option, and labor was not divided along gender lines. Here is where the significant gulf lies between mixed-race elite women and the masses of Black women they tried to lift up. For the most part, the women leaders presented in this chapter are treated in the historiography as indispensable, benevolent Black women leaders, when in fact they actually benefited socially and economically more from the uplift work they did for the Black masses than did the Black masses. Tate notes that Black heroines in Black women’s literature are “cat- egorically . . . pale skinned Mulattas or racially nonspecific, which implies white identity.” She explains that women in late nineteenth- century Black literature “embod[ied] Eurocentric beauty.” She also lists a few “dark-skinned” exceptions, describing Lucille Delaney, a supporting character in Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, for instance, as “a highly educated version of true black womanhood, who is proud to claim the absence of white blood in her veins.” However, Tate recognizes that within the genre there exists different discourses for Black womanhood. At one end are the novels that espouse Victorian ideals, and at the other are works written by such authors as Harper and Pauline Hopkins, who display “reformist discourses” rooted in religious moral authority. These discourses rally for social equality and declare the “inseparable progress of self and race.”103 Hannah Wallinger’s essay on Hopkins is a perfect example of the struggle to control the scope and aims of black leadership during the early part of the twentieth century. The fate of the Colored American Magazine rested on the fight between Hopkins, a literary star with protest and pan-Africanism on her mind, and Booker T. Washington, the established Mulatto leader of the “Tuskegee Machine.” Wallinger writes that Hopkins “was on the scene when race consciousness was being redefined.” She is especially remembered for her novel Con- tending Forces, her tenure as a contributor and editor for the Colored American Magazine from 1900 to 1904, and as an early proponent of pan-Africanism, which she defined in an essay entitled “A Primer and Some Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African Race and the Possibility of Restoration by Its Descendants—Epilogue.” Hop- kins’s early career as a performer, playwright, and novelist laid the 176 “Lifting as We Climb” foundation for the literary emphasis that characterized the Colored American Magazine in its early years. The periodical published all sorts of poems, short stories, and exposés that covered African American life with the express purpose of advancing “progress” and “justice.”104 Hopkins’s acumen for editorship is uncontestable. She drew much attention: Du Bois praised her work, as did the magazine’s owner, the Colored Co-Operative Publishing Company. The magazine boasted a circulation upward of 1,500 copies per month, that is, until Washing- ton wrestled the editorship from Hopkins and subscriptions fell to a low of 200 per month. For Washington and John C. Freund, a White publisher and financier from New York, literary concerns and political agitation were not the appropriate direction for such a popular magazine. In a letter to William Dupree, the new owner of the Colored American as of 1903, Freund outlined Washington’s position: “With any literary magazine, let me tell you frankly, Booker Washington has no sympathy.” Instead Hopkins was pressured to feature mainly pieces on current affairs, social clubs, business affairs, and, most important, industrial education. For example, when Roscoe Bruce was planning his wedding to Clara Burrell in February 1903, he expressed his desire to make the wedding so big that it would be covered as a social event in the Colored American.105 Since Hopkins did not have the kind of money or political or social influence that Washington and the Tus- kegee Machine exploited, the Colored American become the periodical endorsement for Washington’s industrial plan. Readers who at one time considered the magazine a marker for the best of Black literature, and who were on the fence about the role of industrial education, could then be saturated with Tuskegee propaganda. Right before Hopkins lost the editorship in 1904, she was forced to run the series “Industrial Education: Will It Solve the Negro Problem? Answered Each Month by the Greatest Thinkers of the Black Race.”106 Shirley Wilson Logan describes the venue in which Matthews presented her speech “The Value of Race Literature” as the “black public sphere.”107 The conference to which Logan refers was the first Black women’s conference. Held in Boston in 1895 it gathered the efforts of various women’s associations under one umbrella, which would later “Lifting as We Climb” 177 become the National Association of Colored Women.108 However, Logan’s definition of the “black public sphere,” as first articulated by Houston Baker, suggests that this venue was a somewhat remedial version of the actual public sphere, which was dominated by White men. Logan suggests that because Black Americans had limited access to property and education they “would never have participated in . . . [the actual, i.e., White] public sphere.”109 My problem is not that Logan used the analytical framework of the “black public sphere.” I too use the device to interpret social privilege. Rather I disagree with the implication that it was less official or of less value than the White public sphere. That is, the privilege one receives in upper-class circles is relative within one’s own group, not between groups. The tendency is to assume that the upper-class position of women in White and Black communities was, in terms of privilege, completely different. I do not believe it was entirely different, since when one compares the two, one finds that White upper-class women and Black upper-class women both shared dominance over working- class women, regardless of race. In addition, both shared dominance over Black middle-class women. The only time status became difficult to determine was when middle-class White women navigated the same places as upper-class Black women. Despite the latter’s increased wealth, education, and social connections, prevailing prejudices may have prevented upper-class Black women from exercising their privilege when mixing with White middle-class women. Thus we should assess this particular analogy as largely situational. That is, within exclusively Black communities and organizations, upper-class Black women could expect to experience their full privilege. Had they ven- tured into exclusively White organizations like the National Amer- ican Women Suffrage Association, they likely would not have been able to exploit their privilege. In the audience before Matthews sat many of the people she praised in her speech. In fact the men and women seated in that audience were among the most educated and propertied Black-identified people in the country. In contrast to Logan’s interpretation, they were hardly incapable, or too pensive, in 1896 to air their contempt, aspirations, 178 “Lifting as We Climb” and visions for racial uplift. Also among the audience sat delegates from Black women’s clubs from all over the country. They included Mary Church Terrell, Josephine Bruce, and Margaret Murray Wash- ington. Among the men present were T. Thomas Fortune and Rich- ard T. Greener. None of these people was representative of a supposed “alternative public sphere” that remained hidden from the realm of official American discourse.110 Rather they were among the loudest voices of the era. By way of their writing, philanthropy, public appointments and service, prominence, and wealth they were quite comfort- able among interracial groups to articulate various positions.111 Logan suggests that this was Matthews’s “target audience . . . because of their potential as agents of change.”112 It makes more sense, in light of the intermediate position of Matthews’s career, to consider that she was actually performing Black leadership in the hope of impressing the cadre of already established leaders who sat before her. Perhaps she was brandishing her Black credentials? In some ways, she might have overcompensated in order to offset her indisputable White appearance. Yet, unlike a lot of the mixed-race clubwomen, Matthews had actually been born a slave. The system of slavery and racism was so per- verse and inconsistent, in terms of color, that her White appearance may have caused some to question her authority to speak as a leader of Black women. Throughout her speech she made reference to skin color. Thus it is safe to say that the evaluation of skin color and what it meant to racial identity was important to her philosophy. Fred Miller Robinson interprets Matthews’s speech in a different way, as a sort of transitional marker between the goal of political organization and the goal of self-help through social work. One month before Matthews gave the speech in July 1895, Frederick Douglass died. Two months later, on September 11, 1895, Booker T. Washington gave his “Atlanta Compromise” speech, which signified the accommodationist direction of civil rights activism for the coming generations.113 The main point of Matthews’s speech was to rally support for the future development of what she called “race literature.” She began by calling attention to the fact that she shared the degree of oppression that Americans of African descent experienced. She argued that it “Lifting as We Climb” 179 made them a “distinct class.” She believed that the “conditions which govern” Black people “creat[ed] a . . . marked difference in [the] lim- itations, characteristics, aspirations and ambitions of this class of people, in decidedly strong contrast with the more or less powerful races which dominate it.” Here Matthews emphasized the condition of oppression instead of the previous condition of servitude as the current barometer of Black America’s social condition.114 Matthews then shifted her focus to physical markers of racial difference, which she considered the central trigger of racial oppression. She blamed “the prejudice of color! Not condition, not character, not capacity for artistic development, not the possibility of emerging from savagery into Christianity, not these but the ‘Prejudice of Color,’” for causing the downtrodden state of Black America. One cannot help but read the irony in a woman who was among the Whitest in appearance charging that “color” specifically was the problem. Perhaps the social reputation gained from knowledge of one’s ancestral color caused the oppression about which she spoke, but surely the audience did not miss the visual irony. That is, she espoused a Black racial consciousness and emphasized that the problem was “a prejudice of color,” while appearing for all intents and purposes as a White woman.115 She returned to the topic of color several times throughout the speech, claiming, for instance, “Men have cried . . . because [they] cannot change [their] color.” She also opposed the term “colored,” as it brought “unfavorable attention to the most ineradicable difference between the races.” Here again, her words convey a willful state of denial of her own appearance. At one point she argued, “Appear- ing well and weighted with many degrees of titles will not raise us in our own estimation while color is the White elephant in Amer- ica.” For someone who looked so convincingly White in appearance, her choice of words is curious. Perhaps it was an unconscious effort to draw attention away from the gulf between what was seen and what was declared. Matthews advocated for the use of the term “Afro-American” rather than “colored” or “Negro” because, in her line of thinking, it strengthened the bond connecting all Americans of African descent.116 180 “Lifting as We Climb” Some contemporary scholars of gender, race, and ethnicity also have had a difficult time reconciling the White appearance of prominent Black women leaders. The paradox is so complete that images of some of the leaders are often darkened to emphasize African heritage. Perhaps these efforts are the expressions of artistic license, used to emphasize how the particular individual defined herself. However, presenting a distorted image of real people not only obscures the life of the person but submerges the historical utility of racial identification. Compare, for example, the several different photographic images of Matthews.117 In order to make her case for “race literature,” Matthews analyzed how American literature had presented Black people thus far. To the audience of Black intellectuals, authors, teachers, business persons, clubwomen, and philanthropists, she emphasized the need to produce literature that combated the inaccurate or racist portrayals of Black Americans that White authors had already provided. She listed the names of authors whom she believed to be among the guiltiest in presenting negative images of Blacks. She included Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Clarke Ridpath, the “Negro-hating Mark Twain,” as well as several others, whom she believed could be corrected by “counter- irritants” in the field of race literature.118 Race literature was also to serve as an “outlet for the unnaturally suppressed inner lives [of] our people.” She hoped that it would “undermine and utterly drive out the traditional Negro in Dialect,—the subordinate, and the servant as the type representing the race.”119 Matthews also emphasized the link between a vocal Black identity and social mobility. According to her, the construction of race literature would better control Blacks’ image and was “the surest road to real fame.” She reiterated the point by lauding the work of Alexandre Dumas and Alexander Pushkin, giants of French and Russian literature, respectively, both of whom had African ancestry.120 Just as Orientalism found its way into the public rhetoric of other nineteenth-century Black-identified leaders, Matthews echoed anti- Chinese sentiment and the imperialistic tenor so common at the turn of the twentieth century. In her efforts to secure full citizenship rights “Lifting as We Climb” 181 for both Black men and women, she asserted, “No one thinks of mere color when looking upon the Chinese, but the dignified character of the literature of his race, and he for monotony of expression, color and undesirable individual habits is far inferior in these points to the ever-varying American Negro. So our people must awaken to the fact, that our task is a conquest for a place for ourselves.”121 During the speech she celebrated notable leaders in the fields of Black literature and individual scholarship. Among a host of others, she referred to R. T. Greener, Frederick Douglass, Frances Harper, Char- lotte Forten Grimké, Gertrude Mossell, John E. Bruce, T. Thomas For- tune, and Ida B. Wells. Most of the men and women she mentioned were also Black-identified people of mixed ancestry.122 More important, however, was the insight her words provide in assessing the attitudes of clubwomen at the end of the nineteenth century. From this speech we can conclude that Matthews saw those yet to be converted to Christianity as savage. She also specifically pointed out that “condition” need not be the criterion for treatment. Did she mean that both free-born and enslaved Blacks suffered under the same horrors on account of color? When Matthews wrote that the “imperious wrong” of racism “has made Race literature a possibility” she spoke to the heart of my thesis. She recognized, as do I, that oppression is often the circumstance out of which activist leaders arise. Aside from giving speeches, Matthews clamored to lead by teaching. Most evident in the letters she wrote to Washington in 1898 was her desire to re-create the Tuskegee Machine in New York. In one letter she lobbied Washington’s “endorsement” so that she could develop and advance an industrial institution in Brooklyn. She wanted a big house that would eventually serve both Black women and Black men. She told him that she planned to provide temporary lodging; lessons in sewing, cooking, and millinery for the women; and cobbling and manual training for the men. She envisioned that once the industrial school established itself, she would add other classes, such as typing, stenography, bookkeeping, and amenities like an expanded library and gymnasium. She was confident that the “Tuskegee system” 182 “Lifting as We Climb” would spread to New York.123 In another letter sent to Washington just eight days later Matthews reiterated, “I want to plant a ‘minia- ture Tuskegee’ in 97th St.”124 “Let us call it White Rose,” Matthews said, “and I shall always feel that the girls will think of the meaning—purity, goodness and virtue and strive to live up to our beautiful name.”125 In 1897 she founded the White Rose Settlement House for “colored girls” in New York as an offshoot of the larger White Rose Industrial Association. According to Jeffrey B. Perry, Matthews was one of the most “prominent Black women in the country.”126 Looking at the formation of settlement houses like White Rose enables the reader to observe the tangible efforts of Black women’s racial uplift efforts at the turn of the twentieth century. Just as White, middle-class, and educated women, like Jane Addams in Chicago, took to lifting the poor and newly arrived immigrant from foreign lands, so too did women like Matthews. However, Black-identified women, Matthews in particular, focused their attention on young Black girls who had migrated from the South in search of work. The aims of White Rose Settlement House reveal the intersecting interests of Americanization, morality, and productivity, which were quite common during the Progressive Era. Yet Matthews and others were not only teaching women about the virtues of womanhood; they were teaching them how to become Black American workers. The lessons women received from White Rose were not unlike lessons offered by other settlement houses. Taking care of a home, getting an education, often an industrial one, and maintaining their children were the usual concerns. But at White Rose the “colored women” also learned “race history.” The home boasted a comprehensive library dedicated to Black history, and while women resided there they were required to take Black history classes. Interestingly, the women who worked for Matthews at White Rose were usually the children or wives of Reconstruction-era politicians, artists, and entrepreneurs. For example, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, a writer and the wife of the eminent Black poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, taught English at the school.127 Frances Reynolds Keyser, who was the first Black graduate “Lifting as We Climb” 183 from Normal College of the City of New York (later called Hunter College), worked at White Rose as Matthews’s assistant principal, as well as at a number of other service-related associations. This was not uncommon. The women who worked there typically served in some capacity at the Young Woman’s Christian Association, the nacw, Tus- kegee Institute, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.128 In an 1897 article titled “To Help the Colored Race,” the New York Times offered a very different observation about Black conferences.129 Not only did the paper’s coverage of a conference at the Hampton Nor- mal and Agricultural Institute complicate the notion that the “Black public sphere” was remedial or somehow more benevolent in its recommendations to Black people. The article revealed the same sort of class-based, racist assertions one might find in a White public sphere. Moreover the article highlighted the relevance of a two-pronged strategy for Black success: it observed that Black uplift leaders advocated the pursuit of both industrial training for some African Americans and higher education for others, distinctions that were often defined in terms of race, color, and elite class membership. Several states sent delegates to the conference in Hampton, Vir- ginia, on July 21, 1897, to discuss “the Negro’s needs.” Black professors, farmers, entrepreneurs, teachers, clubwomen, and school principals attended. Discussion over the usual matters of concern—education, religion, employment, business, ambition, and health—dominated. The principal of Hampton, Dr. H. B. Frissell, stressed “the matter of getting land and homes.” Frissell warned that “the chances for Negroes to get homes of their own were diminishing.” He concluded that by 1907 it would be next to impossible for Blacks to buy their own land and homes in the South, as “speculators from the North” were voraciously “buying land in blocks,” causing prices to skyrocket. Fris- sell also expressed concern over Black loss of employment to immigrants and to Southern Whites. He said, “Trade, which was once in the hand of . . . colored people in the South are theirs no longer.” B. F. Banks contested Frissell’s grim picture by announcing the founding of a “building loan association.” Banks declared the business was 184 “Lifting as We Climb” so successful that it had loaned $80,000 on mortgages, of which only $50,000 were still outstanding. In terms of uplift devoted to Black women, the conference employed a tone shared by other nineteenth-century reformers. Black women at the conference held a separate meeting. The topics under discussion included the instruction of “dressmaking, millinery, cooking and everything essential to the making of a more perfect home.” Here the limited role offered by the cult of true womanhood was obvious. The Times noted that “such conferences [were] not rare.” Indeed prominent leaders regularly met to discuss the uplift of Black America. However, the tenor of this conference points to the gulf that lay between Black leaders and the masses they served. Frederick M. Fitch, referred to as a Black “missionary worker among colored people” in Charlotte County, Virginia, said that within his community, the “colored people [were] listless and without either energy or ambition.” He urged the conference attendees to awaken the Black masses and insisted that “there needed to be something to make them discontented with their present state.” In order to better Black and White relations in the South, Fannie J. Coppin, before becoming a missionary in Africa, made several condescending suggestions to Black people in the U.S.: “Give the white people better servants to perform the manifold duties of domestic service so well that they cannot complain. Find them better cooks, better laundresses, and better servants. . . . Let the colored people undertake to do well what they know how to do, and they will get along . . . nicely.” Coppin continued, “Those who are advanced in the social scale must set the example of respecting domestic service.” Had a White woman reformer made this speech, one might read the class- based, racially-deterministic language for just what it was. However, these words, uttered by a prominent Black woman leader, are somehow seen as benevolent uplift. Coppin, born to a slave mother in 1837, was purchased by her aunt soon after the Fugitive Slave Law was passed in 1850. She recalled that her aunt tried to provide her an easier life than a former slave might expect: “She had a home to offer me; but the slavish element was so “Lifting as We Climb” 185 strong in me that I must make myself a servant. Ah, how those things cut me then.” As soon as she could, she left her aunt to work as a domestic. However, Coppin continually sought to educate herself. She explained, “I want to fit myself to help educate my people.” After years of self-education and private tutoring for which she paid on her own, she entered Oberlin College and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1865. Coppin went on to teach Greek, Latin, and mathematics at Phil- adelphia’s Institute for Colored Youth. She was later promoted to lady principal of Philadelphia Institute.130 Perhaps it was her experience as a domestic that influenced her recommendation to other Black women to take up domestic labor. Yet she had done so much more. Instead of recommending higher education to other Black people, she emphasized their need to “respect hon- est labor,” which was a euphemistic phrase for industrial or domestic work. Along the same lines, Della I. Hayden, Black principal of Vir- ginia Normal School, pleaded for young Black men and women to stay in the South, where they could receive an industrial education. She concluded, “Neither the climate nor the customs of the North- ern cities . . . were good for the country-bred Negroes of the South.”131

Adella Hunt Logan In describing Hunt Logan’s ancestry, D. W. Culp emphasizes an almost regal quality: “It is known that she has an inheritance of blood, tradition and history of which any American woman might be proud.”132 Born in February 1863 in Sparta, Georgia, Hunt Logan belonged to a group of mixed-race people who were never enslaved. Her father was Henry Hunt, a White farmer and Confederate officer, and her mother was Mariah Hunt, Mulatto freewoman. Because of an increase in Georgia of racially restrictive laws pertaining to interracial marriage, Henry and Mariah lived apart by 1870, but remained married. The fact that Henry paid for Adella’s education attests to his participation in her life.133 She is an archetypal example of a nineteenth-century mixed-race woman who took on the role of steward for a rural Black community. After attending Sparta Academy and graduating from Atlanta University in 1881, she taught at the American Missionary 186 “Lifting as We Climb” School in Georgia. Her work as a “city missionary,” Culp concludes, prepared her to teach at Tuskegee in 1883. She replaced Olivia David- son as lady principal in 1885, on the occasion of Davidson’s marriage to Booker T. Washington. While at Tuskegee, Hunt taught English and social sciences, but focused primarily on training other teachers. In 1888 she married Warren Logan, treasurer of Tuskegee Institute.134 She did exceptionally well at Tuskegee, so that Washington offered her the job of assessing the “fitness of each teacher” employed there. He asked her to think well and hard before accepting the position.135 In the end, Hunt Logan decided to take the job. In 1902, when asked to write an essay addressing the reasons for high mortality rates among Black Southerners, Hunt Logan’s response, although sympathetic to poverty, took on a moralistic, eugenic, and racially essentialist tone. This is not a surprise. Hunt Logan was an ardent supporter of a heredity-based interpretation of racial traits. In 1897, at a conference composed of Black intellectuals in Atlanta, she gave a speech “on the silent but powerful thing known as heredity.”136 In Culp’s 1902 anthology of twentieth-century Negro literature, he included Hunt Logan’s essay regarding high mortality rates in Black America. In her opinion, the areas in which Blacks resided were the “most unsanitary.” She described “dilapidated” homes, where excessive “germs of disease” made it “impossible for the young and the feeble” to survive. She also concluded that “great intemperance in both eating and drinking” contributed significantly to high Black mortality rates. In some cases, she recognized that “scarcity of food” contributed to the problem, but the “criminal carelessness in regard to nutrition” among Black people themselves, she decided, was the cause of such a “low state of health” and “excessive mortality.”137 Hunt Logan directed her criticism mainly toward women, more specifically mothers. She concluded that the “slaughter of innocents” (infants) was “in large measure” a result of “improper feeding.” She suggested that for some mothers, leaving children in order to work was an “honorable” reason; however, she alleged “less worthy . . . purposes” or the “fancied or cultivated dislike of children” as key causes. She wrote, “It is a sad day for people when happy motherhood declines.”138 “Lifting as We Climb” 187 On the topic of disease, Hunt Logan also recognized the prevalence of tuberculosis as a contributor to high Black mortality. She concluded that the transmission of disease was a result of “ignorant people [who] do not understand how to escape it.” She recommended that “anti-spitting laws” be “rigidly” enforced. Nutrition, sanitary habits, and “indifference, to the . . . stages of disease” were other causes of tuberculosis. It was, however, her conclusion that African Ameri- cans’ “comparatively small lung capacity” that contributed to increased transmission of tuberculosis—a judgment that concisely broadcast her eugenic interpretation of disease. It is important to keep in mind, however, that Hunt Logan cannot be taken out of her historical context. At the time her essay was written, eugenics was the prevailing ideology in the study of humans. I do not mean to say that there was something particular or unusual about Hunt Logan, but rather that her conclusions represent the mainstream opinions of women, Black or White, in the reform movement. Interestingly, the men who contributed essays on the same question concluded less moralistic and racially deterministic explanations. Their answers mostly recognized the effects of “poverty, prejudice and ignorance,” that flourished in an era of racial injustice.139 In contrast, Hunt Logan focused blame on the individuals, especially mothers. To emphasize the primacy of individual responsibility for the social condition of poverty, she wrote, “Money will come to those who earnestly desire it, because they will work for it.” Finally, she recommended that the “life of the masses must be improved” by education and various social institutions, including “the press, the courts and the church.”140 Her essay perfectly illustrates what Ruth C. Engs describes as the “convergence of social purity and social hygiene.”141 Her vision of disease transmission and the role mothers should play in making the race more “fit” distinguished a set of different expectations for Black-identified women than for Black-identified men. Women’s role was cemented to reproductive productivity and to the reduction of mortality. Black women’s aims emphasized the physical as much as they recognized the moral or the philosophical. Hackley during her many lectures given to girls across the country emphasized the same sort of reproductive responsibility. 188 “Lifting as We Climb”

E. Azalia Hackley This evaluation of Hackley, a famous concert singer, music teacher, clubwoman, and writer, focuses mainly on a series of lectures she gave while she toured industrial schools and women’s clubs throughout the South during the 1910s. Many of her lectures were compiled into a list of specific recommendations for young Black women to succeed. They were published in a book titled The Colored Girl Beautiful. The ways in which she outlined her expectations of uplift and the means by which she defined beauty, duty, and appropriate strivings for Black women illuminate the gender-specific constraints and expectations for Black women’s leadership, as well as the industrial role they prescribed for the masses of Black women and men. Her biographer, Lisa Brevard, contends that “Hackley’s ministry relied upon working-class people.” Brevard describes Hackley as one of Du Bois’s talented tenth. Yet, in terms of her similarity of purpose, Hackley likened herself to Washington. Like Washington, Hackley envisioned a different path for herself than she did for the masses she counseled and lectured.142 Hackley was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, on June 29, 1867, to Henry and Corilla Beard Smith. The family relocated to Detroit in 1870 because the couple had reached a level of success that heightened White resentment and caused “racial threats.” John Beatty, a Union supporter and contemporary of the Smiths, described Murfreesboro as “an aristocratic town. . . . The poor whites are as poor as rot, and the rich very rich. There is no substantial well-to-do middle class here. The slaves are, in fact, the middle class here. They are not considered so good, of course, as their masters, but a great deal better than the white trash.”143 His description of the town in which Hackley grew up provides insight into how the Smiths, and eventually Hackley, viewed the possibility of class mobility beyond race. At the request of the lady principal of Tuskegee Institute, Hackley gave a lecture to the female students at Tuskegee in 1910. She spoke to a wide range of topics that she deemed indispensable for individual success and the success of the race.144 The topics included appropriate manners, concepts of beauty, motherhood, temperance, and “Lifting as We Climb” 189 opportunities for leadership. Hackley’s recommendations in The Col- ored Girl Beautiful were affectionate in tone, but her criteria for beauty were so thoroughly steeped in the belief of White superiority that her message reads like a eugenically informed instruction manual crafted for the purpose of creating a more palatable form of Blackness.145 For example, Hackley placed special emphasis on deportment. She said that a Black woman should not speak or laugh loudly and ought to mute her emotions in order to appear sensible and in control. The ability to contain oneself, to show restraint, best represented respectability. According to Hackley, “repose of manner . . . a soft voice, [and] quietude [would give Black women] a sense of power.” She supported passivity for Black women in all areas except in matters pertaining to sexual purity. She also advised women to avoid “over-eating, coarseness, inertia, [and] anger.” In order to create a better image of Black America, she instructed Black women to “conquer habits of laziness, [and] untidiness.”146 Hackley also stressed that the racial uplift movement provided significant “opportunities . . . for leadership.” Along with her specific recommendations about beauty and character, she supported the idea of teaching “Negro History” to Black girls so that they would learn to be “proud” of their “dark skin” (this from an extremely light-skinned woman). She proclaimed, “What a privilege to carve the destiny of a race!” As did Hunt Logan, Hackley emphasized the primacy of women in uplifting the race. According to Hackley, it was Black women’s “purpose [to] further race advancement” and to remember that leadership was a requirement for the race, as well as for individual survival: “Everyone who gets up must pull up, or else she will be kept down by the weight of the racial burden.” She described an obliga- tory feature of Black leadership, as well the social distance between those who led and those who followed: “Each one’s welfare is closely bound with that of the masses.”147 Hackley’s interpretation of Black women’s leadership revealed the benefits of racial uplift work, but also presented the work of “race advancement” as a vocation, a specialty that could set one apart. She offered an analogy: “It is better to be the first in an Iberian village than second in Rome. The race needs daring . . . people to think and 190 “Lifting as We Climb” speak.” Here is an allusion to the tendency of lighter-skinned, privileged women to find their life’s mission exclusively within African America, as opposed to trying to rise within a White-dominated society. Hack- ley essentially suggested that it was better to be a big, light-skinned, well-educated fish in a little pond than to venture out as a small fish competing in a vast White ocean. She also believed that another benefit to the work of racial uplift was that it made others “take notice.”148 Hackley believed the Black woman’s primary role was to become “a race missionary and prove her worth and power, thus winning friends for the race.” She said the responsibility for proving racial virtue was specific to Black women, not people of her own class. The gender distinction she conceived could not be clearer than when she stated, “To educate a boy is but the education of an individual—but when one educates a girl, the education of family results.”149 Here the focus on women as the source of family survival parallels Hunt Logan’s blame of mothers, rather than fathers, for high mortality rates. This is a key marker of the way that privilege and identity differed for Black men and Black women. Hackley’s general message to women was similar to the message that White middle-class women espoused: “She will endeavor to lift herself to the highest plane of true womanhood that she may pull others higher.” However, the vision for “colored womanhood,” as articulated by Hackley, was defined not just by temperance, purity, and domesticity; it was also shaped by pursuit of an industrial trade. Her recommendations for education paralleled the Tuskegee vision in that she placed a higher value on industrial or domestic education over liberal studies. She contended, “The progress of the race will depend not upon the ‘book learning’ taught in school, but upon the right habits formed and the amount of self culture that the school inspires.”150 Her de-emphasis on intellectual endeavors echoed the conception of women like Jose- phine Bruce, who warned Black professionals that it would be in their interest to support industrial education so that they might have a class of Black people upon whom they could practice their profession. One cannot avoid observing that this labor division was also drawn along the color line. Compare the images of Tuskegee students during “Lifting as We Climb” 191 the early twentieth century with images of Hackley, Bruce, and Hunt Logan (all of whom either were faculty or lectured at the school). One must observe that the complexions of the students were markedly darker than the majority of lecturers and teachers who taught at Tuskegee. Hackley was not vague in expressing her belief in the proper role education would play for “colored girls.” She averred that “the colored girl beautiful will not aim for book education alone. She will select a school which will fit her to grace her home from parlor to kitchen.” What made her advice specific to Black women was her suggestion that they “be taught a trade.” And she urged Black women to accept their station in life. She asked those employed in manual labor to remember that they are “‘somebody’ [when] washing dishes and scrubbing a floor.” Perhaps she aimed to dignify manual labor? I contend that she gave the masses of young Black women a legitimate rhetoric for labor. Her chapter on “the colored working girl beautiful” attempted to summon pride in one’s work. However, in so doing, she suggested that laborers (who were often darker-skinned) should accept a fixed class position.151 Yet Hackley did not hold herself to the same standard in terms of domestic duties that she prescribed for the young women at Tuskegee. Brevard points out that Hackley had very little interest in housekeeping; in fact “the situation between her and her husband Edwin Hackley, attorney and editor of the Denver Statesmen, became so strained over household duties that Hackley’s mother-in-law moved in with the couple to perform household chores.152 She explained that if, by chance, one were in the position to move up, one should understand that “contacts [were] worth more than money.” Thus a woman in that position should remain patient to enter “the long-closed social door.” If she pulled herself “up-up-up” she would “grow in character influence, and reputation, until people forgot her ancestry.” When Hackley concluded that both “poor white and black alike” were learning better how to decorate their homes, she emphasized the class component of this design as much as the racial. Hackley insisted that these women of the poorer classes were to maintain modest homes that would most accurately represent their class position.153 192 “Lifting as We Climb” Hackley’s description of the people she mentored could be quite condescending. Dictating her obituary before her death, she stated, “Born, lived, and died for her little brown sisters and brothers, that they might be lifted from the slums of music.” She compared the work of transforming the future of Black children to the work of a “breeder,” who must “aim to get a better breed of stock in each generation.” She insisted that the “cry of the hour is ‘a better breed of babies.’” In fact she was convinced that, unlike the “leopard’s” immutable “spots” a “colored person . . . could change his appearance.” She also stressed inheritable qualities of beauty that were exclusive to distinct races. She observed that Black children had “naturally” beautiful eyes, in contrast to “foreign children,” who had “sore eyes.” She believed that Black children had the best teeth and the best voices for sing- ing. She wrote, “Colored children should be taught . . . to improve personal appearance, as far as objectionable racial characteristics are concerned.”154 Hackley considered the development of the Black race in evolution- ary terms: “This mixed race will surely come into its own. The colored race comes from several lines of White ancestry, and as fruit is grafted to a finer degree of species, so the colored race will some day show its latent powers.” Again, this type of thinking was not specific to Hack- ley. The embrace of eugenics was pervasive throughout the country. In fact Hackley came to the same conclusion that Hunt Logan did in terms of inheritable defects of a Black person’s lung capacity. She thought that because Black Americans had let their backs slump over, they had caused their “chest[s] [to] cave in, [which led them to be] lia- ble to pneumonia and tuberculosis.”155 No matter how irrational or offensive these sentiments may seem now, they were received as the most logical explanation for variation among perceptively different groups of people in Hackley and Hunt Logan’s day. Hackley understood that “heredity is not all,” but considered it to have a “great influence.” She recommended that mothers study heredity in order to better regulate their children’s demeanors. She explained, “Inheritance comes from two lines of ancestry, [and] the prospective may be able to control and supervise the tendencies from her line.” It “Lifting as We Climb” 193 was the mother’s responsibility, through her restraint of emotion, to influence her child’s characteristics while she was pregnant.156 According to Hackley, clothes shaped the images of Black women in vital ways, revealing “unfitness and unwholesomeness . . . silliness . . . [and] conceit.” One’s choice of clothes could even cause shame to a home. Thus Hackley insisted that “a colored girl should study . . . her life position and dress accordingly.” Here again, one may observe the sense of permanence associated with class standing, as represented by women’s “costumes.”157 Hackley’s vision of racial pride as it related to appearance was, at times, uplifting and at other times, quite demeaning. She believed that the standard of beauty in the U.S. was measured “mainly upon a white skin.” In order to reconcile prejudice in the U.S, she applied a relativistic framework to describe beauty. For example, “To a savage African, a baby with a black skin and flat nose is the ideal. To a Chinese, a plump, yellow, slant eyed baby satisfies.”158 Her description of an African person was really no different from that which any eugenically informed, White woman missionary in Africa might have offered at that time. Despite Hackley’s condescending references, she advocated for pride in dark skin color, writing, “Is the dark skin a spot? Oh no, it is [the Black person’s] history, his strength.” However, in the passages immediately following, she contended that the noses of Black people were “flat” and too big, their lips thick, and had developed in just that way as a result of their timid and peaceful disposition. She recommended that they ought to “pinch up, think up, will up, a hump,” much like the “hump of the Roman nose which indicates, ‘fight.’” Not only were ideals of physical beauty molded by White concepts, but they were cemented to the idea that one could perfect one’s features. For instance, Hackley was happy to report, “Our mouths are improving.” She went so far as to attribute “rare psychic powers” to darker skin color. In terms of racial identification, she was quite clear: “No one can lift the race unless he [or she] stays in it.”159 Despite her sense of superiority and her apparent physical Whiteness, Hackley remained Black in her own eyes, but a Black person of a special class. 194 “Lifting as We Climb” The lives of many elite mixed-race, Black-identified women necessitate that we reinterpret the nacw’s motto, “Lifting as we climb.” Many of these women leaders did not simply advance in U.S. society and decide to take others along, without some gain to themselves. Rather the very process of uplift was as elevating to the leader as it was to the recipient of help. It was the process of lifting that enabled elite mixed-race leaders to advance their social and, at times, economic status. It was specifically their service that gave them the authority and freedom they sought. Black-identified women, like White women, had to act within the constraints of a male-dominated social order. Many Black- identified and White women leaders espoused racist ideas popular throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They used the rhetoric of empire, including references to native primitiv- ism, while they supported the rationale that American empire was necessary to “civilize” people. They believed that through service a society could be perfected. As they borrowed ideas from social Dar- winism, they spoke about their reform efforts as an “evolution” of a sort. The criteria for republican motherhood, or the “cult of domesticity,” also featured prominently in their reform efforts. Temper- ance, Christianity, thrift, and a strong work ethic were thought to be civilizing, not just for Black women migrating from the South but for women in Africa as well. Mixed-race, Black-identified women described Black working-class American and African women using the same loathsome characterizations White middle-class women used to describe Indigenous Americans and immigrants from Latin Amer- ica, the Caribbean, Asia, and Eastern and Southern Europe. However, as Black women leaders tried to reform the masses of Black women, they themselves were transformed. As they internalized all the racist descriptions of Blackness common to popular culture of the nineteenth century, they reinforced notions of the supposed inferiority of the people they served. Over time, however, their advocacy would result in reforming their own esteem of the race. Despite the attitudes and motives with which they began, they unwittingly lifted up the meaning of Blackness by choosing to identify as Black when other choices were at their disposal. Conclusion

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a Black identity for the masses of Americans of African descent often amounted to political, legal, and social exclusion and exposure to various forms of violence, including lynching and rape. For other Americans of Afri- can descent, particularly those whose racial appearance was ambiguous, their Black identity afforded them an opportunity for leadership, increased status, notoriety, economic gain, and power. The meaning of race in U.S. history has never been consistent, nor have the values ascribed to so-called distinct races been absolute. Yet the story of Black submission and White oppression has remained constant in the nation’s narrative of its own history. Through the research conducted for this study I found that privilege between and among races ebbed and flowed more fluidly than some historians might have presumed. The Black identity of the mixed-race individuals presented in this study generally afforded them a mission—an uplifting vocation, if you will—as well as status, access to wealth, and political power. During the years immediately preceding and following the Civil War, opportunities for mixed-race, Black-identified men became more readily available. Their influence was real: they served in both houses of Congress, as governors, judges, lawyers, and attorneys general. Perhaps 196 Conclusion because of the semifluid nature of racial categories immediately after the formal end of legal slavery, their White contemporaries recognized the legitimacy of their accomplishments more easily than some twenty-first-century readers might. For example, the following letter from a White man named Henry G. Hichborn to Senator Blanche Kelso Bruce, dated March 3, 1876, attests to the acquiescence of ordinary White Americas to Black men in power:

Dear Sir—I have read your speech of great interest touching the relation of the Republican party to your race, which means to me Amer- ican. Now Sir, I am a true American and consequently a Republican, an uncompromising one, believing in the rights of all men, as Amer- ican citizens without regard to color or condition in society. Acknowl- edging you to be far superior to myself, although I am a white man. . . . Since my experience with the colored man during the war I swore to be his friend and I have assisted . . . in a practical way. I have written to Mr. Pinchback asking favor of him and his co-workers the purport of which is this, I desire to be reinstated in the Navy Yard in my former position. . . . Can you lend me your influence and help me and my family?1

This perception of Black leadership was also part of the public discourse. In 1878 The Republican noted that Senator Bruce extended his help to a White woman in search of work. The woman, unnamed in the article, is described as “high-born” and was rumored to have enjoyed, before emancipation, great financial success, prestige, and public recognition. Now widowed and with two children to feed, she asked to see the senator for help. He agreed to help her, saying, “When I was a slave, working on my master’s plantation, you were known as one of the richest and most elegant ladies of the country, and now that times have so greatly changed for us both, I shall be glad of the opportunity to serve you.”2 However, Black leaders did not uniformly support interracial coop- eration. Some reinforced racial antagonism, not only between Black and White but also between mixed-race, lighter-skinned Blacks and those who were considered to be “fully Negro.” While people like P. Conclusion 197 B. S. Pinchback and Théophile T. Allain were fighting segregation, other Black-identified, mixed-race leaders sought to perpetuate segregation in strictly racial terms. Years before the Supreme Court ruled that separate was equal in the Plessy v. Ferguson case, the light-skinned, Black-identified state senator Henry Demas asserted:

[Louisiana] is peopled by a far larger number of cultured and wealthy colored people than is conjectured, and owing to the intermingling of the races, it is frequently a difficult matter to determine—from the standpoint of color—the white from the Negro. Would it not be unjust, I ask, to relegate this class, to a coach occupied by those much inferior to them in life, and by thus doing, humiliate a people accustomed to better surroundings? It would be forcing them to associate with the worst class of the Negro element and be an unmerited rebuke upon the colored man of finer sensibilities.3

By the end of the nineteenth century, Jim Crow statutes had begun to spread across the country, restricting the civil rights of Black Amer- icans still more. In addition, several Democratic electoral wins caused many Black-identified Republican politicians to change course. They sought federal appointments as a way to stay in power. They also looked for ways by which they could exercise proprietary privilege by purchasing land or investing in other entrepreneurial concerns. Others looked to America’s growing territories, both informal and formal, as places to raise their status. Divisions within the Black leadership over domestic immigration and American colonization efforts were common. People like T. Thomas Fortune were in favor of Black migration to the Philippines and Hawai’i. Others, like Richard T. Greener, advocated for capital investment in Vladivostok and elsewhere. Some saw colonization as a venture in which they might exercise a civilizing mission. Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and Fannie J. Cop- pin considered a back-to-Africa movement as a way to carry Chris- tianity and Western mores to Africa. In contrast, Senator Bruce was vehemently opposed to colonization. In a letter to the Cincinnati Com- mercial he wrote, “The Negro of America is not African, but Ameri- can,—in his physical qualities and aptitudes, in his mental development 198 Conclusion and biases, in his religious beliefs and hopes, and in his political conception and convictions he is an American.” Using the language of empire, Bruce sympathized with the “importance . . . [of] carrying forward . . . Christian development in Africa.” For example, in the case of Liberia, he believed that sending over an enormous “dependent class” would do nothing to help that county in general, nor would it help “the barbarian tribes that surround her.” Bruce insisted that the most “efficient” way to assist Africa was to allow “the natives of the country” to benefit from the education afforded by “philanthropic efforts of Christian Nations for their work of civilization.”4 Mixed-race, Black-identified women’s voices and actions were just as important to the leadership of African America. Like their male counterparts, mixed-race women’s propensity to identify monoracially as Black led to their own increased status. However, women’s blocked access to elected positions concentrated their focus on the private and domestic realm. The impetus to define the appropriate roles of women and mothers dominated the Black women’s leadership class, as much as it did for their White female counterparts. In an effort to increase their own status, Black women leaders, often through club work or in their capacity as educators, reinforced permanent class positions by favoring industrial education for the masses. They took this position despite the fact that most of them had enjoyed a liberal education themselves. In addition, mixed-race Black-identified women leaders quite often proclaimed eugenically informed ideas about beauty and health. The role of beauty, specifically as it pertained to racial appearance, also shaped the social organization of Black women’s leadership in the U.S. A Cleveland Gazette article published in 1896 reveals the interre- lated aspects of beauty, racial appearance, and privilege. This idea is further complicated by the subject of the story, a racially ambiguous- looking woman. Ednorah Nahar was an elocutionist and performer during the late nineteenth century. The Gazette commented on her attempt to pass as White while in Ohio. Of particular relevance to this project, however, is not the paper’s assertion of her passing for White but its judgment on the absurdity of using skin color to determine Conclusion 199 race or national identity. It also pointed out how peculiar it was for Nahar, who appeared to be White, to have to pass as White, when in actuality it made more sense to consider that she was “passing for an Afro-American” when she adopted that identity.

Color does not count for as much as nationality. For instance, if a colored person renounces his race and passes for a Spaniard, an Indian, a Turk, a Cuban, he is accorded the same privileges that are accorded a white man. However, if he fails to deny that he is an American Negro, he meets with discrimination. There is now in this city a young lady of light complexion who is an elocutionist of rare ability. On two or three former occasions she has visited this city for the purposes of giving entertainments among colored people, the race with which she is identified, always stopping among them. She is here now, but discards them all, will not recognize them, but associates with whites altogether under the guise of being a Span- iard, and as a result she is accommodated at a white residence and received with and accorded perfect equality. It may not be patriotic to deny your own, but the end justifies the means. Certain it is she is accorded privileges that would be denied her if she were passing for an Afro-American.5

Throughout this project, it may seem that I have been too critical of the men and women of mixed-race heritage featured here. During both the research and writing phases of this book I went to great lengths to evaluate and reevaluate the evidence I introduced, while keeping in mind the very different social circumstances that defined late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Americans. Inspired by other scholars who have analyzed some of the same individuals, I sought to answer a different set of questions: Why did people who looked White choose to identify as Black, at a time when to do so, according to our national narrative, would result in grave circumstances? What I found, in contrast to the oversimplified, congratulatory assessments made about mixed-race Black leaders, was a complex group of people who negotiated their status within a political economy that had yet to settle on the values of Whiteness and Blackness. Thus, when 200 Conclusion historians like Jacqueline M. Moore describe Black women as leaders who “showed unwavering dedication to any benevolent activity, that might improve the conditions for African Americans,” I could not help but feel that their conclusion was incomplete.6 There is no doubt that many men and women of African descent who enjoyed a better quality of life, in economic and social terms, did indeed help the poorer, perhaps less-entitled among them. However, to overgeneralize or to point out only the help leaders offered the so- called Black masses inevitably obscures the more important role those masses played in lifting themselves up. Moreover we miss the other legacy of racial uplift ideology: that uplift activities and ideas had just as significant an impact on the leaders as on the beneficiaries of uplift. Racial uplift, more than anything, elevated the status of the men and women who did the lifting. Positioning themselves as the arbiters of progress, they also understood that a key criterion for success in the uplift movement was for them to identify as Black. Had these people passed as White, it is likely that the record of their lives would not be held in prestigious archives. They would remain anonymous among other White, middle-class people about whom we know nothing.7 For example, other than experts on Reconstruction- era Louisiana, most general readers of U.S. history do not know about, nor do they care to know about, the lieutenant governors who came before or after Pinchback. Similarly, the fact that the U.S. posted a large number of Black-identified diplomats to foreign countries is a complete surprise to most of the public. Moreover our national narrative tends to reinforce the idea that all Black-identified Americans were benevolent actors. What this unwittingly does is suggest that there exists some sort of physiological determinant of character. To continue to perceive Black people in this manner is to displace the complexity intrinsic to all people. For example, students of Progressivism have come to understand how White charity workers, in their efforts for social justice and social control during the period from the 1890s to the 1920s, could both help and harm. This paradox of Progressivism is today widely accepted by academics.8 To acknowledge that Black-identified women and men both helped Conclusion 201 and harmed those they sought to uplift, I contend, makes us uncom- fortable because the idea displaces the American narrative of Black benevolence and White oppression. Making the case might even be considered heretical. However, to acknowledge the presence of this paradox in history is to acknowledge equality in the actual sense— that is, to recognize the capacity for good and evil among all men and women.

Notes

Abbreviations b. Box number. bkbp. Blanche K. Bruce Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Collection, Howard Uni- versity, Washington dc. cbdp. Caroline Bond Day Papers. Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnol- ogy, Harvard University, Cambridge ma. f. Folder number. gamp. George A. Myers Papers. Ohio Historical Center Archives Library, Colum- bus, Ohio. jwj. James Weldon Johnson and Grace Nail Johnson Papers. James Weldon John- son Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven ct. jtp. Jean Toomer Papers. James Weldon Johnson Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven ct. pbsp. P. B. S. Pinchback Papers. Moorland-Spingarn Collection, Howard Uni- versity, Washington dc. rcbp. Roscoe Conklin Bruce Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, How- ard University, Washington dc. rtgp. Richard T. Greener Papers, 1870–18, New York Public Library, Schomburg Library, Mss., Archives, and Rare Books, Sc mg 107, box 1. tafp. Turnbull-Allain Family Papers. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, Louisiana State University Libraries, Baton Rouge.

Introduction 1. While aware of its limits, I employ the term “American” for rhetorical if not technical ease. Its usage is incomplete and at times inaccurate. “Americans” may be understood to include anyone from Quebec to Argentina. In this 204 Notes to Pages xviii–xviii

study, however, the use of the term is meant to include those people who lived within the United States. It is in no way my intention to obscure the racial, ethnic, or national plurality of American identity. Throughout this book I will primarily use the terms “mixed race” and “Black-identified” to describe persons whose ancestry included Black and White lineages. This description is in no way meant to displace or ignore other racial mixes. Clearly a person of both Chinese and Black ancestry may be referred to as of mixed race. The permutations are endless; however, the racial heritages belonging to the figures I chose for this project include Black, White, and, to an undetermined degree, Indigenous American lineages. The extent that Indigenous American ancestry is present in the persons presented here is difficult to determine. This is primarily due to the context of racial classification in which these mixtures occurred. That is, within a society that formed racial criteria in binary terms. Once Indigenous Americans intermixed with Blacks or Whites, their Black or White racial membership often subsumed their Indigenous heritage. The lexicon of terms used in mixed-race or multiracial scholarship is abundant. Categories like biracial, mixed, multiethnic, mulatto, quadroon, and octo- roon have served to describe people who did or did not fit neatly into fixed racial categories. My choice to use the term “mixed race” is also rhetorical, in that the term intimates the historical and etymological trail from which racial construction emerged. The term also reminds the reader of the sense of permanence with which the process of racial rather than ethnic categorization occurred. For thoughtful introductions to the complexities of these dynamics, see Lawry, Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South; Sturm, Blood Pol- itics; Perdue, “Mixed Blood” Indians; Hilden, When Nickels Were Indians. 2. Good places to start for a more sophisticated view are Spickard, Almost All Aliens; Alexander, The New Jim Crow; Coates, Between the World and Me; Ward, The Fire This Time. 3. For a notable exception, see Nash, Forbidden Love. For an in-depth analysis of race as a social construct and its respective formation into single-race categories, see Cornell and Hartmann, Ethnicity and Race, 15–38, or Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States. See Marks, Human Biodi- versity, and Smedley, Race in North America, for the historical relationship between science and the development of race as a biological determinant. 4. W. E. B. Du Bois is arguably the best source for the history of Black oppression in the United States. His prolificacy is unmatched. For a fundamental framework of the study of Black oppression see The Souls of Black Folk and Dusk of Dawn. These books not only offer accounts of oppression but include an analysis of the logic and motive for Black debasement in both the Notes to Pages xix–xxii 205

American and international contexts. The latter half of the twentieth century included scores of historians who continued to chronicle and analyze Black oppression. Among the most prominent are Stampp, The Peculiar Institution; Jordan, White over Black; Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom; Genovese, Roll, Jordan Roll; and Blassingame, The Slave Community. Inspired by those authors writing before them, historians during the 1990s began to shift their perspectives increasingly toward the study of agency among Black Americans in the midst of racial terror and violence. Impressive examples include Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, and Johnson, Soul by Soul. 5. Leslie, Woman of Color, Daughter of Privilege; Bundles, On Her Own Ground; McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom. 6. Litwack and Meier, Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century; Franklin and Meier, Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century; Gordon, Black Leadership for Social Change. 7. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 722–25. 8. Spickard, “The Power of Blackness.” 9. Charles W. Chesnutt articulated this view in his first novel, Mandy Oxen- dine, which White publishers thought too inflammatory to publish. (It was found among his papers more than a century later and published by Uni- versity of Illinois Press in 1997.) See also Chesnutt’s essays and speeches, e.g., “What Is a White Man?,” The Independent, May 30, 1889, 5–6, reprinted in McElrath et al., Charles W. Chesnutt, 68–73; “The Future American: A Com- plete Race-Amalgamation Likely to Occur,” Boston Evening Transcript, Sep- tember 1, 1900, 24, reprinted in McElrath et al., Charles W. Chesnutt, 131–36; “Negro Authors,” speech to the Association of Colored Men, Cleveland, 1918, reprinted in McElrath et al., Charles W. Chesnutt, 458–61. The coexistence of adopting a Black identity and acknowledging one’s own racial multiplicity is the great theme of one of Du Bois’s autobiographies, Dusk of Dawn, see esp. “The Concept of Race,” 97–133. 10. Jordan, White over Black, 74–75; Berlin, Slaves without Masters. 11. Nash, “African Americans in the Early Republics,” 13. 12. Quarles, Black Mosaic, 25–65. 13. Altoff,Amongst My Best Men; Winks, The Blacks in Canada; Thomson, Blacks in the Deep Snow, 98; Benesch, “Melville’s Black Jack.” 14. Harris, Paul Cuffe. 15. Wheatley, Complete Writings; Gates, The Trials of Phillis Wheatley. Wheatley greatly influenced the career of the nineteenth-century abolitionist, prolific novelist, and civil rights activist Francis E. W. Harper; see Harper, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted. 206 Notes to Pages xxiii–1

16. Whipper, “The Slavery of Intemperance”; Willson, A Sketch of the Higher Class of Colored Society in Philadelphia. 17. Taylor, “Mary S. Peake and Charlotte L. Forten.” 18. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 1–4. 19. Some particularly useful accounts of the Black elite include Desdunes, Our People and Our History; Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie; Williamson, New People; Zack, Race and Mixed Race; Zackodnik, The Mulatta and the Politics of Race, ix–xxiii, 115–54; Lake, Blue Veins and Kinky Hair; Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color. 20. Spickard, “The Power of Blackness.” 21. Simmons, Men of Mark, 534. 22. Wallinger, “Pauline Hopkins as Editor and Journalist.” 23. Graham, The Senator and the Socialite, 27. William Lloyd Garrison, abolitionist and publisher, gave Joseph Willson (Josephine’s father) his first job, as an assistant writer at the Liberator 24. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 115–16. 25. See Chesnutt, The Wife of His Youth; Chesnutt, The House behind the Cedars; Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition. 26. Chesnutt, “What Is a White Man?,” in McElrath et al., Charles W. Chesnutt, 68–73; Chesnutt, “Negro Authors” (speech to the Association of Colored Men, Cleveland, 1918), in McElrath, et al., Charles W. Chesnutt, 458–61. 27. Letter from Clara Burill to Roscoe Conklin Bruce, undated, b. 10-3, f. 50, rcbp. 28. “Thomas Fortune in Row with Police,” New York Times, May 15, 1903. 29. Many Reconstruction leaders also served on President William Howard Taft’s “Black Cabinet,” and others would later serve on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet.” For a schedule of their meetings and topics discussed, see, for example, letter from Ralph Waldo Tyler to Emmett Jay Scott, January 19, 1912, in Harlan, Booker T. Washington Papers, 11:459–60. 30. Letter from H. A. Wallace to Monroe C. Work, February 18, 1918, in Work et al., “Some Negro Members of Reconstruction Conventions and Legisla- tures of Congress.” 31. Cf. Daniel, “Passers and Pluralists.”

1. “As a Negro I Will Be Powerful” 1. For example, Reuter, Race Mixture, 129–216; Stonequist, The Marginal Man, esp. 184–209; Lee, I Passed for White; Conyers, “Selected Aspects of the Phenomenon of Negro Passing”; Mencke, “Mulattoes and Race Mixture”; Berzon, Neither Black nor White; Spickard, Mixed Blood, 329–39; Davis, Who Is Black?; Haizlip, The Sweeter the Juice; Williams, Life on the Color Line; Ball, Slaves in the Family; Wiencek, The Hairstons; Graham, Our Kind of People, 376–94; Sanchez, Passing; Notes to Pages 2–4 207

Ardizzone and Lewis, Love on Trial; O’Toole, Passing for White; Kroeger, Passing; Beltran and Fojas, Mixed Race Hollywood; Dreisinger, Near Black; Horne, The Color of Fascism; Broyard, One Drop; Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life; Thomp- son, Exiles at Home; Sandweiss, Passing Strange; Smith-Pryor, Property Rites; Sharfstein, The Invisible Line; Ehlers, Racial Imperatives; Dawkins, Clearly Invis- ible; Onwuachi-Willig, According to Our Hearts; Guterl, Seeing Race in Modern America, 166–81; Hobbs, A Chosen Exile; Jacoby, The Strange Career of William Ellis; Bullock, “The Mulatto in American Fiction”; Conyers, “Negro Pass- ing”; Brown, “Negro Characters as Seen by White Authors”; “The Vanishing Mulatto,” 291; Asbury, “Who Is a Negro?”; Hewlett, “Four Who Are Passing”; Kutner, “Women Who Pass for White”; “White by Day”; Murdock, “What Happened to the ‘Lost Boundaries’ Family”; Stevens, “My Father Passed for White”; “I Lived Two Lives for Thirty Years”; “Why I Never Want to Pass.” 2. “Autobiographical Writings, ‘Incredible Journey,’” jtp, Series II, b. 18, f. 493. 3. Turkel, Heroes of the American Reconstruction, 99; Sewell and Dwight, Missis- sippi Black History Makers. For a good summary of various Reconstruction politicians, see Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers; Greener, “Transit of Goods through Vladivostok”; Gerrare and Greener, Greater Russia, 267. For a biographical summary of Theophile T. Allain see Simmons, Men of Mark, 125–41. 4. Saperstein and Gullickson, “A ‘Mulatto Escape Hatch’ in the United States?” 5. Simmons, Men of Mark, 126. Du Bois offers an uncritical discussion about the prevalence of mixed-race politicians among the ranks of Reconstruc- tion politicians in “The Conservation of Races.” 6. See Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color; Williamson, New People. 7. See Zack, Race and Mixed Race; Lake, Blue Veins and Kinky Hair; Kerr, The Paper Bag Principle. For monoracial interpretations see Gordon, Black Lead- ership for Social Change; Litwack and Meier, Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century; Haskins, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback. 8. The biographical element of this chapter, along with the chronology of events for Pinchback’s life, comes from research conducted at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Division, Yale University; the Library of Congress; the Moorland-Spingarn Collection, Howard University; and the Arthur A. Schomburg Collection, New York Public Library. 9. Darwin Turner recognizes the tradition of passing for Black in In a Minor Chord, 128. Paul Spickard more thoroughly lays out the issue in “The Power of Blackness,” 103–23. 10. jtp, Series II, b.17: f. 485. 11. Simmons, Men of Mark, 533–56. According to Jean Toomer, Pinchback approved of Simmons’s autobiographical account and held a copy in his personal library. 208 Notes to Pages 5–11

12. jtp, Series II, b.17: f. 485; b. 18: f. 492. 13. Davis, Who Is Black?, 36, 41–45, 52–80. 14. jtp, Series II, b.18: f. 493, n.d. 15. Simmons, Men of Mark, 533; Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color, 42. 16. Jenks, “The Legal Status of Negro-White Amalgamation in the United States.” 17. Griffin, “Jean Toomer,” 10.8– 18. For instances of other such families, see Pascoe, What Comes Naturally; Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello; Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. 19. jtp, Series II, b. 18: f. 493. 20. Campbell, Providence, 86–87. 21. jtp, Series II, b. 18: f. 492. 22. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color, 43, 251. 23. jtp, Series II, b. 18: f. 493. For a discussion of the effect of slavery as an institution on both the White master class and Black slaves, see Fox-Genovese and Genovese, In the Mind of the Master Class; Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll; Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. 24. jtp, Series II, b. 18: f. 493. 25. jtp, Series II, b. 17: f. 485. 26. Griffin, “Jean Toomer,” 10; jtp, Series II, b. 18 f. 485. 27. jtp, Series II, b. 18: f. 493. 28. jtp, Series II, b. 18: f. 493. 29. Devol, Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi; Simmons, Men of Mark, 534; Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color, 19; jtp, Series II, b. 18: f. 492. 30. jtp, Series II, b. 18: f. 493. In the lexicon of labels for African-descended Amer- icans, the term “colored” has not always exclusively meant Black or Negro. During the nineteenth century the term referred to Mulattoes who often set themselves apart from other darker-skinned African-descended Ameri- cans. See Lake, Blue Veins and Kinky Hair, 10–12. 31. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color, 42. 32. Griffin, “Jean Toomer,” 12. 33. Davis, Who Is Black?, 36. 34. jtp, Series II, b. 18: f. 492. 35. Willard B. Gatewood and John Chandler Griffin are the notable exceptions. 36. Koger, Black Slave-Owners , 12; Williamson, New People, 18. 37. Haskins, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, 21–23; Turkel, Heroes of the Amer- ican Reconstruction, 125; Griffin, “Jean Toomer,” 15. 38. jtp, Series II, b.18: f. 492. 39. Bontemps, 100 Years of Negro Freedom, 39. Notes to Pages 11–17 209

40. Simmons, Men of Mark, 534; Turkel, Heroes of the American Reconstruction, 125. See also Smith, “The Political Career of Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback.” 41. Haskins, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, 21. 42. Wilson, The Black Phalanx, introduction and 179. 43. Haskins, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, 8; Simmons, Men of Mark, 535. Shirley Elizabeth Thompson writes of Louisiana Creoles of color, gens de cou- leur libre, “choosing to be Black” in this wartime context, for a complex array of reasons (Exiles at Home, 210–60). See also Scott, Degrees of Freedom, 30–60. 44. jtp, Series II, b. 18: f. 492. 45. Adeline P. Saffold to P. B. S. Pinchback, April 30, 1863, jtp, Series II, b. 17: f. 476. 46. Adeline P. Saffold to P. B. S. Pinchback, undated, jtp, Series II, b. 17: f. 476. 47. jtp, Series II, b. 18: f. 492; also cited in Griffin, “Jean Toomer,” 16, emphasis added. 48. jtp, Series II, b. 18: f. 492; also cited in Griffin, “Jean Toomer,” 16. 49. Egerton, Death or Liberty; Nash, The Forgotten Fifth; Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution; Holton, Black Americans in the Revolutionary Era; McPher- son, The Negro’s Civil War; Cornish, The Sable Arm; Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War; Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America. 50. Wilson, The Black Phalanx, 481. 51. Joshi and Reidy, “‘To Come Forward and Aid in Putting Down This Unholy Rebellion.’” 52. Joshi and Reidy, “To Come Forward and Aid in Putting Down This Unholy Rebellion,” 519. For an in-depth discussion of Black slave ownership, see Koger, Black Slave-Owners; Johnson and Roark, Black Masters. For discussion of Dumas and Mulatto slaveholders, see Wilson, The Black Phalanx, 169. 53. Spickard, “The Illogic of American Racial Categories”; Smedley, Race in North America, 13–36; Spickard, “The Return of Scientific Racism?” in Spickard, Race in Mind. 54. Joshi and Reidy, “To Come Forward and Aid in Putting Down This Unholy Rebellion,” 517. 55. Spickard, Mixed Blood, 249–51. 56. Kein, Creole, 29, 218; Rankin, “The Origin of Negro Leadership in New Orle- ans during Reconstruction,” 166–68. 57. Wilson, The Black Phalanx, 482; Thompson, Exiles at Home, 196. 58. Joshi and Reidy, “To Come Forward and Aid in Putting Down This Unholy Rebellion,” 518. For restrictions on the free population of Maryland, see Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground. For a comprehensive discussion of social privilege and limits, see Berlin, Slaves without Masters, 108–30. See Domin- guez, White by Definition, for a survey of the rights and privileges enjoyed by mixed-race freemen and freedmen in Louisiana. 210 Notes to Pages 17–21

59. Joshi and Reidy, “To Come Forward and Aid in Putting Down This Unholy Rebellion,” 525. 60. Ingham and Feldman, African-American Business Leaders; Blassingame, Black New Orleans; Hirsch and Logsdon, Creole New Orleans. 61. Ingham and Feldman, African-American Business Leaders. 62. For a discussion of the Woodson thesis, see Woodson, Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830; Koger, Black Slave-Owners, especially chapter 4, “‘Buying My Childrum from Ole Massa,’” 45–68. 63. Weaver, Thank God My Regiment an African One; Joshi and Reidy, “To Come Forward, and Aid in Putting Down This Unholy Rebellion” 517–18; Everett, “Émigrés and Militiamen”; Wilson, The Black Phalanx, 81–84. See Rankin, “The Origin of Negro Leadership in New Orleans during Reconstruction,” 155, for a list of other political organizations (e.g., Club Unioniste Republic- ain, the Union Radical Association, and the National Equal Rights League) established by freemen of color before and during the Civil War. 64. Testimony of Benjamin F. Butler, filed with 0–328 1863 Letters Received, Record of the Adjunct General’s Office, Record Group 94, quoted in Joshi and Reidy, “To Come Forward and Aid in Putting Down This Unholy Rebel- lion,” 529. 65. Thompson, Exiles at Home; Scott, Degrees of Freedom, 30–60. 66. Haskins, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, 21. See Turkel, Heroes of the American Reconstruction, 125; Hogue, Uncivil War, 68–75. 67. Dunbar-Nelson, “People of Color in Louisiana.” 68. Dunbar-Nelson, “People of Color in Louisiana”; Joshi and Reidy, “To Come Forward and Aid in Putting Down This Unholy Rebellion,” 518. 69. Desdunes, Our People and Our History, 118. 70. Joshi and Reidy, “To Come Forward and Aid in Putting Down This Unholy Rebellion,” 518–19. 71. Butler most likely was referring to Daniel Webster (who was White), a Whig Party politician, secretary of state, and U.S. senator during the 1830–50s. For reliable reference see Daniel Webster, The Great Speeches and Orations of Dan- iel Webster, online edition, www.gutenberg .org /etext /12606, retrieved August 12, 2005. 72. Wilson, The Black Phalanx, 194. 73. Joshi and Reidy, “To Come Forward and Aid in Putting Down This Unholy Rebellion,” 517–20. 74. Wilson, The Black Phalanx, 175; Haskins, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinch- back, 24–25. 75. Wilson, The Black Phalanx, dedication. Notes to Pages 21–25 211

76. Joshi and Reidy, “To Come Forward and Aid in Putting Down This Unholy Rebellion,” 518–20; Haskins, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, 24; jtp, Series II, b. 18: f. 492; Dunbar-Nelson, “People of Color in Louisiana,” 29–30. 77. Diaries, Salmon P. Chase Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington dc, b. 1, reel 1. 78. Joshi and Reidy, “To Come Forward and Aid in Putting Down This Unholy Rebellion,” 521–23; Haskins, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, 29. For a description of Major Dumas’s Civil War service, see P. B. S. Pinchback, “The Negro in the Civil War,” pbsp, b. 81. 79. The term “civil rights activist” is a bit anachronistic, as it would not gain currency for nearly a century after Pinchback made this shift. From the 1890s to the 1950s he might have been called a “race man.” Whatever the term, he decided, for reasons we can only guess, to become a leader of and speaker for Black Americans. 80. Wilson, The Black Phalanx, 175; Congressional Record, 44th Congress, 1st Session, 887, quoted in Haskins, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, 29. 81. Rabinowitz, introduction to Southern Black Leaders of the Reconstruction Era, xi–xiii. For an in-depth study of Black women’s role in the Freedmen’s Bureau and parallel organizations, see Faulkner, Women’s Radical Recon- struction, chapter 4. 82. Harlan, Booker T. Washington Papers, Open Book Edition, “Autobiographical Writings,” 1:258. 83. Republican, March 12, 1872, quoted in Rankin, “The Origins of Negro Lead- ership in New Orleans during Reconstruction,” 165. 84. jtp, Series II, b. 18: f. 492. 85. “Draft of Alabama Speech, 1866,” pbsp, b. 81. White jury nullification occurs when an all-White jury refuses to convict someone who is clearly guilty of a racially inspired crime like lynching, because the defendant is White. Con- rad, Jury Nullification. 86. Draft, “Speech. Montgomery, Alabama, 1865–66,” pbsp, b. 81. 87. Garraty and Carnes, American National Biography, 527–29. 88. Faulkner, Women’s Radical Reconstruction, 81. 89. Harper, Iola Leroy, Or Shadows Uplifted; Harper, Trial and Triumph; Foster, A Brighter Coming Day; Boyd, Discarded Legacy. 90. Faulkner, Women’s Radical Reconstruction, 69–70. For a good discussion of Harper, see Harper, Minnie’s Sacrifice; Ernest, Liberation Historiography. 91. New York Times, March 11, 1872 quoted in Rankin, “The Origins of Negro Leadership in New Orleans during Reconstruction,” 163. 92. jtp, Series II, b. 18: f. 492. 212 Notes to Pages 25–30

93. Joshi and Reidy, “To Come Forward and Aid in Putting Down This Unholy Rebellion,” 527. 94. Pildes, “Democracy, Anti-Democracy, and the Canon,” 12. 95. See Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 257; Hogue, Uncivil War, introduction. 96. Griffin, “Jean Toomer,” 17; Walker, “The Divided Life of Jean Toomer.” 97. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 711–12; Hogue, Uncivil War; Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction; Dunning, Essays on the Civil War and Recon- struction and Related Topics. 98. pbsp, b. 82; Haskins, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, 38–39, 98–116. 99. Pinchback to Hon. James Lewis, August 27, 1872, pbsp, b. 81. 100. The Fusionists were a short-lived political union of members from both the Republican and Democratic parties. 101. Simmons, Men of Mark, 536–39. 102. Congressional Record, 43rd Congress, 1st Session, 10. 103. Haskins, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, 196. 104. pbsp, b. 81. 105. Pinchback to Frances T. Nichols, December 8, 1877, Washington dc, pbsp, b. 81: f. 4; Pinchback to U.S. Senate, September 1875, New Orleans, pbsp, b. 81: f. 6. Also see Rowell, A Historical and Legal Digest of all Contested Election Cases in the House of Representatives from 1789 to 1901, 298–96. 106. Simmons, Men of Mark, 539. 107. The term “Kanaka” refers to local Arab leaders who navigated the social and political transformation of East Africa as missionaries and representatives from the Imperial British East Africa Company encroached. Poet Rob- ert Barnabas Brough wrote a satirical Victorian-era poem about mocking “Lord Tomnoddy,” the son of the “Earl of Fitzdotteral.” The reporter’s allu- sions point to Pinchback’s skin tone—identified between brown Arab and white English. The article is untitled and unsigned (July 6, 1876). I found reference to it in Simmons et al., Men of Mark, 769–70 The author of one untitled article also felt compelled to notice his appearance “as not quite black.” Oshkosh (wi) Daily Northwestern, March 30, 1878. 108. pbsp, b. 81: f. 1. 109. Simmons, Men of Mark, 536, 541–43. 110. Pinchback to Senator Blanche K. Bruce, August 13, 1879, pbsp, b. 81. 111. Ingham and Feldman, African American Business Leaders, 556. 112. jwj mss Series I, autobiographical draft, b. 18: f. 493. 113. Devol, Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi. For a description of the incor- poration of Mississippi River Packet Company see Thomas P. Leathers v. John Notes to Pages 30–37 213

Janney et al., [1889], in Lawyers’ Report Annotated: Book VI (Rochester ny: Lawyers Co-operative, 1905), 661–62. 114. Devol, Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi, 274–75. 115. Griffin, “Jean Toomer,” 13–15. Stanley Turkel and Toomer offer a similar assessment to a limited, more qualified extent; Turkel, Heroes of the Ameri- can Reconstruction, 126–32; jwj mss Series I, b. 18: f. 493. 116. Weaver, Thank God My Regiment an African One. 117. Griffin, “Jean Toomer”; Turkel, Heroes of the American Reconstruction; Joshi and Reidy, “To Come Forward and Aid in Putting Down This Unholy Rebel- lion”; Ingham and Feldman, African-American Business Leaders, 557. 118. jtp, Series II, b. 18: f. 492. 119. jtp, Series II, b. 18: f. 493, from Autobiographical Writings “Incredible Jour- ney” Draft Fragments, chapter 1: Book of Family 3. Pinchback, n.d. 120. Ingham and Feldman, African-American Business Leaders, 557; Derks, The Value of a Dollar. 121. Ingham and Feldman, African-American Business Leaders, 558; Perkins, “Some Negro Officers and Legislators in Louisiana.” 122. “The War of the Races Commenced,” Galveston (tx) Daily News, October 16, 1868. 123. Haskins, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, 86; Ingham and Feldman, African- American Business Leaders 560. 124. Desdunes, Our People and Our History; Joshi and Reidy, “To Come Forward and Aid in Putting Down This Unholy Rebellion,” 517–28; Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 154–59. 125. Rankin, “The Forgotten People.” For Martinet see Smith, Emancipation, 283–85, quoted in Ingham and Feldman, African-American Business Leaders, 561, emphasis added. 126. Quoted in Kein, Creole, 127–28. 127. Simmons, Men of Mark, 536–39; Ingham and Feldman, African-American Business Leaders, 559. 128. jtp, Series II, b. 18: ff. 493, 492; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 469–70. 129. Pinchback to members of the National Executive Committee of acera, pbsp, b. 8, emphasis added. 130. Pinchback to members of the National Executive Committee of acera pbsp, b. 8. 131. Joshi and Reidy, “To Come Forward and Aid in Putting Down This Unholy Rebellion,” 257–58; Thompson, Exiles at Home, 267–68; Scott, Degrees of Free- dom, 88–93. 132. Ingham and Feldman, African-American Business Leaders, 35; Thomas, Plessy v. Ferguson. 214 Notes to Pages 37–47

133. P. B. S. Pinchback to Whitefield McKinlay, August 18, 1912, Whitefield McKinlay Papers, Carter G. Woodson Collection, Library of Congress, Washington dc. 134. P. B. S. Pinchback to Senator Blanche K. Bruce, June 17, 1878, pbsp, b. 82. 135. jtp, Series II, b. 18: f. 492. 136. New Orleans Times, March 11, 1872; Simmons, Men of Mark, 760. 137. Jean Toomer, “J.T. and P.B.,” New Mexico Sentinel, 1937, quoted in Griffin, “Jean Toomer,” 98–100, 29, emphasis added. 138. Toomer, “J.T. and P.B.,” quoted in Griffin, “Jean Toomer,” 30. 139. “Pinchback Feted by Race Leaders,” Cleveland Advocate, June 16, 1917. 140. On the movement for Black racial uplift, see Gaines, Uplifting the Race.

2. Postbellum Strategies 1. Letter from H. A. Wallace to Monroe C. Work, February 18, 1918, in Work, “Some Negro Members of Reconstruction Conventions and Legislatures and of Congress.” 2. For an early nineteenth-century mixed-race study, see Gregoire, An Enquiry concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties and Literature of Negroes. 3. Holm, Holm’s Race Assimilation; Grant, The Passing of the Great Race; Reu- ter, The Mulatto in the United States. 4. Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races. For a good discussion on racial pseudoscientific developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Marks, Human Biodiversity; Gould, The Mismeasure of Man. 5. Holm, Holm’s Race Assimilation, 68. 6. Holm, Holm’s Race Assimilation, 31–35. 7. Holm, Holm’s Race Assimilation, 73, 89, 67. Australia tried a similar approach in the first half of the twentieth century, with disastrous results. See Carey and McLisky, Creating White Australia; Anderson, The Cultivation of White- ness; Smithers, Science, Sexuality, and Race in America and Australia. 8. Holm, Holm’s Race Assimilation, 67, 95. 9. Ferris, The African Abroad, 304. 10. Holm, Holm’s Race Assimilation, 76. 11. Spickard, Almost All Aliens, 267–72; Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, 36, 69. 12. Reuter, The Mulatto in the United States, 17, 88, 68. 13. Reuter, The Mulatto in the United States, 315, 102–3. 14. Reuter, The Mulatto in the United States, 106, 184, emphasis added. 15. jwj mss Series I, b. 18: f. 493. 16. Patterson, The Negro and His Needs, 35, quoted in Reuter, The Mulatto in the United States, 164–65. Notes to Pages 48–54 215

17. Reuter, The Mulatto in the United States, 186. 18. On eugenics, see Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics; Black, War against the Weak; Stern, Eugenic Nation; Baker, From Savage to Negro; Lombardo, A Century of Eugenics in America. 19. Quoted in Reuter, The Mulatto in the United States, 184, from Smith, The Color Line, 43–44. 20. Du Bois, “Possibilities of the Negro,” 15. 21. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” 844. 22. Reuter, The Mulatto in the United States, 359. 23. Reuter, The Mulatto in the United States, 361. 24. Such was the case for the White half of Shirlee Taylor Haizlip’s ancestral family, as she recounts in The Sweeter the Juice. 25. Simmons, Men of Mark, 126. 26. Reuter, The Mulatto in the United States, 367–68. 27. Washington, Up from Slavery, 47. 28. Washington, The Story of the Negro, 2:190–91, quoted in Reuter, The Mulatto in the United States, 369. 29. Harlan, Booker T. Washington Papers, 1: 258–59. 30. Williamson, New People; Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow. 31. Spickard, Mixed Blood; Spickard, “The Power of Blackness.” 32. Washington, The Story of the Negro, 2:22. 33. Simmons, Men of Mark, 422, 421. The fact that his mother’s name is missing from his biography reveals how little nineteenth-century writers concerned themselves with women, mixed race or not. Loren P. Beth (John Marshall Harlan, 12–13) deciphered from the John Marshall Harlan Papers located at the University of Louisville that Robert Harlan’s mother’s name was Mary Harlan. One can read about Plessy v. Ferguson, including Justice Harlan’s dissent, in Thomas, Plessy v. Ferguson. 34. The reader should recall from chapter 1 that Pinchback was born free and remained so while he lived on his father’s Mississippi plantation. 35. “Col. Robert Harlan, Member of the Ohio Legislature,” Cleveland Gazette, May 1, 1886. 36. James W. Gordon suggests that Harlan’s wealth was made only in part by gold, while the rest was purportedly made through gambling. Gordon relied on an 1871 newspaper account of Harlan’s supposed admission to gambling. Also, each account varies in the range of purported amounts of money (between $45,000 and $90,000) that Harlan made. See “Colonel Harlan Visits the West End and Attends a Meeting—A Bit of His Political History by One Who Knows and Other Matters of Interest,” Cincinnati 216 Notes to Pages 54–59

Commercial, September 4, 1871. Beth in John Marshall Harlan explains that Harlan became “wealthy owning race horses” (13). That is, after he moved back to Ohio. 37. Simmons, Men of Mark, 412; see Malvina Shanklin Harlan, “Some Memories of a Long Life, 1854–1911,” Harlan Papers, University of Louisville, Kentucky, 29. 38. Gray v. Ohio (1831), 4 Ohio 353; State of Ohio v. George in Pollack, Unreported Judicial Decisions prior to 1823, 185–88. 39. Beth, John Marshall Harlan, 13. 40. Simmons, Men of Mark, 422. 41. “Col. Robert Harlan, Member of the Ohio Legislature,” Cleveland Gazette, May 1, 1886. 42. Proceedings of the National Conference of Colored Men of the United States Held in the State Capitol at Nashville, Tennessee, May 6, 7, 8, and 9, 1879 (Washing- ton dc: Rui’us H. Darby, Steam Power Printer, 1879), 29, 24. 43. Proceedings of the National Conference of Colored Men of the United States, 30–32. 44. Painter, Exodusters; Jack, The St. Louis African American Community and the Exodusters, 69–71. 45. Proceedings of the National Conference of Colored Men of the United States, 32. For a discussion of the racial impact of westward migration in the U.S., see Spickard, Almost All Aliens, 130–44. 46. Proceedings of the National Conference of Colored Men of the United States, 49–60. 47. Proceedings of the National Conference of Colored Men of the United States, 90. 48. “Col. Robert Harlan, Member of the Ohio Legislature,” Cleveland Gazette, May 1, 1886. 49. Simmons, Men of Mark, 422; Logan and Winston, Dictionary of American Negro Biography; Gordon, “Did the First Justice Harlan Have a Black Brother?”; Hickok, The Negro in Ohio. 50. Finkelman, “Rehearsal for Reconstruction.” 51. See Woodson, “The Negroes of Cincinnati Prior to the Civil War.” 52. Howe, Historical Collection of Ohio in Two Volumes, vol. 1, 45. 53. Arnett and Brown, The Black Laws!; Middleton, The Black Laws, esp. introduction. 54. “Colonel Robert Harlan’s Unwise Action,” Cleveland Gazette, April 16, 1887, Ohio Historical Center Archives Library; “Taken to Task by a Cincinnati Teacher of Color,” Cleveland Gazette, April 23, 1887, Ohio Historical Center Archives Library. Notes to Pages 59–64 217

55. Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 10–13. 56. Randolph, “Fear of Miscegenation.” 57. Annual Report Columbus Board of Education, 1898–1899, 20–21, in Randolph, “Fear of Miscegenation,” 11. 58. Frederick Douglass, “Self-Made Men,” address before the Students of the Indian Industrial School at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress, Washington dc, Series: Speech, Article, and Book File B, f. 1 of 16. 59. Reuter, The Mulatto in the United States, 359. 60. The Cleveland Gazette in 1887 purported that Allain was “for twenty years . . . a member of the Louisiana Legislature”; quoted in Charles Vincent, “Theophile T. Allain,” in Logan and Winston, Dictionary of American Negro Biography, 10. 61. Simmons, Men of Mark, 125. 62. Simmons, Men of Mark, 141, 125. 63. Theophile’s mother is referred to only as “one of his [Sosthene’s] slaves.” tafp. 64. Holm, Holm’s Race Assimilation, 76; Cleveland Gazette, May 5, 1889, Ohio His- torical Center Archives Library. 65. The Victorian-era relegating of social benefits to men rather than women of similar social status is widely acknowledged. See Richter, At Home in Nineteenth-Century America; Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers; Bederman, Man- liness and Civilization. 66. Logan and Winston, Dictionary of American Negro Biography, 11. 67. Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 86. 68. Holm, Holm’s Race Assimilation, 76. 69. Simmons, Men of Mark, 126. 70. tafp, b.13: f.1. 71. Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 159. 72. Dunbar-Nelson, “People of Color in Louisiana,” 3. For a concise discussion of the use of the term “colored” see Lake, Blue Veins and Kinky Hair. 73. Johnson, “Should the Negro Be Given an Education Different from That Given to the Whites?,” 72. 74. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” 844. 75. Washington, The Story of the Negro, 41. 76. Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 223–24. 77. Power, “Investing in the Past,” 18. 78. Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 2. 79. Bowen, “Did the American Negro Make, in the Nineteenth Century, Achieve- ments along the Lines of Wealth,” in Culp, Twentieth Century Negro Litera- ture, 29–34. 218 Notes to Pages 65–70

80. See Woodson, Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830; Frank- lin, The Free Negro in North Carolina; Williamson, New People; Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color; Zack, Race and Mixed Race. 81. Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, 124. 82. Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 3, 4. See also Soltow, Men and Wealth in the United States, 76, 84, 186, 4–5. 83. See for example, Woodson, Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830; Koger, Black Slaveowners. 84. Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 104. 85. For Black slave ownership, see Koger, Black Slaveowners; Woodson, Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830; Johnson and Roark, Black Masters. Depending on which decade one considers in the nineteenth century, the rate of slave ownership in the U.S. among White Americans stands between approximately 26 and 36 percent. Additionally, the Cherokee, Creek, Choc- taw, and other Indigenous Americans owned slaves. See Painter, Creating Black Americans, 84–86; Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Soci- ety; Krauthammer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters; Sturm, Blood Politics; Nay- lor, African Cherokees in Indian Country. 86. Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks, 1–16. For an account of the uss Cre- ole insurrection, see Haine, Mutiny on the High Seas, 65. 87. Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 80, 112, 236. 88. Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 41. Washington, The Story of the Negro, 41. 89. Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 179. 90. Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 222. 91. Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 224–25. 92. Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 224–25. 93. Quoted in Bowen, “Did the American Negro Make, in the Nineteenth Cen- tury, Achievements along the Lines of Wealth,” in Culp, Twentieth Century Negro Literature, 31. 94. Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 257. 95. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color, 88. 96. “The Negro Question, the Mulattoes, and Their Relations to the Blacks and Whites,” Fort Wayne (in) Gazette, February 16, 1883. 97. Pledger is usually referred to as “Black” or “Negro” in the historiography of the Black press. See, e.g., Grant, The Way It Was in the South, 258. 98. Colored American (Washington dc), August 11, 1894, in Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 180. 99. Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 211. Notes to Pages 71–80 219

100. Russell, “Rural Economic Progress of the Negro in Virginia,” 236. 101. Washington, The Story of the Negro, 50. 102. Washington, The Story of the Negro, 52. 103. Washington, The Story of the Negro, 43, 44. 104. Washington, The Story of the Negro, 45, 56. 105. Washington, The Story of the Negro, 47. 106. Washington, The Story of the Negro, 41. 107. Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, 83–87. 108. Letter reprinted in Fortune, Black and White. 109. Hunt, “The Negro as a Farmer,” in Culp, Twentieth Century Negro Literature, 397, 396. 110. Hunt, “The Negro as a Farmer,” in Culp, Twentieth Century Negro Literature, 397. 111. Hunt would later serve on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet” as assistant to the governor of the Farm Credit Administration. See Bellamy, “Henry A. Hunt and Black Agricultural Leadership in the New South,” 474–79. 112. Quoted in Logan and Winston, Dictionary of American Negro Biography, 335. 113. Quoted in Logan and Winston, Dictionary of American Negro Biography, 335. 114. Bellamy, “Hunt, Henry Alexander, Jr.” 115. Culp, Twentieth Century Negro Literature, 37. 116. Washington, The Story of the Negro, 37. 117. Ferris, The African Abroad, 321. 118. Washington, The Story of the Negro, 40. 119. Washington, The Story of the Negro, 40, 54. 120. Washington, The Story of the Negro, 54, 55–56. 121. Washington, The Story of the Negro, 52, 53, 36. 122. Washington, “Extracts from my Larger Education–1911,” in Harlan, Booker T. Washington Papers, 1:423. 123. Simmons, Men of Mark, 126, 127, 125. 124. Simmons, Men of Mark, 136–39; “Hon. Theophile T. Allain,” Cleveland Gazette, May 18, 1889, Ohio Historical Center Archives Library, Cleveland. 125. Simmons, Men of Mark, 138. 126. Gould, Fifty Years on the Mississippi, 263–64. 127. Simmons, Men of Mark, 140. 128. “Hon. Theophile T. Allain,” Cleveland Gazette. 129. Letter from Theophile T. Allain to Booker T. Washington, November 2, 1890, Harlan, Booker T. Washington Papers, 3:96, emphasis in original. 130. Theophile T. Allain to Booker T. Washington, June 1, 1891, Harlan, Booker T. Washington Papers, 3:156. 131. Fortune, Black and White (1884), 190–93. 220 Notes to Pages 80–89

132. Fortune, Black and White (1884), 193. 133. Williams, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880, 414. 134. New Orleans Times-Democrat, May 9, 1886, quoted in Vincent, “Laying the Cornerstone at Southern University,” 340. 135. Simmons, Men of Mark, 126. 136. Simmons, Men of Mark, 126; Holt, Black over White, 3–4. 137. Vincent, Black Legislators in Louisiana during Reconstruction, 143; Weekly Lou- isianian, June 5, 1880. 138. “Using the Race for Personal Gains,” Cleveland Gazette, May 25, 1889, Ohio Historical Center Archives Library. 139. Theophile Tarence Allain to Booker T. Washington, August 29, 1899, Wash- ington dc, Harlan, Booker T. Washington Papers, 5:186; Vincent, Dictionary of American Negro, 11. 140. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color, 87; Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers, 4–5; Vincent, Black Legislators in Louisiana, 143–44. 141. Du Bois, “Reconstruction and Its Benefits,” 798–99. 142. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” 825. 143. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” in The Negro Problem, ed. Booker T. Wash- ington (New York: James Pott, 1903); Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” Boulé Journal, 15 (October 1948), no. 1, 3–13. 144. Simmons, Men of Mark, 136, emphasis in original. 145. Allain, “The Negro in War,” June 30, 1899, tafp, Mss. 4261, b15: f10. See Power, “Investing in the Past.” 146. Nelson, “Black Political Power and the Decline of Black Land Ownership.”

3. New Challenges and Opportunities 1. “The Consul’s Burden,” in letter from M. W. Gibbs to Assistant Secretary of State, Tamatave, Madagascar, July 3, 1899, quoted in Gibbs, Shadow and Light, 308. 2. “Negro Suffrage and White Suffrage,” Waukesha (wi) Plain Dealer, October 16, 1866. 3. Douglass, “The Future of the Negro,” 84. 4. Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns; Lemann, The Promised Land; Gross- man, Land of Hope. 5. Rev. J. H. Morgan, “The Negro as a Business Man,” in Culp, Twentieth Cen- tury Negro Literature, 383. 6. Williams, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880, 419–44; Just- esen, “African-American Consuls Abroad,” 72. See, for example, Pamphile, Haitians and African Americans; Walton and Smith, American Politics and the African American Quest for Universal Freedom. Notes to Pages 90–95 221

7. Teal, Hero of Hispaniola. For other key sources, see Stecopoulos, “‘A Hot Time at Santiago.’” For a strong survey of interpretations, see Krenn, Race and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Colonial Period to the Present; Mitchell, Righ- teous Propagation, 51–75. 8. “T. Thomas Fortune’s Philippine Appointment: Negro Republicans in New Jersey Criticize the President,” New York Times, November 30, 1902. Dr. Roundtree was a darker-skinned political contemporary of Fortune. 9. Fish, “Southern Methodism and Accommodation of the Negro,” 203. 10. Maselli and Candeloro, Italians in New Orleans, 35–42; “Italian Lynching in Louisiana,” New York Times, August 27, 1896; Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 440–45; Rimanelli and Postman, The 1891 New Orleans Lynchings and US-Italian Relations. 11. Fish, “Southern Methodism and Accommodation of the Negro,” 203; Alex- ander Gross, “The Negro Migration to the North,” quoted in Weber, untitled, 555; “Dr. Alexander Gross,” New York Times, September 8, 1915. 12. Freeman, The Devil between White Man and the Negro, 13, 60. 13. Freeman, The Devil between White Man and the Negro, 49, 47, 49. 14. Ferris, The African Abroad, 320. Ferris could not have envisioned that during the 1920s the U.S. would soon drastically restrict immigration from South- ern Europe. The number of Italian immigrants dropped from roughly 4 million at 1910 to fewer than 4,000 per year in 1924. See Spickard, Almost All Aliens, 277–80. 15. Ferris, The African Abroad, 322–24. 16. Ferris, The African Abroad, 324. Richard T. Greener, a Reconstruction-era activist, professor, and U.S. foreign diplomat, also held a position against foreign immigration, specifically as it related to incoming Chinese laborers during the 1880s; see Williams, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880, 444. 17. Ferris, The African Abroad, 324. 18. Ferris, The African Abroad, 325; H. A. Scomp, “The Negro or the Immigrant— Which?,” Christian Advocate (Nashville tn) 69.4 (December 1908). 19. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color. 20. Ferris, The African Abroad, 321. 21. Quoted in Smock, Booker T. Washington in Perspective, 154, 173. 22. Washington, The Story of the Negro, 102. 23. See Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 302; Hellwig, “Strangers in Their Own Land”; Hellwig, “Building a Black Nation,” 537–38; Shank- man, Ambivalent Friends, 90; Diamond, “African American Attitudes toward United States Immigration Policy.” 222 Notes to Pages 96–102

24. Booker T. Washington, “Atlanta Exposition Address, September 18, 1895,” Harlan, Booker T. Washington Papers, 3:584–87. 25. Booker T. Washington was known as a Mulatto. See Smock, Booker T. Wash- ington in Perspective, 25; Baker, Following the Color Line, 173. 26. Greener, “The Emigration of Colored Citizens,” 22, 27. On racial mixing as both product and promoter of racial progress, see Gaines, Uplifting the Race. 27. Greener, “The Emigration of Colored Citizens,” 24–27. 28. Greener, “The Future of the Negro,” 91, 93. 29. See Baker, Following the Color Line, chapter 12, “The Black Man’s Silent Power,” 252–70. 30. Greener, “The Emigration of Colored Citizens,” 26. 31. In terms of U.S. immigration policy, Frederick Douglass’s position was mixed. He was more sympathetic to Chinese immigrants than to Mexican. His rationale against Mexican immigration was rooted in racialist ideas about so-called degenerate “Latin” traits, as opposed to the thrift and industry he witnessed during the coolie trade. See Martin, The Mind of Frederick Dou- glass, 217–20. For Washington’s position on Chinese immigration see Jun, “Black Orientalism.” 32. “Reasons for and against the Negro Exodus,” New York Times, September 13, 1879; “Frederick Douglass and Richard T. Greener on the Negro Exodus, 1879,” in Aptheker, A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, 724; Blassingame and McKivigan, The Frederick Douglass Papers, 501; Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 206–8. 33. Douglass, “Southern Questions,” 12. 34. Greener, “The Emigration of Colored Citizens,” 29, 32. 35. Smock, Booker T. Washington in Perspective, 68, 69. 36. Smock, Booker T. Washington in Perspective, 71–72. 37. Smock, Booker T. Washington in Perspective, 73. 38. Smock, Booker T. Washington in Perspective, 73. 39. Smock, Booker T. Washington in Perspective, 74. 40. For an excellent example of the range of methods missionaries employed to help colonize Africa, see Achebe, Things Fall Apart. In his novel, Achebe reveals the various ways in which Christian missionaries attempted to incorporate Igbo customs in order to smooth conversion, as well as the late nineteenth- century colonial process in Nigeria. 41. Smock, Booker T. Washington in Perspective, 74–75. 42. Smock, Booker T. Washington in Perspective, 75–77. 43. Smock, Booker T. Washington in Perspective, 77–79; Kieh, “Liberia.” George Washington Williams, in his seminal work, History of the Negro in America Notes to Pages 102–109 223

from 1619 to 1880, expressed exuberance over the “industry, intelligence and piety of Negroes” who colonized Liberia. 44. Smock, Booker T. Washington in Perspective, 79. 45. Greener, “The Future of the Negro,” 89, emphasis added. 46. Greener, “The Future of the Negro,” 90. 47. Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life, 37–50. 48. Mitchell, Righteous Propagation. 15. 49. John E. Bruce, “Reasons Why the Colored American Should Go to Africa,” Christian Recorder, November 1, 1877. 50. Mitchell, Righteous Propagation, 15. 51. Gatewood, “Black Americans and the Quest for Empire,” 545. 52. Kramer, The Blood of Government, 2. 53. Albert J. Beveridge, “In Support of an American Empire,” Congressional Record, 56th Cong., 1st Session, 704–12. 54. Gatewood, “Black Americans and the Quest for Empire,” 559, 557, 583. 55. Gatewood, “Black Americans and the Quest for Empire,” 546, 547, 551. 56. “Colored Patriots: Negroes Anxious to Supply Ten Regiments of Immunes,” Los Angeles Times, May 18, 1898. 57. W. T. Anderson to George A. Myers (Manzanillo, Cuba), June 22, 1899, gamp, b. 7: f. 2. 58. “Theophile T. Allain, “The Negro in War,” June 30, 1899, tafp, Mss. 4261, b.15: f. 10. See also Power, “Investing in the Past,” 20. 59. Gatewood, “Black Americans and the Quest for Empire,” 548. 60. Lena Mason, “The Negro in It,” reprinted in Culp, Twentieth Century Negro Literature, 447. 61. Gatewood, “Black Americans and the Quest for Empire,” 548. 62. Mitchell, Righteous Propagation, 56. 63. See, for example, Degler, Neither Black nor White; Zack, Race and Mixed Race. 64. Josiah T. Settle, “Address of Hon. Josiah T. Settle, May 7, 1900,” Daniel Mur- ray Pamphlet Collection, Library of Congress, Washington dc. 65. Williams, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880, 419–44. 66. Dr. Roundtree’s outrage over Fortune’s appointment to the Philippines was based on resentment that Fortune was chosen over other “Negroes” who had labored so long for Black America. See note 8 in this chapter. 67. “‘T. Thomas Fortune in Row with Police’: Negro Labor Commissioner Involved in a Free Fight in Manila,” New York Times, May 15, 1903. The reader should note that there were already a considerable number of Black Americans in the Philippines—overseas laborers, if you will. Among the American troops sent to put down Philippine resistance to American colonization were four 224 Notes to Pages 109–114

segregated Black regiments: the 24th and 25th Infantry and the 9th and 10th Cavalry. Shaw and Francia, Vestiges of War. 68. Fortune, “The Filipino: Some Incidents of a Trip through the Island of Luzon,” 243. 69. “Negro Colony in the Far East: Experiments Planned in Hawaii and the Philippines,” New York Times, December 12, 1902. Senator Burton’s proposal could have been accomplished only by repealing the Chinese Exclusion Act, which had become part of Hawaiian law, and the Organic Act of 1900. Before that time scores of thousands of Chinese workers had indeed migrated to work in Hawai’i. See Takaki, Pau Hana. Also see Fortune, “The Filipino: A Social Study in Three Parts”; Thornbrough, T. Thomas Fortune. 70. Fortune, “The Filipino: Some Incidents of a Trip through the Island of Luzon,” 243. 71. Gatewood, Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 312–15; Fortune, “Politics in the Philippine Islands”; “The Filipino.” 72. Fortune, “The Filipino,” 200–203, quoted in Gatewood, Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 315. 73. See, for example, Silbey, A War of Frontier and Empire, 107–12. 74. Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response, 88; Alt and Alt, Black Soldiers, White Wars, 64. 75. H. T. Johnson, “The Black Man’s Burden,” Voice of Missions 7 (Atlanta ga, April 1899): 1, reprinted in Gatewood, Black Americans and the White Man’s Bur- den, 183–84. For a thorough discussion of the morass of published responses to Kipling, see Brantlinger, “Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden and Its Afterlives.” 76. Spickard, Almost All Aliens, 252–55, 306–9; Kramer, The Blood of Government, 204; Ngozi-Brown, “African-American Soldiers and Filipinos.” 77. Goggin, Carter G. Woodson, 20–25; Ngozi-Brown, “African American Sol- diers and Filipinos,” 49; Zimmerman, Innocents Abroad, 13, 125. 78. John Hope Franklin, “Lynch, John Roy,” in Logan and Winston, Dictionary of American Negro Biography, 407–9. Lynch also served tours of duty in Cuba from 1900 to 1903 and in Hawai’i from 1897 to 1899. 79. William Sanders Scarborough, “Prof. Richard T. Greener: His Commend- able Career and Claims to Recognition,” Christian Recorder, February 9, 1882, reprinted in Ronnick, The Works of William Sanders Scarborough, 99–100. 80. See Penn, The Afro-American Press and Its Editors; Brown, Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction; Culp, Twentieth Century Negro Literature. 81. Penn, The Afro-American Press and Its Editors, 464–66, 454–56, 375. 82. Haley, Afro-American Encyclopedia, iii. Notes to Pages 115–121 225

83. Culp, Twentieth Century Negro Literature, 226–31. 84. [[please cite title of article]] San Antonio Daily Light, June 13, 1900. 85. Penn, The Afro-American Press and Its Editors, 138. 86. See Fortune, Black and White; Ferris, The African Abroad, especially chapter 4, “Reason Why the Term ‘Negrosaxon,’ or Colored, Better Characterizes the Colored People of Mixed Descent in America than the Term ‘Negro,’” 296–311. 87. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” 825–26, 823. 88. Biographical information found in Willis D. Weatherford Papers, #3831, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Caro- lina, Chapel Hill. 89. Weatherford, Present Forces in Negro Progress, 36–38. 90. Booker T. Washington, “Extracts from My Larger Education, 1911,” in Har- lan, Booker T. Washington Papers, 1:418–58. 91. Booker T. Washington, “Skilled Negro Labor Better Treated in the South than in the North,” November 1912, in Harlan, Booker T. Washington Papers, 12:70. 92. Hamilton, Beacon Lights of the Race, 474. 93. Simmons, Men of Mark, 365. 94. Hamilton, Beacon Lights of the Race, 474–86. 95. Unlike Pinchback, Josiah T. Settle was born a slave. 96. Simmons, Men of Mark, 365; Washington, The Story of the Negro, 22–23; Ham- ilton, Beacon of Lights of the Race, 474–86. 97. Sewell and Dwight, Mississippi Black History Makers, 52. 98. Washington, “Skilled Negro Labor Better Treated in the South than in the North,” 70. 99. Washington, “Difficulty of Obtaining Uniform Treatment,” in Harlan, Booker T. Washington Papers, 12:69–70. 100. Simmons, Men of Mark, 366; Hamilton, Beacon Lights of the Race, 474–85. 101. Hamilton, Beacon Lights of the Race, 480. 102. Sewell and Dwight, Mississippi Black History Makers, 53. 103. Simmons, Men of Mark, 366; Sewell and Dwight, Mississippi Black History Makers, 53–54. 104. Washington, The Story of the Negro, 22–23. 105. Kyle, “Reconstruction in Panola County,” 49, 51. 106. Simmons, Men of Mark, 367. 107. Sewell and Dwight, Mississippi Black History Makers, 54. 108. Sewell and Dwight, Mississippi Black History Makers, 54; Simmons, Men of Mark, 367–68. 109. McMurry, To Keep the Waters Troubled, 39; Also see Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color, 90–93. 226 Notes to Pages 122–125

110. McMurry, To Keep the Waters Troubled, 53. 111. DeCosta-Willis, The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells. 112. McMurry, To Keep the Waters Troubled, 40–42. 113. Carlson, “Black Ideals of Womanhood in the Late Victorian Era”; Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform. 114. Diary of Ida B. Wells, September 28, 1887, Wells Papers, Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago; also quoted in McMurry, To Keep the Waters Troubled, 42. 115. Tucker, Black Pastors and Leaders, 18; McMurry, To Keep the Waters Trou- bled, 71. 116. McMurry, To Keep the Waters Troubled, 182. 117. Ida B. Wells to Albion Tourgee, July 2, 1892, Albion Winegar Tourgee Papers, Chautauqua County Historical Society, Westfield, New York; quoted in McMurry, To Keep the Waters Troubled, 182. 118. Williams, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880, 439. 119. Simmons, Men of Mark, 213. 120. Fouche, Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation, 122; Thomas Junius Callo- way to Booker T. Washington, May 2, 1894, in Harlan, Booker T. Washington Papers, 3:415–16. 121. Unless indicated otherwise, Greener’s personal history comes from rtgp. 122. “Richard T. Greener: The First Black Harvard College Graduate,” in Sollors et al., Blacks at Harvard, 2. 123. [No title.] New York Times, January 8, 1881. 124. Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life, 16. Belle changed her surname by drop- ping the second “r” in order to mark her transition from Black to White. In the hope of effecting a Portuguese heritage, which might then explain her darker complexion, she added “da Costa.” The first official reference to Belle da Costa Greene (from her birth name, Marion Greener) was recorded in the U.S. Census in 1900. See Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life, 6, 15, 53. 125. Mounter, “Richard Theodore Greener: Idealist, Statesman, Scholar and South Carolinian,” 6–7, quoted in Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life, 17. 126. Williams, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880, 438. 127. Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life, 18. 128. Sollors et al., Blacks at Harvard, 37. 129. Williams, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880, 438. 130. Sollors et al., Blacks at Harvard, 37–38. 131. Mailloux, “Thinking with Rhetorical Figures.” 132. Sollors et al., Blacks at Harvard, 37–38. 133. Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life, 20–30. Notes to Pages 125–127 227

134. Sollors et al., Blacks at Harvard, 37–41; Williams, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880, 439. 135. Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life, 20–30; Sollors et al, Blacks at Harvard, 37–41. 136. Sollors et al., Blacks at Harvard, 38; Williams’s account in History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880 (1883) differs in that he believed that Greener had to repeat his senior year and that it was not on account of academic hardship, but rather racism on the part of Harvard professors was the cul- prit. The fact remains that Greener started Harvard in the fall of 1865 and graduated in the summer of 1870; at some point he extended his studies for reasons still obscure. 137. Sollors et al., Blacks at Harvard, 38–39. 138. Williams, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880, 439; Sollors et al., Blacks at Harvard, 38–39; Mailloux, “Thinking with Rhetorical Figures.” 139. See, for example, Greener, “Free Speech in Ireland.” 140. Sollors et al., Blacks at Harvard, 39. 141. [No title.] New York Times, February 21, 1886, 2; Mounter, “Richard Theo- dore Greener: Idealist, Statesman, Scholar and South Carolinian,” 347–48. 142. William Roscoe Thayer, William Richards Castle, Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe, Arthur Stanwood Pier, Bernard Augustine De Voto, and Theodore Morrison, Harvard Graduates’ Magazine 17.65 (Boston: Harvard Graduates’ Magazine Association, 1909), 512; Simmons, Men of Mark, 212. 143. Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life, 37–41. 144. Sollors et al., Blacks at Harvard, 39–40. 145. Andrew, Wade Hampton, 430; Sollors et al., Blacks at Harvard, 39–40; Sim- mons, Men of Mark, 212. 146. Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life, 31. 147. There is little record of the success of the company. It seems to have gone under by at least 1885 since it is not included in the American Cyclopedia of Insurance Companies, which kept track of both Black and White Insur- ance firms. 148. Harlan, Booker T. Washington Papers, 2:291; Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life, 31; Simmons, Men of Mark, 212; Williams, History of the Negro Race in Amer- ica from 1619 to 1880, 440. 149. rtgp, Sc mg 107, b. 1. 150. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color, 74, 261; Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life, 27. 151. Green, Secret City, 81, 155. 152. Mounter, “Richard Theodore Greener: Idealist, Statesman, Scholar and South Carolinian,” 181–96. 228 Notes to Pages 128–132

153. U.S. Census 1880; Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life, 33. On the one-drop rule, see Jordan, “Historical Origins of the One-Drop Racial Rule in the United States.” 154. Scarborough, “Prof. Richard T. Greener,” in Ronnick, The Works of William Sanders Scarborough, 99, 100. 155. rtgp, Sc mg 107, b. 1. Lee A. Daniel points out the utility of passing in her essay “The African Female Elite.” Daniel explains passing as pragmatism, whereby one might pass temporarily for convenience, which is different from choosing to live as another race. 156. [No title.] New York Times, January 8, 1881; Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life, 40. 157. Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life, 39. 158. Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life, 43, 38. 159. U.S. Census 1880, 1890; Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life, 44–45. 160. Francis J. Grimké, “Sermon, 14 July 1895,” Francis J. Grimké Papers, b. 15: f. 667, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington dc; Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life, 46. 161. R. T. Greener to George A. Myers, September 2, 1896, gamp, b. 2: f. 3. 162. Editorial, New York Age, February 22, 1892; Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life, 47. 163. Editorial, Washington Bee, February 7, 1885; Fouche, Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation, 122. 164. Ingham and Feldman, African-American Business Leaders, 132; Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life, 38–39; Fouche, Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation, 122. 165. Greener, Southwestern Christian Advocate, June 17, 1886; Ardizzone, An Illu- minated Life, 39. 166. Ellen Collins to Booker T. Washington, August 23, 1892, in Harlan, Booker T. Washington Papers, 3:258–59. 167. Thomas Junius Calloway to Booker T. Washington, May 2, 1894, in Harlan, Booker T. Washington Papers, 3:415–16. 168. R. T. Greener to Geo. A. Myers, August 20, 1896, gamp, b. 2: f. 3.; Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life, 48–49. 169. Alexander Crummell to John E. Bruce, December 4, 1897, John Edward Bruce papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manu- scripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library, Sc Micro r-905. Also see Moses, Alexander Crummell, 269. For the purpose of showcasing the interrelatedness of these leaders, the reader should note that John E. Bruce, under the name Bruce E. Grit, was the same writer who eulogized Pinchback in 1921. 170. Zhang, W. E. B. Du Bois, 27; Fouche, Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation, 121–22. Notes to Pages 133–136 229

171. R. T. Greener to Geo. A. Myers, September 2, 1896, gamp, b. 2: f. 3. 172. R. T. Greener to Booker T. Washington, March 26, 1897, in Harlan, Booker T. Washington Papers, 4:265–66. 173. Justesen, “African-American Consuls Abroad,” 73–76; rtgp, Sc mg 107, b. 1. 174. Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life, 51. 175. Senn, Around the World via Siberia, 171. 176. Senn, Around the World via Siberia, 164. 177. Quoted in Williams, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880, 443. This speech was given at the Harvard Club in New York five years before he and Terrell were denied access (on account of race) to the Harvard Club in Washington dc. The exact date of the dinner at which Greener spoke is unknown. However, the contextual references he made indicate that the dinner took place in 1880. 178. Blakely, “Richard T. Greener and the ‘Talented Tenth’s’ Dilemma”; Taka- hashi, International Law Applied to the Russo-Japanese War. 179. Frederick Douglass to William Lloyd Garrison, January 1, 1846, reprinted in Williams, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880, 429. 180. Williams, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880, 444. For a discussion of Williams see Franklin, George Washington Williams. 181. Williams, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880, 437. 182. W. T. Anderson to George A. Myers (Manzanillo, Cuba), June 22, 1899, gamp, b. 7: f. 2. 183. For recent scholarship on African American foreign diplomacy, see Pam- phile, Haitians and African Americans; Walton and Smith, American Politics and the African American Quest for Universal Freedom; Teal, Hero of Hispan- iola; Stecopoulos, “‘A Hot Time at Santiago.’” For a very strong interpretive overview of Black foreign diplomacy, see Krenn, Race and U.S. Foreign Pol- icy from the Colonial Period to the Present. 184. In Greener’s case, see, for example, “Agriculture in Siberia: American Farm- ing Machinery Has Aided in Increasing Production, but County and Cli- mate Sever,” New York Times, March 2, 1902. 185. Justesen, “African-American Consuls Abroad,” 74; Blakely, “Richard T. Greener and the ‘Talented Tenth’s’ Dilemma,” 311. 186. Williams, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880, 444. Wil- liams was referring specifically to Greener’s support of the Chinese Exclu- sion Act in 1882. For an introduction to the topic of Orientalism, see Said, Orientalism. 187. See, for example, Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, and Hunt, The Making of a Special Relationship. 230 Notes to Pages 136–138

188. Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons”; Kramer, The Blood of Government; Weston, Racism in U.S. Imperialism; Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy. 189. Chang, “Whose ‘Barbarism’?,” 1332–34, referenced in Smith, “The Past as a Foreign Country,” esp. 131–34. 190. R. T. Greener, report on February 19, 1904, Department of Commerce and Labor, Daily Consular Report 1881 (Washington dc: gpo, 1904), 14. 191. Senn, Around the World via Siberia, 166, 170–71. 192. Blakely, “Richard T. Greener and the ‘Talented Tenth’s’ Dilemma,” 311. 193. U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Monthly Consular Reports 73 (Washington dc: Government Printing Office, 1903), May 10, 1903; June 15, 1903; May 20, 1903, 153–54; U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Monthly Consular Reports 75.283 (Washington dc: Government Printing Office, 1904), December 18, 1903, 308; December 8, 1903, 309; November 13, 1903, 309–11. 194. Greener to Medico-Legal Society of New York, The Sanitarian 1 (Brooklyn ny: A. N. Bell, 1903), 536. 195. Sollors et al., Blacks at Harvard, 40–41; also see reference in Harlan, Booker T. Washington Papers, 2:291. 196. U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, U.S. Bureau of Foreign Com- merce, Consular Reports (Washington dc: Government Printing Office, 1903), 276–79; U.S. Department of State, U.S. Bureau of Foreign Commerce, (1854– 1903), Commercial Relations of the United States with Foreign Countries (Wash- ington dc: Government Printing Office, 1903), 978–98; Senn, Around the World via Siberia, 171–72. Russia suffered major losses during the war, and the frustration its citizens experienced helped stir the first, abortive attempt at a Russian revolution in 1905. 197. Gerrare and Greener, Greater Russia, 267. Gerrare was also known as Wil- liam Oliver Greener. Sollors et al. also observed Greener’s representation of Britain (Blacks at Harvard, 40). 198. “Vladivostok Expects Siege: Foreign Commercial Agents Ordered to Leave the Fortress,” New York Times, May 19, 1905. 199. Mounter, “Richard Theodore Greener and the African American Individ- ual in a Black and White World.” Mounter’s evidence is taken from personal correspondence with Kawashima, one of Mishiyo’s grandchildren. Jacob C. White Papers, b. 115–3: f. 174, Moorland-Spingarn Collection, Howard Univer- sity, Washington dc, has bits of correlating material that attests to this union. Papers describe a “genuine Negro” who resided in Vladivostok and was married to a Japanese woman. Quoted in Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life, 495–96n27. Notes to Pages 138–146 231

200. rtgp, Correspondence: Writings, Sc mg 107, b. 1. 201. Daniel, “The African Female Elite.” 202. R. T. Greener to Booker T. Washington, July 31, 1906, in Harlan, Booker T. Washington Papers, 9:48. 203. Harlan, Booker T. Washington, 89–90. 204. Harlan, Booker T. Washington Papers, 2:291. 205. Sollors et al., Blacks at Harvard, 40–41. 206. Greener is buried in Graceland Cemetery, Cook County, Illinois. rtgp, Sc mg 107, b. 1. 207. Ferris, The African Abroad, 182–83, 373, 372. 208. Reuter, The Mulatto in the United States; Reuter, Race Mixture. 209. Douglass, “The Future of the Negro,” 84–85, emphasis added. 210. Douglass, “The Future of the Colored Race,” 308–10, emphasis added. 211. Douglass, “The Future of the Colored Race,” 308–10.

4. “Lifting as We Climb” 1. Hackley, The Colored Girl Beautiful, 139. 2. Later the name was changed to the National Association of Colored Wom- en’s Clubs. 3. Wesley, The History of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, 532; sheet music published by Marie Fines in 1929 and held at the nacw head- quarters in Washington dc; Brady, “Organizing Afro-American Girl’s Clubs in Kansas in the 1920s,” 72. 4. See, for example, Giddings, When and Where I Enter; Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood; Carlton-LaNey, African American Leadership. 5. See Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 22–25. 6. For a good survey of Native American education, see Trafzer et al., Board- ing School Blues; for segregated education for Mexican children, see Gonza- lez and Fernandez, A Century of Chicano History, esp. 90–92. 7. Wesley, The History of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, 10. 8. See Bacon, The Humblest May Stand Forth; Shaw, “Black Club Women and the Creation of the National Association of Colored Women”; Perkins, “Black Women and Racial ‘Uplift’ prior to Emancipation.” 9. The term “republicanism” relates to a form of governance and a set of political ideas about freedom and equity, not the political party. 10. Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, xv. 11. Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood”; Muncy, Creating a Female Domin- ion in American Reform, xi–xvii. 232 Notes to Pages 146–154

12. The contemporaneous impulse to achieve power within as well as outside the home is not meant to suggest that these aims were strictly exclusive. It simply attests to competing visions as to what role women in the U.S. during the Progressive Era should play. 13. Evans, Black Women in the Ivory Tower; Perkins, “The African American Female Elite”; Baumann, Constructing Black Education at Oberlin College. 14. Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood”; Baker, “The Domestication of American Politics”; Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood. 15. Jensen and Davidson, A Needle, a Bobbin, a Strike. 16. Gordon, “Black and White Visions of Welfare,” 214, 215. 17. See Logan, “We Are Coming”; Sterling, We Are Your Sisters; Nero, “‘Oh, What I Think I Must Tell This World!’”; Higginbotham, “African-American Wom- en’s History and the Metalanguage of Race.” 18. Faulkner, Women’s Radical Reconstruction. 19. Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 106. 20. Wesley, The History of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, 6. 21. Brady, “Organizing Afro-American Girl’s Clubs in Kansas in the 1920s,” 69–70. 22. Love, “Emma Azalia Smith Hackley.” 23. Cash, African American Women and Social Action, 89–104. 24. Edwards, “Gender and Changing Roles of Women,” 233. 25. Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg, 90. 26. Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South. 86. 27. Strong, Every-day Law or the Law of Usual Contracts, esp. chapter 11, 164–97. 28. See Boswell, “Married Women’s Property Rights and the Challenge to Patri- archal Order, Colorado City, Texas,” 89–109; Boswell and McArthur, Women Shaping the South. 29. McMillen, Southern Women. 30. Brady, “Organizing Afro-American Girl’s Clubs in Kansas in the 1920s,” 72. 31. White, Too Heavy a Load, 78. 32. Green, Secret City, 143, 145, 153. 33. “Women Meet,” Cleveland Gazette, August 8, 1896, 14:1,1, Ohio Historical Society, Columbus. 34. Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire, 4. 35. Moore, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Struggle for Racial Uplift, 5. 36. Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 3–5 37. Kerr, The Paper Bag Principle, 116. 38. Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 103–5, 125–29. Notes to Pages 154–167 233

39. See Morgan, Women and Patriotism. 40. For an explanation of the Americanization movement. see Spickard, Almost All Aliens, 275–77. 41. Yezierska, “The Free Vacation House,” 706–14. See also Spickard, Almost All Aliens, 296; Konzett, Ethnic Modernisms, 31–33. 42. See Briggs, Reproducing Empire; Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japan and China, 6–29; Putnam, “‘Unhappy’ Haiti.” 43. Cromwell, The Negro in American History, 218. 44. Coppin, Unwritten History, 362–63. 45. Coppin, Reminiscences of School Life, 122, 124, 125. 46. Coppin, Reminiscences of School Life, 126, 130, 132. 47. Johnson, Uplifting the Women and the Race, xxvii. 48. Fink, Major Problems in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, 295–96, chapter 10. 49. Carlton-LaNey, African American Leadership, xiv, emphasis added. 50. Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, introduction. 51. Black, War against the Weak; Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics; Leonard, Illiberal Reformers; Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? 52. Caroline Bond Day to Judea J. Harris, July 21, 1927, Correspondence of Caroline Bond Day, cbdp, #993–21, quoted in Ardizzone, “‘Such Fine Families,’” 106. 53. Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 67–99; Mitchell, Righteous Propagation; chapter 3; Ardizzone, “‘Such Fine Families’”; English, Unnatural Selections, introduction. 54. C. B. Day Mss. [untitled draft] n.d., cbdp, reprinted in Ardizzone, “‘Such Fine Families,’” 110. 55. Ardizzone, “‘Such Fine Families.’” 56. See Dorr, “Fighting Fire with Fire”; Mitchell, Righteous Propagation, chapter 3. 57. Drake, “The National Career of Blanche Kelso Bruce.” For a biographical account of the Bruce family, see Graham, The Senator and the Socialite. 58. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color, 187–88. 59. Harris, “Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi.” 60. Booker T. Washington to Josephine Beall Willson Bruce, March 18, 1898, in Harlan, Booker T. Washington Papers, 4:392. 61. Gatewood, “Bruce, Josephine Beall Willson,” 187–188. 62. Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire, 60. 63. Rooks, Ladies’ Pages, 21–22, 47–49. For the prevalence of Mulatta iconography during the Harlem Renaissance, see Sherrard-Johnson, Portraits of the New Negro Woman. 64. White, Too Heavy a Load, 76. 65. Willson, A Sketch of the Higher Class of Colored Society in Philadelphia. 66. White, Too Heavy a Load, 78–79. 234 Notes to Pages 167–171

67. For Washington’s position on suffrage, see White, Too Heavy a Load, 48; “Edi- torials,” National Association Notes 17.3 (January–February 1915): 13; Terborg- Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 92. 68. Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 92; Alex- ander, Homelands and Waterways, 311–12; 102n37; Fourth Annual Conven- tion of the Southern Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, New Orleans, December 29–30, 1902, National Association Notes Folder, Margaret Mur- ray Washington Papers, Tuskegee University Archives, Tuskegee, Alabama. 69. Gatewood, “Bruce,” Aristocrat of Color, 188. 70. rcbp, b. 10-2. 71. Bruce, “One Phase of the Labor Question.” 72. Bruce, “One Phase of the Labor Question.” 73. “The Capital Social Problem,” Baltimore American, February 2, 1879, quoted in Graham, The Senator and Socialite, 97. 74. Graham, The Senator and Socialite, 87–88. 75. “The Capital Social Problem,” quoted in Graham, The Senator and Socialite, 97. 76. [No title.] Washington Bee, July 21, 1883, bkbp, b. 9. 77. [No title.] Kansas City Times, October 17, 1886, bkbp, b. 9. A letter, addressed to Sadie D. St Clair, dated April 10, 1946, from Mrs. Carrington L. Davis (yet signed by a woman named Erma), states that as a relative of the senator she knew his father to be the “white Bruce.” She also explained that his “white master,” his father, gave his “entire family . . . each a tract of farm land” in Missouri. She explained that it was from this land that the senator got his financial start. The letter is held in the bkbp, b. 9. 78. “A Most Popular Leader: Position of Ex-Senator Bruce in Washington,” Wash- ington Bee, September 10, 1891, bkbp, b. 9. 79. For an account of Bruce property holdings in New Mexico, see People’s Advocate, April 18, 1879, bkbp, b. 9-4: f. 130. The article reported that Sena- tor Bruce had bought “3,000 acres” of land, for which he “proposed to establish a ranch.” 80. Bank note in the amount of $1,200 made out to B. K. Bruce, dated April 17, 1890, Columbia National Bank of Washington, signed by Josephine B. Bruce, bkbp, b. 9-2. The note was cashed on June 16, 1890. 81. rcbp, b. 10-3: f. 50. 82. bkbp, b. 9-1: f. 37. 83. Gatewood, “Bruce,” 188. 84. Roy Church to Mrs. J. B. Bruce (Washington dc), October 8, 1908, bkbp, b. 9-3. 85. Godfrey Frank to J. B. Bruce (Josephine, Mississippi), April 5, 1905, rcbp, b. 10-1: f. 21. The letter indicates that Godfrey Frank & Company, Cotton Notes to Pages 171–176 235

Factors and Commission Merchants, received a payment, on her behalf, in the amount of $4,432.25 from American Security and Trust Co. in Washing- ton dc. See also rcbp, b. 10-3: f. 58. 86. rcbp, b 10-2: f. 35, 47–50. 87. Gatewood, “Bruce,” 188. 88. Letters, rcbp, b. 10-2: f. 44. 89. rcbp, b. 10-2: f. 25. 90. Roscoe Bruce to Clara Burrell, February 13, 1903, rcbp, b. 10-2: f. 27. 91. Blanche Bruce to Roscoe Bruce, undated, rcbp, b. 10-1: ff. 1–2; Letters, bkbp, b. 9: f. 8. See rcbp, b. 10-2: f. 44 for information on Josephine’s care of her mother. 92. Roscoe Conklin Bruce to Josephine Bruce, November 17, 1916, rcbp, b. 10- 3: f. 50. 93. See introduction and Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color. 94. Roscoe Bruce to Josephine Bruce, July 15, 1902, rcbp, b. 10-2: f. 45. 95. Some accounts suggest that William Smith raised Caroline’s children as White while she was in New York. See Kramer, “Matthews, Victoria Earle.” 96. For biographical information on Matthews see Penn, The Afro-American Press and Its Editors, 375–76; Brown, Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction; Logan, “To Embalm Her Memory in Song and Story,” in “We Are Coming,” 127–51; Kramer, “Uplifting Our ‘Downtrodden Sisterhood.’” 97. T. Thomas Fortune to Booker T. Washington (Jacksonville fl.), March 7, 1896, in Harlan, Booker T. Washington Papers, 4:131. 98. Victoria Earle Matthews to Booker T. Washington (New York), January 12, 1898, in Harlan, Booker T. Washington Papers, 4:364; Penn, Afro-American Press and Its Editors, 375. 99. Earle, Aunt Lindy. See Carr, The Online Archive of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women’s Writings. 100. Matthews was not alone in her insistence on teaching Black history. Jose- phine Bruce, as a member of the Lady’s Auxiliary, in 1896 started a literary club that focused exclusively on Black heroes. With the exception of Cris- pus Attucks, all of the heroes she included in the reading list were women. See Brown, Homespun Heroines; Logan, “To Embalm Her Memory in Song and Story” in “We Are Coming,” 127–51. 101. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 10, quoted in Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire, 5. 102. Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire, 7. 103. Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire, 62, 63, 12–13. 104. Wallinger, “Pauline Hopkins as Editor and Journalist,” 146–47. 236 Notes to Pages 176–185

105. Roscoe Conklin Bruce to Clara Burrell, bkbp, b. 10-2: f. 28. 106. Colored American Magazine, January 1904; Wallinger, “Pauline Hopkins as Editor and Journalist,” 159–64. 107. Logan, “We Are Coming,” 140; Baker, “Critical Memory and the Black Pub- lic Sphere.” 108. St. Pierre Ruffin’s father was mixed with an undetermined degree of Afri- can and Indigenous American ancestry. Her mother was known as White. Streitmatter, Raising Her Voice, 7. 109. Logan, “We Are Coming,” 233n9. 110. Logan, “We Are Coming,” 140. 111. Attendance at the conference was not exclusively Black. Among the non- Black attendees were the White widow of Frederick Douglass, Helen Pitts, and William Lloyd Garrison. Robinson, “The Value of Race Literature,” 186. 112. Logan, “We Are Coming,” 148. 113. Matthews, “The Value of Race Literature,” 186. 114. Matthews, “Value of Black Literature,” 253–54. 115. Matthews, “Value of Black Literature,” 254–55. 116. Matthews, “Value of Black Literature,” 261. 117. Rucker and Upton, Encyclopedia of American Race Riots, 292. 118. Matthews, “Value of Black Literature,” 257–61. See Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Twain, The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson or The Comedy of Those Extraordi- nary Twins; Ridpath, History of the World. 119. Matthews, “Value of Race Literature,” 257. 120. Matthews, “Value of Black Literature,” 261. 121. Matthews, “Value of Black Literature,” 262, emphasis added. 122. Matthews, “Value of Black Literature,” 264–67. 123. Victoria Earle Matthews to Booker T. Washington (Brooklyn), January 8, 1898, in Harlan, Booker T. Washington Papers, 4:361–62. 124. Victoria Earle Matthews to Booker T. Washington (Brooklyn), January 12, 1898, in Harlan, Booker T. Washington Papers, 4:364. 125. Quoted in Robinson, “The Value of Race Literature,” 189. 126. Perry, Hubert Harrison, 94. 127. Alice Dunbar-Nelson Papers, Manuscript Special Collections, 1895–1942, n113, Series II, University of Delaware, Newark. 128. Perry, Hubert Harrison, 95. 129. “To Help the Colored Race,” New York Times, July 22, 1897. Descriptions of and all quotations from the conference are from this article. 130. Cromwell, The Negro in American History, 213, emphasis in the original. 131. Cromwell, The Negro in American History, 213. Notes to Pages 185–196 237

132. Alexander, Ambiguous Lives, 128. 133. Alexander, Ambiguous Lives, 128–29, 5, 128, 151–52. 134. Culp, Twentieth Century Negro Literature, 198. 135. Booker T. Washington to Adella Hunt Logan (Tuskegee), March 7, 1896, in Harlan, Booker T. Washington Papers, 4:130. 136. Adella Hunt Logan, “Prenatal and Hereditary Influences,” quoted in Alex- ander, Ambiguous Lives, 3–5. 137. Adella Hunt Logan, “What Are the Causes of the Great Mortality among the Negroes in the Cites of the South, and How Is That Mortality to Be Less- ened?,” in Culp, Twentieth Century Negro Literature, 199. 138. Hunt Logan, “What Are the Causes of the Great Mortality,” 200. 139. John R. Francis, “Causes of Negro Mortality,” in Culp, 205–6. 140. Hunt Logan, “What Are the Causes of the Great Mortality,” 201. 141. Engs, The Progressive Era’s Health Reform Movement, 20. For a discussion on how women reformers defined and maintained ideas about sexual morality and, in some cases, criminalized women’s sexuality, see Pivar, Purity and Hygiene. 142. Brevard, A Biography of E. Azalia Smith Hackley, 13. 143. Smith, Trial by Fire, 238–39. 144. Davenport, Azalia, 138–39. 145. Hackley, The Colored Girl Beautiful, 17. 146. Hackley, The Colored Girl Beautiful, 38, 48–49, 46, 63, 104, 106. 147. Hackley, The Colored Girl Beautiful, 17, 182. 148. Hackley, The Colored Girl Beautiful, 88. 149. Hackley, The Colored Girl Beautiful, 31. 150. Hackley, The Colored Girl Beautiful, 138, 134. 151. Hackley, The Colored Girl Beautiful, 138, 152. 152. Brevard, A Biography of E. Azalia Smith Hackley, 27; Davenport, Azalia, 116. 153. Davenport, Azalia, 156–57. 154. Davenport, Azalia, 191, 18–19, 24–25, 26. 155. Davenport, Azalia, 29, 38. 156. Davenport, Azalia, 183, 186. 157. Hackley, The Colored Girl Beautiful, 74. 158. Davenport, Azalia, 23. 159. Davenport, Azalia 33, 35, 193.

Conclusion 1. Henry G. Hichborn to Blanche K. Bruce, March 3, 1876, bkbp, b. 9-2: f. 37, emphasis added. 238 Notes to Pages 196–200

2. Orra Langhorne, “Bruce the Colored Senator: His Chivalrous Deed in Behalf of a Distressed Southern Lady,” The Republican, July 6, 1878, bkbp, b. 9, emphasis added. 3. Henry Demas, “ Speech of Hon. Henry Demas, on the Separate Car Bill, Delivered in the Senate, at Baton Rouge, La., July 8 ’90,” The Crusader (New Orleans), July 19, 1890. 4. Blanche K. Bruce, “A Letter from Senator Bruce,” Cincinnati Commercial, February 19, 1878. bkbp, b. 9. 5. “Who Said It Is Miss Ednorah Nahar?,” August 8, 1896, Cleveland Gazette, 14:1, 2, Ohio Historical Society, The African American Experience in Ohio, 1850–1910, Columbus, Ohio, emphasis added. 6. Moore, Leading the Race, 164. 7. This is essentially the message of Haizlip’s memoir of a mixed family that split, The Sweeter the Juice. 8. McGerr, A Fierce Discontent. Bibliography

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Italicized figure numbers refer to illustrations following page 142.

Aaron, Hank, xi 130, 134–35; mixed-race women leaders, 143, abolitionism, xvii–xviii, xx, 24, 123, 125, 145–46 145, 162, 189–90 Africa: as locus of Black colonial enterprise, Black Man’s Burden, 111 99–102, 104, 155–57, 184–85 Blackness: as contested identity, 91, 134–35, 151–52 African Methodist Episcopal Church, 155–56 Black public sphere, 165–66, 177 Afro-American Business League, 41, 110 Black resistance, xvii–xviii Allain, Aline Coleman, 61 Black-White paradigm, x–xi Allain, Theophile T., xxv, 32, 42, 45, 50, 53, 60– Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 43–44 63, 70, 73, 77–85, 196–97 Bowen, J. W. E., 64 amalgamation: as means of ending Black race, Boxer Rebellion, 137 45–46; mixed-race into White, 103 Bruce, Blanche K., xviii–xxii, xxiii, 28–29, American Citizens Equal Rights Association, 35–36 70, 81–82, 113, 117, 143, 172, 196; Black identi- American Freedmen’s inquiry Commission, 18 fied, 169; death, 170; marriage to Josephine Americanization, 145 American Revolution: Beale Willson, 162; political career, 162–63; Black soldiers in, xv–xvi opposed to colonization, 197–98; rejected as Anderson, W. T., 106 too Black, 169 Antoine, C. C., 26, 28, 34 Bruce, Josephine B. Willson, fig. 5; xxiii, xxv, Arnett, Benjamin W., 58–59 143, 154–55, 191; childhood, 163–64; accep- Association of Colored Veterans, 18 tance among Whites, 163; Black identified, Atlanta University, 185 164; business activities, 170–72; family wealth, 163–64; marriage to Blanche K. Bruce, 162; back-to-Africa movement, xvi–xvii, 197–98 National Association of Colored Women, Banks, Gen. Nathaniel P., 20–21 167–70; public speeches, 170–71; racial iden- Banneker, Benjamin, xvi tity fluid, 164; rejected as too White, 168–69; Barnard College, 146 supports industrial education, 167–68; sup- Barnett, Ferdinand L., 55–56 ports women suffrage, 167 beigeoisie, xviii Bruce, Roscoe, 171–72 Bethune, Mary McLeod, 157 Burroughs, Nannie Helen, 157 Black Americans: as colonial elites, 99–103, 155–57 Butler, Gen. Benjamin F., 18–20 Black Codes. See segregation Black elite, xviii–xix, xxi–xxii, 3, 24, 64–71, 89– Calloway, Cab, xi 90, 98, 121–22, 127, 148, 152, 163–66, 172 Carroll, Richard, 75 Black identity. See identity as choice: Black; Carver, George Washington, 100 identity: compelled Catholic nuns, 159–60 Black Laws. See segregation Chesnutt, Charles W., xiv, xx–xxi Black leadership, xiii–xxv, 3, 13–14, 41–42, 48–50, Chinese immigrants, 57, 84, 88, 98–99, 109– 52, 55, 112–17, 130–42, 196; Greener on, 97–98, 10, 180–81 264 Index

Church, Robert R., 67 Federation of Afro-American Women’s Clubs, Citizens’ Committee to Test the Constitution- 143–44 ality of the Separate Car Law, 36 Ferris, W. H., 45–46, 93–95, 116 citizenship: emphasis as uplift strategy, 88, 91–95 Fines, Marie (Molly), 144 civil rights activities: post–Civil War, 23–26, 33– Fisk University, xxi, xxii, 41, 146 39, 76–77 Fleet, Genevieve Ida (first wife of Richard T. Civil War, xvi, 1–2, 10–22, 118 Greener), 127–29, 131–33 Cleveland, Frances Folsom, 166 Floyd, Josephine (wife of Robert James Har- colonialism: in Africa, 99–102, 104, 155–57, 197; in lan), 54 Cuba, 91, 104, 106–7; in Guam, 104; in Hawai’i, Forten, Charlotte L., xvii 89–90, 104, 109–12; mixed-race leaders as Fortune, T. Thomas, xxv, 73, 79–80, 85, 89–90, advocates and participants, 85, 89–91, 106–7; 113, 173, 181; as colonizer, 109–12, 115–16, 135, 197 opposed by Black leaders, 105, 157, 197–98; in Fourteenth Amendment, 67 the Philippines, 89–91, 104, 109–12, 115–16 Franklin, John Hope, 64 Colored Caucasians, 43–45 Frazier, E. Franklin, 64 Colored Magazine, xx Freedmen’s Bureau, 67 Colored Orphan Asylum, 54 free people of color, 14–17 Colored Women’s League, 144 colorism, xviii, xxx, 17, 42, 69, 90, 103, 107–8, 117– Garrison, William Lloyd, 124 18, 168–69; and class distinctions, 152–58, 167, Gatewood, Willard, xviii, 64–65, 68, 82–83, 104– 185–87, 190–91, 194; and eugenics, 160–61, 192– 5, 107, 127, 164, 167 93; darker rejection of light-skinned, 167–69 Gibbs, Mifflin Wistar, 89 Contraband Relief Association, 23 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, Comte de, 43 Coppin, Fannie, J., 155–57, 184–85, 197 Grant, Madison, 42, 46, 49–50 Coppin, Levi Jenkins, 155–57 Greene, Theo. I., 57 Creoles. See Louisiana racial system Greener, Richard T., fig. ;4 xxii–xxiii, xxv, 85, Crummel, Alexander, 49, 132 89, 113, 181; abolitionist activities, 123, 125; aca- Cuba: as locus of Black colonial enterprise, 91, demic career, 125–26; allegations of passing, 104, 106–7, 135 123–24, 127–32; anti-Chinese racism, 135–36; Cuffe, Paul, xvi on Black emigration, 96–99; career in government, 128–32; consul in Vladivostok, 133– Day, Caroline Bond, 160–61 38, 197; early life, 124–26; on immigration, 96; Demas, Henry, 197 insistence on Blackness, 123–24, 127–32; mar- Democratic Party, 32, 58 riage to Genevieve Ida Fleet, 127–29, 131–33; Devol, George, 9, 29–30 marriage to Mishiyo Kawashima, 138 Douglass, Frederick, x, xviii–xix, 24, 45, 81–82, Grimké, Archibald, 45, 67 88–89, 113, 134, 139–41, 146, 169, 181; as colo- Grimké, Charlotte Forten, 181 nizer, 135 Grimké, Francis James, 45, 129 Du Bois, W. E. B., xiii, xiv, xx–xxi, 35, 45, 48–49, 63, 76, 138–40, 176; call for a monoracial Black Hackley, E. Azalia, fig. ;6 xxv, 142, 143, 150, 154– identity, 83–84, 116 55, 162; colorism, 189–93; early life, 188; The Dumas, Alexandre, 180 Colored Girl Beautiful, 189–93 Dunbar, Paul Lawrence, 182 Hackley, Edwin (husband of E. Azalia), 150 Dunbar-Nelson, Alice, 62, 182 Haiti: as locus of Black colonial enterprise, Dunn, Oscar J. xix–xx, 26, 35 89, 135 Dupree, William, 176 Haitian Revolution, 66 Dusk of Dawn, xx–xxi Hampton Institute, 75, 183–84 Harlan, John Marshall, 53 eugenics, 43, 46, 91, 101, 140, 142, 194; and color- Harlan, Robert James, fig. 2; xxv, 42, 45, 53–61; ism, 160–61, 192–93; at Tuskegee Institute, 161– Black identity, 54–55; critique of Black leader- 62, 185–87; and uplift 160–61, 189 ship, 59; political activism, 57–60, 70, 82 Index 265

Harlem Renaissance, xi Leary, Lewis, xvii–xviii Harper, Frances, 175, 181 Liberia: as locus of Black colonial enterprise, Harvard University, 123–26, 131, 133, 139, 146, 89, 91, 104, 135 160–61 Lifting as We Climb, 144, 194 Hawai’i: as locus of Black colonial enterprise, Lincoln, Abraham, 20 89–90, 104, 109–12, 197 Lincoln, Mary Todd, 23 Herskovits, Melville, 161 Louisiana Guard (various names), 15, 19–20, 30–31 Hethorn, Nina Emily, 9–10 Louisiana racial system, 14–22, 33–37, 62, 197 Holiday, Billie, xi Loyalty Leagues, 120 Holm, John James, 43–45, 49–50, 61 Lynch, John R., 70, 117, 169 Homestead Act, 67 lynching, xiii, xxiv, 40, 91, 123, 164, 174 Hopkins, Pauline, 175 Lyons, Maritcha, 174 Howard University, xxii, xxiii, 41, 119, 126, 146 Hughes, Langston, xi, xvii Madagascar, as locus of Black colonial enter- Hunt, Henry A., fig. ;9 53, 73–75, 84 prise, 89 Hunt Logan, Adella, fig. 7; xxv, 142, 143, 154–55, Malcolm X, xi 174, 185–87, 191; supports women suffrage, 167 manumission, 6 Hurston, Zora Neale, xi, 161 Martinet, Louis Andre, 33–34 Matthews, Victoria Earle, fig. 8; xxiii–xxiv, xxv, identity: compelled, 9–10, 51 113, 142, 143, 155, 173–85; Aunt Lindy: A Story identity as choice: Black, ix–x, xiv–xv, xx–xxii, Founded on Real Life, 173; Black identified, 179; xxiv, 2–4, 10–12, 18, 24, 30, 32, 35, 37–40, 42–43, colorism, 179; early life, 173; emphasis on race 46–48, 50, 52–53, 65, 67, 112–13, 117–18, 123, 127, history and literature, 174, 176–82; journal- 152, 168–69, 179, 181, 189, 195, 198; mixed race, ism career, 173; political activism, 173–83; pre- xxi–xxii, 51, 65, 69; White, 8, 10–11, 18, 39, 48, scribes Victorian women’s roles, 174–76, 182, 53, 65, 127, 198–200, 226n124 184; racism, 180–81; “The Value of Race Litera- identity change, 2, 3–4, 9–10, 32, 103 ture,” 176–81; White Rose Mission, 181–83 immigration: Black opposition to, 88, 91–96, McKinlay, Whitfield, 37–38, 67 168, 180–81; Chinese, 57, 84, 88, 98–99, 109–10, McKinley, William, 90, 95–96 180–81; German, 88, 94, 98–99; Greener on, Merrick, John, 75–76 96; Irish, 88, 98–99; Italian, 91, 93–94; Wash- migration: as colonialism, 89, 102–3, 107–12, 197; ington on, 95–96 Greener on, 96–99, 102–3; opposed, 92–93, Imperial Order of Libyans, 150 98–99; as solution to Black disabilities, xvi– industrial education, 167–68, 175–77, 181–83. See xvii, 56–57, 67, 87–89, 145, 150, 197 also Tuskegee Institute; Washington, Booker T. miscegenation, 9, 52, 54–55, 140–41; law against, intermarriage, 9, 52, 54–55, 140–41 9–10, 52 Islam, 134–35 missionaries, 155–57 mixed race: concept, xii, 14–16; identified with Jim Crow. See segregation Confederacy, 14–16; self-image as superior to Johnson, James Weldon, 62–63 Blacks, 90. See also identity as choice; identity Johnson, Mordecai, fig. 10; x change; racial mixedness Kawashima, Mishiyo (second wife of Richard mobility (economic, racial) xiv, xix, xxii–xxv; T. Greener), 138 through business activities, 28–35, 62, 80–81, Keckley, Elizabeth, 23 151–54; through diplomatic appointments, xx, Kellogg, William P., 26 xxii–xxiii, 2, 89–91, 107–12, 133–38; through King, Martin Luther, Jr., xi federal appointments, xxii–xxv, 70–71, 90–91, Ku Klux Klan, 120 127–28, 162–63; through intertwined modes, 45, 54, 64, 67–71, 77–79, 85, 195–96; limited for Lafon, Thomy, 16–17, 34 women, 61; through military service, 11–14; Langston, John Mercer, xvii–xix, xxiii, 7, 52, 67, through politics, 2, 57–60, 70–71, 90–91, 119– 89, 113, 117, 119, 169 23; through property ownership, 57, 63–75, 77; 266 Index

mobility (continued) race: as concept. See Blackness; mixed race; through uplift activities, 145–46, 152–54, 158– one-drop rule 60, 175, 198 racial ambiguity, ix–x, xii–xiv, 1, 11, 123, 164– monoracialism. See identity as choice: Black 65, 180, 195. See also identity as choice; iden- Mott, Lucretia, 146 tity change Mulatto, 2–4, 7, 17, 49–50, 61, 175; myth of insta- racial formation, xii–iv bility, 45–47, 52, 69 racial mixedness, xviii–xxii. See also identity as choice; identity change; mixed race National Association of Colored Women Rainey, Joseph H., xxiii (nacw), 143–47, 149–50, 167–69, 176–81, 183 reenslavement threat, 8–9 National Association for the Advancement of reform movements, xvi–xviii Colored People, 170, 183 Republican Party, 2, 23, 25–29, 41–42, 53, 55, 90, National Conference of Colored Men of the 131, 196; Settle, 119–23 United States, 55–56 Reuter, Edward Byron, 42, 46–50, 60 Roosevelt, Theodore, 90, 95–96, 139 National Federation of Afro-American Rudd, Lavinia, 6–7 Women, 174 Russo-Japanese War, 137–38 National Negro Anti-Imperial, Anti-Expansion, and Anti-Trust League, 105 Saffold, Adeline P. “Addie,” 11–12 Negrosaxon, 116 schools: Black, 54, 58–60, 118–19, 124–26 Niagara Movement, 138–39 segregation, 41, 51–52, 56–60, 63, 82, 165; mixed- race leaders for and against, 196–97; as spur to Oberlin College, 119, 125, 146, 185 Black migration, 99 one-drop rule, 5, 10, 35, 91, 135 Seneca Falls Women’s Conference, 146 Orientalism, 135–36, 180–81 Settle, Josiah T., fig. ;3 xxv, 42, 45, 52, 85, 89, 113, 117–23; childhood and youth, 118–19; political Page, Thomas Nelson, 68 career, 119–23 passing. See identity as choice: Black; identity as settlement houses, 150, 153, 158, 181–83 choice: mixed race; identity as choice: White Shaw University, 146 Peake, Mary S., xvii Simmons, Roscoe, xx Philippines: annexation, 85, 104–5; as locus of Black Simmons, William J., 3, 50, 53–54, 60–61, 77– colonial enterprise, 89–91, 104, 109–12, 135, 197 78, 113, 118 Pinchback, P. B. S., fig. ;1 xviii–xx, xxv, 1–42, 45, slaveholders: mixed-race, 14–17, 66 52, 60–61, 81, 105, 196–97, 201; ambivalence Southern University, 81 about Blacks, 37–38; as Black, 2–4, 10–12, 18, Spanish-American War, 84–85, 89, 105, 107 24, 30, 32, 35, 37–40, 47, 113; business success, Spelman College, 146 28–35; childhood and youth, 4–9; civil rights Spickard, Paul, xviii, 52 work, 33–39; corrupt image, 26–35; marriage, Stanton, Edwin M., 20 9; on migration and property ownership, 56– Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 146 57; military service, 10–22, 30–31; political Stewart, Eliza (mother of P. B. S. Pinchback), 4–9 career, 25–29, 67, 70; siblings, 6–8, 11–12, 39; as Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 180 White, 8, 10–11, 18 St. Pierre Ruffin, Josephine, 149, 174 Pinchback, William (father of P. B. S.), 4–8 Talented Tenth, 48–49, 63, 84 Plessy v. Ferguson, 35–37, 53, 123, 197 Terrell, Mary Church, 67, 122, 154, 157, 167, 171 Progressive era, 157–61; critique of progres- Terrell, Robert H., 67 sives, 158 Tillman, Benjamin, 75 Puerto Rico: as locus of Black colonial enter- Toomer, Jean, xi; on P. B. S. Pinchback, 4–6, prise, 89 8–10, 13, 24–25, 31–32, 37–39, 47 Purvis, Charles B., xxiii, 67 Truth, Sojourner, 146 Pushkin, Alexander, 180 Turner, Henry McNeal, 197 Index 267

Turner, Nat, xvii, 65 Washington, Margaret Murray, 167 Tuskegee Institute, xx, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, 41, 71– Wells, Ida B., 122–23, 181; antilynching cam- 72, 75, 79, 96, 154, 167–68, 175–76, 181, 190– paign, 123, 174 91; colonial endeavors, 99–102; colorism, 191; West, Owen Lun, 89 eugenics, 161–62, 185–87; women teachers at, Wheatley, Phyllis, xvi, 49 171, 185–88 Whipper, William, xvi, xxiii, 41 Twain, Mark, 180 White identity. See identity as choice: White United States Army: racial policy, 18–22 White philanthropists: condescension to peo- University of South Carolina, 126 ple served, 154–55; co-optation of mixed-race uplift of Black Americans, xvii, xx, 4, 23–24, 26, leaders, 75–77, 98 54, 67, 81–82, 200–201; and eugenics, 160–61, White Rose Mission House, 150, 158, 181–83 185–87; mixed-race condescension to Black Wilcox, Ella Wheeler, 166 masses, 155–58, 185–87, 189–94, 198; as motiva- Williamson, Joel, 51–52, 64 tion for Black identity choice, 77–78, 152–54, women: historiography of, 147–49; obscured 189, 198; transmission of Victorian values, 146, from history, 118 153, 165, 174–75, 189–93; women as uplifters, Women’s Christian Temperance Union, 170 143–45, 148, 152–57, 174–80, 188–94, 198 women’s clubs, 143–47, 151–52, 154–55, 198 women’s movement, 146–47 Vesey, Denmark, xvii, 65 women’s rights, 36, 56, 146–47 violence against Blacks, 56 women’s roles, 118, 122, 164, 174–80, 188–94 Walker, Madam C. J., xiii women’s suffrage, 147, 150, 167 Wallace, H. A., 41 Woodson, Carter, 64–65 Warmoth, Henry Clay, 26 Woodward, C. Vann, 51–52 War of 1812: Black soldiers in, xvi, 18 World Purity Federation, 170 Washington, Booker T.: as Black power broker, Wright-Cuney, Norris, xxiii, 9, 67 viii–xx, 45, 50–53, 60, 63, 71–73, 76–77, 82, 84, 90, 117, 133, 138–39, 163, 175; as colonizer, 99– Yezierska, Any, 154–55 102, 135; on industrial education, 168 Young Women’s Christian Association, 183 In the Borderlands and Transcultural Studies series

How the West Was Drawn: Mapping, Indians, and the Construction of the Tran-Mississippi West by David Bernstein Chiricahua and Janos: Communities of Violence in the Southwestern Borderlands, 1680–1880 by Lance R. Blyth The Borderland of Fear: Vincennes, Prophetstown, and the Invasion of the Miami Homeland by Patrick Bottiger Captives: How Stolen People Changed the World by Catherine M. Cameron The Allure of Blackness among Mixed Race Americans, 1862–1916 by Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly Words Like Birds: Sakha Language Discourses and Pratices in the City by Jenanne Ferguson Transnational Crossroads: Remapping the Americas and the Pacific edited by Camilla Fojas and Rudy P. Guevarra Jr. Conquering Sickness: Race, Health, and Colonization in the Texas Borderlands by Mark Allan Goldberg Globalizing Borderlands Studies in Europe and North America edited and with an introduction by John W. I. Lee and Michael North Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia by Ann McGrath Shades of Gray: Writing the New American Multiracialism by Molly Littlewood McKibbin The Limits of Liberty: Mobility and the Making of the Eastern U.S.-Mexico Border by James David Nichols Native Diasporas: Indigenous Identities and Settler Colonialism in the Americas edited by Gregory D. Smithers and Brooke N. Newman Shape Shifters: Journeys Across Terrains of Race and Identity edited by Lily Anne Y. Welty Tamai, Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly, and Paul Spickard The Southern Exodus to Mexico: Migration across the Borderlands after the American Civil War by Todd W. Wahlstrom

To order or obtain more information on these or other University of Nebraska Press titles, visit nebraskapress.unl.edu. Fig. 1. Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, Republican governor of Louisiana and businessman. Library of Congress, Matthew Brady, c. 1870 Fig. 2. Robert James Harlan, businessman, educator, military officer, and civil servant. From Simmons, Men of Mark. Fig. 3. Josiah T. Settle, lawyer and politician. From Simmons, Men of Mark. Fig. 4. Richard T. Greener, first Black Harvard graduate, law school dean, Republican functionary, and diplomat. From Simmons, Men of Mark. Fig. 5. Josephine Beall Willson Bruce, business woman, educator, socialite, and leader of the National Organization of Afro-American Women. Photograph by E. Decker, Cleveland, Ohio, c. 1870s. Fig. 6. E. Azalia Hackley, singer, author, teacher, and women’s activist. Photograph by Hiatt-Ford Photography, Jackson, Michigan, c. 1900–1910. Fig. 7. Adella Hunt Logan, writer, suffragist, and “Lady Principal” at Tuskegee Institute. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library/Art Resource, ny Fig. 8. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. “Quarter length portrait of journalist and social worker Victoria Earle Matthews.” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed July 23, 2018. http://digitalcollections .nypl .org /items /86cea810 – 6ba5– 26ae-e040-e00a1806441f Fig. 9. Henry A. Hunt, agricultural educator, New Deal administrator, and member of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Black Cabinet. From Culp, Twentieth Century Negro Literature. Fig. 10. Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, Baptist preacher and first Black president of Howard University. Library of Congress, Harris & Ewing Photograph Collection, 1938.