Black Identity, Masculinity, and Authenticity Through the Body of T

BUILDING MULTIRACIAL FORTUNES: BLACK IDENTITY,

MASCULINITY, AND AUTHENTICITY THROUGH THE BODY OF

T. THOMAS FORTUNE, 1883-1907

______

A Thesis

Presented to the

Faculty of

San Diego State University

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In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

History

______

Guy Mount

Fall 2011

iii

Guy Mount

ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS

Building Multiracial Fortunes: Black Identity, Masculinity, and Authenticity Through the Body of T. Thomas Fortune, 1883-1907 by Guy Mount Master of Arts in History San Diego State University, 2011

This thesis examines the post-emancipation formation of African American identity, masculinity, and authenticity through the white skinned, multiracial body of T. Thomas Fortune, the premier African American newspaper editor of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. It argues that multiracial African American men like Fortune were central to the collective construction of an authentic black male identity between 1883 and 1907. Often functioning as foil characters in elaborate racial performances which characterized them as less authentic, less masculine, and more subject to racial disloyalty, Fortune and others who visually presented a racially ambiguous body challenged this narrowly drawn and internally imposed paradigm of orthodox black male authenticity while resisting its implications. Emerging from chattel slavery in Florida and surviving a particularly violent strand of Reconstruction in Marianna County, Fortune relocated to New York City where he harnessed the power of the press to fight white racism and eventually enter the debates over a rapidly crystallizing image of black masculinity. In doing so he attempted to inscribe an alternative political meaning to interracial sexuality, the bodies of white skinned African Americans, and indeed, the very notion of authentic black manhood itself. All of these projects were informed by Fortune’s deeply rooted anxiety regarding his own white skinned body and what it signified within the black community. Ultimately this formulation and the ongoing struggle over the meaning of blackness, was acted out by Fortune and others at the expense of black women. This process of defining black authenticity and black manhood effectively established a firm patriarchal order within elite African American discourse as it attempted to assert black manhood by controlling the sexualized bodies of black women while silencing their voices in the public sphere. In this way, white skinned African American male bodies can serve as a useful example of the complex problematic of what it means to be a gendered black subject in early Jim Crow America. What emerges, in the end, are complicated, dynamically engaged subjects trying to grasp at an authentic, stable identity that was always shifting, transforming, and at times, vanishing from sight. The four chapters found here cover topics such as the emerging black nationalist movement, segregated insane asylums, the interracial marriage of Frederick Douglass to Helen Pitts in 1884, and the internal debates over the use of the terms ‘Negro,’ ‘colored,’ or ‘Afro-American’ to self-identify African Americans. Methodologically this thesis draws inspiration from Lacanian psychoanalysis, the linguistic work of Jacques Derrida, and the conception of the body, sexuality, and decentralized power networks as envisioned by Michel v

Foucault. The author can be reached for questions, comments, or criticisms at [email protected] or www.twitter.com/guyemersonmount. vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

ABSTRACT...... iv LIST OF FIGURES ...... vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...... viii CHAPTER INTRODUCTION ...... 1 THE INSANITY OF SEGREGATION AND THE SEGREGATION OF INSANITY...... 5 BODIES OF THE BLACK POLITICAL: MULTIRACIAL IDENTITIES, BLACK NATIONALISM, AND THE THREAT OF INTEGRATION...... 12 A Contested Black Nationhood ...... 13 The Limits of Fighting Jim Crow ...... 20 WHAT’S IN A NAME: COMMUNITY, SELF-IDENTITY, AND FORTUNE’S FIGHT FOR THE ‘AFRO-AMERICAN’ ...... 27 “HIS QUEER CHOICE”: INTERRACIAL SEXUALITY AND THE PROBLEM OF THE MULTIRACIAL BODY...... 40 There is No Sexual Relationship...... 41 “His Queer Choice” ...... 49 CONCLUSION: BREAKS IN FORTUNE ...... 55 REFERENCES ...... 57 vii

LIST OF FIGURES

PAGE

Figure 1. T. Thomas Fortune ...... 2 viii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project has been a collaborative venture in more ways than one. My family and friends have inspired me with their love, encouragement, and support allowing my spirit to endure in moments of doubt. My mentors and colleagues have challenged me intellectually, nourishing my mind and setting it off in exciting new directions. My students at San Diego State University have moved my heart and reminded me every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday how far I still have to go. Without these influences, I undoubtedly would have fallen off the path and lost the courage to continue. William and Aimlee Cheek patiently believed in me through all my career diversions. They not only taught me how to think, read and write but also how to live a life filled with love and devotion to the world of humanity. Their passion for teaching and unwavering commitment to their students can only be matched by Elizabeth Colwill whose ideas about the body have festered in my mind for over a decade and will undoubtedly shape my scholarship for decades to come. My gratitude, admiration, and respect for these three precious souls can never sufficiently repay them for all they have done, as they have truly changed my life and the trajectory of my family forever. Edward Blum thankfully agreed to serve as my thesis chair while welcoming me into his American Religious History seminar. While his hand only appears in the shadows of this work, he has successfully converted me into one of his faithful apostles and as I move onward I will be joining his crusade to reassert the centrality of religion in American history. I would also like to thank the many other brilliant professors at San Diego State who impacted me so long ago and who have remained supportive of my work over the years. These include Ross Dunn, Howard Kushner, and Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, all of whom have given generously of their time with letters of recommendation, advice, and administrative fixes to help expedite my return to the life of the mind. I also would like to thank Lawrence Barron whose dedicated work as the department’s graduate advisor helped navigate me through all the bureaucratic red tape with his trademark wit, skill, and charm. The administrative team at SDSU’s history department including Adriana Putko and Jan ix

LeBlanc exemplified the department’s positive ‘vibe’ and showed my children such love and generosity that the frequent trips with Daddy to campus became a joyous adventure rather than a laborious chore. To the SDSU professors who showed me how to teach and gave me the opportunity to practice my crazy ideas on their students I send my humble thanks: Frank Nobiletti, Andrew Wiese, Eve Kornfeld, and Stephen Colston. Further aiding my professionalization on the teaching front, I would also like to thank Stephen Barnes and Kendra Jeffcoat from San Diego State’s Innerworks Institute whose courses in post-secondary educational theory and curriculum design helped me develop the intellectual foundation to purse my teaching passionately. My fellow teaching assistants at San Diego State including Max Rieger, Galit Stam, Dan Driskill, Ryan Wingerd, Mekila Martin, Vivian Valdvia, Joe Bickley, Rob Palermo, and Mike Brickey, served as a constant soundboard for all ideas germane and tangential as we stumbled to balance teaching, learning, writing, and, of course, labor organizing and student activism. Revolution is now upon us and I hope we carry it onward in the name of our fallen sister Jen Lindel who just months after gaining admission to the University of Pennsylvania was tragically taken from us due to complications of cystic fibrosis. She will be sorely missed and we will proceed in her name and carry on her work. To the brothers at the San Diego Black Men’s Gathering, too many to name, who surrounded me with a love, confidence, and community that I never imagined possible I want to send thanks. Joe Walker, John Myers, Dale Bivens, Russ Moxley, Hennin Foreman, Ray Daniel, Tony Hamm, Sylvester Scott, Bruce Smith, Mark Sisson, Phil Sission, and Charles Sisson graciously offered their friendship and acceptance to this wandering soul. I would especially like to thank our dearly departed brother Jihmye Collins who reviewed an early version of this thesis and gave his encouragement and artistic perspective. We love you Jihmye and ‘pile on’ your memory. I am also extremely grateful for my recent invitation to the Tarikh scholarly listserve and its many dedicated members near and far who have offered this project their input and guidance. Don Addison, Christopher Buck, Steve Cooney, Omid Ghaemmaghami, Richard Hollinger, Sonja van Kerkhoff, Anthony Lee, Suzan Maneck, Sen McGlinn, Brent Poirier, Ahang Rabbani, Peter Smith, Robert Stockman, Peter Terry, and Phillip Tussing all offered x up their critical minds and several of them also contributed with careful readings of this thesis. Many thanks goes out to Rick Shenkman and David Walsh at History News Network for providing me a platform to publish some of my ideas and as well as Negar Mottahedeh for including me in her upcoming edited volume. Though it may sound strange and premature, I also want to thank the admissions committee at the University of Chicago and my future mentors in the history department for seeing enough promise in this work to bankroll my dream a bit further. The work of Jane Dailey, Julie Saville, Amy Dru Stanley, Christine Stansell, and Thomas Holt inspired me to do history in the first place and knowing that I will soon be sitting at their feet helped confirm and validate, at least in my mind, the value of the topics I am pursuing. A special thanks also goes out to professor-extraordinaire -in-the-making Shahari Pullom for his insight into the world of academia and his encouragement when things looked bleak. I also want to thank Dickson Bruce for his careful reading of this thesis and his valuable suggestions for improvement while proving that there is no real retirement for the lovers of history. Finally, I must thank my entire family who has tolerated my obsession and loved me in the face of all obstacles. My wife Shannon was always there to reel me in when she saw me sprinting blindly towards the deep end. I’m not exactly sure why or how you do what you do, but I thank the heavens that you do it anyway. If I never write another line, I hope that the two precious loves of my life, Alana and Giovanni, will know with this modest work, Daddy did what little he could to help you navigate this world a bit easier and provide you with a few tools to help you understand your history and the legacy you will honor as you travel down “this thing called life”. 1

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

I am body entirely, and nothing beside —Frederick Nietzsche This study examines the gendered body and racial performance of one white skinned multiracial African American, T. Thomas Fortune. Fortune was born into bondage on October 3, 1856 in Marianna, Florida. He died on June 2, 1928 in New York City and was memorialized as “The Dean of Negro Journalists”1 and one of the most important African American leaders of his generation.2 Noted historian John Hope Franklin would later describe Fortune as the “most articulate” African American between “the decline of Frederick Douglass and the rise of Booker T. Washington.”3 Throughout his extensive career as a newspaper editor, author, activist, father, husband, poet, and public speaker, Fortune negotiated the complicated dynamics of what it meant to be a black man in America. Complicating matters further, he undertook this venture with a body covered in white skin that often made him “so white as not to be distinguishable as colored”4 (see Figure 1). While Fortune was probably somewhere between one quarter and one eighth black with a greater degree of Indian ancestry than black ancestry and a greater degree of white ancestry than all others combined5, his biological genotype would necessarily give way to an elaborate racial performance that would be acted out on an increasingly dramatic social stage. The central tension between Fortune’s African American heritage and his largely European American body is one of the departure points for this study. By the time Fortune

1 Negro World, September 11, 1926. 2 New Amsterdam News, June 13, 1928. 3 John Hope Franklin, foreword to T. Thomas Fortune: Militant Journalist, by Emma Lou Thornbrough (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), vii. 4 New York Freeman, February, 28, 1885. 5 Emma Lou Thornbrough, T. Thomas Fortune: Militant Journalist, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 3-4. 2

Figure 1. T. Thomas Fortune. Source: BTWSociety. “T. Thomas Fortune.” Accessed June 30, 2011. http://btwsociety.org/library/books/The_Negro_Proble m/07.php. was born in the mid-nineteenth century, white skinned African American slaves had experienced a long and varied history on American soil, informed by both their relationships with their darker skinned African American kinfolk and the overarching context of chattel slavery and overt discrimination. This troubled legacy persisted well after Emancipation and into the horror of the Jim Crow period. In 1897 Fortune reflected: 3

The feeling between the pure blacks and all the shades up to that of the white— and there are a lot of white Afro-Americans in this country—has existed all the time, even in the days of slavery, and the feeling has attained more intensity since the close of the war and by the changed conditions which were brought about by the results of the war.6 This paper examines several of these “changed conditions” and explores how Jim Crow segregation and intra-racial patriarchy helped fuel the internal “intensity” that permeated African American constructions of identity, authenticity, and masculinity during the Gilded Age, or “the nadir” as it is often referred to by scholars of African American history.7 Fortune’s body provides a useful methodological prism through which to investigate these inner tensions. As editor between 1883 and 1907 of the only nationally circulated black newspaper in America—appearing successively as The New York Globe, The New York Freeman, and The New York Age—Fortune worked at the crossroads of nearly every major social, cultural, and political issue confronting African Americans during this period. His journalistic lens helped to filter, shape, mold, and frame what African Americans were talking about and how they understood the world around them. He at once spoke to the black community, for the black community, and with the black community on a national stage. To a large degree, I argue, he channeled the hopes, fears, and voices of millions of other African Americans whose racialized and gendered bodies were undergoing dramatic transformations in the shifting social and political landscape of a new but limited freedom. Fortune’s personal anxieties regarding his own body were never far from the surface and frequently bubbled over in his attempts to make meaning for his readers.

6 T. Thomas Fortune, “The Latest Color Line,” New York Sun, May 16, 1897. 7 The term “nadir” was first coined in Rayford Whittingham Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1901 (New York: Dial Press, 1954). Logan conceptualized the nadir as the lowest period in African American history where heightened levels of violence, racism, and oppression were instituted by the ‘redeemed South against its black citizens. It traditionally covers the time period after Reconstruction until the turn of the century, though some scholars, including John Hope Franklin have argued that the nadir should be extended as late as 1923 arguing that it was not until this point that the post-Emancipation African American condition reached its absolute low point. Rayford Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), xxi. The imagery that the nadir evokes contrasts significantly with that of the Gilded Age, whose images of opulent wealth and high technological advancement stand in sharp contrast to the harsh realities of everyday life on the ground during the nadir, not only for African Americans, but also for Native Americans, recent immigrants, and the working poor. 4

The chapters that follow utilize several different theoretical frameworks to examine Fortune’s body and its implications. In the introductory chapter, “The Insanity of Segregation and the Segregation of Insanity,” I rely heavily upon the research of Michel Foucault to interrogate a trip Fortune made to a Virginia insane asylum in 1883 where the self-policing of black authenticity and the criminalization of queer racial behaviors and non- conforming black bodies were institutionalized. In the second chapter, “Bodies of the Black Political: Multiracial Identities, Black Nationalism, and the Threat of Integration,” I examine the ways in which the political discourses of both black nationalism and social integration were intimately tied to the social and cultural battles taking place over the boundaries of blackness and the creation of an idealized black male body. In the third chapter, “What’s in a Name: Community, Self-Identity, and Fortune’s Fight for the ‘Afro-American,’” I utilize the linguistic work of Jacques Derrida to deconstruct black authenticity as it was being produced through the language of proper naming, with the black community debating whether its members should refer to themselves as ‘Negro,’ ‘colored,’ or ‘Afro-American.’ In the fourth chapter, “’His Queer Choice’: Interracial Sexuality and the Problem of the Multiracial Body,” I draw upon Lacanian psychoanalysis to explore the idea of interracial sexuality as it related to gender and authenticity vis-à-vis Fortune’s coverage of the interracial marriage of Frederick Douglass in 1884. In the end, I hope this project will contribute to the historiography on black patriarchy, gender, and sexuality while emphasizing the centrality of white skinned African Americans in the formation of blackness and the resistance to segregation during this critical period. 5

CHAPTER 2

THE INSANITY OF SEGREGATION AND THE SEGREGATION OF INSANITY

Madness no longer exists except as seen. —Michel Foucault In 1883 T. Thomas Fortune, the white skinned African American editor of the most influential black newspaper in the nation, visited the Central Lunatic Asylum in Richmond, Virginia. The institution’s hallways of confinement not only segregated the insane from the sane but also the black from the white. In the Jim Crow South, even the mentally incompetent were segregated from one other on the basis of race. Escorted through the all- black institution by a proud legion of black doctors and overseers, Fortune struggled to analyze what he saw. As he patrolled the hallways and surveyed the madness, he shook the patients’ hands. One dark skinned inmate, however, turned away from Fortune’s outstretched white arm, stating emphatically: “I never shake hands with a ‘nigger.’”8 Fortune’s discomfort must have been palpable as he and his escorts tried to decipher exactly how the black inmate was reading his white body. Did the man, taking Fortune for white, live in some kind of warped reality, where social roles were reversed and ‘white’ people were the ‘niggers’ and good decent black folks were supposed to be repulsed by their presence? Or perhaps the man thought that Fortune was black but that he himself was white, thus entitling him to use such an epithet. Conversely, the man may have perceived the encounter as an intra-racial meeting, with his distain serving as a fractured reflection of the long standing tensions between light skinned and dark skinned African Americans. Folk wisdom at the time probably would have asserted that this inmate was simply a lunatic and in a state of complete delusion regarding his own identity, the new rules of segregation, and who he ‘really was.’ More politically inclined African Americans—to use

8 New York Globe, April 28, 1883. 6 the language of a later day—might have held that the man suffered from a kind of segregation-induced insanity characterized by a racial identity crisis, steeped in self-hatred, which led the man to reject the ‘normal’ social designations prescribed for his body. Crazy or not, the inmate was obviously confused about how to read the black editor’s white body and what such a body meant within the rapidly shifting confines of segregation. Fortune himself remained uncharacteristically silent and forced his readers to speculate about their editor’s personal reactions. Regardless of the man’s actual condition he and all other Americans during this time were forced to function within a system of racial segregation that for many then, and nearly all today, might best be characterized as certifiably insane. The systematic disenfranchisement of African Americans via literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and outright voter intimidation threatened to make a mockery of African American citizenship which had been promised by the Radical Republicans and the 14th Amendment.9 In most locations in the South, African Americans were citizens in name but non-citizens in practice, voters on paper but unable to vote, technically no longer slaves but far from being free. Vagrancy laws, open discrimination, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan coalesced with the Democratic Party to replace slavery with a strict system of sharecropping and menial wage labor that economically returned many African Americans to a de facto state of dependence on their former owners10. Interracial marriage was prohibited by law11 even as white Southern

9 See Jane Dailey, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998), Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black/White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), and C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966). 10On the reorganization of labor post-emancipation see Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina,1860-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Tera W. Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). 11 See Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), Randall Kennedy, Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), and Paul R. Spickard, Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). 7 men, individually and sometimes in groups, raped black women12 and formed mobs to lynch black men on suspicion of committing the very same crimes that they themselves were guilty of.13 Throughout the Gilded Age demoralized white southerners developed increasingly imaginative and brutal ways to socially isolate and personally humiliate African Americans in hopes of reordering their racial, gendered, sexual, and religious worlds after the Civil War.14 While the architects and beneficiaries of segregation believed that there was a method to this madness, for the victims of segregation all that remained was the madness. The system of Jim Crow ironically wielded the power to create and define insanity along racial lines as white segregationists worked to remake the boundaries of blackness and crystallize the meaning of whiteness.15 This powerful force affected whites as well as blacks: for example, in 1893 a northern white woman who declared her intention to marry a black man was “ordered to be examined by the Commissioners for the Insane.”16 With a schizophrenic system in charge, it might not have been a stretch to assume that those who broke down under its absurdities may have ultimately been the lucid ones. Those who accepted

12 For more on the intersection of Southern culture, rape, race, power, and sexuality see Nell Irvin Painter, Southern History Across the Color Line (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). Fortune reported on several instances of where black women were gang raped by groups of white men. One such case was from nearby Newark New Jersey where a young black girl was raped by three or four white men several of whom were actually brought to trial. New York Freeman, November 7, 1885. In a separate report from Louisville, Kentucky, several white men apparently blackened their faces when committing such crimes so that their rapes and other crimes could be blamed on black men. New York Freeman, July, 25, 1885. 13 This sexual hypocrisy was a frequent target of Fortune’s through his editorials and his inclusion of reports about this topic from his correspondents. During a single twelve month period between 1885 and 1886 he printed a critique along these lines no less than six times. See New York Freeman, March 28, 1885, July 25,1885, October 31, 1885, November 7, 1885, November 14, 1885, and April 10, 1886. 14 For race and memory see David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001). For religion and whiteness see Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005). For gender see Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), Laura F. Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997). 15 On the making of whiteness via the instrument of segregation see Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998). 16 Chicago Tribune, January 2, 1893. 8 segregation’s fundamental delusions would find themselves in a world that was, in many ways, far more frightening than the Central Lunatic Asylum. Fortune encountered a further embodiment of this regimented racial procedure around another corner of the institution. This time insanity took the form of a light skinned middle- aged woman who “was once a beautiful woman and still bears traces of a woman's strongest argument.” Despite her beauty, as Fortune saw it, the woman’s body had a very “melancholy history” to tell. After spending her youth as an African American in Virginia, the woman apparently married a darker skinned black man and relocated to his hometown in Georgia. Once there she “claimed to be white and maintained that her husband was simply her servant.” The problem began, according to Fortune, not during this performance in Georgia, but rather when this ‘dangerous individual,’17 after having “imposed herself” as a white woman, “drifted back to Virginia.” There the woman was hastily diagnosed by the black community as being “still under the delusion that she was white.” As a result, she “was adjudged insane and placed in the Central Asylum.”18 It seems, however, that by returning to those who knew her ‘true’ identity, the woman had stumbled upon a ‘field’19 where her fluid racial performance finally encountered the police force that regulated the boundaries between criminal insanity and acceptable racial transgressions. These mechanisms of control proved especially potent for black women, as they were also subjected to the larger 19th century medical establishment’s obsession with ‘curing’ female ‘hysterics’. In this case, a light/white skinned woman was held to be insane

17 For more on the danger assumed to reside within non-conforming bodies as well as a more complete picture of the ‘dangerous individual’ see Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974– 1975, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2003). 18 New York Globe, May 12, 1883. 19 The theoretical concept of a ‘field’, in conjunction with social ‘capital’ that is informed by a subject’s habitus, is normally attributed to Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction : A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). Bourdieu himself acknowledged that the concept of a ‘field’ was simultaneously being worked on by Foucault via the notion of “a field of strategic possibilities” but he criticized Foucault’s particular framing of the issue because it examined each individual ‘field’ only in relationship to itself and not in its interactions with other ‘fields’. Pierre Bourdieu, “Flaubert’s Point of View”, in ed. Philippe Desan, et. al., trans. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson in Literature and Social Practice. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 214-215. For an excellent application of Bourdieu’s model in exploring the unique, and sometimes troublesome, cultural and social ‘capital’ that multiracial people bring to bear on particular ‘fields’, see Kimberly McClain DaCosta, Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). 9 because she was not acting ‘black enough’ and refused to abandon the ‘act’ that she had assumed for so many years. Elsewhere under other circumstances, white skinned African American men, and to a lesser extent white skinned African American women sometimes succeeded in using their ambiguous bodies to subvert racism, challenge segregation, and interrogate fixed racial categories.20 The unspoken caveat, however, was that such individuals must never forget who they ‘really’ were. Apparently to do so would be simply insane. For some of the black asylum inmates, the overwhelming power of segregation, racism, violence, and compulsory identities may have been enough to induce an actual mental health disorder. In other cases, white segregationists would simply brand an entire segment of the black population as insane. For example, the Virginia House of Representatives in 1890 passed a bill calling for the closure of the Petersburg Normal School for African Americans and its conversion into another insane asylum to house the three hundred plus inmates in local jails that the state of Virginia believed should be treated as lunatics.21 Apparently the mass incarceration of African Americans was deemed better policy than mass education. For some individuals, however, like the white/black woman from Petersburg, the restraints of segregation and the strict enforcement of racial codes of conduct threatened that an individual who did not conform to social regulations and controls would be punished and branded insane regardless of her actual mental fitness.22 The most

20 An extensive body of literature exists regarding the potentially anti-racist applications of white skinned African American bodies in the 19th century including G. Reginald Daniel, “Passers and Pluralists: Subverting the Racial Divide,” in Racially Mixed People in America, ed. Maria P. P Root (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1992), Randall Kennedy, “Racial Passing,” Ohio State Law Journal 62 (2001): 1145, Allyson Vanessa Hobbs, “When Black Becomes White: The Problem of Racial Passing in American Life” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2009), Monique Guillory “Some Enchanted Evening on the Auction Block: The Cultural Legacy of the New Orleans Quadroon Balls”, (PhD diss., New York University, 1999), and William Craft and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999). 21 Index-Appeal, Petersburg (VA), February, 1, 1890. The bill failed to pass in the senate. 22 The post-Emancipation period also witnessed the rise of discipline via the prison industrial complex as a clear extension of slavery for Southern blacks, working in parallel with insane asylums in an effort to criminalize and control black behavior. See Karin A. Shapiro, A New South Rebellion: The Battle Against Convict Labor in the Tennessee Coalfields, 1871-1896 (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998), specifically in regards to the culture of segregation surrounding this process and Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010) for a more general and contemporary rendering of this idea. 10 frightening part about this third, and possibly more widespread scenario—as her case would indicate—was that in post-emancipation America, such surveillance was being administered by African Americans themselves. This movement towards an increasingly “self-disciplined society”23 meant that individuals of African descent risked being classified as insane and deemed in need of exclusion not only if they transgressed normative white performance standards, but also if they did not conform to normative black behavior. In other words, not only did white skinned African Americans face the threat of violence, discrimination, and scorn from the advocates of Jim Crow, but they also might open themselves up to internal regulations by fellow African Americans if they took their racial performances into forbidden territory. These dynamically evolving, implicit boundaries of blackness, combined with the overwhelming force of segregation, produced a particularly unstable environment for the fashioning of racial authenticity. Although Fortune merely reported without analysis the situation of the black/white woman from Petersburg, he did use her presence as an opportunity to critique scientific racism and assert his own racial authenticity. He reported that he was “surprised to find among the 440 inmates not more than ten persons of mixed blood, or mulattoes,” a situation that “might disprove in some small degree the sophistical logic of a small class of American scientists who maintain that amalgamation of white and black skinned people deteriorates the species.”24 As a whole, multiracial people, he contended, were racially healthy, conformed to the norm, and did not need to be quarantined. Fortune’s assertion represented not only a critique of white racist ideology but also a desire to define his own body as worthy of inclusion in the black community and thus save it from the institutionalized exile that awaited those unable to cure themselves of their queer bodies and diseased behaviors. 25

23 For more on the idea of an internally patrolled disciplinary society see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Patheon Books, 1977). 24 New York Globe, May 12, 1883. 25 Fortune was not the only actor during this period to read light skin into (or out of) particular bodies. Imagining sexualized histories and making multiracial bodies darker or lighter to fit a particular social context was a constant struggle between blacks and whites during slavery with the slave market place attempting to commodify African Americans and turn them into packaged products of consumption. See Walter Johnson, Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 151-59. This shaping of multiracial bodies through both the white gaze and the black return gaze is also profoundly evident in post-Emancipation black performance art as recounted in Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: 11

As shown in subsequent chapters, Fortune regularly attempted to compensate for the liability that his white body might represent to his standing within the African American community.This compensation often took the form of asserting a hyper-masculine stance and fighting discrimination in an ultra-militant manner in an effort to prove his authenticity to a fragmented African American readership struggling over what it meant to be black in post-Emancipation America. During the Gilded Age, the black community seemed to be constantly on the lookout for any signs of interlopers, traitors, or sell-outs. References to “Black JUDAS,” “treacherous BENEDICT ARNOLDS,” and like symbols of disloyalty were ubiquitous in the black press, indicative of deep intra-racial divides based on class, political affiliation, and skin color.26 Fortune frequently characterized multiracial African Americans, like the black/white woman from Petersburg, in calculated ways to authenticate their bodies and establish their identities as firmly within the continuum of late nineteenth and early twentieth century blackness.

Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006) and Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 26 New York Globe, January 6, 1883. Fortune, while often questioning the loyalties of others within the black community, was very sensitive to the questioning of his own racial loyalties. In New York Freeman, October 17, 1885 he cautioned against throwing around such rhetoric too freely as he sensed that it was often being directed towards him as well. 12

CHAPTER 3

BODIES OF THE BLACK POLITICAL: MULTIRACIAL IDENTITIES, BLACK NATIONALISM, AND THE THREAT OF INTEGRATION

Oh, what a world we make, oppressor and oppressed. Our world— this violent ghetto, slum of the spirit raging against itself. —Robert Hayden One of the most contentious political debates among African Americans during the nadir pitted accommodation, integration, and assimilation, on the one hand, against militancy, segregation, and nationalism on the other.27 An individual’s authenticity might be lost or found depending upon how one navigated these troubled waters. Complicating matters further, none of these stances proved mutually exclusive28 as Fortune himself demonstrated by advocating each and every one of them, to one degree or another, over his

27 For more on this debate, which can be traced back to the early 19th century, see Eddie S. Glaude, Exodus!: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), Kenneth C. Barnes, Journey of Hope: The Back-to-Africa Movement in Arkansas in the Late 1800s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), and Dexter B. Gordon, 2003. Black Identity: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalism. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003). 28 Even modern writers fall victim to the fallacy which assumes that such notions are incompatible. For example, Shawn Leigh Alexander, ed., T. Thomas Fortune, the Afro-American Agitator: A Collection of Writings, 1880-1928 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), xxiii writes in his otherwise excellent compilation of Fortune’s writings that “[d]espite Fortune's belief that amalgamation was one of the solutions to the race problem, he never wavered in his struggle for African American civil and political rights”. Alexander’s use of the word “despite” would seem to presuppose that Fortune’s support of a sexually integrated America was somehow inauthentic and an illegitimate strategy which was contrary to, or at odds with, his support for black civil and political rights. This paper hopes to challenge this assumption, which may have been shared by the many African Americans during Fortune’s time, but was certainly far from settled law. I also hope to examine how Fortune’s efforts to fuse together his support for interracial sexuality and advocacy for black civil rights were systematically undermined from within the black community. 13 nearly fifty years in public life. In part, Fortune’s shifting political positions can be accounted for by the broad changes within these movements themselves during the Gilded Age. They also reflected a growing number of personal, financial, and professional issues affecting Fortune specifically.29 Overall, however, Fortune’s multiracial blackness, and its intersection with his racialized sense of manhood were constant factors that informed his work.His inclination towards intellectual synthesis and his fusing together of seemingly contradictory political philosophies also placed Fortune in a relentless state of change. Not coincidentally, Fortune’s hallmark flexibility and pragmatism put him at odds with several prominent black thinkers of his era.30 While others let their identities dictate their politics, Fortune used his politics to affirm his identity.

A CONTESTED BLACK NATIONHOOD Given the binary culture of segregation—which divided the world into black or white, Christian or heathen, and man or woman—the early debates between black nationalists and black integrationists became increasingly positioned as strictly either/or propositions. Professor Wiley Lane of Howard University, who spoke at the Bethel Literary and Historical Association in Washington, D.C., on May 27, 1884, framed the question as one of “Absorption or Colonization.” Professor Lane assured his audience that “[t]his ranks among the most important questions of the day” and “[i]ts discussion cannot be avoided.”31 The assumption that many in the black community wanted to avoid the question, or at least its

29 Some of these personal problems, which Thornbrough used to explain Fortune’s inconstancies, include his alcoholism, marriage troubles, chronic financial difficulties, personal desire for political power, and complicated relationship with Booker T. Washington. This paper argues that while these factors may have contributed to Fortune’s propensity to change his positions quite radically over time, Fortune was relatively consistent in his core beliefs and shifted his positions largely in an effort to put them in harmony with whatever he believed was the prevailing consensus among ‘authentic’ African Americans on a particular issue at any given time. In this way, rather than seeing Fortune as irrational, erratic, inconsistent, or opportunistic, he can be more clearly understood as having consistently chased the same two basic goals throughout his career: personal intra-racial authenticity and collective interracial equality. 30 Principle among these more ideologically driven leaders were Alexander Crummell, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, and Edward Wilmot Blyden, all of whom will be discussed more below. See Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Alexander Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), Stephen Ward Angell, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and African-American Religion in the South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), Hollis Ralph Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden: Pan-Negro Patriot 1832-1912 (London: Oxford University Press, 1967). 31 New York Globe. July 5, 1884. 14 forced choice between a future in Africa or a future in America, was largely informed by the racially coded implications that such a choice involved for certain multiracial members of the black community. As the debates evolved, clear lines in the sand were being drawn around Fortune and the particular variety of black body that he represented, with proponents of key political projects attempting to link authenticity claims to a few narrowly drawn political ideologies and labeling all other political stances as inauthentic.32 Fortune’s attempt to resist this process as well as the overall canonization of blackness proved to be one of the major losing battles of his career. The precariousness of Fortune’s position, as he attempted to carve out a legitimate space for himself, was discernible in his perceptions of black nationalism during this period. In early 1883 in assessing the relative merits of African colonization as advocated by A.M.E. Bishop Henry McNeal Turner as opposed to the assimilationist model of integration offered by fellow A.M.E. Bishop, Dr. Benjamin T. Tanner, editor of the Christian Recorder, he encouraged his readers to remain neutral. “Dr TANNER is partly right and Bishop TURNER is partly right,” he judged, while urging the black press to “conform their views to the theory which will evolve the most good for the greatest number.”33 Within months Fortune seemed convinced, however, that the theological underpinnings of the colonization movement— which understood slavery and the return of ‘Africans’ to a male dominated ‘fatherland’ to be part of a divine plan to proselytize the Christian faith and bring ‘civilization’ back to Africa—amounted to “religious nonsense boiled down to a sycophantic platitude.”34 At the same time, he came out in favor of establishing a black homeland in America, akin to a Native American reservation. “The suggestion is a good one,” he confidently told his

32 The work of Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) provides much of the theoretical model for this section, specifically regarding the coexistence of seemingly contradictory black political ideologies and the roles of authenticity and everyday black talk as mechanisms in forging meaning out of a diverse set of political positions. 33 New York Globe, January 13, 1883. 34 Timothy Thomas Fortune, Black and White: Land, Labor and Politics in the South (1884; repr., New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1968), 143. Complicating matters further, it appears that Fortune at least minimally supported black missionary work to Africa while arguing against an outright permanent relocation of a large number of African Americans back to Africa. See New York Age, June 28, 1890. 15 readers.35 Later, while still deriding Turner’s version of African colonization, Fortune traveled in 1902 to Hawaii and the Philippines on behalf of the Roosevelt administration to explore the possibility of a mass black migration to these new crown jewels of American imperialism.36 In the waning years of his life, from 1923 until his death in 1928, Fortune served as editor-in-chief of black emigrationist Marcus Garvey’s Negro World newspaper. Although it is unclear to what extent Fortune actually supported the idea of going back to Africa during his years with Garvey, he had in his old age clearly become disenchanted with the prospects of former slaves and their descendants getting a fair shake in America anytime soon.37 Taking these responses to black nationalism in their totality, it appears that Fortune, as an unrepentant ‘race man’38 and vocal supporter of a black nationalist style of self defense,39 was in the end always open to the concept of black nationalism, with the key subtext being that its particular tenets must not threaten his claims to authenticity or masculinity. For example, colonizing the Philippines, with Booker T. Washington as governor no less, was an idea that Fortune initiated. As an advocate for this program he was able to build a discourse insuring that he and those who looked like him would be included in the colonization plans. If Fortune could assure the full participation of himself and other

35 New York Globe, February 23, 1884. 36 For more on Fortune’s travels in the Pacific, see Thornbrough, 234-40 and T. Thomas Fortune, “Politics in the Philippine Islands” in Independent 55 (September 24, 1903) and T. Thomas Fortune, “The Filipino” in Voice of the Negro I (May and June, 1904). 37 For more on Fortune’s general discouragement at this time see Thornbrough, 357, who claims that ultimately Fortune “was not a convert to the ideology which Garvey advocated.” More work needs to be done during this period of Fortune’s life, however, in order to confirm or dispute this claim as Thornbrough does not cite any specific evidence to validate it. 38 For an enlightening discussion of patriarchy, the body, and authenticity in producing the very idea of a ‘race man’, which Fortune often called himself, see Hazel V. Carby, Race Men (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 39 Foreshadowing the Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam, Fortune advocated his eye-for-an-eye “Shoot and Stand” policy as early as December 1, 1883 in the New York Globe. Later he allegedly threatened to stab President McKinley, a statement which he later said was taken out of context as he had only meant to ‘stab’ McKinley at the ballot box. See Washington Times, Washington Evening Star, and Baltimore Herald, December 20 and 21, 1898. Fortune was also reported to have flashed a pistol in public when he encountered white racism while his childhood home during Reconstruction was kept in a constant state of barricade with rifles ready in anticipation of KKK attacks. Alexander, xxv, and Thornbrough, 14-15. 16 white skinned African Americans, then he could in good conscience promote the larger enterprise as a legitimate expression of black solidarity and progress. Bishop Turner’s colonization movement, in contrast, was being sold to the black populace via calls for racial purity and a return to a romanticized view of the African phenotype as somehow more ‘real’ and authentic.40 This position was a complicated one for Turner as he himself was multiracial, very light skinned, and held many European physical characteristics. He often attempted to compensate for his body by claiming that the African side of his family tree was rooted in ancient African royalty. 41 Turner claimed that only ‘weak’ Africans had been captured and sold into slavery, thereby making African Americans the “tail-end of the African races.”42 Only by adopting a dark skinned African male body as the African American ideal could Turner and ‘the race’ hope to overcome the disadvantages of their births. Ultimately then for Turner, the ideal black male body had to be as close to Africa, and as unadulterated by white sexual encounters, as possible. Fortune, as usual, would become a problem. Turner, despite his own body, forged an oppositional link between his movement and the widespread use of skin bleaching and hair straightening products among African Americans. The Bishop insisted that those African Americans with white skin and straight hair, or at least those who artificially created such traits, were not living an authentic experience and should therefore return to Africa in order to recapture it.43 Turner also took up the gendered strategy of referring to Fortune, Frederick Douglass, and other multiracial opponents of his plan as unmanly “cowards” and “sneaks.”44 At the same time that African Americans were being lynched in record numbers, Turner, in one particularly heated

40 Fortune’s good friend T. McCants Stewart on his trip to West Africa exemplifies this idealization when he describes the African male body generally by saying: “Physically he was a perfect specimen—an Apollo. His face was intelligent.” New York Freeman, February 24, 1885. 41 James Campbell, Middle Passages: African American Journey to Africa, 1787-2005 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), 104. Turner’s light skin and personal mythology was a bit of an anomaly in a movement that was overrepresented by those whose bodies tended to fit closely its romanticized picture of the black ‘native’ body. 42 As quoted in Campbell, 122. 43 Campbell, 115. 44 New York Sun, August 30, 1896. 17 exchange with Fortune, went so far as to say that “the best thing that could be done for the race would be to hang a lot of these so-called [multiracial] Negroes.”45 He also became fond of employing a phrase that was rapidly becoming synonymous with inauthenticity—calling multiracial African Americans with whom he disagreed “would-be-white Negroes”.46 Fortune struck back aggressively at Turner’s accusations in his own authenticity- drenched appeals to the black masses. He claimed that it was not he but Turner who was supporting white supremacy and betraying the race by abandoning the domestic civil rights struggle. Turner, he charged, was supporting “a white man's corporation,” the American Colonization Society, which was intent upon expelling blacks from their righteous home in America.47 He further questioned Turner’s romanticized view of racial purity and pointed out the bishop’s own multiracial heritage. “Bishop Turner imagines that he is talking about a Negro population,” he declared, “when as a matter of fact, there is no such population in the United States, the absorbing process having evolved an Afro-American population of which the good Bishop is a distinguished ornament.” Fortune gleefully pointed out the irony that because of Turner’s white skinned body “he was probably regarded as a white man by the natives [of West Africa], or, at least, not as a Negro.” 48 Fortune also clashed with Turner’s West Indian counterpart in the American Colonization Society, Edward Wilmot Blyden. Blyden was chief among the advocates of a ‘pure Negro’ migration back to Africa and was quick to paint prominent multiracial African Americans like Fortune as outsiders, calling them “mongrels who set themselves up as leaders.”49 Unlike Turner, Blyden was able to pride himself on his dark skin and ‘African’

45 John Dittmer, “The Education of Henry McNeal Turner” in Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Leon Litwack and August Meier (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 267. Blyden’s comments came in response to Fortune’s vocal critique in the New York Age of the over one hundred colonists who were stranded in Jew Jersey in 1899 while in route to Africa. 46 Campbell, 114 47 New York Age, March 5, 1892 as quoted in the Indianapolis Freeman, March 12, 1892. The American Colonization Society had a long history and a varied relationship with the black community since its founding in 1816. 48 T. Thomas Fortune, “Race Absorption” in AME Church Review 18, no. 1 (1901), 54-66 as quoted in Alexander, 242. 49 New York Age, January 11, 1890. This quote is from Bishop Edward Wilmot Blyden was originally reported in the Florida Times-Union and reprinted in the New York Age as part of a Fortune editorial. 18 body and unapologetically waved the banner of colonization and racial purity. He made a practice of actively criticizing his political opponents based on their physical features. In 1890 Blyden spoke to a Jacksonville, Florida audience that likely included members of Fortune’s extended family who lived in Jacksonville and were very active in local black politics. Fortune reprinted an account of Blyden’s speech from the Florida Times-Union, which quoted him as saying that “the ‘colored’ or mixed man is not a Negro.”50 Fortune editorially rebuked this slander, and the exclusion of multiracial African Americans by calling Blyden a “hireling and spy.” He further argued, “[t]here is no question in this country between blacks and mulattoes” because “[t]he Afro-American, of whatever shade of color, is working harmoniously together to secure the absolute rights of the race.”51 Nonetheless, Blyden, even in his dying days, vowed to a close friend that his tombstone should not contain his name, his year of birth, his date of death, or any eulogy about his life of service to the African diaspora, but rather a simple three-word inscription: “He hated mulattoes.”52 This was the primary political project Blyden chose to be remembered by and it serves as an indicator of how greatly Blyden’s identity and sense of community depended upon, and was created by, the demonization of Fortune and other light/white skinned African Americans. While Blyden, Turner, and others were demonizing multiracial African Americans in a political setting, this hatred, at least in Blyden’s case, seemed to have been contained to the collective public image of multiracial African Americans rather than manifest itself as a deep seeded personal repulsion. Blyden frequently met socially with Richard T. Greener, Francis Grimké and John M. Cromwell, three well known multiracial African American leaders, and apparently counted them among his friends despite their light skinned bodies and open opposition to the colonization movement.53 It seems that for Blyden, like so many other African Americans inclined towards his stance, light/white skinned bodies needed to be

50 The New York Age, which started in 1887 and lasted until 1960, was the third of three consecutive and continuously running weekly papers that Fortune fully or partially owned and edited. The Age was preceded by the New York Freeman which published between 1884 and 1887 and the New York Globe which ran from 1881 to 1884. 51 New York Age, January 11, 1890. Fortune in editorial commenting on Blyden’s Jacksonville speech. 52 Lynch, 139. 53 Ibid, 112. 19 publicly shunned and visibly purged as a collective stain, even as such individuals could remain privately part of the body politic. If light/white skinned bodies were disproportionately hated and those wearing them accused of racial treason, this was largely because they were emblematic of white racism, rape, and domination. Bodies like Fortune’s, once abstracted and framed in the political context of black nationalism,54 became constant physical reminders to the black community of the sexual domination experienced during slavery, when black men stood almost no chance of defending black women, or indeed themselves, from white men’s sexual advances.55 This making of sexual memory took on an increasingly gendered dynamic in the structuring of political authenticity. Ultimately, the fight between Fortune and the Blyden/Turner emigrationists was as much about the performance of masculinity as it was about blackness, since Turner and Blyden’s valorization of courage, strength, and adventurous explorations of the ‘fatherland’ represented a highly masculinized and deeply gendered ideology. Fortune, in his turn, asserted his own patriarchal hyper-masculinity in an apparent effort to not appear any weaker than his white body already indicated. During this era, black men like Fortune, Turner, and Blyden routinely engaged in similar bouts of rhetorical pugilism in order to determine who was more black and who was more manly.56 In this particular case, the light/white skinned bodies of Fortune and Turner created an even more complex dimension to an already messy exercise.

54 Ibid, 139. See also 105-39 for a more general investigation of Blyden’s views on racial purity and his characterization of the mulatto ‘problem’. See sections below for more on the interaction between rape, gender, and black depictions of the multiracial body. 55 For more on the implications and power dynamics of sexual violence see Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009) and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). 56 Fortune’s papers often provided a forum for everyday black voices to emerge and attempt to assert the most authentic black male voice possible on issues of business, dress, and how the black community should name itself (see next chapter). See for example New York Globe, September 29, 1883, October 13, 1883, and December 29, 1883. These black masculinity competitions can also be seen in every major public personality debate between black male leaders from the W.E.B. Du Bois/Booker T. Washington divide to the Malcolm X/Martin Luther King chasm. See Carby, Race Men and Harris-Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles and BET. 20

Whatever the merits of Fortune’s, Turner’s, and Blyden’s arguments, the underlying debate was primarily about situating black authenticity and masculinity as it related to political thought and the black male body.57 All parties were attempting to construct an African American masculinity in their own image with multiracial African Americans petitioning most urgently for acceptance as they performed their own versions of black manhood. Ultimately, these political contests were less about actual policy and more about exploring which images of the black male body would be included and which would be excluded in the ever narrowing sphere of African American authenticity.

THE LIMITS OF FIGHTING JIM CROW As a counter-narrative to Turner and Blyden’s colonization plans, black advocates of integration and/or assimilation found a ready home in Fortune’s papers as they fought diligently to refashion the multiracial body as opposed to the African body as the ideal display of modern male blackness. 58 As part of their efforts to define blackness away from the emigrationists and challenge white racism, these idealists all held as their starting point that “the relations of the races are too fixed”59 and “prejudice is not natural but acquired.”60 For them, the fact that “all mankind are made of one blood” did not amount to “a meaningless collocation of words, but a living reality, good alike for theory and for practice.”61 As Fortune’s long time friend and noted attorney John F. Quarles put it: “In the onward progress of the human race, the one great need, the one great longing is the removal of the artificial barriers that divide man from man and race from race.” Most integrationists

57 As Harris-Lacewell, 205, puts it: “Black ideological elites perceive themselves as competitors in a marketplace of ideas” where “[a]uthenticity is a marketing strategy as the ideologies compete in a marketplace of ideas.” 58 This radical integrationist ideology also had a strong religious component though it was not quite as pronounced as within the colonization movement. For an excellent survey of this religious “anti-caste radicalism” and how the end of slavery “destroyed an old world and brought a new one into being,” see Reginald F. Hildebrand, The Times Were Strange and Stirring: Methodist Preachers and the Crisis of Emancipation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 120. 59 New York Freeman, December 13, 1884 in a letter to the editor signed only “W.H.F. of Rogersville, Tennessee”. 60 New York Globe, March 29, 1884 in a letter to the editor signed only “Consistency.” 61 Ibid. 21 agreed with Quarles that “the gradual softening of race-distinctions and their ultimate obliteration are the inevitable result of the coexistence of different races in the same social form” and that this notion “is attested by all the facts of history”.62 Given that assimilationists were convinced that they had the inevitable march of history on their side, they proceeded to assert their positions in bold and uncompromising ways. Rev. W.J. White, editor of the Georgia Baptist, explained that “[u]pon this “great law of assimilation hangs, largely, the salvation of the colored man in this country. He must cease to be a separate factor in the political and social system. He must assimilate or get out.”63 Such full assimilation contained liberating yet frightening consequences for black authenticity, literally turning the concept upon its head. According to White and others, if such an integrationist project were ever “fully accomplished the Negro problem will be solved and the true American produced, who will boast not of being white or black, but of being the true child of American soil.”64 For many African Americans, the hope of this monoracial/multiracial utopian world with its idealized beige/brown America was too tantalizing a prospect to resist, especially for a people still under the heavy yoke of racial oppression. Although most agreed that full racial assimilation would be a painfully slow process, even to the point of admitting, as Quarles did, that “this transformation is impossible,”65 the value of the discourse itself, and its ability to counteract some of the more narrowing and exclusionary trends in other arenas of black thought, seemed to be worth the effort. The notion, however, that the authentic black experience might potentially reside in a non-black body proved too much of a paradigm shift for many African Americans to embrace. The loss of black culture and history that was assumed to automatically follow such a change understandably served as another troubling prospect that threatened to erase blackness itself from the American social landscape.

62 New York Globe, May 12, 1883. Quarles’ speech was given at the Bethel Church in New York City, where Fortune was a member, and at the invitation of the Bethel Literary and Historical Association of which Fortune was the president. 63 New York Freeman, April 18, 1885. From a speech given before the Sumner Literary Society of Augusta, Georgia. 64 Ibid. 65 New York Globe, May 12, 1883. Quarles in Bethel speech. 22

Fortune himself was certainly among the light/white skinned African Americans who had “gone so far as to typify themselves as the physical similitude of the future ideal American.”66 In 1883 he editorialized that “the typical American of the future will be the product of the best qualities of the African and the Caucasian.”67 Fortune forwarded such claims, however, with a great many reservations as he recognized the potential problems he faced in trying to counter the prevailing understandings of blackness put forward by the colonization movement. His premise was that racial differences were “so infinitessimal [sic] that it requires the distorted perception of an American to discover them.”68 Following traditional integrationist logic, he pointed out that in “conquest after conquest” in Greece, Rome, France, Germany, and England, history showed “the victors and vanquished gradually blending and becoming one people.”69 Recognizing the unsettling implications that this arrangement posed for some African Americans, Fortune qualified these assertions by stating that the black man in America would “preserve his clannishness until all parties teach him that they neither desire to use him as a tool nor to degrade him as a man” and that “the time is at hand when the colored man will be proud of his black skin.”70 Whether black women were part of Fortune’s demand for respect and his prophetic sense of racial pride is unclear. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century writers and speakers, if put to task, would most likely claim to include women under the universal term ‘man’ or ‘mankind.’ The linguistic invisibility, however, that ‘mankind’ implied often reflected a social invisibility which held that women of all colors were expected to occupy a non-existent social position in most public matters. In light of this gendered language, it seems clear that for Fortune his blackness was firmly entrenched and entangled not just with his imagined black body but also with his masculinity. Ultimately, it was Fortune’s lack of visible “black skin” that proved to be the one key credential that he did not possess. This represented a physical constraint that he could not manfully perform his way out of. It left

66 New York Globe, March 29, 1884. In a letter to the editor signed only “Consistency.” 67 New York Globe, May 26, 1883. 68 New York Freeman, January 17, 1885. 69 New York Globe, May 26, 1883. 70 New York Globe, June 2, 1883. 23 him, despite his pleadings, unable to bask in any of the potential pride and glory of a future universal black manhood. These physical constraints, however, never prevented Fortune from characterizing himself behind the safety of his newspapers as actually possessing the important political capital of “black skin” and overestimating the magnitude of his black ancestry. For example, on March 3, 1883 he proudly reprinted in the Globe a compliment from the Memphis Meriwether's Weekly, a white newspaper that praised his stance on the tariff issue. The article patronizingly claimed that Fortune’s stance was exceptionally remarkable because he was “a man with black skin.” While kindly rebuking the underlying racist assumption that the compliment rested upon, Fortune failed to correct, or even comment on, the much simpler assumption—that he possessed “black skin.”71 Perhaps this can be written off as a simple linguistic glitch that was rooted in the rather imprecise assumption that African Americans universally had “black skin.” Certainly many readers and writers would understand that such a comment probably intended to include all people of African descent in this formulation regardless of their skin color. However, underlying this picture is a visual image that presents Fortune as a man with “black skin” toiling away behind his printing press. Fortune felt no need to challenge this overly vague, and ultimately inaccurate, rendering of his body. By failing to deconstruct its language, which he selectively did with other loaded terms, Fortune was signaling to his black audience that he tacitly accepted the ‘fact’ that he was a man with “black skin.” Perhaps his readers would understand that this “black skin,” at least figuratively, was of the standard variety and that he was therefore firmly part of the African American experience and would stand up for all other individuals with “black skin” in the fight against racist stereotypes. Fortune also conveniently overlooked the fact that he was not always fully subjected to the racial discrimination that people with physically “black skin” faced during Jim Crow.72 This manipulation of the body became part of a larger pattern for Fortune where blackness was less a color and more a form of cultural capital that

71 New York Globe, March 3, 1883. 72 During Fortune’s first trip to the north he unknowingly checked into a white hotel and was not asked to leave until several days later when the innkeeper ‘discovered’ he was black. He no doubt experienced countless other similar events throughout his life in the urban cosmopolitan setting of New York City. Thornbrough, 23- 24. 24 he was always anxious to possess even if it did not harmonize with the physical and visual reality of his body. Another example occurred on April 7, 1883 where Fortune again misrepresented his ancestry in the Globe while reprinting another compliment, this time from the Charleston, S.C., New Era which characterized him as “the noblest Roman of them all.” On this occasion, Fortune was quick to counter the implications of whiteness that this visual imagery represented but in a slightly different way. He simply overstated his black ancestry and led his readers to believe that he was darker than he actually was. While muting his Native American heritage, Fortune replied “[w]e accept the high compliment, but must decline to be classed as a Roman. We are divided pretty equally between the African and the Anglo-Saxon races of the human family, and when we are classed off we prefer to be designated as an African.”73 Fortune might have provided a similar response when he was classified as a man with “black skin,” but in the name of establishing his authenticity, he decided to remain silent in one case and quite vocal and (im)precise in another. Perhaps these particular passages should not be read literally, but their irony could not have been missed by anyone who knew Fortune personally and they certainly indicate his desire to be viewed by his readers as a ‘normal’, unconditional black man. Some twenty years later, Fortune’s angst concerning his body remained transparent, yet took a dramatic turn through his contribution to his close friend and benefactor Booker T. Washington’s 1903 compilation, The Negro Problem. Here Fortune seemed to be directly competing for authenticity points against such other luminaries as Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois,74 and fellow ‘white Negro’ Charles Chesnutt, who was already making a name for himself as a ‘black’ writer. After admitting that “[t]he blood of all the ethnic types that go to make up American citizenship flows in the veins of the Afro-American people,” Fortune uncharacteristically blamed this multiraciality for having “destroyed, in large measure, that

73 New York Globe, April 7, 1883. 74 Du Bois previously had worked as Fortune’s Great Barrington reporter for the New York Globe. For an excellent review of the many influences Fortune had on the young Du Bois at the Globe, including a firmly irreverent stance towards religion, see Brian L. Johnson, W.E.B. Du Bois: Toward Agnosticism 1868-1934 (Lanham: Rowman &Littlefield Publishers, 2008). This agnosticism in Du Bois has not gone unchallenged, however, as in Edward J. Blum, W.E.B. Du Bois, American Prophet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 25 pride of ancestry upon which pride of race must be builded.” He argued that this lack of common ancestry and influx of white blood contributed to self-hatred, rampant individualism, and utter disunity. He concluded that “[i]n no other logical way can we account for the failure of the Afro-American people to stand together.”75 This utterance hardly represents a simple (d)evolution, with the multiracial Fortune of the 1880’s transformed into an anti-miscegenationist figure in the 1900’s. In fact, just two years earlier he had published a lengthy piece in the AME Church Review entitled “Race Absorption” in which he attempted to demonstrate why “there is no other destiny possible to races than absorption.”76 In this article he stated that “the Afro-American is already a mixed race; otherwise he would not be an Afro-American, but an African.” Further, he argued, “[a]bsorption has proceeded so far in this country that the Negroid type has been very nearly destroyed” and replaced by “a new type in the Afro-American race.”77 A juxtaposition of these two articles from the early 20th century and a comparison to Fortune’s earlier arguments in the late 19th century shows that consistency on this point was not Fortune’s hallmark. While prior scholars have attributed this contradiction to Fortune’s deepening relationship with Booker T. Washington, or viewed it as an act of simple financial expediency,78 it seems more likely, when analyzing Fortune’s positions more broadly, that he was simply willing to shift both the meaning of his body and the content of his views in order to maintain a degree of respect and authenticity within the black community. In the end, however, neither the colonization movement’s African body nor the integrationist movement’s multiracial body would be able to monopolize the meaning of black physicality any more than their political strategies were able to gain universal acceptance as the uncontested answer for black America’s future. Former slaves like Fortune negotiated this ever expanding set of political options in a variety of different ways depending upon their individual body’s ability to transfer into the post-Emancipation cultural

75 T. Thomas Fortune, “The Negro's Place in American Life at the Present Day” in The Negro Problem. Booker T. Washington, ed. (1903; repr., New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969), 214-216. 76 Fortune, “Race Absorption,” 54-66 as quoted in Alexander, 244. 77 Ibid. 78 Thornbrough, x, 170-71, 369-70, seems to be the original source of this widely held interpretation. 26 economy and remake itself according to the new rules of race and gender being formed during the Jim Crow era. These responses to racism, segregation, and white supremacy, as the remnants of slavery, proved to be almost as complicated as the actual fight to end the peculiar institution itself, especially for those like Fortune, whose bodies emerged ill prepared to deal with the new social context that was informing their racialized and gendered subjectivity. 27

CHAPTER 4

WHAT’S IN A NAME: COMMUNITY, SELF- IDENTITY, AND FORTUNE’S FIGHT FOR THE ‘AFRO-AMERICAN’

We think only in signs. —Jacques Derrida In response to Emancipation, African Americans during the nadir were actively engaged in the important work of remaking the language of race. In one sense, the actual nature of the black ‘community’79 was being investigated, interrogated, and redefined from within. Simultaneously, linguistic representations of African Americans were being confronted, challenged, and reappropriated. This dual process, which strove to refashion both racial signifiers and the racially signified, was central to the post-emancipation project of crafting black authenticity. Fortune, as usual, had a great deal to say on the subject and once again found himself in a constant uphill battle to convince African Americans to see and represent themselves in ways that were consistent with his physical body and his personal version of blackness. Center stage in this linguistic drama was the act of naming.80 For many newly freed slaves, one of the first orders of business was to rename themselves or reclaim a name that

79 The work of Jacques Derrida, specifically as it relates to notions of ‘community’, otherness, the violence of proper names, and the interdependence of binary categories serves as inspiration for this section. Derrida feared that the idea of a cohesive, stable, discernible ‘community’ contained “as much threat as promise” and that although “[t]here is doubtless this irrepressible desire for a ‘community’ to form” there is imbedded in this desire a need “for it to know its limit—and for its limit to be its opening.” Jacques Derrida, Points…: Interviews, 1974-1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 355. 80 This process of establishing a proper name, as Derrida reminds us, is laced with violence and opposition “because the proper name was never possible except through its functioning within a classification and therefore within a system of differences.” As African Americans worked to define and name themselves they did so by assuming a certain degree of power to distinguish themselves from ‘others’. This power was used by African Americans not only to name and define themselves in opposition to ‘white’ or ‘Anglo-Saxon’ identities but also to mark themselves in opposition to alternate black and multiracial identities such as ‘colored’ or ‘Afro- American.’ This second process necessitated an imagined (and usually multiracial) body that could be 28 was denied to them under slavery. In a similar manner, African Americans as a group extended their quest as newly freed people to find a suitable name to refer to themselves in the collective.81 This process was already underway among free and literate African Americans before the Civil War but took on a new sense of urgency, and a more complex set of considerations, after Emancipation. Everything from ‘freedman’, ‘negro’, ‘colored’, ‘black’, and, Fortune’s eventual favorite ‘Afro-American’, would be tested and contested in an effort to agree upon an appropriate name for people of African descent, or at least a sufficient ‘expressive’ to indicate some ‘presence’ of blackness and contain its meaning. Although a consensus was never reached, the terms that became marginalized, polarized, opposed, and ignored tell a story about who its advocates were and how their voices were silenced. Like many other African Americans born into slavery, Fortune had not been deemed worthy of a last name by his owner. As a slave he was known as Timothy Thomas. After emancipation, when many ex-slaves assumed the names of their former masters, and others chose names for completely unrelated reasons, Fortune’s family, in an act of self-affirmation, took the last name of Fortune’s paternal grandfather and namesake Thomas Fortune, an Irish immigrant who despised the planter class, defied social convention by having a sexual relationship with Fortune’s half-‘mulatto’ half-Seminole Indian paternal grandmother, and was rumored to have been killed in a duel, probably by a member of this planter class. Fortune’s grandfather was so highly regarded by his family that Fortune, as the first born son, was named after him while his younger brother, Emanuel Jr., was named after Fortune’s associated with such terms and then discredited. At the same time, it must be recognized that in spite of this internal wrangling, the “first violence to be named” was exercised by masters against their slaves and all other renaming, reappropriation, and violent contestation thereafter occurs against that backdrop. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, trans. (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1976), 109, 112, 107-118. 81 The difficulty and importance of this task of representation is best summed up by Cornel West when he says: “The modern black diasporan problematic of invisibility and namelessness can be understood as the condition of blacks' relative lack of power to represent themselves to themselves and others as complex human beings.” Cornel West, The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 128. West is rightly critical of Derrida students whose “Johnny-one-note rhetorical readings” have a tendency to ignore hard political realities, lived experience, and the effects, or lack thereof, that deconstructionism has on institutions of power, West, 132. I believe that West and Derrida can, however, at least partially reconcile around notions of otherness, the hierarchical nuances embedded in language, and the false dichotomies produced by white supremacy. 29 father.82 Fortune’s two sons were named Stewart and Frederick after his close friend T. McCants Stewart and presumably his acquaintance and role model Frederick Douglass.83 Fortune selected and briefly used the pen name “Gustafus Bert” sometime after leaving the South in 1874.84 In public, Fortune seemed to deliberately mute his slave name, Timothy, by replacing it with the letter “T” in print, and privately encouraged his family and friends to call him “Bert.”85 Fortune’s use of the letter “T” essentially functioned as a void whereby Fortune’s slave name, and his slave past, could at once be erased, memorialized, and then redefined on his own terms. Although his reasons for many of these naming choices are unknown, the thrust of Fortune’s writings indicate that he somehow hoped to erase the very text of slavery through the process of naming and re-naming himself and the world around him. Early in his career, before the term ‘Afro-American’ appeared broadly, Fortune advocated the use of the word ‘Negro.’ Fortune also intermittently used the terms ‘colored’ and ‘black’ to refer to Americans of African descent. In 1883 he insisted that the American press, both white and black, use the term ‘Negro’ in print to describe African Americans as a group and to do so with a capital ‘N’ as a symbolic matter of respect. He hoped that this would create a sort of grammatical equality with terms like “Anglo Saxon”, “Indian”, and other racial designations which were always capitalized.86 In this way Fortune was following the lead of then US minister to Haiti John Mercer Langston, who was acting president of Howard University during Fortune’s brief career as a student, and other prominent African Americans who supported using ‘Negro’ with a capital ‘N’ in print.87 Although he followed his own injunction fairly consistently in his columns, Fortune had already broken his own

82 Thornbrough, 3-4. 83 Ibid, 97, 99. 84 Faith Berry, From Bondage to Liberation: Writings By and About Afro-Americans from 1700 to 1918 (New York: Continuum, 2001), 295. 85 Thornbrough, 29. 86 New York Globe, July 28, 1883. Fortune in an editorial responding to the Waterbury, Connecticut American’s observation that the Globe capitalized the term ‘Negro’. 87 For more on Langston’s central role during this period see William F. Cheek and Aimee Lee Cheek, John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829-65 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). 30 edict with a small advertisement that had become a regular fixture in his paper over the past month and would run for some time thereafter. Printed in the margins of the same issue in which he demanded the use of the term ‘Negro,’ Fortune wrote: “THE GLOBE aims to supply the place of a National Journal for the colored people of the United States—the term colored embracing in our comprehension all classes and types of people of African origin.”88 This simultaneous and alternate use of the word ‘colored,’ and defining it as a mosaic of all the different “classes” and “types” of African Americans, raises the question: who were these different “classes” and “types” of “colored” people and what term(s) did not embrace such distinctions? Fortune’s slip here can be viewed as a partial answer to these questions. His use of “colored” was an effort to encourage African Americans to embrace a wider sense of inclusivity and a more broadly drawn notion of community among themselves. It also hints at Fortune’s as yet unspoken anxieties regarding the term ‘Negro’, as one of these limiting labels. His simultaneous promotion of the term ‘Negro’ appeared to be an effort to be on the authentic side of a word that was rapidly becoming the default designation for African Americans. Perhaps most importantly, Fortune’s duality in terminology may have exposed his private concerns about the implications that the term ‘Negro’ held for his own blackness and his own body.89 Fortune’s internal dissonance became audible when he allowed his readers to state explicitly for him what his subtle promptings about the term ‘colored’ may not have conveyed directly. In late 1883 Fortune printed a letter to the editor from a reader, “Arius,” entitled: “What Terms should be Used to Describe the Colored people as a Class?” Arius began by quoting the definition of ‘Negro’ in the current Webster's Unabridged dictionary: ”’[a] black man; especially one of a race of black or very dark persons who inhabit the greater part of Africa, and are distinguished by crisped or curly hair, flat noses, high cheek-

88 New York Globe, July 28, 1883. This ad first appeared in June 30, 1883 and continued almost weekly through much of 1883 until it gradually shrunk in size and was eventually displaced by various paid advertisements for cloaks, furs, and promotional tea sets. 89 Imbedded in the word ‘negro’ was of course the word ‘black’ which slipped in rather undetected as a default universal term to describe people of African descent. The implications of being ‘black’ in a ‘white’ body were at the root of Fortune’s dilemma yet ironically he seldom confronted the term ‘black’ directly, only its Latin derivation ‘negro’. 31 bones, and thick, protruding lips.’”90 Arius pointed out that “the above description can be applied to but comparatively few of the colored people of this country.”91 He then asked why the black community continued to accept and promote the use of this term if it did not apply to the majority of the people it purported to describe. Arius proposed a solution rooted in language to account for this disconnect. He advocated the exclusive use of the word “colored” to replace all uses of the word ‘Negro’ which he claimed derived from the word “nigger” and should be “promptly resented as an insult” regardless of its capitalization or lack thereof.92 He then defined ‘colored’ as: “[a]ny hue or tint as distinguished from white.” 93 Fortune likely would have wanted Arius to go one step further by expanding this multiracial definition of blackness to include even those who could not be “distinguished from white,” at least physically. Fortune agreed that some term should be used to bond all people of African descent together but rejected the idea that this identity could be reduced to one stable singularity. In response to several other articles describing African Americans as homogenous, Fortune asked, “who said they were, ‘as a class?’”94 and criticized those who tried to “bunch colored men and to rate them as standing on the same social and intellectual level [as each other].”95 Far from being a call towards elitism, which Fortune publicly denounced while privately

90 New York Globe, November 3, 1883. Letter to the editor signed “Arius” from Key West, Florida 91 Ibid. Exactly what percentage of African Americans at this time were either ‘noticeably’ multiracial or racially indecipherable from whites was a topic of great debate at this time and demonstrates the instability of the body itself in this context. Fortune estimated in 1903 that there were less than four million black people “of pure negroid descent”, six million of multiracial descent and another four million ‘white Negroes’ in America who were not counted among the black population in the 1900 census. T. Thomas Fortune, “The Negro’s Place in American Life at the Present Day” in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negros of To-Day (1903), Booker T. Washington, ed. (New York: Arno Press, 1969) as quoted in Alexander, 93. Fortune’s friend John Quarles in his 1883 speech declared that within the black community “[o]ne-third has a large infusion of white blood, another third has less but still some, and of the other third, it would be difficult to find an assured specimen of pure African blood.” New York Globe, May 12, 1883. Various other estimates can be found during this period with little more in common than the acknowledgment that ‘white Negro’ and multiracial bodies occupied a significantly large space in the collective consciousness of African Americans, especially when compared to today’s standards. 92 New York Globe, November 3, 1883. Letter to the editor signed “Arius” from Key West, Florida 93 Ibid. 94 New York Globe, June 9, 1883. 95 New York Globe, August 8, 1885. 32 rubbing shoulders with prominent African Americans, these statements seem to have represented his view that black power and black unity resided largely in its diversity and ability to distinguish its individual members as heterogeneous, complex, and independent political, social, cultural, and physical agents who happened to share the common history and ancestry of enslaved Africans in America. This, however, is where things get even more complicated. Fortune was certainly in favor of a socially distinct blackness defined in contrast to a ‘pure’ whiteness. It may be argued that he and all African Americans, in fact, needed such an oppositional whiteness to shape the very coordinates of their blackness.96 Fortune, because of his body, needed an especially evil, inauthentic, and cruel version of whiteness that he might position himself outside of it and in contrast to it, so that he might create what Jacques Derrida would call the différance needed to validate his own blackness in the face of his white body.97 Fortune, however, hedged his bets, as his version of blackness ironically, and by necessity, also incorporated certain elements of whiteness. Such whiteness could not, however, represent the pure otherness embodied by a Southern white planter or white racist. That kind of ‘radical otherness’ needed to be opposed and rejected as un-black, anti-black, and not ‘real black’. The problem was how to disconnect this racist, foreign whiteness of ‘the other’, which inescapably and symbolically manifested itself in the physical, from the bodies of multiracial African Americans and ‘white Negroes’ like Fortune. As time went by, such bodies became at least partially inauthentic almost by definition, once their whiteness, either

96 In other words “contradiction [is] an internal condition of every identity” as reasoned in Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989) , 6. In this Hegelian light, blacks and whites were dependent upon one another for their own racial identities as they understood one another in oppositional and contradictory terms. The imbalance of power, however, which favored white Americans produced a consistently warped spectrum that insured ultimate white control over the absolute meaning of race. 97 The concept of différance was originally put forward in Jacques Derrida, “The Supplement of Origin” in Speech and Phenomena; and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans., David B. Allison and Newton B. Garver (1967; repr., Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). America’s original racial différance is of course the product of slavery and white supremacy itself, but African Americans, especially during this period, and especially among themselves, were constantly reworking this original différance with what little power they were afforded. The bulk of this power resided exclusively within the boundaries of the black community, as it was within this counter-public that black voices were actually heard by one another even if they were ignored and denigrated by the dominant white power structure. African Americans, in other words, did not have the power to define themselves to whites but did everything they could to take white renderings of race and reformulate those renderings among themselves. 33 physically or politically, became visible or overly prominent. This de facto alienation of white bodies and white performances required Fortune to promote the idea of a multiracial blackness that was at once separate and distinct from ‘pure’ whiteness but was open to incorporating white physical markers even as it rejected what those markers traditionally signified. In the end, this juggling act was one that Fortune could not sustain. The truth came out nearly a decade later when Fortune felt compelled to take up his noted advocacy of the term ‘Afro-American’ as a sort of second attempt to rein in the reign of the word ‘Negro’, which by then had become an anathema to him. Fortune appears to have first taken up the ‘Afro-American’ project around 1890 when he founded the Afro-American League, the forerunner to the NAACP, which petitioned for civil rights via legal challenges and political pressure. One of Fortune’s first printed pieces that specifically addressed the term ‘Afro-American’ also appeared in 1890 in response to Senator John T. Morgan of Alabama’s misunderstanding that ‘Afro-American’ was the way that “the mulattoes describe themselves,” an error which Fortune was quick to address by proclaiming that the term should include all people of African descent.98 The term also appeared, albeit rather awkwardly, in the title, and intermittently in the text, of Fortune’s 1886 pamphlet, The Negro in Politics: Some Pertinent Reflections on the Past and Present Political Status of the Afro- American, Together with a Cursory Investigation into the Motives Which Actuate Partisan Organizations.99 ‘Afro-American’ essentially became Fortune’s linguistic ammunition as he began to openly disparage both the terms ’Negro’ and ‘colored,’ both of which he had championed such a short time before. In his 1906 essay “Who Are We? Afro-Americans, Colored People or Negroes?” Fortune labeled the word, if not the ideology, of ‘Negro’ as “vulgar” while stating that it “is not a term definitive of race affiliates and unities, but of physical peculiarities of race, of which color is the visible and invariable index.” The homogeneity

98 T. Thomas Fortune, “The Afro-American,” Arena 3, no. 13 (1890), 115-118. 99 T. Thomas Fortune, The Negro in Politics: Some Pertinent Reflections on the Past and Present Political Status of the Afro-American, Together with a Cursory Investigation into the Motives Which Actuate Partisan Organizations (New York: Ogilbie and Rowntree, 1886). 34 that ‘Negro’ implied however was not nearly as bad as the lack of specificity implied by ‘colored.’ Fortune branded the term ‘colored’ as a “cowardly subterfuge” which “may mean anything and it may mean nothing” and could be appropriate only for the individual who “has no race he cares to acknowledge.”100 In this essay, Fortune consciously and deliberately presented the term ‘Afro- American’ so as to include racially ambiguous African Americans such as himself in the meaning of blackness. The racial identity of such individuals was becoming more and more contested with the growing popularity of the terms ‘black’ and ‘negro’ among both African Americans and their white counterparts. Fortune characterized the term ‘Afro-American’ as representative of a wider multiracial blackness that was both African and European in its roots while encompassing individuals of all hues. This hybridity was central to Fortune’s notion of authenticity. He went on to argue that the ‘Afro-American’ people are “an imitative race” capable of “adaptivity to environment and receptivity of its influences of whatever sort.”101 He conceded, nonetheless, that “[w]e may desire race homogeneity as a matter of sentiment or pride of race.”102 “The idea of absorption, of extinction as a race, is repulsive,” he said, but “the corruption of blood” is inevitable because “a minority race in instant contact with a majority race will be either absorbed or exterminated.”103 Fortune’s constant tightrope act of racial definition might be likened to trying to shoot at a moving target even as he was still in the process of designing and building that target with others. He needed to refashion blackness to fit his multiracial body but at the same time

100 T. Thomas Fortune, “Who Are We? Afro-Americans, Colored People or Negroes?” Voice of the Negro 3, no. 3 (1906), 194-98 as quoted in Alexander, 250-51. 101 Ibid, 239. 102 A good many in the African American community by this time had already gone so far as to reject the very notion of ‘race pride’ altogether including the well known George W. Williams who said: “I am opposed to Negroes asking or demanding anything as Negroes. We want race lines abolished? Why then keep them up ourselves?” in New York Globe, May 19, 1883. The lesser known George Edward Davis, the first black faculty member at the Biddle Institute, said “the evils that are now crushing us have root and sap in the narrow spirit of race and color, and Negroes have no more right to foster them than any other race.“ James L. Leloudis, Schooling the New South: Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina, 1880-1920 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 222. 103 Fortune, “Race Absorption” as quoted in Alexander, 244. Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 226 argues that resistance to assimilation and the annihilation of racial identity is “the culmination of the fear of losing generations.” 35 did not want his insistence on any one position to lock him out of the African American community if everyday black talk started leaning in one particular direction or another.104 He could not push his multiracial agenda so hard as to be labeled inauthentic, but he also could not allow others to control the discourse and define his white body out of the meaning of blackness. As a result of this tension, Fortune, unlike many other black leaders, seemed less interested in using authenticity claims to sell his ideological projects and more interested in adapting his ideological positions to insure his own authenticity. This clear shift in semantics and Fortune’s extraordinarily harsh criticism of ‘colored,’ which was more closely associated with light skinned advocates as opposed to the generally darker skinned advocates of ‘Negro,’ can be summed up in his highly gendered proclamation that “I always felt a sort of merciful contempt for the goody-goody Afro- American who insists that he is a ‘colored’ person.”105 For Fortune, the belief that such a person represented a “cowardly subterfuge”106 indicated that this inauthentic “colored” person was equally incapable of being a ‘real man.’ In denigrating this group of fellow light skinned African American men and creating another binary where ‘they’ (meaning ‘colored’ men) were the really inauthentic ones, Fortune seemed to be attempting to reaffirm both his manhood and his blackness while distancing himself from ‘others’ who shared the mark of inauthenticity and femininity that a light/white skinned male body represented. Taking this position to its logical conclusion would mean that for light/white skinned women, this same inauthenticity and increased femininity might be regarded as a ‘good’ thing as it was marked by ‘good’ hair, genteel white performance assumptions, and a body encoded with sexuality.107

104 This requirement for African American leaders to have their authenticity validated by everyday black talk on the ground is a recurring theme throughout African American history as recounted by Harris-Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET, 206, who says: “Everyday black talk is the mechanism black masses use for discerning the authenticity of elite narratives.” and black leaders are only successful if they can “penetrate spaces of black talk”, “direct the dialogue” and convince the masses to “incorporate their ideological views.” 105 Ibid. 106 Fortune, “Who Are We?” as quoted in Alexander, 251. 107 These characterizations of light/white skinned female bodies can be traced back to slavery and the ways in which certain bodies were valued for their sexuality. See Johnson, Soul By Soul, 151-59 and Guillory, “Some Enchanted Evening on the Auction Block.” These values regarding black women’s hair and bodies continue to this day as found in Ingrid Banks, Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women's Consciousness (New 36

Fortune insisted that ‘real’ Afro-Americans, no matter how light skinned, were proud of their African ancestry.108 Multiracial individuals were compelled to recognize their European heritage as marks of oppression that were “forced upon the slave women by the brute lust of the white master” who proved to be “the pioneer and most brutal rapist on a gigantic scale on the American Continent, or on any continent, or in any age.”109 Fortune claimed that with the exception of those who lived within the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi Valley, the remaining “genuine black people” in America have found that “[t]ime, habit and blood-mixture have produced a new race, approximating much nearer the American than the African type.”110 He claimed that the ‘real’ Afro-American, male or female, not only knew the “genuine” black experience of racism, but also quite literally was the embodiment of that racism. Fortune put all of his social capital behind his campaign to include multiracial African American experiences into his vision of the ‘Afro-American.’ This included at least one not-so-subtle attempt to persuade his close friend Booker T. Washington to join his camp.111 Just days after Washington’s famous Atlanta Compromise speech of 1895,

York: New York University Press, 2000) and Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), 194-199. 108 Fortune was relatively consistent throughout his career regarding his African pride. He previously criticized, for example, black leaders who try to “get as far away from his African origin as circumstances will permit.” The Negro in Politics, 10-11. This did not however, as we saw previously, include a romanticizing of African blackness, tradition, or culture, specifically when situated in an idealized African body, but rather involved a more general and non-bodily acknowledgement and respect for his African ancestry and its positive ‘race’ traits and history. 109 Fortune, “Who Are We?” as quoted in Alexander, 251. 110 Ibid. 111 Fortune’s relationship with Booker T. Washington is perhaps one of the most intricate and understudied in African American history. “The riddle of Booker T. Washington endures,” as he remains largely misunderstood according to W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “Reconsidering Booker T. Washington and Up From Slavery,” in Booker T. Washington and Black Progress: Up From Slavery 100 Years Later, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 12. Added to Washington’s riddle is the fact that “historians have often neglected T. Thomas Fortune’s importance,” according to Alexander, xi, thus making a study uncovering their relationship quite difficult. The neglect of Fortune’s station was something even Washington himself was guilty of. Fortune had to remind him in 1900 after proof reading the first draft of Washington’s first autobiography, The Story of My Life and Work, that Washington had forgotten to even mention Fortune in his memoir despite the fact that the two men corresponded daily during this period and that Fortune was essentially his publicist, public relations manager, editor, ghost writer, ‘right hand man’ and most noted advocate. See Fortune to Washington, May 15, 1900, in Washington Papers. Washington promptly added a single paragraph praising Fortune near the end of his final version. He also included a photo of Fortune 37

Fortune, who seemed keenly aware of the speech’s significance and the probability that it would catapult Washington to national prominence, asked if the orator would consider adopting the term ‘Afro-American’ when “speaking of the race as a whole.” He told the darker skinned yet clearly multiracial Washington that “[w]e are not all black and colored and yellow but we are all Afro-Americans.”112 Washington responded with silence and continued to use the term ‘Negro,’ indicating an implicit rejection of Fortune’s bid for a multiracial ‘we’. Moreover, Washington’s status after the Atlanta speech as ‘the’ black leader meant that he essentially eclipsed Fortune’s level of prominence among African Americans of the late Gilded Age. In like fashion, Washington helped bury his friend’s vision of authenticity, as well as the term ‘Afro-American’ that described it. What replaced both were Washington’s images of a Southern, poor, rural, and dark skinned ‘Negro’ who quickly became the standard bearer of authentic male blackness. Fortune, undeterred, continued to demand that “we get ourselves straightened out on this question of ‘Who Are We?’”113 He succeeded only in provoking another vituperative exchange. Many rejected Fortune’s attempt to maintain himself as part of their ‘we’ to begin with. Foremost in this group were Alexander Crummell and his American Negro Academy which actively and openly favored dark skinned over light skinned members.114 Crummell, was proud of his “unmixed Negro ancestry”115 and shared what Bishop Edward Wilmot Blyden’s biographer called a “paranoid hatred of mulattoes.”116 He criticized Fortune and the term ‘Afro-American,’ calling it, and Fortune, a “milk bastard”117 and declared that ‘Negroes’ must preserve the “integrity and perpetuity of the black race as on a shared photo page with Washington’s secretary Emmitt Smith, and his friend and well known attorney, Samuel Laing Williams. Booker T. Washington, The Story of My Life and Work (Toronto: J.L. Nichols and Company, 1901), 386, 47(photo). 112 Fortune to Washington, September 26, 1895, in Washington Papers. 113 Fortune, “Who Are We,” as quoted in Alexander, 251. 114 Ralph L. Crowder, John Edward Bruce: Politician, Journalist, and Self-trained Historian of the African Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 43. 115 Thornbrough, 131. (Thornbrough’s phrase) 116 Lynch, 129. 117 William Seraile, Bruce Grit: The Black Nationalist Writings of John Edward Bruce (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2003), x. 38 such.”118 In turn, Fortune charged that Crummell’s narrow drawing of this internal color line would ultimately cause a “separation of the blacks and the mulattos” and that this scenario, akin to the splits in Haiti and Santo Domingo, “forebodes no good to the Afro- American citizen.”119 Newspaperman John Edward Bruce, Crummell’s closest ally, was also concerned about intra-racial divisions forming but blamed Fortune and other multiracial African Americans for their creation. He told Crummell that “the forces of evil and ignorance are...trying to create a new Negro with the assistance of drunken Tom Fortune[,] the chief apostle of the new religion of color caste among white men's disowned varicolored children.”120 W.E.B. Du Bois also aroused Fortune’s ire by supporting the American Negro Academy’s choice of the term ‘Negro’. Fortune snidely replied that the “amusing phase of the matter is that Mr. Du Bois is not black at all but brown,” going on to charge that Crummell, Du Bois, and several of their associates were violating the very racial purity they were advocating by having “taken to themselves mulatto wives”.121 This display of masculinized and sexualized authenticity through an attempted ownership of ‘real’ black womanhood indicated the depths to which this ‘black enough’ exercise was sinking and the contorted ways that African American men were attempting to define and police one another’s bodies and actions while simultaneously using black women as pawns. With one last-ditch effort to convince the world of his ‘Afro-American’ cause, Fortune gave perhaps his most famous speech in 1906 at Booker T. Washington’s National Negro Business League meeting in Boston. Defiant in the room full of self-professed ‘Negroes,’ he proclaimed: “You can have your choice of names, BUT I AM AN ‘AFRO- AMERICAN.’” Recalling his efforts twenty years earlier to persuade newspapers to adopt the use of ‘Negro,’ Fortune decried the fact that white papers still used the word ‘negro’ with

118 Thornbrough, 131. 119 T. Thomas Fortune, “The Latest Color Line” in New York Sun, May 16, 1897. 120 Bruce to Crummell, November 6, 1897, in Bruce Papers, as quoted in Seraile, 112. 121 T. Thomas Fortune, “The Latest Color Line,” in New York Sun, May 16, 1897. Crummell assured his friend of the racial purity of his wife in a letter to Bruce. Crummell to Bruce, December 15, 1897, in Bruce Papers. This attempt by black men to make meaning out of the bodies of black women is explored more thoroughly in Chapter 4. 39 a lower case ‘n’. Whites “regard you as a common noun,” he said. Fortune planned to “get around that undesirable title by adopting ‘AFRO-AMERICAN,’ which calls for the use of two big capital ‘A’s.’” Laughter and applause consumed the crowd of ‘Negro’ business people who appeared to be at once acknowledging the validity of Fortune’s argument, and laughing with him, while simultaneously ignoring his plea and laughing at him. In the end, and despite his best efforts, Fortune’s vision of the ‘Afro-American’ faded slowly into obscurity. By 1907 Fortune himself was losing relevance as were other ‘Afro- Americans’ whose bodies and politics proved to be not ‘Negro’ enough for the post- Emancipation era of emerging identity politics.As with other ‘white Negroes’ during this period, Fortune’s only hope in preserving his minimal survival within the African America coterie was to define himself into the scope of blackness through the language of naming while asserting a radical anti-racist political agenda. In this sense Fortune’s identity literally was language. In order to mute his body, he purposefully forced his flesh to become word, and his body to become utterance, when he told his audience at the Negro Business League: “I AM A PROPER NOUN, NOT A COMMON NOUN.”122 Unfortunately, being a word without a body was the problem itself. For African Americans during segregation, the flesh and the body became ground zero for measuring authenticity and Fortune’s ‘word,’ no matter how radical, pro-black, or eloquent it was, would have to be broken from its past.

122National Business League, Report of the Seventh Annual Convention (Boston: Charles Alexander Book and Job Printer, 1906), 156. 40

CHAPTER 5

“HIS QUEER CHOICE”: INTERRACIAL SEXUALITY AND THE PROBLEM OF THE MULTIRACIAL BODY

[A]ll dreams have sexual content except explicitly sexual dreams —Slavoj Žižak In 1883 the United States Supreme Court upheld state anti-miscegenation laws, reasoning that such laws did not violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because they applied “the same punishment to both offender, the white and the black alike.”123 Although Fortune might have argued that this logic was invalid because it ignored the importance of hierarchical power and denied America’s racially charged sexuality (and sexually charged raciality), he chose otherwise. Instead, he argued that “marriage is a civil contract” and that it was “the inalienable right of individuals to enter into it without restriction or inhibition on the part of the state.” Since the state cannot limit marriage anymore than it can “prescribe or limit a transfer of land,” he reasoned, a black man “would be justified in defying such law and defending his contract by violence or otherwise.”124 In short all men should be able to contract for their wives just as freely as they could for their real estate, or any other property that they might choose to legally control.125 Fortune’s male-centric stance was odd for a man who was an early advocate of women’s

123 New York Globe, February 3, 1883. 124 Ibid. For an excellent analysis of the transformation and growing importance of contract language post- Emancipation, specifically in regards to gender and the end of slavery, see Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Amy Dru Stanley, "Conjugal Bonds and Wage Labor: Rights of Contract in the Age of Emancipation," Journal of American History, 75 (Sept. 1988): 471-500. 125 The history of marriage in America and the station of interracial marriage within this larger context is covered extensively in Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). 41 rights and a friend to noted black feminist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells. Unfortunately, the control of black women’s bodies in a post-emancipation context, and the enjoyment of any female body, black or white, was viewed by Fortune and other black men as an inalienable right that they should be able to partake of as an act of manhood itself.126 Through this process black men might assert their full legal equality with white men who were de facto exempt from any racial limitations on their sexual desire. For Fortune to fashion himself as a black man, he had the inseparable burden of at once proving himself to be ‘really’ black via African American performance standards and ‘really’ a man on parity with free white men and their ability to function without restriction in the public sphere. Both of these stances necessitated controlling, protecting, and consuming the woman of his choice, while simultaneously staying true to the prevailing currents of black authenticity which normalized same race marriages.

THERE IS NO SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP What inevitably emerged was a classic avowal/disavowal fantasy in terms of interracial sex, where black men were expected to imagine themselves with the power to sexually possess any woman they desired, while refusing to allow any of their interracial sexual desires to be made explicit. This structuring of desire within African American communities presupposed that ‘normal’ black men would remain publicly ‘loyal’ to black women, in a masculine act of honor and valor, while privately repressing any desire for white women. The ‘real’ black man’s pursuit of interracial marriage was supposed to exist only in principle, and as such it was primarily valued as a symbolic indication of racialized manhood equality. In Fortune’s columns, a simultaneous rejection and denial of interracial sexual urges functioned as the dominant discourse of authenticity.Through this prohibition, however, a titillating fetish, and an implied injunction to enjoy, were created. Fortune’s Columbia, South Carolina, correspondent demonstrated this framework succinctly when he reported:“I

126 For more on the culture of patriarchy during this period and how men, black and white, sought to assert their social standing via ownership and control of their female kinfolk, see Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), Tera Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom, Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, and Laura Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion. 42 see little reason why a colored man should want to marry a white woman under present circumstances, and less why a State should prohibit him.”127 Fortune’s Washington, D.C., correspondent echoed this analysis: “As a rule, intermarriages between the races are not desirable to black or white, neither is a law restraining the same desired by any intelligent white or black person.”128 In short, black men should demand the right to marry interracially and then refuse to exercise that right. Fortune wanted to make sure that black women were aware that a similar but not identical orthodoxy applied to them as well. When a black woman in Boston “sued a white man for breach of promise,” Fortune, assuming the role of pop psychoanalyst, advised her that “the proper thing for colored women to do is to avoid, as far as possible, such complications with white frauds as will lead to breach of promise cases.”129 Black women should essentially orient their sexual preferences to exclude white men.130 In a bizarre contrast to this suggestion, however, Fortune reprinted a short article without criticism describing a “white gentleman of San Francisco” who wrote to a black newspaper to ask for “the name of some colored lady with whom he can correspond, with a view to matrimony.” Apparently any ‘colored’ lady would do, as the “white gentleman” had his life saved by a black man and ever since then he “loved the race, and wants to marry one of them.”131 This commodification of black womanhood and the acquiescence of a black radical like Fortune to this act of white male conquest and erotic otherizing holds deep historical significance. It is an example of how, in broad strokes, white coercive power and sexual desire coalesced with black patriarchy around the common bond of masculinity. Sadly, this meant that black

127 New York Globe, March 3, 1883. Report from Columbia, South Carolina signed “D.A.S.” 128 New York Globe, February 9, 1884. Report from Washington, D.C. 129 New York Globe, January 13, 1883. 130 This injunction and attempt to control black women’s sexual desires in the name of racial progress would famously resurface in the post-colonial writings of Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; trans., Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 24-45. For an excellent critique of the patriarchal assumptions embedded in Fanon’s revolutionary vision see Rey Cow, “The Politics of Admittance: Female Sexual Agency, Miscegenation, and the Formation of Community in Frantz Fanon,” in The UTS Review: Cultural Studies and New Writing 1.1 (1995): 5-29. 131 New York Freeman, September 12, 1885. Reprint from Indianapolis World under “Gleaned from the Colored Press” 43 male authenticity would be formed at the expense of black women’s autonomy, specifically as it related to interracial sexuality.132 It also hints at the double standard that, at least in theory, permitted black men to act upon their contractual rights to marry white women, while black women’s bodies were still to be controlled and possessed exclusively by black men and only offered to a white man under the direction and explicit approval of a competent black patriarch. In addition to the threat that unregulated interracial sex posed to black men’s ability to structure their own desires and manage the bodies of black women, there was also the fear that interracial sex might eventually threaten the hold that the ‘black’ body, as opposed to ‘white Negro’ body, had on the ideal physical embodiment of black manhood and African American normalcy. Under this logic, interracial sex supposedly produced less authentic multiracial bodies.133 For Fortune this offered both problem and promise. While the widespread adoption of interracial coupling might eventually serve to normalize his own body, it could only do so by symbolically destroying the bodies of those accustomed to their ‘Negro’ features.134 Fortune wanted to avoid the appearance that he supported the racial suicide that interracial sex entailed for dark skinned African American bodies. At the same

132 Here the works of Judith Butler, bell hooks, and Angela Davis are indispensible. Butler, while challenging notions of a stable singular body, which is often mistakenly assumed to be part of Lacan’s ‘Real’, acknowledges, like Žižek, that our Foucault based feminism ”is in need of a psychoanalytic rethinking” Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London: Routledge, 1993), 189. Angela Davis helped formulate the notion, used here, that interracial sex is always coercive and political. Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1981). bell hooks can best be characterized as the ‘Godmother’ of the intersectionality of blackness and gender. See bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990) and bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 2004). 133 For more on ‘authentic’ representations of ideal black masculinity, see Mark Anthony Neal, New Black Man (New York: Routledge, 2005) and Maurice O. Wallace, Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men's Literature and Culture, 1775-1995 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 134 John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 308. Sweet gives a chilling account of this idea of racial absorption as advocated by whites during the colonial period where a French nobleman advocated a law, supported by several others, that after Independence all black men should be sent back to Africa and all black women should remain behind in some sort of mass sexual servitude so that “such a law, aided by the illicit, but already well established commerce between the negresses, could not fail to giving birth to a race of mulattoes, which would produce another of Quarterons, and so on until the colour should be totally effaced.” This terrifying backdrop and well entrenched fear of white male domination of black womanhood was an idea that tormented both Fortune’s views on interracial sexuality and those of many other black men and women during this period. 44 time, he wanted to promote the inclusion of light and white skinned bodies within a more widely drawn image of the authentic African American male body. Part of Fortune’s strategy to promote a more multiracial black body, while not coming out too strongly in favor of interracial marriage, was to explain interracial sex as something that was primarily pursued by white men and that multiracial people were not to ‘blame’ for their light skinned bodies.135 In this paradigm, white men acted by “using all the arts and seduction which race predominancy and wealth can bring and often resorting to force” in their quest to violate black women.136 Fortune noted the hypocrisy of such white beast rapists who “make a business to seduce from the path of virtue and rectitude young colored girls—many of them too young to know the awful nature of the offense they commit upon themselves and the community.”137 The word “community” here implied that such “awful” sex was an “offense” to all black people and was therefore a legitimate site of internal regulation. Protecting the “virtue and rectitude [of] young colored girls” necessitated a strong black male patriarch capable of controlling the sexuality of his female kinfolk and fending off white male advances irrespective of a black woman’s actual desires. These ‘same’ white men, who were understood as the initial purveyors of this harmful sex act, ironically attempted “to prevent intermarriage between the races by the enactment of infamous laws and by resort to mob violence.”138 With the ‘original sin’ committed by white men against asexualized black women, Fortune could then argue that given the fact that white men were free to have sex with any woman they desired, black men should have the right to do the same. Scratching at the surface of the idea that ‘there is no interracial sexual relationship,’ Fortune then argued his case by recounting a story from Washington, D.C., where “a white woman of the highest character and connections eloped with a colored man who ‘was almost white’” causing the governor of Maryland to demand the “capture and remanding of the ‘colored man almost white’ for absconding with a white woman declared in the writ to be

135 Of course, sex of all sorts between peoples of all colors had been occurring since the earliest days of colonialism in America. See Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), as the most direct challenge to Fortune’s omission here. 136 New York Globe, September 1, 1883. 137 New York Globe, August 2, 1884. 138 Ibid. 45 unsound of my [sic] mind.” 139 Just as the governor assumed the white woman to be insane, Fortune assumes that the “’colored man almost white’” was the product of some unidentified and dishonorable ‘real’ white man who “broke no law of the State of Maryland” by “corrupting [a] colored girl and bring[ing] into the State a ‘colored man almost white.’” The delineation in Fortune’s mind was that the ‘almost’ white man was not really ‘white’ because he could not lawfully enjoy the woman of his choice. The man’s supposed white father thus became ‘really’ white and really a ‘man’ because race was no barrier to his sexual fulfillment while “his son, who proceeds lawfully to marry a white woman must be chased to the limits of the country to be punished.” This is where race and manhood were produced at the expense of gender equity, as black men fantasized about the ability to own the body of a woman, any woman, without inhibition.140 Fortune concluded by asking the question that he failed to apply to his own gendered logic: “Can absurdity be made more ridiculous?”141 For Fortune, what was “ridiculous” was that racism, and its irrational categories, had effectively castrated the multiracial man who was made ‘almost’ white by an act of interracial sex himself but was then rendered impotent by the prohibition that denied him the same right to partake of the sexual pleasures that his fully endowed white father had so easily penetrated. Black women, on the other hand, were left to contemplate the “ridiculous” notion that they should somehow joyfully transfer their personhood from ownership at the

139 Ibid. Emphasis and use of internal quotation marks as in original. By imposing these devices upon the Governor’s ‘official’ words Fortune demonstrates a remarkable fluency with deconstructionist techniques long before they were labeled as such by calling into question the very concepts of whiteness and blackness through an interrogation of the Governor’s language. 140 For more on the patriarchal structuring of black manhood see Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins, A Question of Manhood: A Reader in U.S. Black Men’s History and Masculinity Volume I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999) and Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins, A Question of Manhood: A Reader in U.S. Black Men’s History and Masculinity Volume II (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). 141 New York Globe, August 2, 1884. For another study that examines this contraction of white logic, see Sharon P. Holland, "The Last Word on Racism: Toward a New Critical Race Theory," South Atlantic Quarterly 104, no. 3 (Summer, 2005), 419. Holland observed, “The particular legacy (if not genius) of the Confederacy is that it was able to convince an entire nation to look toward the future for events that had already taken place in the past, to believe that emancipation would result in rampant miscegenation.” 46 hands of a white man to a parallel, though not equivalent, mastery of their bodies at the hands of black men.142 To hammer home his claim to patriarchy and bolster the authenticity of his leadership, Fortune appropriated religious language and moral appeals to criminalize “cruel white men who were too cowardly to marry the mothers of their children, and in many instances so deeply sunk to all sense of paternity as to place their children on the auction block.”143 Positioning interracial sex within the historical memory of slavery, Fortune claimed that it was during slavery that “[m]en were robbed of all manhood, of all self- respect, debased to the level of the brute to swell the ungodly gains of the descendants of Puritans and Huguenots.” Just as black “[m]anhood was robbed of its God-like attributes,” black women themselves became “helpless women [who] were made the victims of atrocious and unrestrained lust by a people proclaimed itself from ten thousand pulpits as Christian.”144 While certainly ‘victimized’, the black women in Fortune’s life would probably have reminded him that although they may have been powerless under slavery to resist white advances, they were certainly not open to being “victims” of a new black governed patriarchy and were not “helpless” to resist its embrace.145 In spite of this disconnect between post-Emancipation expectations of black men and black women, Fortune and his female counterparts could readily agree that the prior control of black women’s bodies by various state and religiously sanctioned acts of slavery meant, “Such Christianity was, and is, a lie! God is just.”146 Fortune contended, more

142 For more on black women’s struggle to define themselves and resist patriarchy see Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy A Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999). 143 New York Globe, March 1, 1884. 144 New York Freeman, December, 6, 1884. 145 For black women’s resistance to early black patriarchy post-Emancipation see Tera W. Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), Laura F. Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997). For a more theoretical approach to black female subjectivity and representation see Carol Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (New York: Routledge, 1994). 146 New York Freeman, December 6, 1884. 47 controversially, that anyone who opposed interracial marriage post-emancipation stood in opposition to “one of the most sacred and all important of the institutions growing out of the New Testament theology” and that consequently “we are free to pronounce the religion of such people a living lie.”147 With God now firmly in his corner, Fortune had no fear in proclaiming that when white “corruptors of colored female chastity band themselves into infamous mobs to wreak vengeance upon the innocent contracting parties,” in heavenly fashion “it would be a godsend if each one of them” would be “not only mobbed soundly but tarred and feathered.”148 In assuming the role of hyper-masculine protector of black women’s sexual honor, a stance that was also being taken by many other black men at the time, Fortune’s position was as much about controlling black womanhood and validating his own manhood as it was about critiquing white racism. Just as Fortune was fetishizing black women’s bodies by looking backward, he also noted the “striking satire” of current interracial sexual practices which supposedly involved, by and large,149 “young white girls becoming infatuated with Negroes of the opposite sex” and the injustice that this supposedly more consensual couple faced when they were “separated by mob violence” and state sanctioned criminalization of their sexual desires.150 Ultimately, however, these desires were also built into, and condoned by, anti-miscegenation

147 New York Globe, August 2, 1884. 148 Ibid. Fortune was not above directing his religious fervor at African Americans on this matter. On May 8, 1886, in the New York Freeman, he responded to the preacher/editor of the Southwestern Christian Advocate who attempted to lead his flock via a parable of a young black barber who had recently “lost” his white wife via divorce. The preacher, convinced of the man’s racial immorality and communal betrayal, believed that “all colored girls should boycott him.” Fortune fired back in the royal plural stating “We protest,” arguing that especially given the religious nature of the paper, “any attempt to abridge [interracial marriage] is infamous, unchristian and perverse of good morals.” 149 Fortune certainly seemed to be using his editorial license to ‘edit’ out sexual relations between black women and white men. The overwhelming majority of stories involving interracial sex reported in the New York Globe and the New York Freeman seemed to involve black men, often light skinned, ‘conquering’ white women. This may have partially been due to an actual shift in sexual practices, with black women freed from the compulsion of slavery less willing to entertain white suitors, and black men more able and willing to test the taboo or seek a measure of subconscious power by sexually dominating the bodies of white women. More probably, however, Fortune was using his editorial license to symbolically protect black women from white advances by rendering such affairs less visible in print, even as he provided a forum for black men to vicariously act out their sexual fantasies. In most instances when black women were reported as being involved in interracial sex, Fortune either painted the white man as the ‘beast rapist’ of slavery days or as a noble upstanding romantic bent on true love. 150 New York Globe, September 1, 1883. 48 laws as a hidden injunction with a tempting pleasure residing just behind the explicit public prohibition. Fortune reprinted an article from a white Chicago based newspaper, the Rambler, which argued that “white girls are, as a natural consequence [of anti-miscegenation laws], always falling in love with their father's Negro coachman.”151 This explanation for America’s great sexual taboo, and its undertones of teenage rebellion, demonstrated that not only were anti-miscegenation laws a response to a certain pre-existing sexual desire but that they also served to fuel that desire by increasing the level of danger and taboo associated with such acts. This reversal of sexual fears, where black men were supposed to fear the untamed sexual desire of white women, gained significant traction among black newspaper reporters.152 Fortune reprinted one such account from the Kansas City Gate City Press, which claimed that in some cities “[t]he colored girls don't stand much show with the colored boys” because “it is a common thing to see these white girls make these hotel boys and barbers marry them.” The notion that it was white women who were doing the coercing and able to ‘make’ black men marry them and ‘abandon’ black women was compounded by the ‘fact’ that “it is always a colored man and a white woman, never a white man and a colored woman.”153 Regardless of its validity, this portrait certainly served the function of absolving black men of any racial guilt in pursuing such relationships as they were simply acting upon their supposedly natural masculine rights in the face of an uncontrollable white female lust. One of Fortune’s own correspondents seemed to believe that it was almost impossible for a black man to resist the sexual advances of “a pretty white girl” who “got the notion in her head that she would like to have a colored man for a husband.”154

151 New York Globe, August 9, 1884. 152 This fear of white female sexuality continued to develop and can be seen in Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks which has since been critiqued from a feminist perspective in Rey Cow, “The Politics of Admittance.” In essence Fanon’s patriarchal intellectual linage can be traced back, albeit indirectly, to Fortune and the early black nationalists/’race men’ of the early 20th century who required the control of female desire, both black and white, as part of their liberation ideology and community formation. 153 New York Globe, June 16, 1883. Report from The Gate City Press of Kansas City, Missouri claiming that “miscegenation is becoming quite common at Des Moines, Iowa.” 154 New York Freeman, April 18, 1885. Report from the Freeman’s Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania correspondent about a black barber and white woman in Shickshinny who were “both willing to take each other for better or worse.” 49

Through this particular sexual framework, and in many ways because of it, black women’s chastity and purity could still be protected by strong black men, who loved their female kinfolk and were able, at least in print, to shield them from the white male gaze while only pursuing interracial sex themselves when it was ‘forced’ upon them. Perhaps most important was the notion that it was in fact white sexual desire that was attempting to challenge black solidarity, foster sexual insecurity, and break the authentic experience of the black family. Black men, amidst this threat, still fashioned themselves as firmly authentic by professing their desire to marry a strong black woman, which Fortune, not coincidentally, actually did,155 while still demanding to keep their options open.

“HIS QUEER CHOICE” In 1884 Frederick Douglass, the symbol of black manhood for almost forty years, made “[h]is queer choice,”156 as one black newspaper in Alabama called it, to marry Helen Pitts, a white feminist who was the daughter of his friend and fellow abolitionist Gideon Pitts, Jr. News of this ‘queer’ sexual act precipitated a wide range of strong reactions by the black press and demonstrated the intersection between authenticity and interracial sexuality. A few editors retained a respectful tone; as one put it, “we would have liked it better if he had married a colored woman, so that his fortune might have remained in the race, yet we cannot censure the old gentleman for suiting himself.”157 Others maintained a veneer of politeness: “It was the one grand mistake of his life! But he suited himself so we leave him in his glory(?) Himself and Mrs. Douglass have put themselves beyond the pale of either of the

155 Fortune’s wife Carrie, although light skinned herself, “gave more evidence of her Negro ancestry” than Fortune and by all indications was a former slave that Fortune knew from his childhood in Florida. His choice to follow a traditional family structure rooted in plantation patterns and extended kin ties, which characterized the ‘real’ black slave experience, seems to have been consciously pursued by Fortune even after his relocation to the North in 1874 where according to Thornbrough many available black women “were eager for the attentions of such an attractive young man”. The fact that in a new city with seemingly endless options, Fortune would choose to marry a woman from his hometown that he knew during slavery may have been a simple act of romantic attachment but more than likely would have come with the added benefit that it bolstered Fortune’s tie to the authentic black slave family. Thornbrough, 31. 156 New York Globe, February 9, 1884. Reprinted quote originally from Huntsville, Alabama Gazette. 157 Ibid. Reprinted quote originally from Augusta, Georgia People's Defense. 50 social circles among which they moved respectively.”158 Many took it upon themselves to expel Douglass from the black community with such comments as “he has made the fatal error of his life. He has forfeited his claim to the leadership of his race by a foolish and unwise step.”159 Or: “Good bye black blood in that family. We have no further use for him as a leader. His picture hangs in our parlor, we will hang it in the stable.”160 What Douglass might have considered a private act had become a public debate. Several papers believed that he had “branded us by his own act as inferior to the white race; which reverses the labors of his life”161 while reinforcing the “malicious libel” that there were no good black women with “chastity” and “other refined virtues” available.162 Overall, it seemed clear that as one white newspaper wrote “the Negroes' idol had fallen.”163 Those who dared confront the angry crusaders against Douglass could only do so by attempting to rework the ever narrowing consensus forming around black authenticity. Using the argument that Douglass himself would eventually employ, one paper reasoned that the marriage was consistent with who he ‘really’ was because “[h]e is an American, partly of African descent, and belongs as much to one side as the other.”164 Another believed that opinion was divided between the uneducated black masses and the educated black elite: “We in common with the masses of our people regret very much Douglass' marriage” but to “see Douglass' marriage in the light some of our prominent men do, and would have the masses of our people see it, would require at least a common education among the masses of the Negro race.”165 These counter voices were significant. Yet the most vocal figure willing to support Douglass publicly was Douglass himself.

158 Ibid. Reprinted quote originally from Washington Grit. 159 Ibid. Reprinted quote originally from Birmingham, Alabama Pilot. 160 Ibid. Reprinted quote originally from Pittsburg, Pennsylvania Weekly News. 161 Ibid. Reprinted quote originally from Little Rock, Arkansas Mansion. 162 Ibid. Reprinted quote originally from The Topeka, Kansas Tribune. 163 Ibid. Reprinted quote originally from Petersburg, Virginia Southern Tribune. Some seventy years later, historian Rayford Logan commented on the marriage in a similar vein “The great abolitionist had become the “’tragic mulatto.’” Rayford W. Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir 1877-1901 (New York: The Dial Press, 1954), 233. 164 New York Globe, February 9, 1884. Reprinted quote originally from Lexington, Kentucky Republican. 165 Ibid. Reprinted quote originally from Cleveland, Ohio Gazette. 51

In his own defense, Douglass recognized that an explanation or apology could only represent an admission of wrongdoing. He therefore declared, “I can give no explanation. I can make no apology.” The anti-racist appeals he did make were ultimately a variation on ‘there is no interracial sexual relationship’. In an effort to shatter racial and sexual difference, Douglass professed: “There is no division of races. God Almighty made but one race. I adopt the theory that in time the varieties of races will be blended into one.” He offered his own multiracial body as proof of this claim: “I am not an African, as may be seen from my features and hair, and it is equally easy to discern that I am not a Caucasian.” “All this excitement, then, is caused by my marriage with a woman a few shades lighter than myself. If I had married a black woman there would have been nothing said about it. Yet the disparity in our complexion would have been the same.” In this same interview, which would become known as his “Not a Negro but a Man” position, Douglass famously said: “I do not presume to be a leader; but if I have advocated the cause of the colored people it is not because I am a Negro, but because I am a man.”166 This re-appeal to racial authenticity via the back door of gender, as well as Douglass’s underlying claim that his manhood in this case somehow trumped his blackness, was something that Fortune could not fully concede despite his consistent appeals to masculinity to validate his own blackness. He did support Douglass’s right to choose his wife regardless of color, arguing: “The criticisms upon Mr. Douglass's course by our own people are just what we expect in cases of that kind, and yet such criticisms should not come from us.”167 It was Douglass’s failure to defend interracial marriage itself as authentic, and his abandonment of the centrality of race in favor of a sort of universal humanity, that was the problem for Fortune. On the issue of universal personhood, Fortune explained once again his vision of a black multiracial identity: “We grant freely that Mr. Douglass is a member of the race universal, but he is further allied to the African and Caucasian branches,

166 New York Globe, February 2, 1883. Reprint of an interview with Douglass from the Washington Post, January 26, 1883. 167 New York Globe, February 2, 1883. Fortune commenting on Douglass’s “Not a Negro but a Man” interview. 52 and more nearly allied to the former than to the latter.”168 In other words, yes, Douglass is a human being, and he is also a multiracial human being, but his alliance should be tied more closely to the black side of his family tree, thus making him a black multiracial human being who, only by identifying himself as such, can be seen as a ‘real’ black man. For his own personal reasons, Fortune could not allow such an important multiracial figure as Frederick Douglass to define himself voluntarily out of the circle of blackness. If an individual as ‘black’ as Douglass could be allowed to leave (or be pushed out) of the black community, Fortune’s white body was suspect at best and open to much swifter expulsion. Fortune, therefore, with the phallus of media authority, attempted to settle the matter once and for all by stating: “Therefore, Mr. Douglass will stand corrected in that he is (1) a Negro; (2) a Caucasian-Negro; (3) a Caucasian-Negro-man. All of this amalgation [sic] conspires to make Mr. Douglass a very valuable member of the race universal.”169 So it seemed that even in his old age and after decades of struggle, The Great Abolitionist still lacked the freedom to define himself. In the months following his marriage, Douglass further denied the very idea of a black race and his place within it, while Fortune tried desperately to prevent him from leaving his blackness behind because of the promptings of an angry public outcry. Douglass and Fortune, in their own ways, were both attempting to move the idea of authenticity in a direction radical enough to embrace Douglass’s supposedly newfound sexual preference.170 Fortune asserted his agreement with Douglass in principle. “We regard the American people as one people, and the artificial barriers which now divide them into races, with more or less of odium or immunity,” he said. Further, he predicted that these boundaries “will eventually succumb to the march of time and the triumph of Christian enlightenment.”171 Nonetheless, Douglass’s move to immediately deny the existence of racial boundaries was a little too

168 Ibid. 169 Ibid. 170 Although Douglass’s choice in sexual partners came as a sudden and unforeseen event for most of the black community, historians now know that Douglass had extra marital affairs with at least two other white women prior to marrying Helen Pitts. See Maria Diedrich, Love Across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999). 171 New York Globe, February 16, 1884. 53 radical even for Fortune, who seemed determined to hold on to the cult of black authenticity a while longer, provided he could still find a way to remain a part of it. Fortune acknowledged, with a subtle hint of sarcasm, that a man like Douglass “who has reached this transcendent, idealistic state of mind” where race disappeared was “an object rare, wonderful and altogether phenomenal to behold.” He advised Douglass and his Globe readers, however, that only “when our leaders get off the ‘man’ hobby and bestraddle the broad back of the race, give and take blows as black men, demonstrate the black man's genius and strength— then we shall cease to be a degraded people.” Seeing the opportunity to further validate his own blackness at Douglass’s expense, Fortune called for “race unity, race love, race confidence,” and assured black America that he himself would never “fly from the race into that general abstraction ‘man,’ ‘humanity,’ ‘universal brotherhood’ and other such generalities, all fine enough in theory in books build [sic] upon an utopian conception.” Such idealism for Fortune could not overshadow the general principle that “in this country a man is either ‘black’ or ‘white’ and his social and political life is affected according to this estimate.” Fortune seemed to be conveniently forgetting his own racial ambiguity as he fell into the abyss of the binary and reaffirmed the prevailing black/white view of America’s original sin: “We did not draw the line; we did not paint the colors; we did not create the conditions. But they do exist.”172 In the end, for Douglass, whom Fortune nostalgically regarded as having been “the Negro,” the pull of authenticity continuously tried to reel him back in, even while it simultaneously tried to push him out. This made Douglass, Fortune, and so many other African Americans essentially captives in their own homes, forced to leave but begged to stay. Even as much of the black public convicted Douglass of sexual treason, Fortune relished the rare chance to play racial police officer, admonishing: “It makes no difference what he considers—the press and the people, together with his own acts and utterances, make him to be regarded as a leader, not of the white race, but of the black race.”173 In this strange sense of racial inevitability, Fortune also acknowledged that even if the black community

172 New York Globe, March 15, 1884. Fortune in response to Douglass’ clarifications on his “Not a Negro but a Man” interview which Fortune reprinted in the same issue. 173 Ibid. 54 disowned Douglass as inauthentic (while simultaneously claiming him as their own), they could not prevent him from leaving because: “[w]e know there is nothing to bind a successful black man to his race but love of race. If he does not love his race he does wisely to shift his interest.”174 So Douglass, like Fortune, was at once bound to blackness by public opinion and the historical underpinnings of institutionalized power, while at the same time capable of being expelled from blackness by the consensus view formulated in the discourse of authenticity. The key distinction in Fortune’s mind revolved around the notion of racial choice. Fortune himself vowed that he would never “shift his interest.” He could only hope that this loyalty, as well as his appeals to manhood, would be enough to keep his interracial body free from the sexual stigma that surrounded its production.

174 Ibid. 55

CHAPTER 6

CONCLUSION: BREAKS IN FORTUNE

Sometimes I feel like I don’t belong anywhere and it’s gonna take so long for me to get to somewhere —Alicia Keys From his birth in 1856 to his death in 1928, Fortune was surrounded by the invisible insane asylum of racism while being haunted by the ever-present ghost of black authenticity. Segregation interacted with internal African American racial dynamics in an effort to govern the limits of blackness. Racial agents, black and white, stood ready at all times to expel and constrain those who became inauthentic at any given point. Fortune was actively engaged in the battle to define these boundaries and used his command of language in an effort to shape the discourse of blackness through his newspapers, books, pamphlets, speeches, poetry, and civil rights activities. His bold assertions of multiracial consciousness, his support for interracial sexuality, and his insistence upon immediate integration were in constant tension with the ever narrowing scope of black authenticity. By 1907 the tension led to fissure and Fortune began his own ten-year journey among the ‘insane’. After fighting with alcoholism since at least the 1880’s, he sold his interest in the Age and went on a series of prolonged drinking binges where he became publicly belligerent to friend and foe alike. He lost his home, separated from his wife and was frequently seen begging acquaintances for money and panhandling for food while wandering aimlessly around public parks. In a letter to his estranged wife, he claimed to pray daily for death, saying, when it comes “I will be glad and will not be missed. As the life of me has been worthless to myself and to the rest of mankind.”175 After over two decades in the public spotlight, Fortune had fallen from “the most prominent and brilliant young Negro in

175 Fortune to Carrie Fortune, May 29, 1908 as quoted in Thornbrough, 325. 56

America,”176 and a possible successor to Frederick Douglass,177 to a middle aged semi- homeless alcoholic derelict. His condition, like so many of the ‘lunatics’ he met back in 1883, may have had biological underpinnings. Fortune himself was quick to attribute a hereditary causality to his predicament.He believed that he suffered from the same “uncertain nervous condition” as his father, leading to depression, anxiety, chills, and generally poor health.178 His body betrayed him not just physically, however, but also socially, as Fortune struggled over what it meant to occupy a white body in the black community.179 This white body proved endlessly problematic. The threat of expulsion informed almost every aspect of his public life even as he strove to remain an integral part of the black community which he loved so dearly. His struggle and ultimate failure to resolve these contradictions represented a deep personal pain. It may have also marked the moment when he and other white skinned African Americans discovered, via the insanity of segregation, that their ‘one drop’ bodies were simply not ‘black enough’ for the new racial, sexual, and gender dynamics governing black life in Jim Crow America.

176 Washington Grit, September 20, 1884, emphasis in original. 177 New York Amsterdam News, June 13, 1928. 178 Fortune to Carrie Fortune, September 27, 1912, as quoted in Thornbrough, 348. 179 For more on Fortune’s father see, Thornbrough, 3-22. 57

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