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In Search of Purity: Popular Eugenics and Racial
Uplift among New Negroes 1915-1935
Shantella Y. Sherman
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, [email protected]
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IN SEARCH OF PURITY: POPULAR EUGENICS AND RACIAL UPLIFT AMONG NEW
NEGROES
1915-1935
By
Shantella Y. Sherman
A DISSERTATION
Presented to the Faculty of
The Graduate College at the University of Nebraska
In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements
For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Major: History
Under the Supervision of Professor Jeannette Eileen Jones
Lincoln, Nebraska
May, 2014
IN SEARCH OF PURITY: POPULAR EUGENICS AND RACIAL UPLIFT AMONG NEW
NEGROES
1915-1935
Shantella Yolanda Sherman, Ph.D.
University of Nebraska, 2014
Adviser: Jeannette Eileen Jones
“In Search of Purity: Eugenics and Racial Uplift among New Negroes, 19151935” examines the reinterpretation of eugenic theories by Black scholars, who helped
integrate the science into a social movement for racial uplift. Areas of analyses include:
The Talented Tenth, links between ideas about social degeneracy and physical hygiene,
eugenics courses and professors at Howard University, hereditarian, and colorism.
Guiding principles of African American-led eugenic theory are examined alongside the
fading imagery of the Old Negro that consisted of stereotypes scattered throughout
plantation fiction, blackface minstrelsy, vaudeville, and Darwinism. Specifically, terms
like germ plasm (negative characteristics transmitted through genes through continual
selection, unchanged, from one generation to the next) , and racial hygiene (a public
health platform designed to eliminate, among other ailments, venereal disease and
promote healthy reproduction within a race) are analyzed in their relation to popular
discourses about Black cleanliness that included “moral fitness” and intellectual
ineptness. Ideologies that intrinsically tied blackness to social degeneracy and
criminality, as well as terms like full-blood and mulatto, are also examined. Links
between standards of beauty, desirability, and marriage-worthiness in relation to those
ideas are also critiqued. Of particular interest is the impact of racial hygiene discourses
on African-American advertising through the promotion of products to lighten skin and
straighten hair in order to eliminate noticeable signs of racial inferiority.
iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This dissertation has been a true labor of love, inspired by an initial inquiry about
concepts of racial fitness and colorism that yielded an abundance of fruit, not yet fully
exhausted. I am ever grateful to my dissertation adviser, Jeannette Eileen Jones, whose
scholarship and intellectual depth is matched only by her ability to encourage deeper
insight, stronger command of theory, and concise explication in her students.
I extend a heartfelt thank you to The University of Nebraska – Lincoln
Department of History – particularly, Margaret Jacobs, who has been a true godsend
during my matriculation, Dawne Curry, Carol Levine, William Thomas, and Thomas
Berg – I appreciate your every effort. To my dissertation committee, Margaret Jacobs,
Maureen Honey, Susan Lawrence, and Katrina Jagodinsky, thank you for your feedback
and support both of which proved invaluable.
I offer sincere thanks to the research staff and librarians at UNL, Duke University
in Durham, North Carolina, the Schomburg Research Center in New York, the Eugenic
Records Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center
on the campus of Howard University, the Gelman Library at George Washington
University, Howard University Founders Library, the Library of Congress and the
Archives of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
And to my family, Lee Ross-Clark and Dr. Robert P. Edwards, III, thank you for
setting lifelong examples of academic and social excellence. McKinley Clark, Henrietta
Ross-Murry, every prayer was answered. Thank you. Additional thanks to Lee Andrew
v
Ross, Jr., Carlotta Teal, Alisha Hetmyer, Dennis Mills, Anthony Mills, Dr. Shireen Lewis
and the ladies of SisterMentors, my spiritual supporters Margaret Duncan, Dr. Lucy
Horne, Rev. Reginald M. Green, and Ernest and Delores Gibson at First Rising Mt. Zion
(DC), Bishop Ronnie Crudup at New Horizons Church (Jackson, Miss.) and Dean
Bernard Richardson at Rankin Chapel on the campus of Howard University; and
additional support from friends, Dr. John A. McMillan, Sophia Johnson, Fuanmbai
Ahmadu-Turay, Ronda Smith, Beulah Bell, Saul Dorsey, Towana Phillips, Andy Evans,
Sherry Ann Dixon, Dr. Dernoral Davis, Dr. Wilmer Leon, Sylvia Watley, Pauline
Andrews, Irv Randolph and Shonda McClain (The Philadelphia Tribune); and Denise
Rolark Barnes, Denise W. Barnes, Brian Young, and the staff of the Washington
Informer newspaper.
Finally, all honor to Lee Andrew Ross, Hattie Hall Ross, Clardia Ross, Percy
Ross, Torcy B. Caston, Jacob Addison, Robert Boldin, and Walter Percy Mills, I know
you’re watching.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One
The Civilizing Process: New Negro Eugenics and Hereditarian Thought
35
Colorism and Eugenic Classification
58
Defining New Negroes by Dysgenic Behaviors
69
Chapter Two
“Fewer, But Better Children” New Negro Eugenics, Black Fertility and the Birth Control
Movement
85
Black Sociologists, Social Workers, and the Chicago School
91
Wayward and Incorrigible Girls
108
Birth Control and Eugenic Sterilization as Social Rehabilitation
129
Chapter Three
“Creating the Colored 400: Eugenics at D.C.’s Dunbar High School and Howard
University
New Negro Education, White Philanthropy and Racial Uplift
154
161
Dunbar High School, Howard University and the Eugenic Double Jim Crow
175
Eugenic Instruction and Racial Hygiene at Howard University
198
Chapter Four
“What the Negro Needs to Become Fit” Popular Eugenic Framing of Better Health and
Beauty
225
Disease Prevention, Health Improvements and Eugenics
232
Insurance, North Carolina Mutual and Fitter Families
248
Colorism and the Negro Beauty Aesthetic
256
Conclusion: The Legacy of Popular Eugenics Among African Americans
290
Bibliography
297
vii
LIST OF IMAGES
W.E.B. Du Bois’ Talented Tenth
1.1 Fisk Graduating Class 1888
87
1.2 Howard University Professor Kelly Miller
87
1.3 W.E.B. Du Bois and his Family
87
Eugenic Classification
2.1 Carrie and Emma Buck
109
2.2 Davenport’s Jamaican Race Mixing Study
109
2.3 Kallikak Chart of Dysgenicism
109
Washington, D.C. Elite / Poverty
3.1 Neighborhood Outhouse
187
3.2 Migrant Children
187
3.3 Migrant Housing in Alley
188
3.4 Howard University Football Game
189
3.5 Colored 400 Children
189
North Carolina Mutual Insurance Company
4.1 North Carolina Mutual - Executives
269
4.2 North Carolina Mutual – Field Workers
269
4.3 North Carolina Mutual – “Swat the Fly”
269
4.4 Golden Brown Skin Bleach
270
4.5 Garrett A. Morgan Hair Straighteners
270
4.6 Chicago Defender “Vamp” Ad
271
1
Perhaps the most significant fact regarding the Negro people in America is the degree to which the race
has undergone differentiation during the period of contact with European civilization…While the bulk of
the race in America is as yet not many steps removed from the African standards…a study of the more
advanced groups shows a great preponderance of individuals of mixed blood and dearth, almost an entire
absence of Negroes of pure blood.
E.B. Reuter (1917)
There are three cardinal beliefs that may be said to control in one form or another most of the thinking
about Negroes: first that they are mentally inferior; second, that they are immoral; and third, that they are
criminal. – Charles S. Johnson (1923)
INTRODUCTION: IN SEARCH OF PURITY
In 1914 the First National Conference on Race Betterment welcomed thousands
from across the United States to Michigan to promote a broader and more systemic use of
state sanctioned eugenic sterilization. Defined as the science of being “well-born,”
eugenics noted the “marked tendency toward the reappearance in offspring of structures,
habits, features, personal mannerisms, minute physical defects, and intimate peculiarities
found in their parents or more remote forebears.”1 While some researchers like Merryn
Ekberg assert that the differences between eugenics and genetics is so slight as to make
“old eugenics, genetics and the new genetics, eugenics,”2 my research makes a distinction
between them based on the active social movement of eugenics to promote desirable
1
Michael F. Guyer, Being Well-Born: An Introduction to Heredity and Eugenics, (New York: BobbsMerrill Company, 1916), 1.
2
Merryn Ekberg, “The Old Eugenics and the New Genetics Compared,” Social History of Medicine 20:3
(2007): 581.
2
traits and eliminate undesirable human traits through selective breeding. Genetics
identified the function, limitations, and characteristics of cells as well as the transmission
of traits from parents to offspring; eugenics, used this data to predict the prevalence of
“bad” traits or characteristics believing that those with weaker genes would out-breed the
strong causing overall weakening of superior genetic material. According to eugenicists,
“Negroes” constituted a dysgenic race with a potential to weaken and eventually destroy
white genetic purity through miscegenation. Despite this well-established maxim, a
single, prominent Black attendee sat among the thousands of participants at the
conference, – educator and scholar Booker T. Washington and many affluent African
Americans embraced various aspects of eugenics. While sidestepping the racist
overtones of mainline eugenic theories, New Negro eugenicists utilized variations of the
language and classifications established by white eugenicists to categorize the unfit
among them. Following his 1895 Atlanta Exposition speech in which he reassured
whites that emancipated blacks remained their social inferiors and continued to need
paternalistic support, Washington grew in prominence among white America’s social and
scientific communities. Washington understood the projected racial endgame of
mainstream eugenicists – namely the extinction of the Negro and other “defective” races.
In a series of articles and books written between 1904 and 1907, including The Negro in
the South, The Future of the Negro Race in America, and The Negro in America,
Washington and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois challenged the belief that Negroes would
naturally begin to die from lack of white paternalistic aid. Both Du Bois and Washington
examined the theory of survival of the fittest through antagonistic and exploitative labor
3
practices used by white landowners against black laborers. Washington posited that labor
exploitation would force the Negro down until he became “thoroughly demoralized or
extinct.”3 Du Bois, while not a eugenicist, explored hereditarian logic in his sociological
research and attacked the survival of the fittest theory as manufactured by race bitterness
saying:
If all authority is stripped from a people, their customs interfered with, their
religion laughed at, their children corrupted, and run, gambling and prostitution
forced upon them – such a proceeding will undoubtedly kill them off, and kill
them quickly. But that is not survival of the fittest – it is plain murder. Turning
then, to the second possible future of the Negro in America—namely that he may
die out – it must be candidly acknowledged that this is quite possible.4
Du Bois and Washington refuted the racial extinction of blacks as a biological and
inherited given; however, as Du Bois admitted in a letter to Cornell University economics
professor W.F. Wilcox who took exception to his position on evolution given his
submerged tenth writings, “I have my prejudices but they are backed by knowledge if not
supported.”5
Washington’s presence at the 1914 Conference on Race Betterment signaled the
effective passing of reproductive and social policing of Negroes to Negro scholars,
professionals, and middle-class reformers. Washington’s participation in the conference
indicated a shift in eugenic discourses that for the most part afforded a small minority of
3
Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, The Negro in the South, His Economic Progress in Relation
to His Moral and Religious Development (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Company, 1907), 117.
4
W.E.B. Dub Bois, “The Future of the Negro Race in America,” The East and the West Quarterly Review
2 (January 1904):5.
5
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois: Selections, 1877-1934 (Amherst: The
University of Massachusetts Press, 1973), 75.
4
Negro intellectuals the authority to manage the racial hygiene of their own disparate
populations. Eugenic thought and practice among African-Americans, however, was
hardly new and appeared in pivotal works by intellectuals like William Hannibal
Thomas, Kelly Miller, and W. E. B. Du Bois, even if their reinterpretations dislodged
their work from traditional eugenics.6 Eugenics appealed to many New Negro
intellectuals as an extension of racial uplift ideals that promoted marriage and
reproduction between physically and intellectually superior members of the race. What I
term “New Negro eugenics” noted differences between inherited traits and learned
behaviors dictated by environment, and used social engagement and education to
transform the marginally fit into useful and progressive members of the race.
Accordingly, New Negro eugenicists promoted segregation of unfit members of the race
to prevent mate selection and reproduction between them and the more superior members
of “the race”.
Du Bois’ 1899 study of Black families The Philadelphia Negro, for instance,
divided African Americans into four intra-racial categories or “grades” based on social
and sexual habits. Grade 1 comprised “families of undoubted respectability,” whose
6
The works by William Hannibal Thomas that contain themes on eugenics and hereditarianism, include
The American Negro: What He Was, What He Is, and What He May Become (New York: The MacMillan
Company, 1901); Kelly Miller’s Out of the House of Bondage (New York: Neale Publishing, 1914); Race
Adjustment: Essays on the Negro in America (New York: Neale Publishing, 1909); As to the Leopard’s
Spots: An Open Letter to Thomas Dixon, Jr. (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1905); and
“Eugenics of the Negro Race,” Scientific Monthly (1917): 57-59 offer his insights on eugenics and
hereditarianism. W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Philadelphia Negro (Philadelphia: The University of Philadelphia
Press, 1899); “The Social Evolution of the Black South,” American Negro Monographs1 (March): 3-12;
and The American Family (Atlanta: The Atlanta University Press, 1908) are among his eugenic and
hereditarian writings.
5
livelihoods were generated by men not engaged in menial or service-related jobs and
whose women and children did not work. These families were eugenically sound, having
placed together a man with enough cell vitality (intellect) to work as the sole breadwinner
and head of household. His wife, by remaining at home functioned solely as reproducer
and caregiver of progeny. These families represented the best the race offered and
symbolized Du Bois’ Talented Tenth – or the top ten percent of Negroes tasked with
leading the remaining ninety percent into moral and social civility. Grade 2 comprised
“respectable working-class households,” but included women working outside the home.
Du Bois further distinguishes Negroes in Grade 2 from those in subsequent grades by
their morality, personal cleanliness, and the appearance of their homes.
Morality, personal cleanliness and appearance, while made up as social markers
of respectability, also characterized eugenic markers of fitness. For instance, the eugenic
category “moron” or moronia as established by social eugenicist Henry Goddard,
emerged as the binary opposite of normality and defined moral purity as well as mental
capability.7 Further, Du Bois’ reliance on visual representations of fitness places his
ideology firmly in line with eugenicists like Goddard, whose scales of genetic fitness
attributed dysgenic links to social traits, behaviors, and physical appearance. Social
eugenics applied the scientific doctrine of better breeding to issues of birth control,
population control, venereal disease, and sterilization through legislation, health
7
Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to
the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California, 2001), 26.
6
programs, and education.8 Grade 3 included the working poor who, though honest, “with
no touch of gross immorality or crime,” could not pull themselves out of poverty. It must
be understood that eugenicists like Charles Davenport placed poverty or pauperism into
categories of heredity in the same manner as inherent eye color or hair texture.9 Du Bois
suggested the inability to progress financially and socially in Grade 3 households derived
from a lack of energy and thrift, noting a eugenic connection between poverty and
inherent self-determination, notes in The Philadelphia Negro:
We must remember that all these bad habits and surroundings are not simply
matters of the present generation, but that many generations of unhealthy bodies
have bequeathed to the present generation impaired vitality and hereditary
disease. There cannot be much doubt, when former social conditions are studied,
but that hereditary disease plays a large part in the law vitality of Negroes to-day,
and the health of the past has to some extent been exaggerated.10
A lack of vitality in eugenic and hereditarian terms functioned as the cause for
pauperism as it was defined as being willfully poor, indicating the fault for poverty to be
the individual’s laziness, making pauperism a disease rather than a crime.11
Finally, Grade 4, according to Du Bois, constituted a “submerged tenth,” of the
Negro population and was made up almost exclusively of the “germs of the race.” The
concept of a eugenically disparate portion of society – the submerged tenth – preceded
Du Bois’ grades, and was introduced by Salvation Army founder General William Booth,
8
Alexandra Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005), 82.
9
Charles Benedict Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (New York: Henry Holt & Company,
1915), 80.
10
Du Bois, 162.
11
Amory H Bradford, “Neglected Factors in the Problem of Reform,” The Andover Review, 7, (Jan. – June
1887): 152.
7
in In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), in which he categorizes a “population
sodden with drink, steeped in vice, and eaten up by every social and physical malady.”12
Booth considered these people representative of an inherently dependent class beyond the
reach of the nine-tenths.13 Du Bois similarly characterized his Grade 4 as prostitutes,
criminals, and a willful element of degenerates, capable of outwitting both law
enforcement and charitable organizations. The term submerged tenth among eugenicists
like Charles Davenport identified those with an “infinite tangle of germ-plasm
continually making new combinations”14 of dysgenic bodies through inheritance and
cannot be separated from its remedy, namely, its eugenically effective elimination. While
Du Bois’ hereditarian thought infused the potential for uplift from one grade to another
and the potential improvement of grades or stock, the work of black hereditarian thinkers
like Marcus Garvey and William Hannibal Thomas did not.
Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey strongly supported the uplift of African Americans
through breeding for race purity and opposing miscegenation at all costs. Calling racemixing a moral disadvantage of slavery, Garvey asserted that “where our slave masters
were able to abuse our slave mothers and thereby create a hybrid bastardy, we ourselves,
at this time of freedom and culture, should not perpetuate the crime of nature.”15 Garvey
believed that the extinction of the Negro race would come as a result of miscegenation
12
William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1890), 14.
Booth, 23.
14
Henry H. Goddard, Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness (Cold Spring Harbor, NY, 1911), 145.
15
Tony Martin, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (Dover, Mass,: Majority Publishing,
1986), 86.
13
8
and the weakening of pure African genetic material. By labeling miscegenation a crime
of nature, Garvey invoked the eugenicist theory that the races were not meant to mix
without genetic consequence – namely the extinction of the weaker race, as well as the
moral disadvantage created by being born of sexual perversion or rape. Garvey nuanced
his treatment of miscegenation and race purity by accusing Du Bois and members of the
colored elite of scientifically arranging propaganda to encourage men of darker groups to
marry the lightest elements of “their” women in order to be accepted into intellectual and
sophisticated social circles.16 Garvey’s theory demonstrated the social currency of
choosing white or light over dark skin, implying that there was a scientific rationale
undergirding the so-called inversion of black purity. Though Garvey embraced the
concept of the New Negro, he viewed him as rising to the heights of nationhood by
distinction in science, art, history, politics, industry, and religion, while becoming free of
the “pollution of miscegenation.”17
The work of William Hannibal Thomas, represents Negro eugenic thought that
runs most parallel to mainstream eugenic theories. Thomas advanced the theory of
“savage inheritance” that purported all pure Negro types (dark-skinned Blacks)
irrespective of world geography and social environment displayed identical
characteristics, which differentiated them from the total of mankind. In his 1901 work,
The American Negro: What He Was, What He Is, and What He May Become – A Critical
and Practical Discussion, Thomas determined that whether pure Negroes constituted an
16
17
Martin, 87.
Martin, 112.
9
un-awakened member of the human family, a survival of an earlier type of man, or a
specific type of “un-durated degeneracy”, they nonetheless represented modified, but
“un-eradicated alien blood.”18 For Thomas, who was born to free black parents in 1843,
African Americans constituted an alien and diverse race of men,19 and while they had
undergone a transformation from “sensuous savage animals” into rational human
creatures through interbreeding under slavery, their inferior blood remained and tainted
whites.20
Kelly Miller, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University
made a similar examination of black families, the results of which were published in an
article for Scientific Monthly in 1909 entitled “Eugenics of the Negro Race.” What Du
Bois had posited as social categories where reinterpreted as markers of genetic fitness. In
the article, Miller assessed the self-sustaining ability of upper class Negroes and declared
the existence of only two classes of Negro – the intellectual and the “bulk of the race.”
This labeling was reminiscent of the grades set forth by Du Bois and readily embraced
the language of Du Bois’ Talented Tenth theory by reducing all Negroes outside of the
“intellectual” category to a status of unfit. Miller focused largely on the poor breeding
practices of the eugenically fit and their contribution to “race suicide” through low birth
rates. The term race suicide developed from a theory that entire races of men potentially
faced extinction through a failure to fulfill the reproductive function and was made
18
William Hannibal Thomas, The American Negro: What He Was, What He Is, and What He May Become,
A Critical Practical Discussion, (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1901), 106.
19
Thomas, 402.
20
Thomas, 106.
10
popular around the turn of the century by then scholar-politician Theodore Roosevelt.21
Roosevelt’s interest in racial reproduction progressed over a ten-year period (1890-1900)
amidst a declining birth rate that he believed signaled racial decline and required white
women to breed as part of their patriotic duty.22
Using the 55 families making up the faculty of Howard University, Miller
determined that the more educated and financially secure the instructor, the more
vehement the subject was in delaying both marriage and reproduction. Citing an
unwillingness to marry or reproduce well into their forties, subjects, according to Miller’s
study, were as much to blame for the Negroes’ overall lowly social standing in larger
society as were the “unfit.”
By 1932, when the Atlanta Weekly celebrated the participation of Morehouse
College graduate and West Virginia State University biology professor Harold E. Finley
as the first Negro invited to participate fully in the Third International Congress of
Eugenics held in New York, the eugenic theories of Miller and Turner had all been
widely espoused and embraced by African Americans. Finley’s detailed conference
schedule included attending panels on the “Assortive Mating for Color in the American
Negro,” that noted the tendency among Negroes to favor light-skin to dark-skin unions
resulting in a nearly homogenous light brown color in progeny, and “The Effect of
Migration on the Natural Increase of the Negro” which advocated full-scale birth control
21
Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University,
1980), 143.
22
Laura L. Lovett, Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States,
1890-1938 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 91.
11
programs among Negro populations to deter continued increases in birth rates among
dysgenic, migrant Negro women in urban areas. The term dysgenic was coined by Galton
and Caleb William Saleeby in the 1910s, to describe the opposite of eugenic and covered
scientific, social and popular constructs of unfitness.23
This project examines the techniques and disciplines New Negro leaders used to
promote social eugenics in the black community while publicly disputing theories of
Negro dysgenicism promoted by mainstream eugenics. By New Negroes, I refer to
African Americans who consciously asserted their social, educational, economic, and
political peoplehood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this context,
the New Negroes in this study are often “beyond Harlem” and not tied directly to the arts
and literature movement of the 1920s and 1903s. This study analyzes New Negro
interpretations of social eugenics and the various ways in which the appropriation of
eugenic ideology by black intellectuals informed New Negro activism, a range of New
Negro identities, elite black responses to the Great Migration, and the mission of black
colleges and universities to produce fit members of the race. Unlike the eugenic aims of
white intellectuals, racial hygiene theories among New Negroes splintered severely along
socioeconomic, regional, and gender lines.
Colorism - social mobility, currency and a beauty aesthetic that preferred light
skin and Anglo features over dark skin and African features- also greatly informed the
nature and scope of “racial fitness” ideologies in many Negro communities. Colorism
23
Caleb Williams Saleeby, The Progress of Eugenics (New York: Cassell and Company, 1914), 182.
12
grew out of mainstream eugenic beliefs that pure blood Negroes (dark skinned) had yet to
fully progress from a primitive state of evolution, rendering them incapable of racial or
social autonomy and mobility. Only the hereditary integration of white blood offered the
New Negro genetic, and subsequent racial improvement. Paradoxically, as racial
amalgamation supposedly advanced Negro evolution, it created degeneration among
whites. The offspring of black-white unions, often termed “hybrids” or “mulattoes”
constituted a genetic species believed superior to the full-blood Negro parent, but still
inferior to whites in general. Scientists like E. B. Reuter asserted that “in all times in the
history of the American Negro and in all fields of human effort in which the Negroes
have entered, the successful individuals, with very few exceptions, have been mulattoes.
The black Negroes, either past or present who have made any marked degree of success
are decidedly exceptions.”24 Such beliefs created a social hierarchy wherein whites saw
simply Negroes, [but] “Black people saw dozens of gradations, from ‘ash black’ to ‘olive
brown’ to ‘high yaller’,”25 and assigned social currency to each. For instance, New
Negroes openly discussed their desire to choose a light or tan mate over dark ones,
sometimes even if the dark prospect were more educated and financially secure, and of
better character. In this context, this study examines “colorphobia” a term used by activist
Nannie Helen Burroughs to describe New Negroes’ social aversion to dark skin and
African features often mimicked eugenic ideas about evolution-based race progress.
E.B. Reuter, “The Superiority of the Mulatto,” American Journal of Sociology 23: no.1 (July 1917):85.
Paul R. Prickard, Mixed Blood: Inter-marriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 319.
24
25
13
Sharon Harley likens Burroughs’ condemnation of New Negro attachments of moral
value to skin color to the race pride rhetoric of Marcus Garvey and black power
advocates of the 1960s and 1970s.26
This work uses links between blackness, social degeneracy and criminality to
strengthen my argument that the success of New Negro leaders depended heavily on their
physical appearance and classification as full-blooded or mulatto. Focus is placed on the
charismatic leader Marcus Garvey and college instructors like Allison Davis of the
University of Chicago, whose attacks against light-skinned New Negroes as racial
degenerates inverted the white/light-skinned aesthetic embraced by some eugenicists and
many in the Black community. Davis passionately advocated the “casting off of the
mulatto upper class” in the interest of race betterment, and argued that striving for white
social acceptance was a sign of neurosis or racial degeneracy. This work examines New
Negro eugenics through health and community mandates, social platforms, and racial
assumptions that I classify as parts of a larger racial hygiene component of eugenics.
In the hands of New Negro eugenicists, ideas about racial inferiority became
linked to loose indicators such as behavior, class, color, and education. Black
intellectuals like E. Franklin Frazier openly discussed eugenics as a necessity. In a 1925
essay titled “Eugenics and the Race Problem”, Frazier not only promoted the belief that a
small minority of intellectual Negroes should determine the social worthiness of the
working-class Negro masses, he also blamed increases in incidents of feeblemindedness
Sharon Harley, “Nannie Helen Burroughs: ‘The Black Goddess of Liberty’” The Journal of Negro
History (Winter-Autumn, 1996): 67.
26
14
among Southern Negroes on poor breeding practices. Frazier noted a danger in not
having proper institutional controls, which would control the procreation of the colored
feebleminded. Frazier argued that in the South where little notice was taken of the
colored feebleminded, defective Blacks were permitted to breed at rapid rates.
Mainstream and New Negro eugenics stressed that unfit Negroes inherited hyper-fertility;
therefore, the lack of Negro asylums for the feebleminded and “whites-only” facilities in
the South left the Negro vulnerable to sexual exploitation.27 More importantly to Negro
eugenicists, feebleminded Negroes from the South could migrate freely to urban areas as
cheap manual labor, bringing with them their dysgenicism, stigma of disenfranchisement,
and social awkwardness.28
One of the most widely-accepted race theories among men like Frazier, was
hereditarianism, which held that heredity played the most significant role in determining
human character. Accordingly, degeneracy plagued African-Americans, along with the
inability to produce positive heritable qualities such as intelligence. Improving one’s
social condition demanded education, a separation from people and places that were
deemed socially unacceptable, and proper mate selection. The idea was that grooming,
instruction, and discipline could lessen genetic errors in character and encourage racial
fitness. This research analyzes the appropriation of terms like germ plasm
(characteristics transmitted through genes by continual selection, unchanged, from one
E. Franklin Frazier, “Eugenics and the Race Problem,” The Crisis, December 1925, 91-92.
Steven Noll, Feeble-minded in Our Midst: Institutions for the Mentally Retarded in the South 1900-1940
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 90-91.
27
28
15
generation to the next), and racial hygiene (a public health platform designed to
eliminate, among other ailments, venereal disease and promote healthy reproduction
within a race) in their relation to popular discourses about Black moral fitness and
intellectual ineptness to reveal that whites and blacks maintained slightly divergent ideas
about how social inadequacy developed.
This dissertation attempts to create a cultural and intellectual history of African
American eugenic thought, incorporating some cultural studies analyses of public health
movements, demography, and black crime. Areas of analyses include The Talented
Tenth, links between social degeneracy, internalized racism, and physical hygiene, and
the editorial content of major African-American newspapers and magazines (1914-1935)
to support my overall argument that colorism and an inverted concept of race purity
(white over black, rather than black over white) mirrored mainstream beliefs about race
inferiority and manufactured a system of intra-racial standards of hereditary fitness with
dark-skinned and impoverished blacks at the bottom.
***
Between the turn of the twentieth century and the 1930s, mainstream America
embraced a shift in eugenic thought from a largely scientific and medical discourse to a
social and cultural vehicle for reform. The original scientific movement drew on
scholarship ranging from the classification of humanity by German anthropologist Johann
Friedrich Blumenbach in the 18th century to Charles Darwin’s scientific theory of a
common ancestry and survival of the fittest. It was a cousin of Darwin’s, British scientist
Francis Galton, who first formulated racial traits alongside Darwinism and promoted the
16
belief that poor breeding practices could weaken the white race from within and
miscegenation (mixing races) could bring about the degeneration of superior white
genetic material. In his formidable work Inquiries into Human Faculty and
Development, published in 1883, Galton purported a definitive racial hierarchy among
men that pre-disposed some and made others vulnerable to, social deviancy, sexual
immorality, and poor health. Eugenics also became a function of agencies that may
improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or
mentally.29 Eugenics posited that all traits passed directly from parents to children
through genetic assimilation. While positive characteristics passed directly from parent
to child in a single generation, pathological and degenerative traits passed from parents to
offspring through a genetic material, germ plasm, enabling successive generations of
unfit persons to reproduce unchallenged and burden the nation. Under social eugenics,
frequent hereditary limitations, notably limitations in capacity for intellectual
development, which may not be particularly painful to individuals but may involve
serious social consequences,30 required social and legal remedy. Galton enlisted the
support of other eugenicists, including Harry Laughlin, director of the Eugenics Records
Office in Cold Springs Harbor, New York, to lobby and promote better breeding
practices among social reformers, politicians, educators, and then use these individuals to
disseminate the merits of those practices among the general public. Laughlin defined the
Francis Galton, “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope, and Aims,” Nature 70: no.1804 (1904): 82.
Edmund Ramsden, “Social Demography and Eugenics in the Interwar United States,” Population and
Development Review 29:no.4 (Dec., 2003):560.
29
30
17
socially inadequate as any person who by his or her own effort, regardless of etiology or
prognosis, fails chronically in comparison with normal persons, to maintain himself or
herself as a useful member of the organized social life of the state. These persons
included the “feeble-minded, insane, criminalistic, epileptic, inebriate, diseased, blind,
deaf, deformed, and dependent (including orphans, ne'er-do-wells, the homeless, tramps
and paupers).”31
Laughlin’s Eugenics Records Office was funded largely by endowments from the
Carnegie Institution of Washington, John Harvey Kellogg and the Race Betterment
Foundation, and wealthy benefactors including Mrs. E. H. Harriman, (Mary Williamson
Averell), widow of the railroad tycoon. The Race Betterment Society worked to assemble
evidence as to the extent to which degenerative tendencies were actively at work in
America and to promote agencies for race betterment. They introduced educators, social
workers, and insurance company representatives to the medical observations of
physicians and hospital superintendents. Assessing feeblemindedness was critical to
those attending the Race Betterment Conference and seeking measurable ways of
warding off degeneracy. On the surface, however, the Race Betterment conference
offered little more than a platform for reinforcing white supremacy in an increasingly
diverse America. Amid increased European immigration to the United States and the
31
Harry Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization in the United States (Chicago: Psychopathic Laboratory of the
Municipal Court of Chicago, 1922), 446.
18
migration of African Americans from the South to the North and Midwest, the Race
Betterment Conference focused much of its attention on the preservation of whiteness. 32
Severe economic depression and labor unrest, including thirty-seven thousand
strikes in two decades, increased U.S. anxieties that the white middle class was losing
social authority.33 The power of manhood, as the middle class understood it,
encompassed the ability to wield civic authority, to control strife and unrest, and to shape
the future of the nation. White middle-class men’s inability to fulfill these manly
obligations and exercise this manly authority, in the face of challenges by working class
and immigrant men, reinforced many White eugenicists’ focus on manhood.34 Angelique
Richardson in Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century asserts that while
women provided the most sustained expressions of eugenic ideas, their roles in the
eugenics movement have been obscured by the “reluctance of feminist theory history to
accept the role played by women in the early history of eugenic thought.”35 Many white
women believed it was their duty to strengthen the race by breeding exemplary stock, a
position set at cross currents with later feminist theories of women having little agency
over their fertility.36
32
Wendy Kline, Building A Better Race: Gender, Sexuality and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to
the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 9.
33
Kline, 9.
34
Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States,
1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 14.
35
Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and
the New Woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), xvii.
36
Laura L. Lovett, Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States
1890-1938 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 80.
19
Ideals of white manhood took shape both stateside and abroad. In an 1899 speech
before a Chicago crowd, Theodore Roosevelt warned that “when men fear work or fear
righteous war, when women fear motherhood, they tremble on the brink of doom.”
Roosevelt’s conscription, in eugenic terms, positioned white genetic survival as a war
against inferior stocks and placed women’s fertility as the battleground. He challenged
white men to “live the strenuous life” and demonstrate their virility by defending their
women and their race from the threat of amalgamation with Black and immigrant
populations.37 As a supporter of eugenics, who once wrote “I wish very much that the
wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding; and when the evil nature of
these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done. Criminals should be sterilized
and feebleminded persons forbidden to leave offspring behind them,”38 Roosevelt’s
charge to redefine white manhood was undergirded by social eugenics platforms gleaned
from his friend and fellow eugenicist Charles Davenport.
Abroad, white manhood was characterized by interventions into the social and
political affairs of Caribbean and Central American countries. Armed with an extension
of the Monroe Doctrine that allowed the U.S. to intervene in the affairs of smaller nations
in the role of stabilizing agents, the U.S. military used force or the threat of force
(gunboat diplomacy) to occupy and control Cuba (1905-09), Nicaragua (1909-1910,
1912–1925, 1926–1933), Haiti (1915-1934), and the Philippines (1898-1946). As
Roosevelt argued, to prove their virility, as a race and a nation, American men needed to
37
38
Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (New York: The Century Co., 1902), 7.
Theodore Roosevelt, “Twisted Eugenics,” New Outlook, 106 (Jan. 3, 1914), 32.
20
take up the “strenuous life” and strive to advance civilization – through imperialistic
warfare and racial violence if necessary.39 New Negro men similarly sought to assert
their manhood and establish their nationalism through enlistment in the military, though
their participation was restricted and often limited to non-combat roles. As Alessandra
Lorini notes, “by showing patriotism and manhood in freeing the world for democracy,
black soldiers would demonstrate, once again, their virtuous citizenship and the
capability of uplifting their entire race.40 So even as American mass media cast
American military invasions as civilizing missions and white men as paternal figures
ushering primitive males into civility, New Negroes took up the “white man’s burden”41
as an extension of his patriotism.
Eugenics-based theories of Negro inferiority, however, followed New Negro men
into military service and dictated both their eligibility for service and range of mobility
within the ranks. For instance, William Allison Sweeney wrote in 1919 that despite the
Negroes’ overwhelming desire to join the ranks of fighting men, he had been conscripted,
in many regiments, to domestic or servile positions based solely on his race traits. In
addition to officer training being off-limits to Negro soldiers, a “strong prejudice against
inducting [Negroes] into the artillery branch of the service had always existed in the
39
Bederman, 171.
Alessandra Lorini, Rituals of Race: American Public Culture and the Search for Racial Democracy
(Richmond: The University Press of Virginia, 1999), 254.
41
Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “The White Man's Burden” (1899) was a response to the American takeover of
the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, and defined U.S. imperial expansion as a global eugenic
effort to curb the fertility of inferior races of men. Kipling’s opening stanza, cast foreign men, particularly
those of color, as a direct challenge to white genetic purity, civility, and morality. He connects the genetic
kinship of all white men and coping with the dysgenic lesser races around them as a “burden.”
40
21
army. It was especially affirmed the Negro did not possess the mathematical ability
necessary to qualify as an expert artillery officer.”42 By the summer of 1919, at the
height of white mob violence against Negroes, lynching Negro soldiers became
increasingly commonplace with “news reports most frequently indicating that the causes
of the outbreaks were attacks by colored soldiers on white women.”43 Attacks sometimes
cost veterans their lives before they even took off their uniforms, as some white
supremacists saw provocation in the mere fact of a black man in a military uniform.44
While white males exercised their virility abroad and at home against racial “others”,
white women’s growing autonomy continued to pose the chief threat to notions of white
manhood. Particularly in urban cities like New York, single working-class women often
lived, worked and enjoyed leisure with little concern for traditional codes of behavior,
marriage and childbearing. “Cheap amusements” threatened to inundate New York,
appealing to the “low” instincts of the masses, debasing womanly virtues, segregating
youth from the family, and fostering a dangerously expressive culture. Reformers
imbued the everyday pleasures of working women with a moral reading that linked cheap
amusements with promiscuous sexuality and heterosocial relations.45 For this reason,
eugenicists placed the sanctity of white womanhood at the core of race betterment,
arguing that miscegenation, interracial marriage, lesbianism, and “free love” would lead
42
William Allison Sweeney, History of the America Negro in the Great World War (Chicago: G.G. Sapp,
1919), 79.
43
Carl Sandburg, The Chicago Race Riots (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1919), 55.
44
Nell Irvin Painter, Creating Black Americans: African American History and its Meaning 1619 to the
Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 183.
45
Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 163.
22
to the impending annihilation of the Caucasian race. Eugenics became a male-dominated
discourse that held womanhood as the key to race purity and progress, while utilizing
mostly women as grassroots inspectors of both white men and women and charged with
going door-to-door to assess and document signs of dysgenicism.
Characterizing dysgenicism though, was no easy task for white eugenicists, and
proved equally daunting for New Negro eugenicists. In 1900, Henry Goddard, a
psychologist working with the New Jersey Training School of Vineland added the
category “moron” to the original Binet IQ test used to diagnose mental and social
degeneracy, or feeblemindedness. The original scale labeled persons with a mental
capacity of two years old or younger, as idiots, and those with a mental capacity of threeto-seven-years-old as imbeciles.46 Negroes, assessed as having only a slight mental
capacity allowing them the ability to imitate, excel at rudimentary physical tasks, and
follow basic instructions, were labeled collectively among the imbecile grade. This
placement did not change according to whether the eugenicist was white or black;
although among whites, the characterization was made by an examination of physical
traits, rather than actual aptitude tests. For instance, Edmund Shaftesbury, a leading 19th
century social reformer asserted that the Negro possessed “only two senses, sex and
digestion for which they would plunge to death.” Shaftesbury wrote the Negro possessed
a “forehead that indicates an inability to acquire or propagate a degree of intelligence
above the grade of the imbecile; eyes that denote treachery and a willingness to murder
46
Kline, 22.
23
the best friend, a mouth that is the highest expression of the most intense animal and
brutish sensualism; yet a face attractive to a woman because it was more intelligent than a
dog’s.47 Such definitive and negative characterization helped move eugenic labeling
from the laboratory and into the purview of the everyday man or woman who could make
a determination of Negro character and fitness at a glance.
For New Negroes however, classifications of intellectual capability impacted the
crux of racial uplift: education. Mainstream eugenic theories helped determine the scope
of Negro aptitude, and subsequently, how much money philanthropic organizations
contributed to Negro normal schools and colleges. Through Binet IQ testing conducted
by the Federal Bureau of Education, Negroes overwhelmingly received low scores and
subsequently low-grade instruction. Poverty and pathologies, like affluence and its
comforts, were indicators of heredity and not the environment in which human beings
were conceived, born, and nurtured or raised. By connecting intelligence with heredity,
the Binet testing scale insured that education policy would be based on a philosophy of
biological determinism.48 Binet and other aptitude tests, helped determine which Negro
students could successfully matriculate industrial, liberal, and classical educations.
Charles S. Johnson, Director of Research and Investigations for Opportunity
magazine argued in his article “Mental Measurements of Negro Groups” (1924), that
tests by Black eugenicists demonstrated that the average Northern Negro had the ability
47
Edmund Shaftesbury, Child Life: Before and After Birth: A Solution to Perplexing Problems
(Washington, D.C.: The Ralston Club Press, 1897), 22.
48
Ann Gibson Winfield, Eugenics and Education: Institutionalized Racism and the Implications of History,
Ideology, and Memory (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 118.
24
to learn new things which is about equivalent to that possessed by the average elevenyear-old white school boy; while the average Southern Negro is about as capable in
intellectual capacities as the average nine-year-old white school boy. Terms like
“ability” and “capacity” were employed and linked inferentially with “heredity.” 49 The
results of the tests indicated a disparity between Northern-born and Southern-born
students, supporting a belief in Southern dysgenicism.
Further, in keeping with the Goddard measurements of social and intellectual
aptitude, the results of aptitude tests placed Blacks collectively in a mental category
reserved for “morons”. Awareness of the importance of such findings, New Negro
students struggled to gain a sense of themselves individually, as well as members of the
Talented Tenth, who carried the burden of redeeming the race. In this context, racial
hygiene and uplift courses sought to guide individual New Negro students and link them
to the race collectively, with the understanding that the race’s behavior, beliefs,
deficiencies or accomplishments reflected on their own. Black racial destiny – the belief
that Negroes collectively existed as one body, with one origin and one end – became a
unifier of Black college students that inevitably determined Black standards of behavior,
dress, and etiquette.
Other classifications under Goddard’s scale included “morons,” who had a mental
capacity of eight-to twelve-year-olds, but also a particular propensity for sexual
degeneracy. By adding the “moron” class to the definition of feeblemindedness, Goddard
49
Charles S. Johnson, “Mental Measurements of Negro Groups,” Opportunity 1:no. 2 (Feb. 1923): 23.
25
effectively broadened the scope of mental deficiency to include a wider range of
symptoms. This new category essentially blurred the distinction between behavior that
was unmistakably “normal” and behavior that was “pathological”; it allowed those with
new social “symptoms” such as unwed mothers and prostitutes, to be diagnosed as
“feebleminded.”50
The moron classification became an albatross to New Negro women in urban areas,
as their every movement became arbitrary data in the assessment and determination of
their social and eugenic fitness. In many cases, it also led to discriminatory practices in
hiring, lodging and jurisprudence. In places like New York and Chicago, the social
burden of caring for illegitimate children of Negro girls and women threatened to
collapse aid societies and the moral fabric of entire neighborhoods. Out-of-wedlock
births, in some black reformers’ estimations, resulted from a man delaying marriage until
financially able to support a wife, but ultimately getting the women pregnant. If the man
is named as the father in court and is unable to make a contribution to the household
equal to or greater to that which the state provides the woman and child, he may be
sentenced to a workhouse. Negro women were often faced with claiming not to know the
father’s name or whereabouts, or naming him and risking his incarceration.51 E. Franklin
Frazier estimated that as a result, the illegitimacy rate increased steadily between 1917
and 1928 from 116.8 per 1,000 households to 136.6 in 1928 per 1,000 births.52 Frazier’s
50
Kline, 24-25.
Ruth Reed, The Illegitimate Family in New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), 13.
52
E. Franklin Frazier, “An Analysis of Statistics on Negro Illegitimacy in the United States,” Social
Forces, 11:no.2 (Dec. 1932):249.
51
26
assessment, unlike Reed’s, offered a closer examination of Negro households in Harlem
and Washington, D.C. and determined that many of the illegitimate children registered
inside of Negro families were the product one of either the husband or wife and an
extramarital affair. Frazier’s work is critical to the eugenic maxim that marriage between
dysgenic members of a race susceptible to sexual wantonness resulted in the breakdown
of marriage and family. For Negro eugenicists, such data further defined the role migrant
populations played in the disproportionate birth rates among the race. Frazier boldly
announced that the illegitimacy of the country “reflects the simple and naïve behavior of
peasant folk. It is not licentious and could scarcely be called immoral. Of course, in
some cases it does represent degeneration and where it conflicts with the mores of
community becomes immoral.”53 Frazier examines degeneration in this instance in an
example of unmarried couples, aware of breaking the mores of cohabitating, but choosing
not to wed. In communities where the household enjoyed economic stability and relative
comfort, being unmarried with children was not necessarily frowned upon as immoral.
George Robb’s The Way of All Flesh: Degeneration, Eugenics and the Gospel of
Free Love notes that some progressive eugenicists believed the restraints of marriage –
with its ties to property, law, religion, and propriety, actually hindered the natural
selection of sexual partners and created race degeneration. Since, in the estimation of
eugenicists like Karl Pearson, breeding children was the ultimate goal of marriage,
natural sexual selection became far more important than material and cultural
53
Frazier, 255-256.
27
considerations of marriage. While immoral, this posture, would promote good breeding
among individuals with a natural sexual attraction to each other.54 Frazier speaks of an
allegedly inherent pathology supported by rural Negro communities and suggests that the
tide of illegitimacy and sex crime among urban Negro women was a result of
feeblemindedness, rather than poor social adjustment to new urban environments. Using
Pearson’s schema these women may have been acting on a natural impulse that promoted
the birth of their progeny. Reformers and policy makers who echoed Frazier’s sentiments
supported the incarceration of many girls in asylums for the wayward, where their habits
could be rehabilitated, they could be treated for venereal diseases, and in many cases,
allowed to carry and give birth to children away from the watchful eye of society.55
However real or imagined the hereditary unfitness of wayward girls, there existed a
growing number of Americans between 1890 and 1920 suffering from mental and
physical handicaps, including birth defects, sensory impairments, and neurological
ailments including epilepsy, that were similarly classified. Poor diet, harsh living, and
exposure to industrial chemicals at home and in the workplace easily accounted for the
explosion of children suffering from birth defects during the 1930s; however, medical
communities linked the numbers to an increase in unions between couples where at least
one of the pair came from genetically inferior stock. Reformers actively lobbied among
middle-class white communities, emphasizing the value of closely documented medical
George Robb, “The Way of All Flesh: Degeneration, Eugenics, and the Gospel of Free Love,” Journal of
the History of Sexuality, 6, no. 4 (April 1996): 592.
55
Percy Gamble Kammerer, The Unmarried Mother: A Study of Five Hundred Cases (Boston: Little,
Brown & Company, 1918), ix-x.
54
28
and social histories of their own families and those of perspective mates for their
offspring. A type of social phrenology utilizing the language and images of “criminal
types” found its way into popular films, advertisements, and live performances to ensure
that those absorbing popular amusements recognized the characteristics of immorality
and genetic pathology at a glance. To aid in such programming, counties in most states
offered Better Babies and Fitter Families contests that made an exhibition of genetic
fitness. The first Fitter Family Contest was held at the Kansas State Free Fair in 1920,
with support from the American Eugenics Society’s Committee on Popular Education.
And while Negroes were excluded from both contests in order to promote the belief that
only whites could be perfect, New Negroes similarly promoted eugenic fitness through
family and baby contests, as well as Men of the Month features and Prize Babies editions
in Black newspapers and magazines like the Crisis.56
Fitness criteria created by magazines and newspapers linked standards of beauty,
desirability, and marriage-worthiness to public hygiene discourses and played out in New
Negro advertising through the promotion of products to eliminate noticeable signs of
racial inferiority. Dark skin and naturally curly hair were linked to germ plasm, (the
location of irreversible biological traits), despite both skin color and hair texture being
irreversible biological traits. Products like Brownlight placed advertisements in Black
newspapers exclusively and promised to lighten skin by pitching: “You can’t change
germ plasm, but you can bleach the coloring matter of the pigment cells, which makes
56
Nicole Wallgora-Davis, Sanctuary: African Americans and Empire (New York: Oxford University Press,
2011), 37.
29
you dark of countenance”. Brownlight advertised their ingredients as capable of reorchestrating the inheritance of dark skin by bleaching the actual (pigment) cells of the
purchaser and eliminating the resulting physical evidence of poor germ plasm – a dark
countenance. Brownlight leaps from internal (science / biology) to external (physical
countenance) manifestations of poor genetic inheritance, making its claims both a
scientific and popular eugenic pronouncement. This type of popular science language
proves critical to understanding the transition eugenics made from science laboratory to
perfume or drug store counter. The New York-based company sold Brownlight through
drugstores and beauty parlors across the country.57 The same language used by scientists
and eugenicists to justify biological predisposition to degeneracy, helped usher in a
beauty industry designed to remove the outward signs of social stigma and inferiority.
August Weismann’s “The Germ Plasm, A Theory of Heredity” asserts that germ plasm
constitutes the transmittable material (fixed grouping of pangenes) and primary trait
information passed from one generation to another and includes physical traits like skin
color, eye color and hair texture.58 While some beauty preparations and processes could
alter the appearance hair and skin color externally, they could not change the composition
of genes. These products represent, instead of an attack on poor germ plasm, a masking
of inherited traits.
57
Display Ad 25, Brownlight. New York Amsterdam News, (Dec. 7, 1927), 6.
August Weismann, The Germ-Plasm: A Theory of Heredity (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1893),
17.
58
30
The scholarly literature on African Americans and eugenics focuses on African
Americans as the objects of white eugenic fears, theories, and practices. Texts concerned
with African Americans as self-directed eugenicists and hereditarianism thought fall into
three categories of inquiry: intellectual histories, which focuses on the ideology of racial
uplift and dissects the theories of W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Alice Nelson
Dunbar, Marcus Garvey, and the organizations that supported their efforts;59 history of
medicine and science studies that tend to focus attention on the medical and reproductive
beliefs about Black behavior, particularly that of women and their relations to germ
59
Scholarly works that highlight the intellectual histories of African American eugenic thought include
Daylanne K. English, Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem
Renaissance (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Michelle Mitchell, “Adjusting
the Race: Gender, Sexuality, and the Question of African-American Destiny, 1877-1930.” Ph.D. diss.,
Northwestern University, 1998.; Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture
in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Hazel Carby, Race Men
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998); Henry Louis Gates, “The Trope of the New Negro
and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black,” in Philip Fisher, ed., The New American Studies
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Kelly Miller, “Eugenics of the Negro Race” (The
Scientific Monthly, 5:1, 57-59); and Martha Jane Nadell, Enter the New Negro: Images of Race in
American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
31
plasm or degenerate genes;60 and popular culture studies, which document the infusion of
racial destiny and collective character messages into mass media.61
Some scholarship overlaps these categories to paint more complex pictures of the
intersections of racial uplift and eugenic discourses. In his analysis of eugenics in AngloAmerican thought through the prisms of race, class, religion, and gender, Marouf A.
Hasian asserts that the popularity of eugenics made its rhetoric commonplace for average
Americans and its consumption almost compulsory. One of the most popular ways of
disseminating eugenicist messages to the public was by combining entertainment with art
60
History of medicine and science studies that focus attention on the medical and reproductive beliefs
about Black behavior include, Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of
Race, 1894-1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Gregory Michael Dorr, Segregation’s
Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia (Richmond: University of Virginia Press, 2008); Dorothy
Robert, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1997); Crystal N. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009); Steven Selden, Inheriting Shame: The Story of
Eugenics and Racism in America (New York: Teachers College, 1999); Cheryl D. Hicks, Talk with You
Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890-1935 (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans
and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press,
2004); W.E.B. Du Bois, The Health and Physique of the Negro American, Report of a Social Study made
under the direction of Atlanta University Press, 1906; John William Gibson, Golden Thoughts on Chastity
and Procreation Including Heredity Prenatal Influences, etc. Washington, D.C.: Austin Jenkins, ca. 1914;
61
Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in
American Films ( New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1973); Jan Nederveen Pieterse,
White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1992); William Arens, The Man-eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1979); Jennifer DeVere Brody, Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity and Victorian
Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); K. Sue Jewell, An Analysis of the Visual Development of a
Stereotype: The Media Portrayal of Mammy and Aunt Jemima as Symbols of Black Womanhood,
Dissertation, Columbus, Ohio, The Ohio State University, 1976; James E. Combs, Polpop: Politics and
Popular Culture in America (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1991);
Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class, Politics, and Mass Culture in
Nineteenth Century America (New York: Verso, 1990); William H. Turner, “Myths and Stereotypes: The
African Man in America,” in D.Y. Wilkinson and R.L. Taylor, The Black Male in America (Chicago:
Nelson Hall Publishers, 1977).
32
and education with recreation.62 In addition to “Fitter Families” contests and baby
contests at state fairs, 1920s eugenicists began to create spectacular shows that would be
staged across the country to demonstrate to the farmer and the urban dweller alike the
dangers of the feebleminded and the degenerates in America.63 Hasian reveals how this
recreational instruction was further enhanced through church sermons, school biology
classes, and social reform organizations, in Black and white communities alike. The
examination of African-American eugenics as a vehicle of racial uplift in this work, like
Hasian’s, explores school biology classes and some church sermons. Both the church
and school disseminated eugenic-framed information on morality, breeding habits, and
mate selection through courses on biology and race hygiene (schools) and sermons about
the chaste, responsible duties of those involved in romantic relationships. In both
instances, the instruction sought to protect the germ plasm of its fit membership from
degeneration.
This research posits that within the African American community, churches,
universities, and social reform agencies, often chose leadership from within its ranks of
educated members, many of whom attended the same colleges, belonged to same
fraternal orders and professional clubs, and maintained similar views about society and
their place it. Black colleges and universities formed a virtual clearinghouse of eugenic
thought that moved effortlessly from classrooms, to medical and social associations, and
62
Marouf A. Hasian, The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1996), 43.
63
Hasian, 43.
33
into public discourse. This examination of Howard University faculty member Kelly
Miller demonstrates this interconnectedness. Miller wrote and spoke extensively
between 1910 and 1940 on eugenics, biology, moral pedagogy, and race for national and
international publications, including The Half-Century Magazine, The Messenger, the
NAACP’s Crisis magazine the Baltimore Afro-American and public lectures at the
YMCA. These magazines reached the black masses and thus, allowed eugenic thought to
flourish outside institutions.
My work also departs from Hasian’s by incorporating data from the Textbook
History Database, which charts the growth and decline of eugenics in college biology
textbooks from 1904 to 1944. This analysis of mainstream college textbooks introduces
an additional layer of inquiry about what textbooks were used among the bourgeoning
Black intelligentsia at Black colleges. Of particular importance are theories African
Americans gleaned from these texts in developing racial uplift, scientific, and eugenic
ideology. My work also traces the shifts in eugenic thought among textbook writers. For
instance, up until 1914, there had been no mention of eugenics in college biology
textbooks. When introduced in the Elementary Principles of General Biology in late
1914, by Macmillan author James Francis Abbott, eugenics was attributed to “the
proportion of all sorts of persons who, on account of physical, moral, or mental
abnormalities are a burden on society”.64
64
James Francis Abbott, Elementary Principles of General Biology (New York: MacMillan Publishers
1914), 241.
34
Among Negroes attempting to assimilate fully into society following
Emancipation and Reconstruction, eugenic concepts, including race purity, selective
breeding, and “breeding out” came to represent methods of uplift. When coupled with
efforts to educate, own businesses and homes, and reap the benefits of full citizenship,
the adoption of eugenic practices by New Negroes demonstrated the social fitness and
respectability that heredity supposedly denied them.
Chapter One, “The New Negro”, consists of two subparts. The first examines the
birth and ideology of the New Negro as defined by both Booker T. Washington in A New
Negro for a New Century (1900) and later by Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925), as
well as the social imperatives that defined someone as a “New Negro.” While
Washington’s interpretation lent itself most aggressively to a progressive model of black
social evolution, it also articulated social eugenic discourses that denoted the inherent
inability of the black masses to lead themselves out of social infancy. Locke, however,
presents a “social portraiture” of New Negro culture that exposes deep seated
generational and class divisions within the race and places Washington’s earlier
movement as both a folk remnant of Old Negro social progress and proof that social
evolution created a new, radical-thinking Negro. A loose chronological narrative of New
Negro thought is used within a largely thematic framework to support my assertion that
even as factions of the “Negro race” made noticeable social progress, internal eugenicbased theories of racial and social fitness based on skin color, remained constant.
The second subpart of this chapter examines Black hereditarian thought in
relation to the migration of rural Blacks to urban cities as well as the immigration of West
35
Indians from Jamaica and Trinidad to Harlem. This research reveals that educated Black
intellectuals defined migrants with the same eugenic terms white Americans used when
defining the eugenic threat posed by immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe and
Asia. Frazier’s raw data gathered on Negro migrants in Chicago family courts
documenting cases of marriage abandonment, non-support, drunkenness, domestic abuse,
incorrigible offspring, and general criminality, are used to demonstrate the perceived
eugenic link between arrests, confinement in asylums, and classifications of
feeblemindedness among Blacks.
The second chapter, “Fewer But Better Children: New Negro Eugenics, Black
Fertility and the Birth Control Movement” documents efforts to promote birth control
among migrant women by both mainstream and Negro intellectuals and reformers.
Fertility among New Negro migrants remained a constant concern for eugenicists and
incorporated a desire to decrease both the number of defective children, as well as, the
financial burden their poor health, housing and education placed on the nation. My
examination demonstrates how the frequency of such charges among migrants correlated
to the increase in fertility among this same population and the sexualization of Negro
crime in Chicago and New York courts. The primary focus of this work notes efforts to
correct the supposedly socially deviant sexual habits of migrant-class women by a
growing body of social reformers made up of leading Negro scholars, physicians and
Progressives. Of specific emphasis is the 1932 Special Negro Edition of The Birth
Control Review which promoted birth control as eugenic respectability and social
responsibility.
36
Chapter Three, “Howard University as Eugenic Laboratory” details the promotion
of eugenics at the nation’s premiere Black college, Howard University. Alternately
known as “The Capstone” and “The Mecca,” Howard groomed students as race
representatives and leaders of the dysgenic Negro masses. This mandate ran concurrent
with W.E.B. Du Bois’ Talented Tenth paradigm wherein a superior stock of Negro
(roughly ten percent of the total population) would lead the remaining. The examination
of Howard University charts the work of Rosenwald Fund-sponsored Black college
professors and their direct link to Black intellectual thought that posited hereditarian and
evolutionary causes to Negro health and social problems. Professors used social eugenics
and racial uplift theories to formulate race-specific exercises and instruction for Black
students. These courses, as well as their instructors, demonstrate a direct correlation
between eugenic instruction and the acceptance of eugenic theories among New Negroes.
Chapter Four, “What the New Negro Needs to Become Fit,” examines the coded
language of social eugenics utilized to entice the purchase of corrective products in
Negro advertising, as well as Black consumer interpretations of dysgenic New Negroes
advertising images. The second part examines fitness protocols designed by North
Carolina Mutual Insurance Company, the oldest and largest Black-owned life insurance
company in the nation. Established in 1896, NC Mutual offered economic stability to the
insured through unemployment, injury and death benefits, but also the ability to gain
social respectability through the management or elimination of inherent health
conditions. Analysis is made of the process by which NC Mutual field workers and
policy writers determined the mental and physical fitness of potential clients. Specific
37
detail is given to mandates by NC Mutual Medical Director Clyde Donnell, who
spearheaded its Life Extension Services program for policyholders and employees that
addressed eugenic data on the mortality and morbidity of Negroes. Beauty culture, with
its promises of corrective properties and physical transformations is placed alongside
preventative health programs conducted by NC Mutual in this work in order to solidify
connections between the personal appearance (condition) of individuals and the
cleanliness of homes as extensions of internal health (good germ plasm).
This dissertation is concluded by examining the inversion of race purity among
African Americans that by eugenic terms would favor the pure-blood (dark skinned) over
the brown or light skinned (hybrid) as true possessor of genetic and cultural strength.
Eugenic constructs of purity, degeneracy, race betterment, and race evolution, functioned
within a prism of physiognomy, colorism (colorphobia) and pigmentocracy, that while
not quite delegitimizing the original course of hereditarian thought, presented them as
light-supremacy and class based fitness.
38
CHAPTER ONE
“THE CIVILIZING PROCESS: NEW NEGRO EUGENICS AND HEREDITARIAN
THOUGHT”
“By the definition accepted in the United States, any person with even a small amount of Negro
Blood... is a Negro. Logically, it would be exactly as justifiable to say that any person with even a small
amount of white blood is white. Why do they say one rather than the other? Because the former
classification suits the convenience of those making the classification. Society, in short, regards as true
those systems that produce the desired results. Science seeks only the most generally useful systems of
classification; these it regards for the time being, until more useful classifications are invented, as true.”
-- Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa (1941)
“Intermarriage is the only logical, sound and correct aim.”
-- Chandler Owen & A. Phillip Randolph (1920)
Scholars have long-associated the term New Negro with the Harlem Renaissance, an
intellectual and arts movement that legitimated Black writing, artistic expression, and
southern folk culture as worthy of appreciation. However, Davarian Baldwin, in Escape
from New York: The New Negro Renaissance Beyond Harlem, argued that the New
Negro actually existed as a global social movement made up of political, cultural, social,
and intellectual (including the arts) expressions.1 Jeannette Eileen Jones notes that the
term may have been established as early as 1894 by Reverend W.E.C. Wright, a
Cleveland clergyman who identified a new Negro capable of contributing to the capitalist
economy, affairs of the nation, and the missionary uplift of Africans. Jones notes these
1
Davarian Baldwin and Minkah Makalani, Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance Beyond
Harlem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2013), 12.
39
“New Negroes often claimed their special relationship with Africa as descendants of
enslaved Africans in the Americas, even as they affirmed their rights as Americans,
Frenchmen, Jamaicans, Trinidadians, and so on. In this sense, modern New Negroes’
emerging cosmopolitan sensibilities found congruence with pan-Africanism.”2
Christopher George Buck notes that the term had been “variously used to refer to
transplanted Africans as slaves in the New World, then to newly emancipated slaves, and
then to politically activist African Americans” after the Civil War.3
The close of Reconstruction ushered in decades— known as the Jim Crow era—of
state and federal laws enacted to maintain white supremacy. Formerly enslaved Blacks
attempted to solidify their citizenship in American society by assimilating into
established political, social, and economic spheres. The political aims of the New Negro
movement included demanding elective representation in urban areas, and as Hubert
Harrison noted, “no longer begging or asking.” Those aims also included embracing the
idea of being Negro first, before any other classification including Christian or
Republican, thereby solidifying race alongside manhood (or womanhood).
Jeannette Eileen Jones, “Brightest Africa in the New Negro Imagination,” in Escape from New York: The
New Negro Renaissance Beyond Harlem ed. Davarian Baldwin and Minkah Makalani (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota, 2013), 41.
3
Jayetta Slawson, “Political Activity, Migration, and Urbanization,” in Encyclopedia of African American
History, ed. Leslie M. Alexander, vol. 3 (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2010), 926.
2
40
Charity begins at home, and our first duty is to ourselves…striving to be men, and
finding no effective aid in government or in politics, the Negro of the Western world
must follow the path of the Swadesha movement in India and the Sinn Fein
movement of Ireland. The meaning of both these terms is ‘ourselves first.’ This is
the mental background of the new politics of the New Negro, and we commend it to
the consideration of all political parties.4
Harrison makes clear that New Negroes sought to credential themselves as capable of
their own racial uplift without the aid of white intervention.
These efforts required casting aside any resemblance to Old Negro imagery found in
stereotypes scattered throughout plantation fiction, blackface minstrelsy, vaudeville,
racist pseudo-science, and Social Darwinism.5 While some whites viewed burgeoning
Black independence as necessary “baby steps” toward full citizenship, others felt mocked
and threatened by African American demands for equality. Fear drove whites to violence
and threats of violence that included rape, lynching, murder, and the destruction of entire
Black towns and neighborhoods in a series of racially motivated riots that began in the
1880s and peaked in 1919. While works like Cameron McWhirter’s Red Summer: The
Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America, James Hirsch’s Riot and
Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy, and Barbara Foley’s Spectres of
1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro argue that the hostilities that
grew into a series of riots of between 1900 and 1920 were precipitated by labor and class
antagonism, my research piggybacks on Doris Roberts’ assertion in Fatal Invention: How
4
Hubert Harrison, When Africa Awakes (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1920), 40.
Martha Jane Nadell, Enter the New Negroes: Images of Race in American Popular Culture (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2004), 11.
5
41
Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century that it was
the pathological obsession of preserving their racial purity that led to “the vicious race
riots across the country.”6 As witnessed with a series of riots following Jack Johnson’s
boxing win over white opponent Jim Jeffries in 1910, white mob violence erupted after a
public spectacle proved “blacks were not inferior and that in a test of the fittest, they
would not be found wanting.”7 By staging the fight on Independence Day, 1910,
promoters “positioned white masculinity against the assertion of black power,”8 and used
the boxing ring as a symbolic earth upon which the weaker race would fall. Johnson
challenged white superiority by first, demonstrating the vulnerability of the white male
body, and second, through the sexual objectification of the white female body (cavorting
with a string of white prostitutes and marrying three white women during his professional
career.) Legitimization of hostilities toward blacks was supported by scientific and
medical theories that categorized Blacks as subhuman and genetically predisposed to
crime, sexual lewdness and bringing about white degeneration. Further, under eugenic
ideologies, the Negro, old and new, was considered mentally degenerate and ill-equipped
for modernity without the benefit of white largess. Thus, their enfranchisement, often at
the cost of competing with their former enslavers, was particularly infuriating to white
supremacists.
6
Doris Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twentyfirst Century (New York: The New Press, 2011), 37.
7
Randy Roberts, Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and the Era of White Hopes (New York: The Free Press, 1983),
134.
8
Peter J. Bloom, French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 194.
42
Socially, the term New Negro is what I consider a triple entendre—that is the phrase
takes on three distinct meanings. The first denotes a visual challenge to the imagery and
lore of the Antebellum South that marked pathological habits and exaggerated physical
characteristics of the Negro. Literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes that Blacks
believed that the features of the race itself needed realigning, noting that its “collective
mouth shape and lip size, the shape of its head (which especially concerned phrenologists
at the turn of the century), its black skin color, its kinky hair—had been caricatured and
stereotyped so severely in popular American art that black intellectuals seemed to feel
that nothing less than a full facelift and a complete break with the enslaved past could
ameliorate the social conditions of the modern Black person.”9 Secondly, the term New
Negro represented ideologically self-willed men who embraced ideals of American
masculinity and who were poised to defend themselves and their families against white
aggression. Unlike earlier racial violence during Reconstruction, that which took place
during the Jim Crow era witnessed the rise of armed Negro resistance and retaliation.
Craig Thompson Friend links elements of white male masculinity to enfranchisement,
noting that white men whose status depended on racial hierarchy saw the issue of black
suffrage clearly as a threat to white manhood.10 There was a major difference between
helping supposedly child-like and docile blacks and receiving them as equal members of
the body politic. Kimberly S. Johnson asserts that the multiple challenges to white male
Henry Louis Gates, “The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black”
Representations, 24, Special Issue: America Reconstructed, 1840-1940 (Autumn, 1988), 129-155.
10
Craig Thompson Friend, Southern Masculinity: Perspectives on Manhood in the South since
Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 9.
9
43
supremacy posed by the display of black martial citizenship, coupled with the economic
stress, social tensions, and political competition associated with modernity, unleashed a
furious torrent of hatred from whites toward blacks.11 Thirdly, the New Negro, in blackstyled eugenic terms, described the genetically-evolved (evolving) black person whose
inherent racial markers resembled his “American” stock and could be set apart from the
primitiveness of his African ancestry. Negro intellectuals often combined these various
meanings of the term “New Negro,” to chart individual and shared race progress.
Education, for example, proved a sphere in which the triplicate meaning of New
Negro could be espoused. In addition to negotiating the value of their labor as wageearners and purchasing property, many Blacks developed both formal and informal
schools where the young and elderly could learn to read, write and figure basic
mathematics. Between 1877 and 1900, more than 1.5 million African Americans
between the ages of 5 and 18 attended normal or industrial schools and colleges –
representing 57 percent of the 2.7 million Blacks of that age.12 A New Negro student
embodied visually his/her separation from his/her sharecropper parents (Old Negroes).
This student demonstrated an active will and self-determination to teach and to learn; and
finally, he proved his genetic capability to learn not only rudimentary and mimicked
actions, but also to master classical, theory-based instruction that required complex
thought. Eugenics held that African American mental capacity could not progress
11
Kimberley S. Johnson, Reforming Jim Crow: Southern Politics and State in the Age Before Brown (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 27.
12
Commissioner of Education, Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year 1900-1901
(Washington: Government Printing Office, 1902), 25-31.
44
beyond that of children, except through an intricate process of social evolution. Built
upon Charles Darwin’s theory of physical evolution, the eugenic model positioned Negro
mental degeneration and progression as a natural result of either white care or neglect.
Outside of white paternalism, the commonly held consensus as reported in journals like
the Medical Times was that the New Negro would naturally regress to a state of
animalism found in his African forefathers.13 Attempting to provide Negroes anything
remotely similar to instruction received by whites was considered fundamentally absurd
by most white school boards.
Among these “New Negro” schools were Alabama’s Tuskegee Normal and
Industrial Institute, led by activist and scholar Booker Taliaferro Washington.
Washington, the child of an enslaved mother and white landowner, attended Hampton
Institute in Virginia, and eventually became the most sought-after and respected Negro
spokesman in white philanthropic circles. Owing that success in large part to a belief in
the slow evolutionary progress of some members of the Negro race with the aid of
whites, Washington also charged that the New Negro should be afforded rights of
equality only after he had successfully proven himself capable and worthy of advanced
political citizenship. Washington cautioned against abrupt change. Having witnessed the
brute violence and racial hostility that characterized everyday interactions between whites
and newly freed Blacks in the South, Washington believed that sudden assimilation
would only serve to antagonize and further anger whites. His racial ideologies often ran
A. N. Ulrich, “Curious Facts Concerning Medical Demography,” The Medical Times 33 (March 1905):
77.
13
45
counter to racial uplift ideologies and seemed at times to coax white sympathies by
assuring white supporters that the traditional “docile” plantation Negro of the antebellum
South (the Old Negro) was still very much alive and posed no threat to the white
supremacist economic and social agenda. For example, Washington once wrote:
The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social
equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the
privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant
struggle rather than of artificial forcing… While, you can be sure in the
future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the
most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has
seen. As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your
children, watching by the sick bed of your mothers and fathers, and often
following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our
humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can
approach…14
Washington implies by this statement that the quest for racial equality by some
Negroes was folly and that any Negro who considered equality an entitlement of
citizenship to be misguided or an agitator. For while Washington may have believed that
some segments of New Negro society deserved the privilege of equality, he associated
the demand for forced equality by some emancipated Negroes a sign of racial regression,
suggesting that such behavior demonstrated lawlessness, disloyalty, and impatience.
Washington further implored Blacks to “cast down [their] buckets where [they] are,” and
find as much “dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem,” at once mocking efforts by
New Negro intellectuals to incorporate liberal arts courses into industrial training, and
unwittingly reinforcing social eugenic theories of black intellectual inferiority. Quite
14
Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery: An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, Page and Co.,
1907), 223.
46
skillfully, Washington was able to coax attendees of the 1895 Atlanta Exposition into
viewing his exhibit on Negro progress by first offering a psychic strainer and
interpretation of the images. Through a speech that placed New Negro progress in both
scientific and social contexts, the exhibit, A New Negro, presented photos of Tuskegee
and Fisk students hard at work studying, participating in chapel, and representing the
imagined civility of both the nation and their former masters. Grace Elizabeth Hale
suggests that in many respects “the New Negro, the name some educated African
Americans of the generation born in freedom chose for themselves, forced white
southerners to create a New South.”15 Essentially, whites in fear of black advancement
and uplift created a New South that defied the very logic of New Negro-ness. That is,
white Southerners created laws, institutions, and social spaces that reminded blacks that
despite their rhetoric of becoming “new”, they remained inferior.
Five years after the exposition, Washington penned A New Negro for a New Century
(1900) along with Fannie Barrier Williams and N.B. Wood. The book consisted of 428
pages and 60 portraits, detailing the slow but definite advancement of the Negro race
before, during, and after enslavement. Self-help institutions and reformers such as
“Colored Women’s Clubs,” figured prominently in Washington’s work and illustrated the
race’s capacity for elevation. They also introduced the concept of representative Negroes
whose appearance was non-threatening and whose life goals were; virtuous. Kevin
Gaines argues that visual symbols of representative Negroes formed the backbone of
15
Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South 1890-1940 (New
York: Vintage Books: 1999), 22.
47
racial uplift programs by reinvigorating the dignity erased or mocked in mainstream
images of Negroes. “Studio portraits of uplift and respectability – depicting black
families with attributes of cleanliness, leisure, and literacy – found expression in the
sitters’ posture, demeanor, dress, and setting.”16 Gaines suggests this show of deportment
was designed to project unchallengeable dignity and legitimize Negro suffrage, which
came under constant attack by whites. Social scientists, legislators, and even clergy,
spoke regularly, (despite the right to vote having already been granted by the 14th
Amendment), of the need for Negro suffrage only after Negro men demonstrated their
manhood. Just as some whites believed all men are created equal to be a fallacy, so too
was the belief that all blacks were created equal. Both Black and white Americans
believed that the right to vote should be kept from uneducated elements of the race.
Following this logic, Washington asserted that not all blacks should be allowed to vote.
Washington believed African Americans to be largely undefined in the national
consciousness. He declared, “The Negro has been more of a formula than a human being
– a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be ‘kept down,’ or ‘in his
place,’ or ‘helped up,’ to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social
bogey or a social burden.”17 As such, politicians could not take seriously the ability of
black men, who unaccustomed to managing the conditions of their own livelihood,
16
Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 68-69.
17
Booker T. Washington, A New Negro for a New Century: An Accurate and up-to-date Record of the
Upward Struggles of the Negro Race (Chicago: American Publishing House, 1900), 3.
48
education or family, to be knowledgeable or conversant enough in local, state or national
affairs to properly utilize their voting power.
The stark difference between the New Negro and the Old Negro as represented in
Washington’s work can be found in the skin tones of the two tropes/figures. Among the
60 portraits of racial uplift, only one contains an image of a dark-skinned New Negro –
writer, Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Washington seemed to answer critics looking for a
particular type of Old Negro imagery, explaining that the progress he documented did not
fit into any prescribed beliefs about Negro inferiority. Marlon B. Ross argues that the
photos created a powerful psychic tool in a visual battle for positive Negro imaging. The
race album subordinated “the larger Darwinian narrative in order to frame smaller ragsto-riches biographies, highlighting the careers of individual black men ascending to the
peak of their powers”18 While Ross makes a convincing argument, he stops short of
making the connection between the assignment of positive and negative character and
capabilities with physical appearance, especially dark skin, which was generally
associated with the traits of criminality, laziness, and ignorance. So, the fact that the
album privileges lighter-skinned Negroes suggests that their skin functioned as a part of
evolved fitness.
The same year that Washington released his New Negro for a New Century, W.E.B.
Du Bois compiled two albums of photographs titled “The Type of American Negroes,
Georgia, and U.S.A.” and presented them at the Paris Exhibition. Similar to
18
Marlon B. Ross, Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era (New York: New York
University Press, 2004), 25.
49
Washington’s New Negro portraits, Du Bois offered an exhibition of racial “class”
progress – education, business leadership, political activism, artistic acumen, and
religious and family devotion – all with decidedly mulatto and light-skinned subjects. It
could be argued that through the social currency of light skin, Du Bois’ and
Washington’s subjects gained access to education and social privilege at disproportionate
rates and would therefore be naturally over-represented in depictions of racial uplift.
This research contends, instead, that scientific reasoning proclaimed mulattoes bestsuited for Negro race representation and leadership because their white ancestry afforded
them an aptitude and mental stamina allegedly not possessed by pure Negro types. Both
Washington and Du Bois also realized that the habit of regarding the Negro race as an
unclassified or loosely classified people had not yet wholly faded into a memory.19
Under slavery, the classification of Negro character developed almost entirely
through the interpretation of his behavior by plantation owners or overseers. Using
Michel Foucault’s theory of the panoptic gaze, wherein perpetual surveillance renders
subjects self-conscious about their every action, making their surveyed behavior a
manufactured product, few classifications could be truly viewed outside of the frame of
either resistance or surrender to white authority. Coupled with the constant threat of
physical violence for behavioral infractions, the “true” character and nature of Negroes
could not be gauged until after emancipation. Both Du Bois and Washington sought to
19
Raymond W. Smock, Booker T. Washington: Black Leadership in the Age of Jim Crow (Chicago: Ivan
R. Dee Publisher, 2009), 14.
50
reclassify old and identify new Negro types, as well as offer alternative interpretations of
previously documented Negro types through their albums.
Adolph L. Reed notes that when Du Bois spoke of classes, he did not refer to social
production or income, but to an amalgam of behavioral criteria and morals, beliefs, and
sentiments. What separated the classes in the black community was the variation in their
behavioral and attitudinal responses to the social order of urban capitalism.20 Du Bois
documented as much in his work The Philadelphia Negro: A Study (1900), wherein the
vices and criminal behaviors of migrants were tied to inherent social deficiencies – or the
lack of biological vigor to keep him from dependency and crime. Frederick Hoffman, in
his Race Traits of the American Negro argues that the low and anti-social condition of
African Americans were not “in conditions of life, but in race and heredity,”21 making
their social inadequacy a function of an inherited social inferiority. While some would
argue that the Talented Tenth was a class, rather than genetic construct, the historical
context in which Du Bois reached his formula for black racial uplift, (The Talented
Tenth, The (teachable) Masses, and Submerged (unchangeable) Tenth) is heavily
influenced by eugenics or at least scientific theories of race.
Black intellectuals rarely approached eugenics from the traditional white superiority
over black inferiority paradigm, embracing instead, a spectrum of hereditarian causes and
solutions to social, sexual and health issues. In keeping with notions of uplifting
20
Adolph L. Reed, Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 37.
21
Frederick Hoffman, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (New York: Macmillan
Company, 1896), 312.
51
members of the race, hereditarian thinkers like Du Bois sponsored his own series of
student examinations to gauge Negro progress by changes in his physique. When Du
Bois served as the corresponding secretary and editor for the Atlanta University for the
Eleventh Conference for the Study of Negro Problems, he contributed to and edited a
series of studies on the health and physique of the Negro which utilized tests and
measurements similar to those used by eugenicist Charles Davenport to develop an intraracial classification of Negro types. It was one of a series of periodic studies undertaken
with the aid of Atlanta University students to examine the human condition of African
Americans and included a study of morality (1896), homes (1897) social reform (1898),
economic organization (1899 and 1902), education (1900 and 1901) religion (1903), and
crime (1904).22 These works tended to overlap by building upon previous data and while
they constitute different studies, represent a body of research with a collective stream of
inquiry. Of the 56 persons examined, Du Bois and the other researchers named four sets
of American Negro types based on skin color: Full-blooded to Brown Types, Mulatto
Types (of which there were four subsets based on hair texture and color), Quadroon
Types, and White Types with Negro Blood. Character attributes were also assigned these
subjects, aged 12-20, with notes that described their color, hair texture, demeanor, and
mental capacity in a single description. For instance, one participant, #19, was described
as: “light brown, curled hair, stocky build; good ability, erratic application; quick
tempered. Grandson of a leading white Southerner;” another, #33, was described as
22
W.E. B. Du Bois, The Health and Physique of the American Negro (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press,
1906), 29.
52
“creamy color, crimped and wavy hair, tall and graceful and well bred.”23 It is unclear
how breeding was discerned. Individual characteristics were noted as common among
particular types as with two young ladies described as having a “melancholy cast of
countenance often noticed in mixed blooded people, and associated with deep
sensitiveness.”24
Du Bois walked a fine line between scientific and sociological analysis, citing the
difficulties that arose from judging the influences of heredity and environment on the
mental and social capacity of Negro and mulatto people. Ultimately, he utilized the
scientific constructs of breeding and ancestry to conclude that “most of the blacks [dark
skinned or pure-blood Negroes] are country-bred and descended from the depressed and
ignorant field-hands, while a majority of the mulattoes were town-bred and descended
from the master class and the indulged house-servants.”25 Shifts in tenses are noted by
Du Bois as a subconscious reading of dark-skinned subjects as perpetually tied to their
racial pasts, while mulattoes possessed a certain level of autonomy and ability to distance
themselves from their African forbearers. Further, by examining these young people
outside of their original environments, Du Bois suggests that characteristics like
reliability, earnestness, drollness, and sensitiveness functioned as a result of breeding
rather than environment, and that social classes developed in direct relation to proper
breeding. Du Bois deployed a classic eugenic position that the ignorant produced poorly-
23
W.E. B. Du Bois, 32.
Du Bois, 34.
25
Du Bois, 37.
24
53
bred (sick, ignorant, criminal-minded) children too often and out of carelessness, creating
a permanent underclass. In order to produce mentally and physically exceptional
children, Du Bois explained that “the Negro has not been breeding for an object” and that
he must begin to “train and breed for brains, for efficiency, for beauty.”26 It is here that
Du Bois makes apparent his eugenic leanings.
In his study of identity formation in the literary works of black female writers in the
immediate years following emancipation, Pier Gabrielle Foreman argues that status,
social acceptance, reputation, ancestry, and blood, behavior, and innumerable physical
markers – hair, skin, nails, eyes, heels, etc. – all functioned in concert and were
sometimes discordant indicators of racial classification..27 More importantly, racial
character or racial temperament – a social component of popular eugenics – dictated that
behaviors were predicated upon race and therefore, predictable. Negro character, then,
was more approximate to that of African ancestry than any mimicked patterns of
behavior learned through generations of enslavement and contact with whites, and thus,
could not be viewed as racial progression or race evolution. The concept of race
evolution and deterioration held that without white supervision, Negroes would revert
socially back to the primitive nature of their ancestral origins. Phillip Alexander Bruce
helped champion the belief that the return to this lowly stature came as the result of the
“whole race reverting to the original physical type, and therefore to the original moral
26
Du Bois, 37.
P. Gabrielle Foreman, Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2009), 63.
27
54
[type]”28 Bruce aligns his theory with a eugenic law that notes evolutionary changes to
the Negro developed only through their crossing with other, superior races. This concept,
promoted most vehemently by white physicians like as Robert Wilson Shufeldt, cast
Negroes as savage Africans who happened to stand on American soil. He viewed the
civilizing process undertaken during slavery as a sort of evolutionary control mechanism
that kept the Negro’s debased nature in check.29
Shufeldt’s 1915 race manifesto, America’s Greatest Problem: the Negro, used the
photo of a menacing-looking African male, spear in hand, draped by a topless African
female as cover art. Both figures show tribal facial scars (depicting barbarism), are seminude (depicting immodesty), and appear proudly so. Such representations of Negroes as
savage Africans on American soil, cast them eugenically as a threat to white race purity,
but also (with weapon at the ready) as a threat to the physical safety and survival of the
white race alluded to by Bruce. Bruce’s interpretation was well-regarded widely, and may
have encouraged certain elements of racial uplift to incorporate the role of caregiver and
paternalistic influence in order to keep the race from reverting to its animalistic ancestry.
In this way, many members of Du Bois’ Talented Tenth, with their genetic kinship
(physical appearance) to whites, could not be wholly classified as Negro, and therefore,
with one foot in either race, was capable of guiding and policing the others. Bruce feared
that if the American Negro remained racially “African” or dark it would not advance in
28
Cathy Boeckmann, A Question of Character: Scientific Racism and the Genres of American Fiction,
1892-1912 (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2000), 26
29
Robert Wilson Shufeldt, America’s Greatest Problem: The Negro (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis Company,
1915), 4.
55
the modern world. As Cathy Boeckmann makes clear, “The crucial and determining issue
was not race per se but rather the implications and conclusions that could be drawn from
the manifestations of racial character: the question of race had become a question of
character”30, and character a direct result of genetic purity or impurity.
It is within this historical context of cultural and intellectual eugenic reclassification
that Alain Locke further redefined the New Negro in 1925. Having witnessed the
enormous possibilities of social equality through military service, higher education, and
economic enfranchisement, Locke noted the unchecked violence against African
Americans following the First World War and counted the New Negro as astutely
capable of self-defense. Locke defined the evolving Negro as “not necessarily a New
Negro – some new creation, but an unsupported, un-defined, thinking man, but a
younger, vibrant generation with a new psychology.”31 For Locke, the new psychology
defined the internal reprogramming that African American underwent to reject beliefs in
individual and collective inferiority based on race. It helped promote new sentiments that
effectively repaired the damaged group mentality.32
“The Negro physiognomy must be freshly and objectively conceived on its own
patterns if it ever is to be seriously and importantly interpreted. Art must discover and
reveal the beauty which prejudice and caricature have obscured and overlaid.”33 Locke’s
call for a racially self-defined physiognomy discredited efforts by hereditarian thinkers
30
Boeckmann, 15.
Alain Locke, The New Negro (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 3.
32
Alain Locke, The Works of Alain Locke (New York: Oxford, 2012), 447.
33
Alain Locke, “To Certain of Our Philistines,” Opportunity, May 1935, 155.
31
56
like Roland Dixon, whose work Racial History of Man connected anthropological
classifications to race capacity and character. Locke does not attempt to discredit
physiognomy as a whole, but merely the classification structure of current anthropologicbased construct. This suggests that Locke found legitimacy in assessing character from
physical traits so long as the scale of fitness was determined from within the race. Locke
believed the plight of the New Negro required political, economic, and social remedies to
combat economic chaos, political upheaval and social distress. While largely concerned
with art and creativity, Locke made clear the distinction between the covert and
subversive defense of enslaved Negroes, and that of their descendants—a younger
generation of more militant Negroes.
A. Philip Randolph answered his own rhetorical question “The New Negro, What Is
He?” in a 1920 Messenger newspaper article. Though Randolph spoke in terms of
political and economic agendas, including advocating that New Negroes join labor
unions, he also promoted education and active defense of oneself, family and property as
a natural right. “No one who will not fight to protect his life is fit to live. Self-defense is
recognized as a legitimate weapon in all civilized countries. Yet, the Old Crowd Negroes
have counseled the doctrine of non-resistance.”34 While Randolph sidesteps an actual
definition of the New Negro, he presents a racial assimilationist view concerning social
segregation and goes on to promote intermarriage for the New Negro as the “only logical,
sound and correct aim for the Negro to entertain. He realizes that the acceptance of laws
A. Phillip Randolph and Chandler Owens, “The New Negro – What Is He?” The Messenger, August
1920, 73.
34
57
against intermarriage is tantamount to the acceptance of the stigma of inferiority.”35 He
implied that as long as Blacks were prevented from marrying whites, their offspring
would remain inferior. The article proved a spirited attack against editors of the
conservative Negro newspaper The New York Age, which asked its readers (mostly
migrants from the South) to define the “New Negro” in their own words. Critics called
most of the responses “vague and nebulous,” and the average reader ill-equipped
mentally to define themselves.36 While many New York Age respondents likened the term
to socially fit indicators like “protest” and “manhood,” others defined the New Negro in
terms of what it was not – using phrases like “not a Sambo” and “not an old time
Negro.”37
Journalist and minister Rollin Lynde Hartt defined the New Negro as a stylized
soldier, whose time in the Great War provided training in physical combat and selfdefense, as well as, confidence in his own abilities to fight white powers. “Patience was
the watchword—then. It is seldom the watchword now… I remembered a telegram from
a Negro editor, ‘Henceforward, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life.’ Hit,
he hits back. In a succession of race riots, he has proved it.”38 Hartt cites a New York Age
commentary that further embraced self-defense as a New Negro requirement and openly
mocked as cowards those unwilling to take up arms against white hostilities. “America
35
Randolph, 73.
Jennifer Fronc, New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2009), 174.
37
Randolph, 73.
38
Rollin Lynde Hartt, “The New Negro: When He’s Hit, He Hits Back,” Independent, January 15, 1921,
59.
36
58
hates, lynches and enslaves us, not because we are black, but because we are weak. A
strong, united Negro race will not be mistreated. It is always strength over weakness,
might over right.”39 The call for personal and racial self-defense stood as the backbone
of self-respect and, in Hartt’s estimation, ended the bullying tactics of white hostilities.
Poet and dramatist Leslie Pinckney Hill, contrarily defined the New Negro in terms
of what he was not. Hill wrote that the response to the question of who and what is the
New Negro could no longer be posed legitimately among “Old Negro-types.” Faulting
Old Negro loyalty and innocent impotence [emphasis his] and acceptance of inferiority as
causes for their abuse, Hill, assured readers that the “fidelity of the Negro slave to a
sincerely appreciative master was often indeed a noble and beautiful thing; but, let it be
understood, this type of Negro is to be no more in this land.”40 Hill acknowledges the
plantation hierarchy as ended except, perhaps, in the minds of former slave owners, and
blacks whose belief in their own inferiority kept them tied to old thinking.
Not all race thinkers bought into the wholesale branding of the New Negro. Some,
like Gustavus Adolphus Stewart challenged the validity of the existence of the New
Negro given the continued lowly economic and social state of the majority of Negroes
and their continued reliance on white benevolence for the very racial uplift they sought or
claimed to have secured. Stewart lamented the mythological nature of New Negro
rhetoric, and questioned the existence of the New Negro himself. He insisted that the
39
Hartt, 60.
Leslie Pinckney Hill, “Negro Ideals: Their Effects and Their Embarrassments,” The Journal of Race
Development, 6, no.1 (July, 1915): 97.
40
59
New Negro legend “approaches indistinguishably close to the superlative degree of
unmitigated bunk.”41 Similarly, W.S. Turner, in his 1927 editorial “Has the Negro
Arrived?” discounts New Negro rhetoric as scientifically absurd as no “swift
evolutionary ‘magic’” had released the Negro from his supposedly primitive instincts.
“The Uncle Toms, the subservient type of Negro, has not been swept so suddenly from
the stage of action as some of the exponents of the new order assume. We cannot
determine the extent of the new emancipation from the outspoken utterances of the
Chicago Defender, the Crisis, and the ringing pronunciamentos of adventuresome
intellectuals housed in happy Harlem”.42 Turner’s scientific indictment of black
advancement rejects any illusion that physical emancipation produced the biological
evolution necessary to develop race equality. Working within a eugenic frame, Turner
calls any notion of such race equality between the emancipated and the former enslaver, a
form of evolutionary magic – as a transition from primitive states to racial equality
required hundreds of years. Turner also makes a social delineation between the Chicago
and New York-based pronouncements by educated intellectuals, and condition of the
mass of blacks in rural and southern areas whose identities were still tied inextricably to
the Old Negro, subservient-type that others pronounced dead.
The myth and realities of the New Negro functioned at the core of intense debate
both within and outside the race, framing passionate discourses on the “Negro Question”
or the “Negro Problem,” which asked “What shall be done with four million ex-
41
42
Gustavus Adolphus Steward, “The New Negro Hokum,” Social Forces 6, no. 3(March 1928): 438.
W.S. Turner, “Has the Negro Arrived?” Social Forces 5, no. 3 (March 1927): 479.
60
slaves?”43 The dawning of the Great Migration spurred both a move by Negroes into
urban industrial spaces, as well as an awakening of Negro thought and culture that
created an intellectual movement known as the New Negro Movement or the Harlem
Renaissance. Led by artists and public intellectuals like Aaron Douglass and Hubert
Harrison, who promoted a “race first” social platform, The New Negro movement sought
to define Negro character and capacity by documenting the previous achievements of
Blacks from antiquity, while making the current political and social expectations and
achievements of the race known. Harrison asserted: “The New Negro is demanding as a
right that which he is in position to enforce. In the presence of this new demand the old
political leaders are bewildered, and afraid; for the old idea of Negro leadership by virtue
of the white man’s selection has collapsed.”44 Harrison notes the ability of blacks to
determine their own leadership established a level of true autonomy removed from the
token leadership (blacks chosen to lead the race by whites who ultimately did the bidding
of the whites who put him in place). Harrison at once attacked the character assignment
and classification of blacks set by the “white man’s selection” process, and
simultaneously identifies the New Negro as one who can “demand,” “enforce,” and
“collapse” old systems. In so doing, Harrison also makes clear the mental (perhaps, even
read as eugenic) evolution of the race from dependent to self-actualized. Jeffrey Perry
argues in Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism that Harrison considered
Negro leadership to be more “colored” leadership as whites tended to view mixed-race
43
44
Hollis Read, The Negro Problem Solved (New York: A.A. Constantine, 1864), iii.
Hubert Harrison., When Africa Awakes (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1920), 39
61
individuals who had in their “veins the blood of the selector,” as legitimate African
American leaders.45
COLORISM AND EUGENIC CLASSIFICATION
Perceptions of skin color among New Negroes ran the full gamut from an acceptance
of all skin tones, to an aesthetic distaste for the extremely light and the extremely dark.
Among middle-class and working-class blacks there also existed an aversion for those
Negroes able to “pass” for white, but only if they successfully crossed the color line. For
Negro eugenicists and hereditarian thinkers, their opinions on interracial sex coupled with
scientific race theories, functioned symbiotically. While some assimilationist platforms
posited the improved genetic and subsequent social conditioning obtained through blackwhite unions, racial purists believed that race mixing weakened the purity of each race,
leaving only the weakened and dysgenic progeny of each to propagate the race. E.
Franklin Frazier, for instance, referred often to Du Bois as a marginal man and a “cultural
hybrid” based on his skin color and affluent upbringing. Frazier once asserted that
“cultural hybrids like Du Bois have often ‘returned’ to the minority race with which they
were identified, but nothing would be more unendurable for him than to live within a
Black Ghetto or within a black nation unless he were king, and then he would probably
attempt to unite the whites and blacks through marriage of the royal families.”46
Frazier’s play on the eugenic concept of hybridity to discount Du Bois’ full commitment
45
Jeffrey Perry, A Hubert Harrison Reader (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 21.
Charles F. Peterson, Fanon, Cabral: The Margins of Elite Anti-Colonial Leadership (Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, 2007), 80.
46
62
to the black masses positions Du Bois as racially and culturally unsuited to lead based on
an aversion to blackness itself. Frazier positions Du Bois’ ultimate goal to either
assimilate the races to create more mixed raced people or to lead the dark masses as an
inferior group. In doing so, Frazier also aligns Du Bois’ leadership with eugenic beliefs
that where leadership is needed, it must not come from pure-blood (dark skinned)
Negroes.
Cursive comments about dark skin and the lowly character of “pure” Negroes
were commonplace in speeches, newspaper articles, and popular songs written by whites
beginning in the 1910s. Few Negroes escaped the eugenic assignment of color-based
characteristics and an almost universal aversion to black skin. Creative writers, relishing
in the newfound notoriety of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote about eugenics as well, often
taking sides in ongoing debates among Negro leaders through complicated characters and
narratives threaded together with themes of feeblemindedness, migration, intra-racial
assimilation, and colorism. Authors like Zora Neale Hurston and Charles W. Chestnutt
brought colorism and the often-shameful narratives associated with eugenic beliefs about
color to working-class readers, as well as a mainstream audience who served, in some
cases, as their patrons.47 While characters like Emmaline and John in Hurston’s
Cynthia Davis, Verner D. Mitchell’s “Waste and Whiteness: Zora Neale Hurston and the Politics of
Eugenics.” in African American Review 34.4 (Winter 2000): 639—660; H. Lin Classon’s “Re-evaluating
Color Struck: Zora Neale Hurston and the Issue of Colorism” in Theatre Studies 42 (1997): 5-18; Meghan
Thomas’ “An Analysis of Colorism as Revealed in Zora Neale Hurston’s Glossary of Harlem Slang, Color
Struck, and Their Eyes Were Watching God.” in Zora Neale Hurston Forum, 21 (2009-2010: 20-28; and
Ethel Young-Minor’s “Who Is Responsible for My Oppression? Zora Neale Hurston’s Interrogations of
Color Hierarchies in Color Struck.” in Zora Neale Hurston Forum 15 (2001): 9-22, offer examinations of
Hurston’s Colorist Thoughts and their incorporation into her works.
47
63
Colorstruck (1925) and The Waldens of Chesnutt’s House behind the Cedars (1900),
faced many of the conflicting ideologies of colorism, neither Hurston nor Chestnutt
actively promoted colorism. The scope of this project does not allow for an in-depth
examination of literary interpretations of eugenic theories in black literature. However,
Chuck Jackson writes in “Waste and Whiteness: Zora Neale Hurston and the Politics of
Eugenics” that similarities can be found between Hurston’s fictional and anthropological
work and eugenic family studies due most likely, to her work with Franz Boas gathering
measurements of black bodies and exploring black folk culture.48
In many ways, Zora Neale Hurston, who was born in low-country Florida and
migrated to Washington, D.C. to study at Howard University, typified the New Negro
transformation from unfit (or marginal) to fit. Hurston moved fluidly from the biology
courses and language classes into a much-sought after position as one of Franz Boas’
student researchers. Boas previously set himself apart as a race scientist by presenting
anthropological data counter to common held eugenic theories about Negro inferiority,
including the inferiority of mulatto populations. He theorized that instead of mulattoes
inheriting “all the evil characteristics of both parental races and none of their qualities”49,
mulatto successes and failures were in direct relation to social opportunity and condition.
While Boas continued to study theories of mulatto inheritability – how and which racial
Dean McWillliams’ Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
2010); The Literary Career of Charles W. Chestnutt by William L. Andrews (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University, 1980); and David Garrett Izzo’s Charles Chesnutt Reappraised: Essays on the First Major
African American Fiction Writer provide analysis on colorism and eugenics in his works.
48
Chuck Jackson, “Waste of Whiteness: Zora Neale Hurston and the Politics of Eugenics,” African
American Review 34, no. 4 (Winter, 2000), 643.
49
Franz Boas, “The Real Race Problem” The Crisis, Dec. 1910, 23.
64
traits offspring of white and Negro parents inherited – his students, including Hurston
studied the race acculturation of full-blooded (dark skin) and mulatto (mixed race or light
skinned) Negroes in the South. Roseanne Hoefel asserts that Hurston (and Ella Cara
Deloria, who similarly conducted research on Native Americans under Boas) provided
research with cultural understanding that allowed them to “serve as active subjects of
survival, not passive victims of the agenda embedded in the theories of the
disappeared.”50 As evolution dictated disappearance of forms of life during the
competition for survival, anthropologists like eugenicists believed that it was important to
document the process of extinction or disappearance. Hoefel’s reference is to the belief
that blacks (and Indians) continuously moved toward extinction that was documented
through the cultural excerpts of everyday life provided by Deloria and Hurston.
Understanding that what ethnographers dismissed as vanishing New Negro
folklore and cultural primitiveness, in fact, still existed and thrived in the South, Hurston
set out to preserve and redefine the existing low-country “Old Negro” culture. Folklore,
which showed a clear distinction between cultural idioms and customs (including
language and personal behaviors), paid homage to a past being replaced ad hoc by a new,
modern culture. Hurston fretted “Negroness is being rubbed off by close contact with
white culture” and determined in both her literary works and her anthropological studies
to assess Negro behaviors deemed pathological and signs of unfitness by eugenicists, as
complicated cultural nuances that incorporated the spiritual above the intellectual, and
Roseanne Hoefel, “Different by Degree: Ella Cara Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, and Franz Boas Contend
with Race and Ethnicity,” American Indian Quarterly 25, no.2 (Spring 2001): 184.
50
65
therefore positioned every action and belief, as coded. Hurston’s work “The
Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1934) attempts to define blacks as primitive, but
also as a manifestation of the present and “still in the making… [as] nothing is too old, or
too new, domestic or foreign, high or low, for [Negro] use.”51 In describing black
women’s sexuality, she writes,
A Negro girl strolls past the corner lounger. Her whole body panging and posing.
A slight shoulder movement that calls attention to her bust that is all of a dare.
A hippy undulation below the waist that is a sheaf of promises tied with conscious
power. She is acting out “I’m a darned sweet woman and you know it.” These
little plays by strolling players are acted out daily in a dozen streets in a thousand
cities, and one never mistakes the meaning.52
The panging and posing of the Negro girl, in Hurston’s assessment signifies a ritual of
unspoken language that promotes the strengths and character of the female – in this
instance, her sexuality, in an almost primal show of strolling. As if a member of a
primitive order, the “peacocking,” strutting before potential sexual partners, showing off
her assets, and making her availability known, the Negro girl displays speaks a language
common to and understood by members of her own environment. The strolling is
situated as primitive in that it is removed spoken language by Hurston and contrary to
etiquette prescribed by the black middle-class. Hurston’s assessments of black women
were often sweeping and pejorative, though oddly celebratory. For instance, Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston, “The Characteristics of Negro Expression,” in Negro: An Anthology, ed. Nancy
Cunard (London: Wishart, 1934), 58.
52
Hurston, 24.
51
66
mocks Negro attempts at beauty by noting the habit of “decorating a decoration” until
even what is beautiful becomes a gaudy and embarrassing display.
It is grotesque, yes. But it indicated the desire for beauty. And decorating a
decoration, as in the case of the doily on the gaudy wall pocket, did not seem out
of place to the hostess. The feeling in the back of such an act is that there can
never be enough of beauty, let along too much. Perhaps she is right. We each
have our standards of art, and thus, are we all interested parties and so unfit to
pass judgment upon the art concepts of others.53
Adorning adornments, according to Hurston is dramatic performance that encompassed
all aspects of Negro life from church service to clothing, demonstrating a clear
undesirability to culturally assimilate or evolve.
The stark, trimmed phrases of the Occident seem too bare for the
voluptuous child of the sun, hence the adornment. It arises out of the same
impulse as the wearing of jewelry and the making of sculpture – the urge
to adorn… Whatever the Negro does of his own volition he embellishes.54
Hurston’s characterization of Southern black culture as folk, rudimentary, and
distinct from modern Negro culture in other regions supported some social and scientific
beliefs that migration, itself, caused New Negro mental instability.55 She points to
Ellison’s personal narrative of travels into the Deep South, specifically to Tuskegee
Institute, during the 1930s, and later published in a 1964 Harper’s Magazine article
“Harlem Is Nowhere”, wherein he writes:
The change that the black Southerner undergoes upon experiencing life in
an urban environment read as one of both trauma and transformation. His
family disintegrates, his church splinters, his folk wisdom is discarded in
the mistaken notion that it in no way applies to urban living, and his
formal education (never really his own) provides him with neither
53
Hurston, 25-26.
Hurston, 59.
55
Badia Sahar Ahad, Freud Upside Down, (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 97.
54
67
scientific description nor rounded philosophical interpretation of the
profound forces that are transforming his total being.56
Ellison suggested that it was not the “pure blood” Southern Negroes who produced
genetically unfit offspring necessarily, but the trauma of migration that rendered the
migrant socially crippled and intellectually dwarfed. While Ellison’s writings would not
appear in popular print until the 1950s, the foundation for works like the Invisible Man
emerged from intense study of New Negro migration during the 1930s. Literary critic
Barbara Foley writes:
Much of the material contained in the notes, outlines, and drafts of the section of
Invisible Man portraying the protagonist’s experiences as a recently arrived
migrant in the urban North depart dramatically from the plan laid in [his]
“Working Notes”; after undergoing extensive revision, a good deal ended up
being jettisoned… History supplied the matrix of rebirth.57
Ellison may have initially interpreted the experiences of dark-skinned migrants
within the limited space of the migration itself; however, as Foley notes, it was only with
reflection and historical distance from the migration that Ellison could more thoroughly
decipher the impact of dark skin on social mobility.
In contrast to what would become Ellison’s magnum opus, Charles W.
Chestnutt’s satirical play on complexion-based eugenic themes served as a forerunner to
popular New Negro literature. Chesnutt’s A Matter of Principle from the work The Wife
of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899), for instance, details a wealthy
Ralph Ellison, “Harlem is Nowhere,” Harper’s Magazine, August 1964, 56-57.
Barbara Foley, Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010), 188.
56
57
68
mulatto’s attempts at discerning the color of a Congressman and possible suitor for his
daughter with whom she vaguely remembers as either extremely dark-skinned or a
mulatto. As a member of the Blue Vein Society – a group of Negroes light enough to
pass for white, but who preferred the creation of a third caste classification separate of
both races – the father is inclined to either castigate or embrace the potential suitor based
solely on this skin color. Having extended every courtesy to the visiting Congressman,
the father is panicked to find that the man he has offered lodging and, by unspoken
custom, permission to marry his daughter is the dark man. Chestnutt writes:
He had invited to his house, had come down to meet, had made elaborate
preparations to entertain on the following evening, a light-colored man,--a
white man by his theory, an acceptable guest, a possible husband for his
daughter, an avowed suitor for her hand. If the Congressman had turned
out to be brown, even dark brown, with fairly good hair, though he might
not have desired him as a son-in-law, yet he could have welcomed him as
a guest. But even this softening of the blow was denied him, for the man
in the waiting-room was palpably, aggressively black, with pronounced
African features and woolly hair, without apparently a single drop of
redeeming white blood. Could he, in the face of his well-known principles,
his lifelong rule of conduct, take this Negro into his home and introduce
him to his friends?58
Chestnutt mocks the colorism that defined elite and middle-class attempts at
eugenic mating. Despite the hereditarian fitness implied by education
(intellectual ability) and wealth (social adequacy) Chestnutt demonstrates the
power of hereditarian beliefs in dark skin as primitive and the socially
degenerative power of mixing the blood of dark and light skinned Negroes.
58
Charles W. Chesnutt, The Wife of His Youth: And Other Stories of the Color Line (New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1899), 99.
69
Chestnutt’s characters demonstrate how the scientific concept of transmittable
character – status based upon a single drop of white blood -- shifted into the social
eugenic construct of social currency and became attached to light skin tone and straight
or wavy hair textures. The father’s own character is called into question by entertaining
the thought of allowing a man with African features and woolly hair to enter and lodge in
his home, let alone marry his daughter. The eugenic consequence of the Congressman
producing progeny with “aggressively” African features devalued his economic,
educational, and intellectual fitness.
It was through popular culture (e.g., film, short stories, plays, beauty contests, and
visual arts) invocations of eugenics that many Negroes developed a sense of social
eugenic understanding. Behavior and public decorum helped define fitness when placed
against the uncertain validity of skin color and hair texture as indicators of social
adequacy. Creating models of fitness among migrants often meant working from the
bottom up, or addressing the needs of the unfit to determine how they became so and
setting a course for ameliorating the behaviors that marked their dysgenicism. The
municipal courts of Chicago, New York and other cities that served as migrant enclaves
became the stage upon which those fitness models developed.
Increased migration (and immigration of West Indians) of the wrong “types”
threatened the stability and legitimacy of such efforts, except where eugenic labeling
actively worked to castigate and segregate dysgenic Negroes on sight. With the
exception of the nasty exchange between Du Bois and Garvey some years earlier, Du
Bois’ placement of West Indians within his categorization of Negro types proved
70
daunting. Ira Reid, for instance, documented the social and cultural differences between
West Indians and migrant Blacks converging on New York. The move from caste to
class systems and one based on a three-tier racial classification – Black, colored (mixed
race), and White to one that simply saw white and Negro, complicated black immigrant
identity formation and social expectations for both groups. Reid wrote:
Many West Indians openly refused to be grouped with African Americans whom
they considered less refined than themselves. West Indians often went to
extremes to maintain the difference between themselves and their American
counterparts. For instance, most British West Indians refused to give up their
British citizenship. When immigrants were faced with racial discrimination, it
was not to American authorities but to the British embassy that they appealed.59
Roi Ottley and William Weatherby acknowledge that some derisive comments
about West Indians by native blacks, including the use of the term “monkey chaser,” to
describe them, actually grew from competition over jobs and improved living conditions.
West Indians were accused of exhibiting a pseudo-superiority complex that hurt
the efforts of black Americans to confront racism and achieve first-class
citizenship. American blacks, the charged that British West Indians, while
keeping their British citizenship, took jobs from American blacks, the same
blacks who actively fought for such employment opportunities through voting and
other racially oriented tactics that the West Indian benefitted from, but did not
support.60
For their part, West Indians, like many immigrants resented the shift from
character-driven assessments of fitness, to the all-encompassing stigma of Otherness that
59
Ira Reed, The Negro Immigrant: His Background, Characteristics, and Social Adjustment, 1899-1937
(New York: Arno Press, 1939), 110.
60
Roi Ottley and William Weatherby, The Negro in New York: An Informal Social History (New York:
New York Public Library Press, 1960), 191.
71
cast them as second-class citizens irrespective of their character. According to Reid,
black immigrants found this especially difficult to navigate.
Accustomed to the class lines that he has learned to respect even though he may
hate them, he can find little solace in a system that brands him as inferior before
he is even known. Acceptance of inferior status that is urged upon him abruptly is
not easily done even if the economic conditions are materially improved.61
Many Negro intellectuals looked upon West Indian immigrants with disdain and
suspicion. Kelly Miller, for instance announced: “The West Indian Negro in America is a
political conundrum. Conservative at home, he becomes radical abroad; as meek as
Moses and as submissive as a lamb…but crossing the seas, seems to fill them with the
spirit of irresponsible revolt.”62 And though Du Bois was absent from an August 1923
Friends of Negro Freedom rally in Harlem (at which NAACP member Robert Bagnall
held court) that disparaged West Indians as out-of-work and overeducated monkeychasers, and the UNIA as standing for “ugliest Negroes in America,”63 his descriptions of
West Indian character in general, remained neutral.
The description of West Indian character Du Bois provided in his 1928 novel Dark
Princess, for example, labels a group of Jamaicans in a parlor as “singular, foreign and
funny”64 – all decidedly obscure terms, easily interpreted as negative. In contrary terms,
Du Bois also insisted in several speeches that for the security of the black race as a
61
Reid, 163.
Kelly Miller, “After Marcus Garvey – What of the Negro?” Contemporary Review 131 (April 1927) 494.
63
David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century (New York:
Henry Holt, 2000), 80.
64
W.E.B. Du Bois, Dark Princess (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1928) 43.
62
72
whole, millions of West Indians and Africans peacefully organize “or else drift into
greater poverty, greater crime, greater helplessness, until there is no resort but the last red
alternative of revolt, revenge and war.”65 It becomes evident that Du Bois cannot so
easily define West Indian behavior, but is clear that between their largely educated
numbers, their cultural and nationalistic pride, and their ability to inculcate themselves
linguistically and economically, the West Indian was believed to hold grandiose notions
of his superiority to the average native-born Negro.
DEFINING NEW NEGROES BY DYSGENIC BEHAVIORS
Determining who was fit and what behaviors constituted dysgenicism required the
examination of large numbers of research subjects. With the support of the Chicago
Urban League, E. Franklin Frazier conducted thousands of interviews with migrant and
immigrant Negroes to determine the race evolution of the new supplants. Subjects were
asked to participate in Frazier’s studies as a condition to receiving aid from the Urban
League or were approached by Frazier during legal proceedings in the Chicago Court of
Domestic Relations, the Chicago Criminal Court, or the Chicago Juvenile Court during
the period from 1928 to 1932. Though Frazier meant the study to offer solutions to the
“problem of the assimilation of the Negro and his adjustment to modern civilization,”66
he actively incorporated eugenics-based assumptions and theories into his findings with
65
W.E.B. Du Bois, W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader (New York: Henry Holt, 1995) 80.
E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1939), 2.
66
73
regard to supposedly inherent Negro behaviors and deficiencies. The very criteria upon
which the urban New Negro was defined did not take into account realities of migrant
life.
Frazier’s assessments showcased a new social work agenda that approached social
ills by examining the mental and emotional weaknesses of the individual. As a graduate
student of the Chicago School of Sociology, Frazier believed that due to slavery, all
previous cultural knowledge that Negroes might have brought from Africa had been
effectively destroyed and that the “inherent instability of chattel slavery had severely
reduced the ability of men to play the family roles… After the end of slavery, poorer
African Americans still suffered disproportionately from broken families and male
desertion.”67 Much of Franklin’s field work supported this belief; however, it also
suggested that Negroes from the South did not possess the cultural capacity to embody
New Negro-ness.
In each interview conducted by Frazier beginning in 1928, he asked a series of
questions similar to those formulated and used by Eugenic Records Office field workers
between 1910 and 1928, designed to ascertain the mental and cultural background of the
subject. In many regards, the responses gave specifics to theoretical assumptions already
understood by Franklin to be positive. For instance, Negroes from the South, with poor
educations, allegedly marginal social skills, and limited work experience as other than as
domestics and sharecroppers, most often required relief aid and social services, or were
Anthony Q. Cheeseboro, “Conflict and Continuity: E. Franklin Frazier, Oliver C. Cox and the Chicago
School of Sociology,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 92, no.2 (Summer, 1999): 150-172.
67
74
confined in prisons or asylums according to reformers’ dictates. An earlier commission
to study the causes of the Chicago Riots in 1919 reported that “the social histories
showed a conspicuous lack of schooling in the Negroes arrested, more than half of whom
had left school before reaching the age of twelve.” Only eight had gone beyond the fifth
grade. “Illiteracy, ignorance, immorality, pauperism, criminality are more or less
characteristic of degenerates and of the submerged classes everywhere. A criminal is not
a criminal because he is illiterate, but he is more often an illiterate for the same reasons
that he is a criminal.”68
In searching for the cause of white mob violence against Chicago’s Negro
population, the report places the blame squarely on the ruin the migrants have made of
the city with their unruly and socially inadequate character. The qualities of ignorance,
immorality, pauperism, and criminality ascribed to the migrants follow eugenic notions
of mental and social defectives. The authors assert that what makes a migrant Negro
criminal is the same genetic inheritance that essentially, dictates his life.
Frazier posed questions to subjects that included: Where were you born? How
long have you been here in Chicago? What kind of work do your people do? And how far
did you go in school? Nearly 100 percent of respondents claimed some state in the South
as their birthplace, with Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, North and South Carolina, and
Atlanta most often cited. The length of time in Chicago ranged from a few months to
68
Charles Harvey McCord, The American Negro as a Dependent, Defective and Delinquent (Nashville:
Benson Printing, 1914), 201.
75
seven years, and the occupation of most respondents and their family members in
Chicago reflected that which marked their lives in the South— “laundry work”
“laborers,” and “agriculture.” According to Frazier, a number of those without any
education took night instruction and literacy classes as a matter of race pride, only after
arriving in Chicago. Frazier’s raw notes from the Court of Domestic Relations offer a
glimpse into the private triumphs, however small, and the daily tumult many married
migrants faced. Dockets appear over-run with women seeking relief in the form of food,
employment services, and investigative services to find husbands who had abandoned
their households.
The chief complaint among female subjects was non-support, which could easily
be explained as a social condition born of racist hiring practices and a subsequent
inability to maintain proper male household leadership. Frazier’s data revealed husbands
who supported households with an average of six children of which outside children
constituted a good portion of the numbers. Outside children, for Frazier’s purposes
included children conceived by one of the spouses through an extramarital affair, as well
as children of relatives sent from the South to secure better educations. While the
strained structure of these households could be interracially lauded as attempts to sustain
marriages and Negro families, it instead reinforced a eugenic theory that the extreme
pathology within Negro families, a result of genetics, overtaxed state correctional and
social services agencies.69 The pathology read in biological terms, posited black women,
69
Frazier, 298.
76
with allegedly mannish dispositions, and domineering and emasculating habits, as
biologically inept and socially inadequate. According to eugenicists like Charles McCord
black women routinely forced their husbands and sexual partners to abandon their homes,
and the children, left without structure, to turn to lives of criminality. McCord’s studies
of Negro behavior, along with supplemental data received from asylum patients, and
prison inmates were used by relief agencies to aid dependent classes. McCord’s work
The American Negro as a Dependent, Defective and Delinquent (1914) labeled these
three characteristics interdependent with a common cause, namely the inherited
“character of the pauper, the defective, and the criminal.”70 While Frazier looked for the
social causality to crime and dependency, McCord determined crime a natural outgrowth
of delinquency and defectiveness. Outside children – those produced by a parent
married to someone outside their home – tended to live in poverty with the aid of
dependency funds. In other instances, children were placed in the care of any relative
willing to take charge of them.
For instance, the case of Sam and Rose Bogans, both from Jackson, Tennessee
demonstrates how charges of non-support proved complicated by Frazier’s
‘disorganization.’ The Bogans had been married 14 years, with intermittent periods of
Rose abandoning her husband for other men. Each time she returned. After going to
visit relatives in Dearborn, Michigan, Rose returned with a three-year-old child. Rose
had previously charged Sam with non-support, but investigations found that the child for
70
McCord, 8.
77
which she sought weekly aid, belonged to neither of them. Sam testified, “There is one
child that we raised but it is not mine. It is my wife’s dead sister’s child. She is
[hollering] about the child but it has a daddy up here in Cleveland that hasn’t given her
anything in three years. I have been paying rent and taking care of the home ever since I
married.”71 Rose’s infidelity could be classified within eugenic constructs as
feeblemindedness based on the abandonment of her home for various men only,
wanderlust (an unnatural desire to run away from responsibility), and moronic, given that
she appealed to the courts to seek child support from a child not biologically related to
her husband. Rose accepted responsibility for rearing her sister’s child, despite periodic
neglect and abandonment of her duties as wife. Her actions speak directly to Frazier’s
theory of social disorganization, but also to a larger body of social inadequacy that would
classify Rose biologically as degenerate.
In the majority of the aid cases Frazier investigated, married female subjects
reported their husband’s weekly pay at $21 and a weekly housing lease of $7. Food and
care of children often suffered as the remaining money went to the purchase of alcohol,
drugs, dice and policy games (illegal lottery), and personal amusements for the husband
alone. Such was the case with Eldora Fields when she appeared before the Chicago
Court of Domestic Relations on December 6, 1929 to obtain an order of support from her
husband Charles for the care of their six-year-old daughter. The couple conceived the
child when Eldora was only fifteen and they married a year later. Though the couple had
Frazier, E. Franklin, Court Proceedings – Juvenile Courts, Case #51, Box 131-82, Folder7; Manuscript
Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
71
78
been married for seven years, they had never lived in the same home; the wife and child
resided with her parents, and the husband, with his relatives. When asked why she did
not want to live with her husband, Eldora responded: “He stays drunk all the time, I don’t
want him… he’s a whisky head and I just don’t want to live with him.”72 In the interim,
Eldora’s pregnancy caused her own parents to separate, with her father moving to
Detroit. To earn money, Eldora joined a dance troupe and toured, leaving the baby in the
care of her mother. Charles claimed he had been supporting the child all along and
bringing money to her mother while she toured with the show. Charles was ordered to
get a job within two weeks. The Fields’ case identified an illegitimate conception, and
ill-conceived marriage of minors, and a gross immaturity on the part of the couple. 73
Among Frazier’s subjects, this level of supposed disorganization proved common.
Frazier opposed eugenic claims of inherent defectiveness and social maladjustment, though his use of the term disorganization to note a failure among migrants
in urban areas to assimilate, resemble Davenport’s Eugenic Records Office criteria for
social inadequacy. Franklin used quasi-eugenic concepts of civilizational processes,
wherein “competition would eliminate those Afro-Americans unable to reorganize on a
more intellectual and efficient basis.”74 His use of survival of the fittest theory spoke to
an evolutionary framework despite side-stepping eugenics. Among the signs of family
E. Franklin Frazier, Court Proceedings – Domestic Relations, Case #6, Box 131-81, Folder 11, E.
Franklin Frazier Papers. Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
73
E. Franklin Frazier, Court Proceedings – Domestic Relations, Case #7, Box 131-81, Folder 11, E.
Franklin Frazier Papers. Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
74
E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932), 244.
72
79
disorganization, Frazier found increased fecundity among poor blacks (seen in the large
number of families with “stair-step” births occurring twice a year), illegitimate births,
female-headed households, and juvenile delinquency common and looked for
environmental causes for their prevalence. Such was the case with Charles and Mamie
Ichelberger. Mamie addressed the court on December 6, 1929, at nine-months pregnant,
seeking support for her other two children ages 3 and 1. Charles earned only $21 a week
and paid $7 for rent. Frazier’s disposition with Ichelberger grew decidedly tacit as noted
in the nature of his questions. In addition to asking questions that determined their points
of origin to be Koscuisko, Mississippi and their backgrounds to be agricultural, Frazier
injects a line of inquiry about the couple’s understanding of sexual activity, the children
sex produced, and their inability to pay for the upkeep of additional children. Frazier
asks Charles if he brings what money he makes home? To which Charles does not
respond. Instead, Mamie offers “No. He don’t bring his money home, he has been
throwing away his money for three years gambling and he calls up telling me he is in
jail... He don’t say anything to me when he comes in unless the children say
something.”75 This response opens the following exchange:
Q: Mrs. I, did you ever hear anything about birth control?
A: No.
Q: Did you, Mr. I?
A: No.
Q: Well, don’t you think you have enough children now for the money you are
making?
A: Yes.
Q: Do you like children? (Mr. I. offers no answer)
A: (Mrs. I) No he don’t like them, he don’t even carry them out or nothing.
75
Court Proceedings – Domestic Relations, Case #8. Box 131-81, Folder 11, Frazier Papers.
80
Q: Do you want your wife to keep on having children?
A: Well, if she don’t mind having them, I don’t mind it.
Q: Mrs. I, do you have children because you want to have them?
A: No.
Q: When you go to the county to have your baby, will you ask some of them to
direct you to a birth control clinic?
A: Yes, I will.76
Frazier’s suggestion that the couple seek birth control counseling may have had as
much to do with his study’s affiliation with the National Urban League and their efforts
to promote birth control among poor African Americans as Frazier’s own personal desire
to have the couple reign in their production of children. The Urban League’s birth
control agenda was solidified in March 1923 when its Harlem Community Forum invited
Margaret Sanger to speak to its members, and in 1925 when the League requested the
American Birth Control League establish clinics in Columbus Hill and Harlem, but have
begun before then. The American Birth Control League, under the leadership of its board
chair Eleanor Dwight Jones demonstrated “a strong eugenic motivation in trying to
deliver birth control to the poorest and least-educated Americans,”77 making Frazier’s
interviews a bridge to the ABCL.
Frazier’s research similarly traced the supposed sexual lewdness among Negro
migrant families by documenting the proceedings of Chicago’s Juvenile Courts where
New Negro migrants sought judicial remedies to rearing incorrigible children. The
E. Franklin Frazier, Court Proceedings –Case #8. Box 131-81, Folder 11, Frazier, E. Franklin Papers.
Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
77
Peter Engelman, A History of the Birth Control Movement in America (Santa Monica: ABC-CLIO,
2011), 165.
76
81
unruliness of children increasingly pointed to the inability among dysgenic Negro
families to properly rear children. It was imperative for the sake of the Negro family’s
reputation that children reflect fitness, respectability, and integrity. Where disorder
reigned instead, many parents asked courts to commit the children to asylums or
detention homes. Most of the girls committed were charged with being either immoral or
incorrigible, although in Chicago, the city facilitated the means by which many girls fell
victim to vice. A former Chief of Police gave out a semi-official statement that so long
as degenerate groups of whites (e.g., prostitutes, drug dealers, and gamblers) confined
their residence to districts west of Wabash Avenue and east of Wentworth Avenue, in the
same area segregated for Negro Chicagoans, they would not be apprehended. Despite
churches, schools and civic organizations at their backdoors, young Negro girls’
proximity to immoral conditions, especially when seeking employment, forced them “to
accept positions as maids in houses of prostitution. Employment agents do not hesitate to
send colored girls as servants to these houses.”78
Once in a house of ill-repute, raids and subsequent arrests, often fell heavier upon
the support staff than the actual sex workers, who according to Franklin’s records, were
more often than not, young Negro girls. Such was the case with the arrest of 14-year-old
Georgia Simmons. Simmons lived with an aged grandmother and worked in a “house of
bad reputation.” Officers Maynor and Regg found her in bed with a man during a raid.
“The girl states that she went to the house to wash for Fannie Cross…she is not going to
78
Vice Commission of Chicago, The Social Evil in Chicago, a Study of Existing Conditions with
Recommendations (Chicago: Gunthrop-Warren Printing Company, 1911), 32.
82
school, nor is she working but is loafing and associating with immoral people. She has no
one to supervise her.”79 Simmons, as a result of the testimony of the officers, entered the
Colored Detention Home for an indefinite period under the charge of “delinquency.”80
In eugenic nomenclature, immoral defined mostly young girls – not yet seventeen
– engaging in sexual behaviors deemed inappropriate because of their age or due to the
taboo of certain acts. Incorrigibility, on the other hand, classified the person committing
the immoral behavior as incapable of reform.81 Former Georgia Governor W.J. Northern
suggested as early as 1912 that the “idle among [Negroes], with the incorrigible and the
vicious, should be taken by the State and confined at some helpful service and kept there
until they become fit to be put on the community again.”82 States confined incorrigible
young people, often, just “rebellious” teens, to asylums and detention homes as inmates,
distinguishing their willfulness as criminal pathology, and perhaps, even communicable
without quarantine from other youth. In the case of New Negro migrant families, some
confinements came as a form of protection against the elements, rather than guilt of
actual crime. The concepts of “fallen women” and “wayward girls” subconsciously
supposed both to be of some purity and respectability until corrupted. Halting this
corruption before it destroyed society and made dysgenicism the norm, meant using new
scientific methods for finding, documenting, and segregating the unfit. Karen Tice
E. Franklin Frazier, Court Proceedings – Juvenile Courts, Case #51, Box 131-82, Folder7, E. Franklin
Frazier Papers. Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
80
E. Franklin Frazier, Court Proceedings – Juvenile Courts, Case #51, Box 131-82, Folder 7, E. Franklin
Frazier Papers. Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
81
Barbara M. Brenzel, Daughters of the State: A Social Portrait at the First Reform School for Girls in
North America, 1856-1905 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 155.
82
Editors, “An Ex-Governor of Georgia Speaks,” The Crisis, May 1912, 17.
79
83
argues that as “reliance on heredity as a cause of otherness intensified, extensive
investigation and documentation of family histories became customary.”83 The Chicago
Urban League extended its work with Frazier to include providing him with
stenographer to document court proceedings and access to young girls who received birth
control services at the county clinic.
Florence A. Key came before the courts June 12, 1929 with an appeal of
commitment from her parents. The 14-year-old, according to Frazier’s records, could not
be controlled by either parent and had taken to staying out all night. The Courts readily
accepted the appeal and confined Key to the Colored Detention Home (CDH) for an
indefinite period.84 Other girls, like Samella Patton, age 15, came before courts after an
arrest by police. Patton was caught by police “engaged in lewdness,” and sentenced to
CDH as well for “lewdness, delinquency, truancy, and vagrancy, for not less than one
year.”85
Studies of New Negro migrant families, like Frazier’s, demonstrate a concerted
effort toward race betterment on the part of the families, who worked toward obtaining
better housing, employment, and educations for their children. However, Franklin’s
work points to a virtual minefield of dangers that made the most “fit” families susceptible
83
Karen W. Tice, Tales of Fallen Women and Wayward Girls: Case Records and the Professionalization of
Social Work (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 28.
84
E. Franklin Frazier, Court Proceedings – Juvenile Courts, Case #51, Box 131-82, Folder 1, Frazier
Papers, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard
University.
85
E. Franklin Frazier, Court Proceedings – Juvenile Courts, Case #51, Box 131-82, Folder 2, Frazier
Papers, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard
University.
84
to the vice around them. The evidence of whether New Negro race evolution or
degeneracy existed rested squarely in the hands of those conducting research and
interpreting the results. As self-proclaimed race leaders took up the charge for aiding
their “lesser” brethren, many inadvertently reinforced the very stereotypes of Negro
dysgenicism they worked to dispel.
CONCLUSION
The reliance on New Negro thinkers, including authors like Zora Neale Hurston
and sociologists, like E. Franklin Frazier, to define the socially and genetically weak
among the Negro race, created a paradigm in which gradations of skin color, place of
birth, and education determined biological fitness. Foreign-born Negroes, mostly West
Indians, helped dispel the myth of dark-skinned degeneracy by advancing socially and
economically through internal systems of progress. Where direct conflict existed
between New Negro leadership and West Indians, colorism was fused with eugenicsbased language to substantiate prejudice against New Negro migrants and immigrants. In
the process, the scientific discourse of eugenics, based solely on genetic inheritance and
measured by physical and mental fitness, gave way to social markers of hereditary
unfitness, such as criminality and sexual promiscuity. Social eugenics increasingly relied
on behavioral patterns and the observed conduct of individuals as proof of social
inadequacy. Still utilizing scientific data – intelligence tests, anthropometric
examinations, and surveys -- the classification of acceptable behavior became as much
the work of everyday New Negroes as social scientists.
85
Despite divergent interpretations of behaviors and fluid definitions of social
inadequacies, middle-class Negroes by the 1920s had firmly established ideas of what
constituted impropriety and respectability. Negro intellectuals readily accepted migrating
Negroes from the South, with their folk beliefs, unsophisticated mannerisms, and poor
schooling, as fervent examples of dysgenicism. The behaviors and attitudes of Negro
migrants, whether believed to be a function of a physically hostile environment (white
supremacy / Jim Crow), or the savage inheritance of poor race regeneration, provided the
ammunition necessary to have them labeled, disproportionately, as criminals and never
do wells, as well as promiscuous, mentally and intellectually inept, and socially
inadequate when compared to those Negroes born and reared in the North.
West Indians provided another challenge to the visual and behavioral litmus tests
middle-class Negroes used in determining social fitness. For while West Indians –
largely from British territories – constituted Negro stock, their socializing under a caste
system of Negro, Colored, and White, afforded them social and educational opportunities
rare in America. Skilled tradesmen traveled from Jamaica to England or France, as well
as to America in search of financial opportunities the same as migrants from the South.
However, the West Indian traveled without duress and used his access to the British
consulate and British Embassy to voice grievances with discriminatory practices in cities
like Harlem and Boston. Further complicating the identity formation of the New Negro
under social eugenic constructs was the highly-educated West Indians’ ability to maintain
British citizenship, utilize West Indian cultural ties in America and abroad to finance
businesses and education, and attain middle-class status without venturing from the
86
periphery of New Negro struggles for the same. Many West Indians did, however, make
their presence known in labor and political struggles alongside New Negro activists,
though the strivings of both led to suspicion about the other’s character and abilities –
genetic and social -- to serve as race leaders.
Ultimately, the pathology of New Negro migrants as identified through court
records and social work intercession, created the contested space of dysgenic
categorization. Negro researchers like E. Franklin Frazier, set out to both study the
generational tendencies and behaviors that contributed to the numbers of New Negro
migrants arrested, incarcerated, or paroled in cities like Chicago and New York. Franklin
found widespread gullibility, which he associated with poor social evolution and the
disorganization of migrant families. With millions of Southern Negroes migrating to
urban cities, the dysgenicism that supposedly fostered arrests for prostitution, public
intoxication, lawlessness, and a range of poverty-related crimes, had the potential to spill
over into respectable society without direct action from reformers. With the aid of the
Urban League and other benevolent societies, researchers worked to correct the
proliferation poor racial stock by focusing reform efforts on working-class Negro
women’s fertility.
87
1.1 Members of the Fisk Graduating Class 1888
1.2 Howard University Professor Kelly Miller
W.E.B. DuBois with wife Nina, and daughter, Yolande (1901)
88
CHAPTER TWO
“FEWER, BUT BETTER CHILDREN”1
NEW NEGRO EUEGENICS, BLACK FERTILITY AND THE BIRTH CONTROL
MOVEMENT
“[Negroes] are led away by the fallacy of numbers. They want the Black race to survive. They are cheered by the
Census return of increasing numbers and a high rate of increase. They must learn that among human races and groups,
as among vegetables, quality and not mere quantity really counts.”
– W. E. B. Du Bois2
When Lena Edwards was arrested in 1912 for stealing $2 to purchase shoes and
food, she was swiftly apprehended and marched before the New York juvenile courts.
Her story was like thousands heard in urban cities since the mass migration of Southern
African Americans northward had begun a few years earlier. Edwards’ mother (never
named in court records) had abandoned her husband in Virginia and journeyed to New
York with Lena for a “good time.” The 13-year-old stated that “there had been three
different men living in the flat within ten months, and that she had been told by her
mother each was her stepfather. On refusal of the child to call them father, she had been
whipped and half starved.”3 The judge refused to punish the child. Edwards was,
however, committed to a home for delinquent girls to protect her from her mother’s
“immoral” behavior and keep her from following her mother’s example. When the
courts, often working with Negro reform organizations like the National Urban League,
1
William Earl Dodge Stokes, The Right of be Well Born: or Horse-Breeding in its Relation to Eugenics
(New York: C J O’Brien Company, 1917), 101.
2
W.E.B. Du Bois, “Black Folks and Birth Control,” The Birth Control Review, 16:6 (June 1932), 167.
3
Editor, “The Sojourner Truth House,” The Survey, 9:10 (Dec. 9, 1912), 269.
89
committed girls like Edwards to institutions in order to address a supposed inherited
tendency toward sexual promiscuity, or to punish them for their own social transgressions
(in this case, theft), their classification and confinement as “risks” to public morality
initiated a state-sanctioned process of “fixing” them.
The New York Medical Journal reported in 1913 that increased birth rates,
particularly among unmarried women, fostered increased prostitution, poverty, crime and
disease and became a source of continual recruitment of the undesirable class by
potentially worthy citizens.4 By the 1920s, an increased number of cities found
themselves struggling to manage young people, like Lena, who resorted to misdemeanor
crimes and “criminal” activity to cope with the poverty that accompanied
industrialization and urbanization.5
Reformers, like Margaret Sanger, connected eugenic better breeding to a larger
movement to regulate the poor and stop the rise in crime and illegitimacy. Many birth
control platforms initially cast white women as reproductively taxed and called for
female emancipation from a type of procreant slavery where frequent pregnancies
threatened the overall health of the mother. Sanger, a trained nurse and one of eleven
children, used her own mother’s early death from “overwork and the strain of too
frequent child bearing,”6 as raw data in interpreting how the lack of proper intervals
Editor, “Problems of Parenthood – Venereal Disease, Clinics, and Professional Secrecy,” New York
Medical Journal (New York: A.R. Elliot Publishing, 1920), 131.
5
Shaun L Gabbidon, W.E.B. Du Bois on Crime and Justice: Laying the Foundations of Sociological
Criminology (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), 29.
6
Margaret Sanger, The Case for Birth Control (New York: Modern Art Printing, 1917), 5.
4
90
between pregnancies and an ignorance among women of how to avoid pregnancy, forced
them to “sacrific[e] their lives to populate the earth.”7 Sanger and other birth control
proponents faced staunch criticism over the morality of birth control from religious
leaders and some middle-class reformers, because it interfered with the “divine” nature of
conception, as well as the right of men to produce as many children as they chose. For
example, Georgia Commissioner of Health T.F. Abercrombie, in detailing the annual
death rates for pregnant women in Georgia, described reproduction in decidedly socioreligious terms, writing: “[A] total of 2,357 mothers during the last four years, in the
performance of their God-given function and in their supreme effort to establish a family
and a home, the anchors of civilization, lost their lives because they went blindfolded into
the very shadows of death without, in many cases, scientific help or a competent guide.”8
Abercrombie’s lament decries the lack of scientific knowledge among Georgia’s white
women to select proper partners and make healthy lifestyle and dietary decisions to
eugenically manage their pregnancies. Fear of death from pregnancies and labor,
according to Abercrombie had also caused the native birth rates to decline, making it a
eugenic imperative to establish sex education among white female school girls.
While the Georgia commissioner included black women in his study of mothers,
it was strictly to establish comparative data between black and white fecundity,
concluding that unless health conditions for white women were changed, the race
7
Sanger, 6.
T.F. Abercrombie, Annual Report of the Georgia State Board of Health for 1923 (Atlanta: Stein Printing,
1924), 77.
8
91
problem would be settled by the over production of black to white babies.9 Black and
white eugenicists alike linked the “Negro Problem;” however, to black female fertility,
which white religious figures rarely afforded divine status.10 Black girls, like Lena,
entered into sexual bargaining with men to survive harsh living conditions and in the
process gave birth to illegitimate children, which reformers and eugenicists viewed as a
new generation that would languish in poverty and potentially spread crime and disease.
Philip Jenkins notes in “Eugenics, Crime and Ideology: The Case of Progressive
Pennsylvania” that crime was attributed to dangerous classes whose congenital pathology
caused them to fail in an overwhelmingly fair society suited for ‘normal’ people.11
The Bureau of the Census collected data on illegitimacy and crime by state, and
compiled it as “valuable source information regarding the progress and status of the
Negro race in the United States.12 Securing a regulated birthrate, according to
demographer Charles Edward Pell, offered one very special advantage; it helped
eliminate the Negro problem.13 Claiming that antagonism between the races grew in
direct proportion to the increase of the Negro population, Pell concluded that in securing
white fertility, “it should only be necessary to obtain as many children per family as are
9
Abercrombie, 27.
Kali N. Gross, Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love,
1880-1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 65-66.
11
Philip Jenkins, “Eugenics, Crime, and Ideology: The Case of Progressive Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania
History 51:1 (January, 1984): 74.
12
William Lane Austin, Negroes in the United States 1920-1932 (Washington, D.C.: The United States
Government Printing Office, 1935), iii.
13
Pell penned two important works The Riddle of Unemployment and Its Solution-1922 (London: Cecil
Parker, 1922) wherein he blames the disorganization of society for high unemployment rates; and The Laws
of Birth and Death (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1921) in which he posits nature’s tendency to cause the
birthrate to decline with the death rate to render a race sterile once a certain stage of development has been
reached.
10
92
needed for the maintenance of the white race, while allowing the Negro population to
diminish through increasing sterility.”14 Sterility among African Americans was believed
to become more commonplace as rates of venereal disease – particularly syphilis – went
untreated.15 Pell, and other birth control advocates, believed that contraception
promotion among Black women pointless because “the negro generally exercises less
prudence and foresight than white people do in all sexual matters.”16 Pell’s remarks,
given at the First Annual Birth Control Conference in New York in 1921, challenged the
supporters of birth control methods for white family planning to consider a plan for birth
rate control for Negroes to insure the survival of the white race in America.17 Pell did not
propose a program of compulsory or voluntary sterilization during his address, however,
his work on stemming social ills through birth rate control appeared often in The Birth
Control Review and the Eugenics Review.
New Negro leaders, including Du Bois, activist Alice Dunbar Nelson, sociologist
Chandler Owen, and physician M.O. Bousfield supported birth control as a modern and
civilized family’s moral responsibility. With the increase in crime and sexual vice among
poor African Americans, black reformers believed the decrease in unfit progeny would
naturally decrease Negro crime. New Negro hereditarian thought adhered to the skeletal
framework of positive and negative eugenics including Pell’s belief that sterility from
Charles Edward Pell, “Is Birth Control Moral?” (Speech presented at the proceedings of the First
American Birth Control Conference, New York, New York, November 11, 1921).
15
Jessie M. Rodrique, “The Black Community and the Birth Control Movement” in Passion and Power:
Sexuality in History, ed. Kathy Peiss et al. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 139.
16
Rodrique, 139.
17
Pell, 198.
14
93
venereal disease would result in a decrease in “unfit” Negro population growth. Black
eugenicists encouraged the fit to produce more children and the unfit to utilize whatever
methods available to keep from having children.18 This research demonstrates how
Negro hereditarian thought incorporated economic factors into both environmental and
genetic data to devise a more fluid description of fitness.
Some theorists recognized that the overall financial stability of African American
families declined with the birth of each new child.19 Instead of promoting the birth of
more children among middle-class Negro families and jeopardizing positive race and
socioeconomic progress, Black eugenicists proposed the birth of fewer, but better
offspring. Some thinkers, like Du Bois, positioned birth control as science and sense
applied to the bringing children into the world necessary to ward off becoming divided
into the mass who have endless children and the class who through long postponement of
marriage have few or none.20 Some African American eugenicists, like William
Hannibal Thomas, proposed the sterilization of the unfit. The project also documents the
attempts by Negro reformers to answer social problems using eugenic and scientific
solutions. This is most clearly seen in the push by sociologists to test, categorize and
physically segregate unfit blacks into asylums. This work asserts that New Negro reform
activities sought to uplift by identifying “Negroes” of “poor stock” and lesser means and
then either addressing the environmental stimuli that fostered their defectiveness or
Chandler Owen, “Women and Children of the South” The Birth Control Review 3: no.7 (July 1919): 20.
Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (New York: Pantheon, 1976), 324.
20
W.E.B. Du Bois, Editorial, The Birth Control Review, 6, no. 11, November 1922, 229.
18
19
94
segregating those individuals from larger society through reformatories.21 Binet and I.Q.
tests scores, physiognomy (physical appearance), low-class “behavior”, and family
heredity served as legitimate indicators of fitness for black reformers as they did for
mainline eugenicists.
BLACK SOCIOLOGISTS, SOCIAL WORKERS AND, THE CHICAGO SCHOOL
Black sociologists E. Franklin Frazier, Allison Davis, Charles Johnson, St. Clair
Drake, and Horace Cayton formed a unique body of men who studied at the University of
Chicago. Generally regarded as the first sociology department established anywhere in
the world, the University of Chicago’s Department of Anthropology and Sociology
became synonymous with urban sociology during the first half of the twentieth century.22
Under the direction of white social scientists Albion Small, W.I. Thomas, Robert Park
and Louis Wirth, the department developed the theory that “society shaped the mind and
identity of a person and social settings functioned as human laboratories where
sociologists could do scientific studies intended to address human needs.”23 Thomas,
Wirth, and Park discussed Social Darwinism and eugenics within the framework of urban
studies and accepted many of their tenets as scientific data upon which they could build
social evidence and suggest social policy. Thomas wrote in 1909, “The idea of eugenics
does not imply that the family is to be interfered with, but the family should be the place
Alice Dunbar Nelson, “A Woman’s Most Serious Problem,” Messenger, March 1927, 73.
Phil Hubbard, City (New York: Routledge, 2006), 25.
23
Margaret L. Anderson, Howard F. Taylor, Sociology: Understanding a Diverse Society (Belmont:
Thomson-Wadsworth Publishers, 2006), 17.
21
22
95
where the sentiment for eugenism should be developed most acutely.”24 Thomas here
promotes the belief that while the character of the parents may not be transmutable, the
function of eugenics in their household dictates that they strive to improve the fitness of
their offspring and future generations. This may incorporate ensuring they and their
children are in good physical health and that all necessary precautions are undertaken to
secure mates among the best possible physical and mental suitors.
Thomas connected the scientific with the social and used the voices of the hosts of
public officials working directly with reportedly degenerate populations to fuel his
research. In one instance, Thomas recounts the words of a New York police justice who
stated, “there are thousands of families in this city where the rearing of two or more
children means a girl for the brothel and a boy for the penitentiary.” As increases in
Negro crime ushered in new municipal courts, including New York’s Women’s Court,
judicial reformers welcomed the input of the Chicago School sociologists. They installed
staffs of disciplinary personnel, including psychologists, psychiatrists, physicians, social
workers, and probation officers whose job as social experts included examining offenders
and advising judges on the best individual treatment (prison for punishment or asylum for
reform) given the offenders’ mental makeup, family background, and social history.25
Juveniles brought into courts for crimes committed as a consequence of parental neglect,
abandonment, or influence, may have initially received the compassion of the courts – as
24
William Isaac Thomas, "Eugenics: The Science of Breeding Men," American Magazine, June 1909, 192.
Michael Willrich, City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago (Cambridge: The
University of Cambridge, 2003), xxxii.
25
96
Lena Edwards’ case demonstrates. However, upon commitment to reformatories where
branded as threats to society, the potential of becoming burdens on service agencies cast
young people as inmates—i.e., criminals. Additionally, state reform institutions often
housed different classes of supposed dysgenics together. For instance, the Statistical
Directory of State Institutions for the Defective, Dependent and Delinquent Classes,
acknowledged receipt in 1916 of those they classified as feebleminded, insane,
criminalistic, epileptic, inebriate, and tubercular.26 Though all represented various
categories of social defectives, feebleminded, criminalistic, and inebriate fell under
behavioral issues, where epileptic and tubercular constituted strictly medical conditions.
Insanity, epilepsy, and tuberculosis may have been placed as a hereditary conditions, but
were largely believed to be mental or medical conditions as well. Each required some
level of treatment.
Drake and Cayton, in keeping with their Chicago School training, asserted that the
fluctuating environments of migrant Negroes in Northern cities facilitated a social
disorder that perpetuated crime – particularly prostitution. Drake posited that Negro
crime evidenced “an early social environment which tended to produce personal
disorganization – such as unkind foster-parents, parent-child conflicts, a sense of
inadequacy due to very dark or very light skin color, etc… that will often lead to
prostitution.”27 An urban ecology, (as the Chicago School termed it) of instability –
26
Sam L. Rogers, Statistical Directory of State Institutions for the Defective, Dependent, and Delinquent
Classes (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919), 8.
27
St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, The Black Metropolis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1945), 598.
97
single parents, parents working away from home, children left to their own devices or
preyed upon by others, caused children to seek stability among friends and selfsufficiency through petty crime. It is through the delinquency and petty criminal activity
of black children that social workers entered into detailed studies on the structures of
black households.
Black social workers, many trained at the Chicago School of Social Work,
Howard University, and Tuskegee Institute, galvanized the study of urban Negro life
throughout the 1920s and produced vast amounts of “empirical” data that gave gentle
support to eugenics.28 In some instances, Negro sociologists set out to study organic
themes of migrant life, including marriage rates, fertility, and education; while others reevaluated the results of mainstream studies on issues like Negro illegitimacy and crime.29
Sociologists’ concerns about illegitimacy and fertility, with their alleged ties to
criminality and poverty, influenced hundreds of studies during the Great Migration.30
According to popular eugenic guides, including physician William J. Robinson’s
Eugenics Marriage and Birth Control (Practical Eugenics), both illegitimacy and
28
Jonathan Scott Holloway. Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris, Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph
Bunche 1919-1941 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 127.
29
Some studies assessing the New Negro illegitimacy and crime included: Anna J. Thompson’s “A Survey
of Crime among Negroes in Philadelphia,” Opportunity (August and September 1926), Ira De A. Reid’s “A
Study of 200 Negro Prisoners in the Western Penitentiary of Pennsylvania,” Opportunity June 1925, p.
168-170; Charles S. Johnson’s “Mental Measurements of Negro Groups,” Howard University Record,
1923; Howard H. Long’s “Race and Mental Tests,” Opportunity January 1923, p. 21-28; Ruth Reed’s The
Social and Health Care of the Illegitimate Family in New York City (New York: Research Bureau Welfare
Council of New York, 1932); Ruth Reed’s “Illegitimacy among Negroes,” Journal of Social Hygiene
11(February 1925); and E. Franklin Frazier’s “An Analysis of Statistics on Negro Illegitimacy,” Social
Forces 11 (December 1932): 249-257.
30
Joe William Trotter, The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions in Race, Class and
Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 11.
98
unchecked fertility constituted eugenic symptoms of inherent immorality;31 therefore, in
examining unwed mothers, eugenicists could also document social factors contributing to
the perpetuation of feebleminded Negroes.
The documentation of feebleminded “Negroes”, most of whom researchers linked
to poverty and poverty-related crime, allowed eugenicists to project future (il)legitimate
birth rates among Blacks. A 1921 study by George Manigold of the University of
Missouri reported that among the 250,000 to 300,000 Negro births every year,
approximately 35,000 to 55,000 constituted illegitimate births.32 Manigold pointed his
readers to the immorality among Negroes and blamed their fecundity on the incomplete
social evolution of Negroes from their crude states of family and marriage under slavery.
Slavery, in the estimation of some members of the Talented Tenth, including Du Bois,
created the poor eugenic status of the black race by nurturing the survival of those who
evolution would have naturally eliminated. Calling slavery the “legalized survival of the
unfit and the nullification of the work of natural internal leadership,”33 Du Bois suggested
the prostitutes and wayward among the race constituted the “submerged tenth” of
reprobates never meant to survive evolution.34 Marigold and others embraced Du Bois’
assessment of never do wells as cast offs who never developed into fit citizens. In
William J. Robinson, Eugenics. Marriage, and Birth Control – Practical Eugenics (New York: The
Critic and Guide Company, 1917), 63-83.
32
George Benjamin Manigold, Children Born out of Wedlock (Columbia: University of Missouri Press,
1921), 26.
33
Booker T. Washington, The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes
(New York: James Pott & Company, 1903), 34-35.
34
Paul Lombardo, A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome
Era (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 73.
31
99
another study, the Milbank Memorial Fund conducted a house-to-house canvas of 2,256
Negro families living in Harlem in 1935 and found 91 births in Central Harlem per 1,000
married colored women of childbearing age. Researchers concluded the reduction in
birthrates among married Negro women “suggested Negroes migrating from the South
attached more importance to independence and new experience than to family life.”35
Such conclusions ignored the economic imperatives of the fewer, but better children ideal
that Negro eugenicists and race leaders promoted, and instead supported notions among
mainstream social workers and the newly forming criminal justice system that Negro
families operated in relative dysfunction with individual pleasures taking precedence over
a desire for structured living.
In the records of Negro sociologists, similar data on illegitimacy existed. In many
instances, the subtext of the data sought to answer why the rates of illegitimacy were so
high, how the structural make-up of a household of illegitimate children developed, and
how best to reduce those illegitimate births. E. Franklin Frazier and fellow sociologist
Charles S. Johnson examined out-of-wedlock births in Chicago well into the 1940s, as
Urban League researchers. Johnson, in an effort to better understand the social mores and
norms of rural black communities where illegitimate births were common, began
studying 612 families in Macon County, Alabama. The research, which contextualized
southern black life before migration, charted about an eighth of all the families in the
county. Data showed that 122 women in 114 of these families had had 191 illegitimate
Clyde V. Kiser, “Fertility of Harlem Negroes,” The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, 13, no.3 (July
1935): 279.
35
100
children. In all except three of the 114 families, one or all of the illegitimate children
resided with the immediate or nuclear family. These children were born of married
women who produced children through extramarital affairs. The children were part of
the family group and lived as brothers and sisters of the legitimate children of these
married couples. Johnson notes that in the case of 14 of them the mothers were married
to the fathers of their illegitimate offspring. “Sexual unions resulting in the birth of
children without the legal sanctions are of several types, and cannot properly be grouped
together under the single classification ‘illegitimate’.”36 Frazier would later celebrate
Johnson’s research as opening a critical examination on normative behavior and
community standard. That these women subsequently married the fathers of their
illegitimate offspring indicates the important distinctions that are covered up when
illegitimacy is considered as an undifferentiated form of behavior.37
Frazier’s work with the Chicago Urban League offered insight into the inner
workings of New Negro households in urban areas. With an increase of out of wedlock
births from 66 percent between 1910 and 1920 to an alarming increase of illegitimate
births by 115 percent between 1920 and 1930,38 Negro eugenicists and social reformers
worked tirelessly to analyze and rehabilitate migrant fertility. At the core of Frazier’s
study of Negro family life, lay his reading of black fecundity as a moral misinterpretation
among Blacks of the Biblical adage: “be fruitful and multiply.” While there is little hard
36
Charles Spurgeon Johnson, Shadow of the Plantation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), 66.
E. Franklin Frazier, “An Analysis of Statistics on Negro Illegitimacy in the United States,” Social Forces
11, no.2 (Dec.1932): 255.
38
Frazier, 255.
37
101
evidence that Frazier embraced eugenic sterilizations or believed in segregating
degenerate stock, yet his reading of acceptable premarital sex, illegitimacy, and children
of illicit extramarital affairs as the “simple and naïve behavior of peasant folks,”
reinforced eugenic beliefs in the inherently poor moral capacity of blacks. Frazier wrote,
“Illegitimacy is not licentious [among them] and could scarcely be called immoral. Of
course, in some cases it does represent degeneration and where it conflicts with the mores
of community, becomes immoral.”39 Frazier, in short, viewed illegitimacy an acceptable
moral norm, supported within lower and migrant-class Negro communities. Yet,
Frazier’s view on black illegitimacy as partially a result of “degeneration” follows the
scientific-social eugenic interpretations of illegitimacy expressed by Richard Dugdale in
his research on the Jukes. This bridge between unseen hereditary forces and the resulting
behavioral indications stressed that a woman’s “promiscuity” created ongoing social
transgressions. The begetting of illegitimate children represented a moral offense
(bastardy) that corporealized a biological offense (degeneration), which led to social
offenses (crime).40 Individual and family degeneracy could be explained among whites
through genetic inheritance – such as feeblemindedness without those traits
characterizing the entire race. And while eugenicists like Dugdale and Charles Davenport
utilized the concept of hereditary social failure to explain impoverished, illiterate,
criminal and sexually deviant whites, African American reformers like Frazier adopted
39
Frazier, 255.
Elizabeth Yukins. “Feebleminded White Women,” in Lois A. Cuddy’s Evolution and Eugenics in
American Literature and Culture, 1880-1940 (Cranbury NJ: Associated University Presses, 2003), 173.
40
102
the language in discussing crime and illegitimacy among rural blacks and migrant blacks
of rural background.
Frazier linked the mores of segregated southern life to the social inability of
Negro migrants to adapt to new, more civilized, northern and urban environments. As
more migrants settled in urban areas, Negro reformers feared that their flexible Southern
sexual attitudes would threaten the race progress already made by old-settler Negro
communities. For some Negro reformers, particularly those who espoused eugenics,
illegitimate birth rates resulted from not only community disorganization but also
biological “degeneration.” Frazier pointed to nearly a third of all girls who gave birth to
illegitimate children as, themselves, coming from broken homes where either their
parents were unmarried, they had been abandoned by family, or had migrated to the
North alone. Frazier blamed high rates of illegitimacy among migrant Negro girls on
“casual and impersonal contacts through which random and undisciplined impulses found
expression.”41 As with Dugdale’s Jukes, immorality worked in Frazier’s assessments as
inherited traits that were recognized in the expression of undisciplined impulses
(premarital sex and illegitimate births). The origin of such expression grew from
biologically inherited germ plasm and further developed into the lax attitudes and
behaviors concerning sex, marriage, and childbearing.
Frazier was joined by other social scientists in connecting the inherited taint of
sexual immorality to reproductive (and social) dangers migrant Negro women created.
41
Yukins, 256.
103
Chandler Owens, for instance, in a 1919 article for the Birth Control Review, cast New
Negro female migrants as highly sexual and socially immoral. “When they are tied down
by children, they stop a hard day’s work, go home, and the chief pleasure they have is
reproduction gratification. This is a very important factor, and gives rise to the large
number of children which we see among the poor. The sex relation is their amusement
and enjoyment.”42 Owens evokes the belief that the sexual urge among blacks
superseded natural laws of decorum and reason. Owens asserts that the children of black
homes “tie down” the adults, making them a seemingly unwanted by-product of pleasureseekers and the only stabilizing factors in their homes. Others like Helen Gardener, a
Virginia public intellectual, tied the treatment of Black women by larger society to the
hereditary cause of associated social ills. Gardener, who wrote on behalf of the suffrage
movement and was appointed to the U.S. Civil Service Commission by Woodrow Wilson
in 1917, lamented that a “race which is born of mothers who are harassed, bullied,
subordinated, and made the victims of blind passion or power… cannot fail to continue to
give us the horrible spectacles we have always had of war, of crime, of vice, or trickery,
of double-dealing, of pretense, of lying, of arrogance, of subserviency, of incompetence,
of brutality, and alas, of insanity, idiocy, and disease.”43 All dysgenic roads among the
Negro population, for Gardener, led back to mothers. Gardener incorporated criminal
anthropology into her eugenic beliefs and utilized works by researchers like Robert
42
Chandler Owens, “Women and Children of the South,” The Birth Control Review 3 (September 1919):9.
Helen Gardener, “Woman as an Annex,” in World’s Congress of Representative Women, ed. May Wright
Sewall (Chicago: Rand, McNally, 1894), 488.
43
104
Fletcher (the president of the Anthropological Society in Washington), and Arthur
MacDonald to merge the science of inheritance with the behavior and conduct of
criminals. For instance, Fletcher pronounced criminal classes a natural outgrowth of
transmittable criminal propensity, examining the anatomy, physiology and external
appearance for characteristic criminal abnormalities. Gardener informally examined the
mothers of the criminals with these abnormalities. After visiting a New York maternity
ward, Gardener wrote that she encountered hundreds of cases where “parents were
robust, healthy, strong country folk until – and then followed the history of the parents
who had ‘acquired’ the ‘character’ which they transmitted (Lamarkian) – which had
made the mental, moral, and physical cripple in the ward before me.”44 Gardner believed
dysgenic character was potentially ‘acquired’ by one or both parents. Thus, through the
transmission of the acquired traits, the parents and their offspring, according to Gardener
became not only physically (as would be the case for deformity), but also morally and
mentally deficient. It is unclear how a moral taint is evident in babies, but Gardener’s
beliefs were common amongst eugenic thinkers of her ilk.
Research by Owens and Frazier followed a similar pattern as Gardener’s, (also
adopted by W.E.B. Du Bois) of analyzing Negro behavior in the context of the “Negro
Problem”. Du Bois provided a stage for race sociology and studies as part of his
Conference for the Study of the Negro Problems, which ran annually from 1896 to 1914.
Topics presented the conference ran the full gamut from economics to biology, and
44
Helen Hamilton Gardener, Facts and Fictions of Life (Boston: Arena Publishing Company, 1895), 279.
105
featured speakers included anthropologist Franz Boas, eugenicist Felix von Luschan, and
white sociologist R. S. Woodworth. In the 1913 conference report Du Bois surveyed
Negro leaders in 35 states on the social and moral conditions of New Negroes to
determine how best to meet the challenges of Negro problems specific to sexual crimes
and illegitimacy. While the questionnaire was meant in no way to presuppose New
Negro behavior as particularly outside the norm of shifting American values, Du Bois
makes a delineation between social, environmental, and hereditary-based moral decay.
The survey queries the educational access and housing of New Negro families, in
addition to more health-related concerns like personal hygiene. “Section 9: Rearing of
Children” deals exclusively with the attitudes and beliefs of New Negro leaders on the
race’s ability to produce and rear fit progeny.45
Unnamed representatives from every region of the country responded to the
survey produced by the previous years’ conference attendees, including those from
Alabama, the District of Columbia, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, and Texas. With the
exception of Mississippi, all respondents believed severe lackadaisical attitudes towards
sex and children existed among Negroes, creating intolerance for children and a general
neglect of them. Most respondents separated the race into categories of established and
migrant classes, or educated and illiterate persons. Though descriptors of the family
studies were vague, respondents made statements such as: “Better families look after
children well” or “Among the lower elements the children are not reared properly.” By
45
W.E.B. Du Bois, Morals and Manners among Negro Americans (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press,
1914), 82-89.
106
what measure better or lower came to be established, remained unclear. The respondent
from Indiana, where the first laws authorizing eugenic sterilization were signed in 1907
provided a eugenic-themed comment: “There is no race suicide. The slogan is: ‘Fewer
but better children.”46 His response suggests a conscious effort on the parts of middleclass black Indianans to practice positive eugenics – producing fit children at steady
paces to ensure the proliferation of a better stock. Similarly, the Louisiana participant
commented: “As the race improves in education, there is a tendency toward fewer
children, but they are rearing the few they have better.”47 Espousing the race
regeneration of blacks into middle –class spaces, where education redirected standards of
mate selection and reproduction, captured the spirit of Kelly Miller’s directive to Howard
study participants to selectively reproduce their kind.
Respondents from Missouri and New York linked the scourge of poor character,
crime (vice), and immorality to the ignorance of black mothers. Both respondents
associated unintended pregnancy with ignorance and hypersexual behavior, resulting in
the inability (or even lack of desire) to rear children. Missouri’s participant offered: “I
know of only one family where the children were desired. Ninety percent were either
accidental or incidental. Very little pride. Sixty percent are illegitimate. Very little
interest taken in them.”48 New York’s respondent wrote, “Our people here marry early in
life and as a rule have large and rapidly increasing families. There is probably no effort
46
Du Bois, 85.
Du Bois, 86.
48
Du Bois, 87.
47
107
among any of them to prevent or hinder rapid increase of children. There is much
parental negligence and many of the children do not receive the proper home attention…
Result: the children become immoral before they are matured.”49 Here respondents make
the social eugenic connection between heredity and immorality as social scientists and
researchers Frazier, Owen, and Johnson did. That these are observations by laypeople of
inherited character – showing little pride, illegitimacy, and neglect, among those they
classify as accidental or incidental -- demonstrates how powerful the social classification
of offspring of the dysgenic households among black reformers had become. Eugenics
insists character is inherited. For instance Galton’s contemporary eugenicist Arthur
Holmes writes, “all character is inherited or acquired; that is, it comes from ancestors or
environment,”50 and even when it is attributed to reactions to environmental stimuli, it
signals poor intellectual (coping) skills. Moreover, eugenics “allied character so closely
to feeblemindedness that it cannot occur without its mental cognate, moral imbecility.”51
Such biological and social overlap in classification helped move scientific constructs of
inherited degeneracy into the paths of social scientists and reformers concerned with
loose behavior and its impact on the character of the nation.
Yet, New York’s respondent addressed more than the supposed licentious and
immorality of New York blacks. His response echoed sentiments of Kentucky eugenicist
William Dodge Stokes in his breeding manifesto The Right of Being Well-Born, wherein
49
Du Bois, 87.
Arthur Holmes, Eugenics: Twelve University Lectures (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1914),
191.
51
Holmes, 200.
50
108
he cited natural Negro mental atrophy as the cause for mental lethargy and hypersexuality.52 The New York respondent wrote: “The mind of the Negro gets its maturity at
the end of the second or third or fourth grade… It is due to the inherent fiber of the brain
that only can be changed by a process of evolution which may take some thousands of
years to accomplish.”53 Stokes similarly described the black brain as inferior to that of
whites, arguing that it was still attempting to evolve from the savage inheritance naturally
occurring in African-types. Building off of early eugenic theories of craniology that
labeled the black brain inferior due to its smaller size, but heavier size (an average of five
ounces heavier than whites), and fewer convolutions (wrinkles) on the brain, Stokes
associated the cognitive abilities of black students with inherited racial inferiority and
consequently, defective intellectual capacity.54 The immaturity of the black brain
resulted from what British naturalist Robert Dunn termed a continuous “state of
enjoyment” during slavery and reflected his lack of mental complexity.55 It also created
an inability among Negroes to function as civilized adults. As the process of evolution
had yet to be completed in them, they were prone to behaviors that spurred social
degeneracy. Still other race thinkers, like the Illinois respondent based in Chicago,
blamed loose morals among Negro migrants on their willingness to imitate white
behaviors, insisting that “the Negro is not more to be charged than the white race that
52
W.E.D. Stokes, The Right to be Well Born: Horse Breeding in its Relation to Eugenics (New York: C.J.
O’Brien, 1917), 166.
53
Stokes, 101.
54
Emil Du Bois-Reymond, “Civilization and Science,” Popular Science Monthly, August 1878, 500.
55
Robert Dunn, “Some Observations on the Psychological Differences Which Exist among the Typical
Races of Man,” Ethnological Society of London Transactions III (1863), 20.
109
invented the debased system”.56 The respondent may have been speaking of the houses
of prostitution owned and operated by white men that formed an illicit district in the
middle of a respectable working-class Chicago neighborhood. In one such community,
named the Levee, beer gardens, whorehouses, and buffet flats were moved from a white
area of town into the middle of an area established for migrant settlement houses. The
resulting immoral influence helped shaped the neighborhood and informal economy
produced by prostitution and low living.57
2.1 Carrie Buck and Emma Buck
56
Du Bois, 30.
Robert M. Lombardo, Organized Crime in Chicago: Beyond the Mafia (Urbana-Champaign: University
of Illinois, 2013), 47.
57
110
2.2 Charles Davenport’s Jamaican Race Crossing Study
2.3 Kallikak Chart of Dysgenicism
Searching for root causes of debased sexual behavior, participants in Du Bois’
conferences and social reformers targeted young Negro girls of migrant households. The
goal of this research in many cases was to keep young girls from falling prey to vice and
crime, or rehabilitating them once they had. Rehabilitation required the girls spend
months and sometimes years in asylums, reformatories, or prisons. In Chicago in 1914,
for instance, sixteen percent of the prostitutes appearing in court were Negro; by 1929,
the proportion had jumped to seventy percent, and Negro women accounted for over half
of the arrests for prostitution in New York City in the 1930s.58 While many reformers
John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 296.
58
111
noted that these girls and women had been falsely accused and arrested, law enforcement
agencies and courts tended to look upon migrating and working class Black women as
unnaturally prone to vice. Characterized as morally weak, Black women were often
arrested by police officers as “near prostitutes” – a term that implies intent without a
crime.
WAYWARD AND INCORRIBLE GIRLS
Viewed as inherently marked for sexual mischief, Black girls caught and kept the
attention of eugenicists, reformatory administrators, and police without much effort.
Often Negro girls labeled “incorrigible” or “wayward” were the victims of sexual abuse
and rape perpetuated by members of their families, households, or neighborhoods.
Though incarcerating these girls – supposedly for their own protection – further
victimized them, social scientists believed doing so recognized their propensity to
become perpetrators of sexual crimes based on their inherited predisposition. Herman
Senator, a physician who authored several eugenic manuals on the relation of health and
marriage, noted in 1905 a close relationship between some sexual perversions, epilepsy
and degeneration. Much of his research examined incidents of sexual perversion like
exhibitionism as a symptom of progressive paralysis or dementia, or homosexual desire
as a forerunner to cerebral disease, Senator charged that, “there is reason to anticipate
with very great probability the procreation of severely afflicted children,”59 from those
59
Hermann Senator and Siegfried Kaminer, Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage and the Married
State (New York: Rebman Company, 1905), 1045-1046.
112
characterized as feebleminded. Senator ties epilepsy to depraved sexual behavior and
writes that sexual desire which is qualitatively normal, can in feeble-minded individuals
and other degenerates break out quite impulsively and lead to carnal offences…which
show the character of an epileptic attack.”60 By framing the sexuality of girls labeled
wayward and incorrigible as a lack of impulse control, Senator suggests they have
inherited a mental degeneration from one or both parents that will progress and show in
future offspring.
Gilman Sanders also documented the inheritance of sexual perversion in
Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness, where sexual
pathology and perversion were connected as forms of inherited degeneracy.
Disease-entities were invented which defined a clearly limited subset of human
beings as the group solely at risk. For such diseases were labeled as inherited to
one degree or another. The inherited diseases, whether masturbation, hysteria,
neurasthenia, congenital syphilis, or even incest, all had one thing in common. In
all cases the etiology and the symptomatology are identical. All begin with some
type of sexual deviancy and result in sexual perversion.61
Gilman finds that the inheritable nature of sexual perversion made reigning in or
segregating wayward girls, prostitutes and even victims of sexual abuse, to keep them
from harming other members of society.
To these eugenicists, the arrest and confinement of wayward girls seemed logical
and explained the prevalence of incarcerations for victims of sexual crime rather than
60
Senator, 1026.
Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca:
Cornell University, 1985), 215.
61
113
their perpetrators. In Boston, for instance in 1920, of all the sex delinquent cases
reported, “40 percent alleged incest and another 20 percent alleged non-incestuous
rape.”62 The arrests informed how not only the course of rehabilitation for the
incarcerated, but also how reformers viewed and handled migrant Negro women in
general.
There appeared such small differential between the categories of “normal” and
“pathological” when observing Negro women as to suggest general pathology within the
race. In one such survey of 2,185 women (1,360 white; 825 Negro) admitted to the Ohio
Reformatory for Women between 1925 and 1930, the mental age of the inmates was with
that of the racial norm as established by the U.S. Army during the first World War. The
results determined that the “median age of the Negro prisoners was 9.65 years or .45
years below the norm for Negroes in the general population. The median mental age for
Negro felons was 9.50 years, for Negro misdemeanants 9.66 years, or .50 years and .44
years, respectively, below their racial median.”63 With only one half of a percentile
separating fit from unfit, eugenicists and social workers claimed to have the necessary
data to support routine incarcerations and forced sterilizations, as well as to support birth
control among Negro women of all classes. These test results supported the belief that
the criminal trait or the propensity to commit crime rested in the general population of
black migrant offspring. Accordingly, social workers urged African American
62
James W. Messerschmidt, Masculinities and Crime: Critique and Reconceptualization of Theory (New
York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1993), 170.
63
Clarence H. Growdon, “The Mental Status of Reformatory Women,” The Journal of Criminal Law and
Criminology, 22, no. 2 (July 1931): 219.
114
eugenicists and reformers to support such measures, but almost entirely among poor, and
working-class migrant women, as well as wayward girls.
Further, laws were enacted to ensure that those most susceptible to being led into
vice – or in the case of inherited wantonness – leading the fit astray, were segregated
from the larger community and placed in state-run institutions. New York’s Wayward
Minors‘ Act, passed in the 1920s, defined a wayward minor in part as “[a]ny person
between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one who is ―habitually addicted to the use of
drugs or the intemperate use of intoxicating liquors; ―habitually associates with
dissolute persons; ―is found of his or her own free will . . . in a house of prostitution;
―habitually associates with . . . pimps or other criminals; willfully disobeys parents and
is ―in danger of becoming morally depraved; ―deserts his or her home and is ―in
danger of becoming morally depraved; or ―so deports himself or herself as to willfully
injure or endanger the morals or health of himself or herself or of others.”64 Cheryl D.
Hicks explains, “State legislators and reformers used the incorrigible girl and wayward
minor laws to regulate what they saw as improper parenting within working-class, nativeborn and immigrant, white and black families.”65 Hicks notes that the increased scrutiny
of single working women’s sexuality directly influenced Negro women’s treatment in the
social welfare and criminal justice systems and led to their imprisonment in state
“Wayward Minors’ Act, Title VII-A, Code of Criminal Procedure, Section 913-a.” Penal Law and the
Code of Criminal Procedure of New York (New York: M. Bender & Company, 1927), 387-a.
65
Cheryl D. Hicks, Talk with You Like a Woman: Urban Reform, Criminal Justice, and African-American
Women, Justice and Reform in New York, 1890-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2010), 185.
64
115
institutions with permanent arrest records.”66 Imprisonment in state institutions served
other functions; namely, it allowed social workers to study Negro criminal elements in
controlled groups, while testing eugenic theories of hereditary versus environmental
causes for dysgenicism.
In many instances, Negro eugenicists pushed to have wayward and incorrigible
girls removed from their families’ care and institutionalized to keep them from being
further led astray. Studies of criminals in both penal institutions and reformatories
solidified the loose connections between criminality and heredity by interpreting Binet
and other intelligence test responses as common among “imbeciles” or “morons” and the
“feebleminded.” In making such connections, social reformers believed they could
identify through intelligence testing, physical appearance (including posture), and family
engagement67 the potential criminality of the subject. Subsequently, these reformers
would promote forced sterilization and birth control among these populations.
Even among respected Black reformers and educators, eugenics factored into how
they classified Black students’ mental aptitude, behavior, and character. Ione Peak, a
black public health and hygiene teacher, made such links between eugenic defects and
learning abilities, writing for the NAACP Crisis magazine. Having observed Negro
schoolchildren, she noted that classroom performance problems grew out of childhood
accidents, disease or malnutrition. Yet, Peak used eugenic language and terminology in
66
Hicks, 221.
Family engagement included records of overall family fitness and included information on education,
occupation, number of births of mother, place of birth, and the number of family members and conditions
under which they were committed to state institutions.
67
116
describing these children as “mental defectives” and determined that they fell “into
groups ranging from idiocy to high type morons.”68 While, she went on to characterize
the children’s defects as the result of the wantonness and careless behaviors of their
parents, Peak’s assessments of these girls labeled them social defectives whose biological
inheritance – in this case, the parents’ sexual depravity (indiscriminant sexual practices,
venereal disease, or mate selection) -- influenced the child’s abilities to develop mentally.
Peak proposed birth control as a viable solution to preventing the spread of those defects
and the birth of children under unhappy and ill-fated circumstances, and she criticized
those who deemed birth control to be un-Christian. She concluded, “Birth control is by
far the most effective means of preventing the increase of poverty, in eliminating the
tragedies of venereal diseases, and criminal delinquency.”69 Peak’s ability to shape
child’s play and learning difficulties as tragic results of malnutrition and childhood
accidents on the one hand, and then cast those same children as society’s future
degenerates on the other, demonstrated the schizophrenic nature of Negro eugenic testing
and diagnoses. Mental tests used by Peak and other black teachers included the StanfordBinet and the National Intelligence Test, both created by psychologists-eugenicists
Robert M. Yerkes and Lewis Terman. The results of these tests, then, had educational,
social, and health consequences as eugenic labeling was attached to outcomes. The
“why” and “how” aspects of diagnoses rarely made for seamless conclusions.
Researchers rarely found test subjects whose behaviors or abilities could not solely be
68
69
Ione Vesta Peak, “Prevention of Children’s Handicaps,” The Crisis, Dec. 1935, 367.
Peak, 381.
117
ascribed to heredity or social environment. Particularly among Black migrants with poor
educational backgrounds, satisfactory results may have hinged upon the examiners’
ability to work outside of their own bias. Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, for instance, found in
her examination of the Wittier School in California that ideas about intelligence, race and
science were inextricably linked and low scores on mental tests generally resulted in the
removal of Mexicans, Mexican Americans and African Americans who officials believed
would be unlikely to reform and become productive citizens. Students, labeled by their
parents’ condition – migrants, nomadic, immoral, and drinkers, found that their poor test
results provided evidence of hereditary defect.70 Officials categorized students who
performed poorly on intelligence tests as not only moronic or imbecilic, but also offered
corresponding eugenic and social classification including feebleminded and
psychopathic. J. McKeen Cattell cited the importance of measurements and labels in a
1924 article for the Scientific Monthly, writing the measure indicates the combined
natural and acquired ability of the individual to deal promptly and correctly with relations
that are largely verbal and mathematical in life. An inability to perform well on a Binet
test signaled a genetic issue that made it difficult to discover the true mental age or
capacity of a person.71
African American acceptance and use of eugenic terminology in assessing black
student behavior often moved fluidly between educational assessments and criminal
Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, “Intelligence Testing at Whittier School, 1890-1920,” Pacific Historical
Review 76, no. 2 (May 2007): 197.
71
J. McKeen Cattell, “The Interpretation of Intelligence Tests,” The Scientific Monthly, 18, no. 5, (May
1924) 512.
70
118
labeling. For instance, Edith Spurlock Sampson, an African American New York-based
attorney, graduate of the Columbia University School of Social Work, and probation
officer from 1925 to 1942, offered entries from her notes on a 16-year-old female subject
“Mathilda” who she placed in the State Institution for Feebleminded Children after
catching her writing “smutty notes to boys.” Sampson, a Negro sociologist, secured
eugenic-based IQ testing of Mathilda at the Institute for Juvenile Research, which found
Mathilda to have a mental age of six. She received “an intelligence rating of 39, and…
was classed as feebleminded in a high-grade imbecile group.”72 The Institute
recommended institutional care for her. Mathilda had no criminal or civil charges leveled
against her at the time of her commitment, and appears to have been placed in Bedford
simply to manage her sexuality. Based on the testing of other girls at Bedford,
researchers had already determined by the nature of the smutty note in Mathilda’s hand
that she was eugenically unfit. To what extent her feeblemindedness had shaped would be
determined by the exam results – the same Stanford-Binet or National Intelligence Test
used to document basic mental and intellectual abilities for potential schoolchildren.73
Even more direct links between inherited character and criminality were
established within reformatories for wayward girls as institution administrators took
advantage of access to their feebleminded populations and studied the possibilities of
familial taint among them. Alberta Guibord’s 1917 study of 200 women between the
ages 14-25 examined in the Laboratory of Social Hygiene at the State Reformatory for
72
73
Edith Sampson, “From the Diary of a Child Placing Agent,” Opportunity, April 1923, 11.
R.M. Yerkes, “Practical Mental Measurement,” The Scientific American Monthly, March 1920, 270.
119
Women at Bedford Hills, New York also characterized young Negro girls of migrant
families as sexual threats to decency. The lack of education and parental supervision
may have contributed to sex play, causing social workers to deduce that left on their own,
wayward girls would corrupt marriages, spread disease, and produce impoverished,
illegitimate children. Guibord found that “nearly three-fourths of the cases came from
domestic and factory employment and that only three and one-half per cent had engaged
in anything as skilled as office work,”74 leading her to correlate the inmate’s occupation,
education, and family background with a biological predisposition to criminality. In
keeping with general Eugenic Records Office documentations of posture, length of arms,
and overall observed constitutions of inmates, Guibord used the personal histories of the
children – most notably their parental neglect or household condition to theorize as to the
source of their waywardness. Guibord assigned posture as an indicator of character and
morality among the inmates based on the belief that breeding among defectives created
children with poor mental conditions as well as substandard organ and system
functions.75
Posture is noted as good in only 37 percent. The others show slumping
shoulders, flat chests, protruding abdomens and a generally poor carriage
which matches well the inert, unambitious character of their practices and
ideals… No person with organs pressed out of shape and vascular
mechanisms restricted by faulty posture can be expected to make proper
response to the demands of society.76
74
Guibord, 85.
Guibord, 85.
76
Guibord, 88.
75
120
The eugenic charting at Bedford was common at most reformatories and included
questions about the overall physical appearance of subjects that required measurements
or the speculative observation of trained nurses.77 Inasmuch as inmates at Bedford had
their measurements documented to denote the poor posture of dysgenic bodies, similarly
students at Ivy League universities – including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Barnard, and
Vassar – were required to take posture photos to produce objective measurements of
superiority. The photos were part of a formal medical discourse on superior character.
Joseph A. Soares, writes in The Power of Privilege:
Yale willingly participated in eugenic schemes to measure personal
character in particular the infamous practice that lasted until 1968 of
taking nude “posture” photographs to study the relation of body type to
personal abilities… Two technicians would instruct the youth to disrobe
before they would place metal pins against his spine that would both
measure and hold each youth in position while three photographs were
taken.78
The significance of these photos rests in their use in race hygiene courses on Ivy
League campuses, directly linking the genetic inheritance of physical (posture) mental
(aptitude) and intellectual (character) traits. While the causality was never made clear
between posture and inherited mental or intellectual traits, the Society for Science and the
Public posited in 1932 that the posture of pregnant women was indivisibly tied to the
overall health of the child en utero and in later life. Consulting Dr. Percy Toombs, the
Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California’s
Juvenile Justice System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 84.
78
Joseph A. Soares, The Power of Privilege: Yale and America’s Elite Colleges (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2007), 42.
77
121
article cites him cautioning readers that the physical structure of the child, bone
deformities, and congenital infections could all be lessened by the proper posture of the
mother.79 Toombs gives no indication of how the mother’s posture genetically affected
the unborn child; however, he asserts that even congenital infections have as their origin,
the mother’s posture. While congenital conditions were not necessarily inherited
(developing instead en utero as a result of environment), this did not disabuse the
common belief among laypeople that disease and deformities among children were the
result of inheritance.
In 1920, Ada Eliot Sheffield, Director of the Boston Bureau of Illegitimacy,
created a template for social work diagnoses in which she maintained certain physical
descriptors aided in determining placement, treatment, and reform measures for each
“client.” Sheffield offered the below description of a client and noted that such
descriptive facts were relevant for treatment because any evidence of Negro blood had a
bearing on character and required race-based treatment. The patient’s intake records
never indicated how she came to the reformatory or specifics of her confinement;
however, she was confined a unit for illegitimacy, so she was either pregnant or had
recently delivered at the facility. “The girl was a medium height, very dark, complexion
clear, black hair, glittering eyes, bridge of nose somewhat flattened, teeth good and have
been take care of, shows evidence of Negro blood…” Accordingly, she reasoned that the
appearance of the young girl “in so far as it is a factor in her attractiveness to men is
Society for Science and the Public, “Encouraging Fit Parents to Bear Children Advised,” The Science
News-Letter, 21, no. 579 (May 14, 1932): 305.
79
122
always of prime importance,”80 and the level of danger her waywardness posed.
Interestingly, Sheffield causally mentions “evidence of Negro blood” as important for
treatment purposes because the facilities Sheffield oversaw accepted only white girls, and
socially critical in that her ability to ‘pass’ for white could allow her to cross the color
line at will, disrupting white racial purity by marrying or having children with an
unsuspecting white man. Any suggestion that she may have been mixed-raced would
have eugenically impacted her confinement (she may have been asked to leave) as well as
her racial status.
Teeth became a tale-tell sign of Negro dysgenicism among reformers like
Sheffield. The condition of teeth among reformatory inmates signaled the presence of
congenital syphilis (absent visible sores), and was an indicator of either the child’s or the
parent’s morality. By linking mental aptitude to social and moral conditioning –
especially when diagnoses labeled such disorders as bad teeth, a result of congenital
syphilis – researchers could categorize professional Black women as inherently tainted
and no different from their urban, migrant contemporaries. An additional test of physical
strength found Negro women’s strength in “far excess of [white women],”81 eugenically
demonstrating a lack of femininity and gentility among Negro women – two
characteristics attached to true womanhood and proper mothering. Guibord admitted that
the relationship between physical structure and abnormalities in conduct were not
80
Ada Eliot Sheffield, The Social Case History: Its Construction and Content (New York: Russell Sage
Foundation, 1920), 184.
81
Guibord, 22.
123
conclusive; nevertheless, she wrote “it cannot escape the notice of even a casual observer
that viewed in a group the women of our study do present an undeniable oddity of
appearance.”82 The line between fit and unfit often misdiagnosed, overlooked, and
marginalized entire groups of individuals. Guibord understood that studying the inherited
traits of individuals within a reformatory system could possibly connect undiscovered
taint among semi-professional classes, namely college students and teachers.
Considering the perpetual fear that unguarded purity was being undermined by poor
stock, the study of semi-professional classes proved as important as documenting the
pure stock of Ivy League students and the criminal classes of reformatories.
For both Negro eugenicists, as well as for reformers with no particular eugenic
leanings, regulating Negro fertility formed a crucial component to improving housing,
overall health, and better educational opportunities for migrant Negro women. As these
social indicators of well-being competed with efforts to reduce and ward off vice-related
crime, Negro eugenicists turned increasingly to urban courts and the social organizations
aiding the rehabilitation of Negro convicts. The Urban League gathered raw data on
Negro fitness through interviews with individuals and families seeking financial or food
support. Occasionally, reform efforts united non-eugenic reformers and those that
utilized eugenic theories to address dysgenic behavior, as they incorporated eugenic
language and eugenic arguments into their reform proposals. For example, to determine
the root causes of Negro women’s involvement in dysgenic behavior such as near
82
Guibord, 88.
124
prostitution (dates with promise of sexual contact in exchange for favors), prostitution,
carousing, and loitering, black clubwomen from 1917 through the Depression established
settlement houses in migrant neighborhoods.83
Migrant women provided Negro researchers a particularly vital subject for
eugenic and social reform analysis reflecting the intersections between gender, class and
race. Negro women’s sexuality and the implications of their sexual behavior necessarily
set the parameters of normal, marginal, and pathological. Susan Cahn notes,
“Clubwomen believed that left unchecked, the assertive sexuality of teenagers put them
in danger of sexual abuse and placed a stain on the image of all Black women by
confirming the stereotype of Black female promiscuity.”84 Further, by working as gender
and race role models to young mothers, clubwomen “hoped to inculcate a set of values
that included middle-class standards of sexual propriety.”85 Clubwomen did not believe
that black poverty reflected eugenically poor standards of propriety. However, they
understood that the mere appearance of sexual degeneracy caused urban law enforcement
to arrest and detain Negro women for sexual vice. For instance, as Negro women often
found work and maintained it for sustained periods, their arrests for prostitution, (falsely
or accurately), removed both a caregiver and a wage-earner from an already
economically-stretched household.
83
Wanda A. Hendricks, Gender, Race and Politics in the Midwest: Black Club Women in Illinois
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998) 54-55.
84
Susan K. Cahn, Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2007), 32.
85
Cahn, 33.
125
Timothy Gilfoyle noted that being “relegated to the margins of nineteenth century
economic and social life, black women were frequently portrayed as highly sexed and
motivated by carnal impulses.”86 Similarly, Thomas Mackey wrote that the number of
arrests of Negro women in Harlem legitimated the perception among whites that
prostitution and sex crimes were Negro issues and not one with which whites needed to
be terribly concerned.87 Jacqueline Jones’ research on sex trafficking during the Great
Migration documents a ready system of “flesh peddling” that thrived through migrant
naiveté. She wrote:
More than one young Black woman, lured north by the prospect of a cook’s job
and provided transportation at a nominal cost, found herself alone on the dock in
New York or Boston and at the mercy of a society official. After her luggage was
confiscated, she might be placed in a brothel or with a white woman who only
wanted a window washer or floor scrubber.88
The belief in Black women’s promiscuity seemed to have arrived in urban areas before
black women themselves alighted from trains fresh from the South. Gilfolye, Mackey
and Jones’ acknowledge that the unscrupulous practice of baiting unsuspecting
southerners to urban towns for illicit means had a history as long and varied as the
migrants themselves. As early as the turn-of-the-century, urban cities maintained a steady
stream of vice that required the gullibility of migrants and the blind-eye of average
citizens to function.
86
Timothy J. Gilfoyle. City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 17901920 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 42.
87
Thomas C. Mackey, Pursing Johns: Criminal Law Reform, Defending Character and New York City
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005), 53.
88
Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to
the Present (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 134.
126
Young girls were easily preyed upon and often unaware of the dangers
surrounding them. Reformer Jane Hunter detailed her first weeks in Cleveland in 1905 as
hazard-ridden with her inadvertently seeking lodging in a house of prostitution, and
accepting help from a “civic organization” led by a ward leader turned pimp, Albert
“Starlight” Boyd. She recollected, “Until my arrival in Cleveland I was ignorant of the
wholesale organized traffic in black flesh.” Hunter called Boyd’s businesses “a
recruiting station for the notorious Starlight – procurer for wild, wealthy men; later
master of the underworld; and finally, manipulator of the Negro vote for unprincipled
politicians.”89 Migration and settlement bred several systems of racialized moral
oppression that to the eugenic reformist proved the dysgenicism of those migrating from
the South. Lodging for Negro women became scarce enough to make lodging in rooming
houses, whorehouses, and with families, whose family business included some form of
vice, a necessity.
Confinement was also a matter of protecting the public welfare according to these
reformers and social workers. Katharine Bement Davis, a eugenicist and the first
superintendent of the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford, spoke
candidly alongside Charles Davenport (head of the Eugenics Records Office) at the New
York State Conference of Charities and Corrections in 1913. She argued that without
long-term confinement of Negro women in state institutions where researchers could
observe these women, Binet and other eugenic testing, possessed little real value.90 In
89
90
Jane Edna Hunter, A Nickel and a Prayer (Cleveland: Elli Kani Publishing Company, 1940), 68.
Nicole Hahn Rafter, Encyclopedia of Women and Crime (New York: Onyx Press, 2000), 15.
127
1915 the young women confined to Bedford began to protest against the mental and
intellectual examinations conducted on them by various bodies of researchers, including
those supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. The protests included acts of defiance,
insubordination, and fire setting, culminating in a 1920 riot and investigation of the
facility’s disciplinary procedures. The precipitation of more advanced mental
examinations came as crime was officially attached to feeblemindedness and researchers
labeled all wanton girls potential psychopaths—that it as women exhibiting inherent
defects in volition and inhibition, together with a lowered threshold for and a
disproportionate response to implicit and explicit stimuli or defective emotional control.91
The 1920 penal shift toward the theory of psychopathy as a cause of crime established the
defective-delinquent law, making the girls’ arrests for immoral behavior criminal
offenses that “might send them to civil institutions for indefinite terms.” One inmate,
Ruth Carter, assaulted an officer during the 1920s riot and a resulting news story led to a
court case to address the charges she leveled against the facility. The initial investigation
by the commissioner of prisons substantiated charges of attendant abuse, including
cruelty, forced sterilizations under eugenic sanction, and physical torture.92
By action of the Board of Managers taken on December 12, 1919, during the
progress of the investigation, the so-called “stringing-up” “water treatment” and
handcuffing in cells were ordered discontinued and should be – FOREVER.
Young women are only sent to Bedford when there are prevalent conditions
which make it evident to the magistrate that the girls could not be helped by
91
National Committee for Mental Hygiene, Mental Hygiene (New York: National Committee for Mental
Hygiene, 1922), 730.
92
Nicole Hahn Rafter, Partial Justice: Women, Prisons, and Social Control (New Brunswick: Transaction
Publishers, 1990), 80.
128
probation and that they require institutional treatment. During the past year, of
167 committed to the institution, 100 had from one to five arrests, and one had
fourteen previous arrests. What the institution has to deal with is a heterogeneous
population largely drawn from the lowest strata of New York City life; 75 per
cent, of the women being prostitutes and 70 per cent, of those suffering from
venereal diseases. Probably the most serious of all the commitments are the
supposedly incorrigible girls sent here by the courts after they have been found
impossible to control in the private correctional institutions of New York City.93
Reformatories, while ideal for segregating wayward and incorrigible girls and
putting them to “useful” work, often resulted in distrust for the court system and
facilitated alternative sexual behaviors among inmates. Administrators at The New York
State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills (known simply as Bedford) for instance,
felt no need to segregate female inmates based on race until the mid-1920s when the
interracial sexual dalliances between inmates became problematic. Racial segregation of
the Negro and white female inmates at Bedford stemmed from a supposed sexual
fascination among white females with their black contemporaries, rather than from a
eugenic belief that the dysgenic Negro girls would further corrupt the white females.
Several State Board of Charity reports noticed an increase of white girls moving into allNegro neighborhoods after leaving Bedford and living openly lesbian lifestyles,
suggesting the reformatory as the place where “harmful intimacies” originated.94
Bedford officials argued that black inmates were the passive rather than
aggressive parties in homoerotic and homosexual relationships, concluding that the
93
Alfred E. Smith. State of New York: The Pubic Papers of Alfred E. Smith, Governor. (Albany: J. B.
Lyon Company, 1921), 175.
94
Ruth M. Alexander, The “Girl Problem”: Female Sexual Delinquency in New York, 1900-1930 (Ithaca:
Cornell University, 1995), 96.
129
“unfortunate psychological influence” of black women on white women stemmed from
the former’s perceived masculinity. That is, they argued that black women possessed
masculine traits that attracted white women. In her study, Hicks noted that one inmate in
particular, Amanda B.is described in institution records as a “young colored woman with
thick lips and very dark skin…readily supplied through her racial characteristics a
feminine substitute for the masculine companionship [white women] were temporarily
denied.”95 The records described other Negro female inmates with thick lips and deeply
pigmented skin as sexually eliciting an “emotional disturbance” among the white female
inmates by their appearance. White women associated the dark skin of fellow inmates
with both virility and masculinity, inverting within the reformatory, the white
supremacist aversion to dark-skinned black women. The darker the skin the more “male”
the inmate appeared, the more aggressive her supposed tendencies, and the more she was
subsequently desired. Criminologists, psychologists, and state officials denounced crossrace romance between black and white inmates for disrupting discipline and “often cast
black women as masculine, aggressive, hypersexual, [and] sexually deviant.”96 Hypersexuality was often posited as a racial, biological imperative applied solely to black
women and used to explain high rates of illegitimacy.97 Social scientists, government
workers, and service providers considered black women’s moral degeneracy inherited,
95
Stephanie Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers during the
Jim Crow Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 227.
96
Estelle B. Freedman, “The Prison Lesbian: Race, Class, and the Construction of the Aggressive Female
Homosexual, 1915-1965,” in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History ed. Martha
Hodes (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 425.
97
Rickie Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race before Roe v. Wade (New York:
Routledge, 2000), 59.
130
where sexually promiscuous white females were largely labeled neurotic and their hypersexuality deemed a function of an irrational subconscious.98 There was certainly no
inherited component to the condition and it was considered completely curable with
confinement. While confined, white hyper-sexuality took on other unexpected
characteristics, including the projection of maleness onto black female patients. Estelle
B. Freedman explains that assigning the male aggressor role to black women and
preserving a semblance of femininity for their white partners racialized the sexual
pathology of inversion. According to asylum physicians, “white women were not really
lesbians, for they were attracted to men, for whom black women temporarily substituted
… implicitly blaming black women for sexual aggression, and indeed, homosexuality by
associating them with a male role.”99
Theories of Negro women’s greater capacity for criminality rested in part on a
model of sexual inversion, wherein Negro women supposedly shared equal masculine,
violent, and aggressive tendencies with Negro men. In sharing hyper-sexuality with
Negro men, lesbianism and sexual aggression among Negro women alarmed few prison
administrators. White female aggression toward Negro women, however, ushered in the
diagnosis of sexual psychopathy, which applied almost exclusively in the 1930s to these
white female inmates. Sexual psychopathy was a manner of classifying “masculine”,
98
Susan Cahn, Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2007), 59.
99
Freedman, 425.
131
“aggressive”, and “sexually perverted” white females confined in reformatories.100 The
term would later be applied to homosexuality in general, but came to categorize girls like
Lena Lebofsky, whose sexually explicit letter to a black inmate in 1920 created a penalwide scandal. The note, confiscated before it could be given to “Freeman” announced
“some fine day I’m going to grab you and make you warm me up and fuck me and I’ll be
willing to get punished every day in the week for you and you only.”101 Both the overt
and vulgar nature of the letter raised the ire of administrators who grappled as much with
the interracial aspects of such interactions as with the offensive wording. Black women
were not labeled under the term sexual psychopathy because theories of black women’s
greater criminality rested in part on a model of sexual inversion, in which black women
more easily engaged in male aggressive behavior.102
While eugenics specifically categorized homosexuality as a form of degeneracy, it
also lauded the belief that homosexuals were largely sterile, thereby restricting their
dysgenicism from passing to additional generations. Homosexuality could be likened to
the greatest form of race suicide in that marriage and children would not be reproduced
from homosexual relationships. Provided the immorality ascribed to homosexuality was
temporary and a function of the reformatory environment, social workers were not
alarmed. Still physicians like William Robinson, considered homosexuality a scourge on
100
Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 294.
101
Sarah Potter, “Undesirable Relations”: Same-Sex Relationships and the Meaning of Sexual Desire at a
Women’s Reformatory during the Progressive Era.” Feminist Studies 30, no.2, (Summer 2004): 294.
102
Freedman, 426.
132
white manhood, writing in 1914, “Every sexual deviation or disorder which has for its
result an inability to perpetuate the race is ipso facto pathologic, ipso facto an
abnormality, and this is pre-eminently true of homosexuality.”103
Lesbianism, when practiced among Negro women became quietly acceptable to
eugenicist and some reformers, as it usually guaranteed an absence of progeny among
these women. Similarly, the belief that incarcerated Negro women carried congenital
syphilis and would over time be rendered sterile, suggested segregating them from white
females would halt the potential spread of the disease. In fact, some criminologists,
including Alberta S.B. Guibord, considered the hereditary transmission of syphilis “one
of the chief factors in physical, moral, and mental degeneration.”104 In her
groundbreaking study of criminal women, Guibord asserted “the high degree of venereal
infection in these subjects makes sterility a probability… Another fact lessening
likelihood of numerous populations from this source is the almost universally poor
physical condition of the children born to these women. In general, they are marantic,
rachitic babies who die early.”105 Guibord found that many of the black women
incarcerated for prostitution had early stages of venereal infections. Noting their poor
living conditions and inability to maintain steady incomes, these women could ill-afford
to seek medical help for “female issues.” Their infections, then, created a volatile heath
103
Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American
Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 31.
104
Alberta S.B. Guibord, “Physical States of Criminal Women,” Journal of the American Institute of
Criminal Law and Criminology, 8 (May 1917 – March 1918,):92.
105
Guibord, 86.
133
environment for unborn children that saw many of them born with congenital forms of
the mother’s condition.
Eugenic measurements of intellect and ability tended to serve two purposes
whether conducted in reformatories or on Ivy League college campuses: to identify the
cause (inherited or environmental) of fitness/unfitness, and to properly secure the genetic
material through confinement and sterilization in the case of dysgenicism or to segregate
and promote reproduction among the ‘pure.’ Within the reformatory setting, a desire to
protect white genetic superiority continued despite the hyper-sexual, criminal, or
otherwise dysgenic behavior of white females. Celine Parrenas Shimizu calls the notions
of race-positive sexuality a part of a larger psychic legacy requiring emphasis and
continuity of white indifference to the different racial contexts for discourse of sexuality.
White females connote the psychic innocence of the nation and require protection
racially, sexually, and from themselves.106 Eugenic classifications by the 1930s,
increasingly relied on race and class and led researchers to explain feeblemindedness,
criminality, illegitimacy or mental defect among black females as inherited and constant.
BIRTH CONTROL & EUGENIC STERILIZATION AS SOCIAL REHABILITATION
Mainstream eugenics supported the idea that there existed among the
feebleminded a notorious fecundity. Feebleminded women, Margaret Sanger wrote in
1922, “constitute a permanent menace to the race and one which becomes serious at a
106
Celine Parrenas Shimizu, The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian / American Women on Screen
and Scene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 145.
134
time when the decline of the birth rate is unmistakable.”107 With feebleminded white
women averaging 7.3 degenerate children, while their fit counterparts averaged only four
fit children, Sanger made a plea for “cradle competition,” wherein only the soundest
women would be allowed to reproduce, guaranteeing fit progeny. Negro ministers offered
a legitimate segue-way for White physicians, social workers, and eugenicists to promote
birth control.
In addition to supporting the Eugenic Record Office, Sanger maintained
membership with the American Eugenics Society. By 1939, Margaret Sanger had
introduced both the Negro Project – a series of birth control efforts and clinics opened in
Negro communities expressly for the use of Negro women -- as well as the Division of
Negro Services within the Birth Control Federation of America. The latter utilized a
broad range of high-profile professional Negroes – including Mary McLeod Bethune – to
assist in the promotion of birth control among Negro women.
In similar terms, Negro eugenicists touted the prolific nature of unfit (poor, undereducated, and increasingly unmarried) Negro women, but overwhelmingly blamed their
social status and high fertility on ignorance and naiveté.108 The supposed ignorance and
naiveté of Black migrants was directly linked to their alleged child-like minds and lack of
social evolution. U.S. Public Health Service agents tasked with detecting dysgenic
immigrants at Ellis Island could have, using various tests of social aptitude on migrants,
Margaret Sanger, Pivot of Civilization (New York: Brentano’s Publishers, 1922), 87.
American Academy of Political and Social Science, The Negro’s Progress in Fifty Years (Philadelphia:
American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1913), 140.
107
108
135
easily labeled blacks among the “moron” class of immigrants. Characterized by “near
normal [appearances] and being less easily recognized…[morons] would immediately
start a line of defectives whose progeny, like a brook, will go on forever, branching off
here in an imbecile and there in an epileptic, costing the country millions of dollars in
court fees and incarceration expenses.”109 The moron, a classification constructed by
ERO researcher Henry Goddard to denote the mentally dull, “symbolized the danger of
female sexuality unleashed.”110 In fact, between 1919 and 1935 the dialogue among
Negroes about birth control moved from intra-racial conferences promoting racial uplift
to mainstream magazines and journals speaking directly to population and social control.
Many African Americans objected to birth control on the grounds that regulating
fecundity was morally unsound and anti-Christian. Others readily associated birth
control with sterilizations and the emasculation of black men in childbearing decisions.
Yet, some ministers believed the necessity for birth control among poor and working
class Negro women took precedence over religious tenets. Reverend Cecil Weier wrote
in 1932 that in order to eliminate poverty the Negro had to practice birth control in a less
rudimentary, more scientific manner. Where Negroes objected to birth control on the
grounds of Christian belief, Weier proposed organized Christianity either change its
position that constituted birth control a sin or expect continued poverty among Negro
congregants. “This is no doubt a place where Christianity must break and make some
109
William H. Tucker, The Science and Politics of Racial Research (Urbana-Champaign: The University of
Illinois, 1996), 77.
110
Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to
the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 3.
136
mores with herself.”111 Negro ministers, like the majority of the Negro population, split
along socio-economic lines when discussing birth control; the affluent, middle-class
preachers supported population control to beat back the tide of poverty and stabilize the
professional class, whereas rural and working-class ministers overwhelmingly cast any
man-made interference in the conception or birth of a child as, a sin.112
Negro ministers, like Isaac Reed Berry, discussed social themes within their
sermons that provided dictates on purity, mate selection, vice, and race degeneration. In
one1931 sermon, Berry detailed the misery of a female parishioner whose fifteen-yearold daughter had married a boy the mother had been inviting to her house regularly for
meals. Having run off with the young man months earlier, she returned home, pregnant
and alone. Berry’s sermon claimed the mother had “aided and abetted” the child’s
misery, by not offering her sound eugenic advice on marriageable young men. Mate
selection, in his estimation was far more important than birth control itself. He wrote:
The young man that a young woman should marry should possess a number of
things before she marries him. First, he should be well-born. I care not whether
he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. I care not whether he has achieved
much success. I care not whether he comes from a lowly log cabin so long as the
blood within his veins runs pure...That’s what I am after.113
G. Cecil Weier, “Christianity and the Negro Problem,” The Journal of Negro History 16, no.1, (Jan.
1931): 75.
112
(See Chapter Three for additional information on the relationship between Bethune and the transmission
of birth control information to Howard University students through her colleague and Howard University
professor Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee).
113
Isaac Reed Berry, Isaac Reed Berry Papers / Sermons “The Young Man a Young Woman Should
Marry” MC 283. Box 4, Folder 227 / 234. * In the same sermon Berry address homosexuality, surmising
that “A man may not be handsome but he must be normal with a voice speaking as a man’s voice should
speak, with all the vitality and strength of a man… If he were to find himself having feminine tendencies,
he would look himself squarely in the eyes in the mirror and say “Now look here, you sissy, you are going
to turn around and be a man. Nobody will ever love you or care for you. Eccentric men should be avoided
because they are often not real men. Avoid a sissy as you would a rattlesnake.”
111
137
At first glance, it appears as if Berry is calling for the young woman to marry a “pure
blood” Negro man. The fact that he references the man being “well-born” and not
wealthy contradicts the logic of social eugenics that encouraged the selective breeding of
mates based on social status. However, given that many African Americans at the time
were not “pure bloods” according to eugenic racial scales, Berry’s invective for the
young woman to marry a man whose blood “runs pure” may indicate a blurring of
standard scientific eugenic and social eugenic dogmas. Regardless, Berry’s key point,
that blood and not status should determine the suitability of a potential husband reveals
how popular eugenics could influence black theology. Moreover, Berry intimates that
“bad marriages” could lead to the birth of unfit children. So, while his sermon does not
endorse birth control by artificial means, it advocates a kind of natural birth control by
encouraging “better breeding.” Berry’s sermon cloaked birth control beneath a
respectable subtext marriage; however, other clergy, including Harlem’s Adam Clayton
Powell, openly framed his talks and sermons on birth control around illegitimacy,
disease, health, and social mobility, telling critics that “it is because of ignorance that so
many diseases have spread.”114 Powell’s congregants at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist
Church one of the most influential in New York, were required to take sex education
classes,115 irrespective of their marital status, signaling an active campaign to promote
114
Witold Rybczynski, City Life: Urban Expectations in a New World (New York: Harper Collins, 1995),
160.
115
Steven Andrew Reich, Encyclopedia of the Great Black Migration (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2008), 698.
138
birth control among all classes, including migrants. Perhaps it was Powell’s willingness
as a preacher to discuss sexuality and birth control that prompted, at least the Harlem
migrants to consider birth control methods.
When migrant Negro women utilized birth control methods, their practices
appeared to mimic the traditional organic tinctures used by their enslaved grandmothers
and included such solutions as tansy, rue, roots and seeds of the cotton plant, pennyroyal,
cedar gum, and camphor. Additionally, “vaginal douches made of a tea brewed from
cocklebur roots mixed with bluestone was used both as a menstrual regulator and to wash
out the fetus if pregnancy did occur.”116
As early as 1915, Negro physician Barnett Rhetta reinforced calls for birth
control, but lamented the reticence many Negro doctors had toward discussing birth
control or even venereal disease prevention among migrant patients. Rhetta believed a
large “majority of those who indulge in sexual intercourse, especially between puberty
and the marriageable age, are diseased.”117 Returning to the desire among Negro
reformers to name a cause for dysgenicism, including disease susceptibility, Rhetta listed
dysgenic Negro children the result of paternal idiopathic sterility – a condition caused by
hyper-sexuality, wherein the seminal ducts burst internally and render inferior quality
ejaculate. Rhetta echoed the same sentiments as eugenicists like Wilbur C. Phillips in his
The Trend of Medico-Social Effort in Child Welfare Work (1912), arguing that that the
116
Nick J. Myers, III, Black Hearts: The Development of Black Sexuality in America (New York: Trafford
Publishing, 2003), 41-42.
117
Barnett M. Rhetta, “A Plea for the Lives of the Unborn” Journal of the National Medical Association, 7,
no. 3 (July – September 1915): 200.
139
physician should be the best friend of the unborn child. However, he implores physicians
to accept the rhetoric that “few well-bred and well-educated children would mean more
to the race,” but insists that acceptance “no argument in favor of the abortion, nor is it an
argument in favor of the so-called eugenics as practiced here today.”118 Rhetta notes the
non-scientific approach of birth control which encouraged the middle-class to produce
and the poor to produce less, without the benefit of a selection process to determine,
irrespective of class, the biological fitness of individuals to reproduce. Rhetta insisted
that in order for eugenics to work scientifically, laws of who shall marry and reproduce
had to be squarely applied.119 Calling the unfit a “menace to the very life of men,” Rhetta
linked dubious attempts by white physicians to “wipe out” the Negro in America with the
common practice of big hospitals and institutions of surgically sterilizing Negro women
without their permission, or subjecting them to x-rays for the purpose rendering Negro
women barren.120 For some Negroes, birth control, abortion, and sterilization were tools
of race suicide in the hands of doctors, though many black women considered birth
control necessary to their status, attitudes about sex and childbearing, and their roles at
home and in the larger community.121
Negro physician W. G. Alexander alluded to sterilization as a form of birth
control, citing centuries-old customs and traditions in the United States that encouraged
the mass birth of Negro babies during slavery and through the 1920s. Alexander called
118
Rhetta, 205.
Rhetta, 203.
120
Rhetta, 203.
121
Rodrique, 141.
119
140
birth control a “reasonable, a sane, and a safe program and procedure; that was
particularly applicable to Negroes.”122 Alexander intimates that Negroes had not
developed the autonomy to determine their family size as they were still influenced by
the reproductive imperatives of slavery. For him, modernity dictated that African
Americans—particularly poor black women—reduce their family size using “procedures”
as multiple births were now anachronistic and harmful to the advancement of the race.
Alexander dismisses the skill and role of traditional black female authority by eliminating
midwives from the reproductive dialogue in favor of college-trained men. Gertrude
Jacinta Fraser notes in African American Midwifery in the South: Dialogues of Birth,
Race and Memory, that while midwives were perceived as ignorant, superstitious,
illiterate, and of an inferior class, they also constituted professional competition. 123
Further, in terming birth control a procedure rather than acknowledging the bounty of
foams, douches, and prophylactics used by Negro women to limit family size, Alexander
most likely referred to any of a number of surgical procedures employed by doctors to
render Negro women sterile.
While Dunbar-Nelson did not criticize educated New Negro women for limiting
their number of children, Chandler Owen, editor of the Messenger, a New Negro weekly
newspaper, expressed disturbance at the prospect of the children of poor blacks
outnumbering those of the educated. He wrote in The Birth Control Review in September
W.G. Alexander, “Birth Control for the Negro: Fad or Necessity?” Journal of the National Medical
Association 24 (August 1932), 39.
123
Gertrude Jacinta Fraser, African American Midwifery in the South: Dialogues of Birth, Race, and
Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 122.
122
141
1919, that census takers in Norfolk, Virginia (his hometown) often encountered Negro
homes with between seven and eighteen children – a great many of which had died from
poverty-related illness by the subsequent census. He remarked, “The Negroes in the
cities today are beginning to learn a great deal about Birth Control. In Boston,
Philadelphia, New York, Washington, and Baltimore, it is difficult to find the more
intelligent Negro women who have any children at all. Those who are most able to care
for children have the fewest, those who are least able, have the greatest number.”124
Owen imbibes the standard social eugenic lament that the most capable parents have the
fewest children, whereas the most inadequate gave birth to the greatest number of
children. He posits the “able” as both the intellectually fit, as well as the most socially
and economically fit. Eugenics posited ability – mental, intellectual, social, and artistic –
as inheritable traits whose levels of transmission depended on the existing traits of
parents as well as ancestors.125 Arguably, Owen’s play on intellect also casts black
women with no children as having control over their impulses and being able to regulate
their own bodies, rather than as asexual or pious women. In so doing, Owen makes a
correlation between reproductive control and upward mobility. Owen’s argument may
have grown out of a 1914 report from the American Statistical Association that heralded
the increased number of childless, married black women in Northern cities in Minnesota,
Ohio and Rhode Island. 126 The report found “a degree of barrenness far exceeding that
Chandler Owen, “Women and Children of the South,” The Birth Control Review (September 1919): 20.
Charles Davenport, Heredity and Eugenics, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1912), 284.
126
Joseph A. Hill, “Comparative Fecundity of Women in Native and Foreign Parentage in the United
States,” Journal of the American Statistical Association, (1914), 589.
124
125
142
for the white women of American stock. Of the married Negro women 20.5 percent or
one in five, was childless…[and] believed to be typical,”127 and suggested that the
women who had been married for between 10 and 20 years represented stable, perhaps
even middle-class women who through either choice or inability, had no children.
Social reformer Alice Dunbar-Nelson discussed folk birth control methods among
New Negro women as covert methods used by educated Negro women. In a 1920 essay,
“Woman’s Most Serious Problem” Dunbar-Nelson wrote that educated Negro women
overwhelming preferred economic independence and earning potential to rearing
children. The notion was that given a choice, these women would go to work rather than
stay at home, reasoning that having children and working full-time could inadvertently
supply a steady number of delinquent children due to their absence in the home as
caregivers. In an attempt to assert both their sexual and economic freedom, many of
these women utilized pre-industrial birth control methods such as herbal douches and
female preparations such as savin (a plant similar to juniper that when boiled and drank
produced uterine hemorrhages) and pennyroyal to induce miscarriages.128
By the 1930s, H.L. Mencken, a journalist and cultural critic, openly promoted the
sterilization of Negro migrants as a form of population control and economic stability.
Annoyed with the amount of taxpayer revenue used to finance reformatories and support
impoverished families, Mencken made clear the job of dealing with dysgenic populations
belonged to biologists rather than reformers or racial uplift activists. Mencken argued
127
128
Hill, 588-589.
Alice Dunbar-Nelson, “Woman’s Most Serious Problem,” The Messenger, March 1927, 73, 86.
143
that being able to “buy and scrap their biological potency [would be cheaper] than to
support their hopeless and innumerable progeny.”129 Other proponents of sterilization
introduced U.S. legislation to mimic that introduced into the British parliament to
sterilize the Negro populations of Bermuda due to their rapid increase and supposed
financial burden to England. The British government considered agricultural toilers
increasingly burdensome with the pregnancies, illnesses and deaths (of women and small
children during or immediately following childbirth), and cost of maintaining larger
families of laborers, compromised the efficiency of production.130 Elaine Ellis examined
several other attempts by both German and U.S. politicians to either reduce or eliminate
the population increase among Negroes through sterilization. In one instance, she
reported in an October 1938 The Crisis article that ex-Governor J. M. Futrell of Arkansas
proposed sterilization for Negro tenant farmers and sharecroppers of that state on the
grounds of their low mental capacity. Ellis believed Futrell’s efforts stemmed from an
overall plan to sterilize mentally deficient tenant-croppers as a “disguise for his real
intention to include the entire group if necessary.”131
Ellis pointed to plans by seated politicians to “extoll sterilization as a method of
economic social planning which would allow only the self-sustaining to propagate.”132
Economist Thomas Nixon Carter, similarly, proposed that marriage be limited to couples
able to afford automobiles. Ellis’ further examination of eugenic laws found that in thirty
H. L. Mencken, “The Dole for Bogus Farmers,” American Mercury, December 1936, 408.
Elaine Ellis, “Sterilization: A Menace to the Negro,” The Crisis, May 1937 137
131
Elaine Ellis, “Women in the Cotton Fields,” The Crisis, 45, no.10 (October 1938), 333.
132
Ellis, 333.
129
130
144
states until 1935, sterilizations had been performed on the mentally deficient, the insane,
and in several states, the ‘habitual’ (second or third-time offenders) criminals, “perverts”
(those engaged in rape, incest, sodomy, and necrophilia)133, drug addicts and prostitutes.
Particularly in the case of Negro women, whose incarceration rates in Northern cities for
petty crimes almost inevitably led to incarceration in asylums or prisons, eugenic
sterilization often came as a pre-requisite of release. Ellis noted that “even under socalled eugenic sterilization, the Negro bears mute witness to the status forced upon him
by society; for he fills his quota in the state institutions” where forced sterilizations were
mandated.134 Eugenic proponents argued that each of the thirty states that had enacted
compulsory sterilization laws beginning in 1907, had authority to perform reproductive
sterilizations on their criminal, feebleminded (that is, sexually wayward), and defective
charges.135 African Americans made up large numbers of the incarcerated based on
arrests stemming from debt peonage and Jim Crow justice, which saw incarcerations tied
to manufactured charges of idleness and vagrancy and sentences of 1 to 99 years for most
offenses. The jailed would work off their debt on chain gangs, building state highways,
or as labor to local private industry. The vague structure of the 1 to 99 year sentence,
also known as the indeterminate maximum (IM), allowed a landowner to determine the
length of confinement for the offender. Ellis alludes to the number of blacks
disproportionately in state custody as potential victims of forced sterilization. Most
133
Paul Eugene Bowers, Clinical Studies in the Relationship of Insanity to Crime (Michigan City, Indiana:
Dispatch Print, 1915), 87.
134
Ellis, 155.
135
This initial legislation was overturned as unconstitutional in 1921 as unconstitutional.
145
Negro eugenicists and reformers accepted some hereditarianism, but not to the exclusion
of a belief that the proper nurturing and reform efforts could ameliorate– at least some –
levels of Negro dysgenicism.
The use of sterilization as a method of birth control was a reality for thousands of
New Negroes between 1915 and 1935. Calls by Negro reformers to improve the quality
of the race often imbibed eugenic language Thomas Garth, for instance, wrote in a 1930
Opportunity magazine article that Negroes could have no race pride in substandard
members of the race. He posited that the race “should seek to eliminate them weed them
out – and thereby obtain by means of selection a better stock.”136 Terms like “weeding
out” and “eliminating” speak directly to the identification of dysgenics members of the
race, and their segregation from larger society through reformatory or prison
commitments. Garth promotes the establishment of a selection process that identified
better stock – though it is unclear from what means or criteria – and the subsequent
elimination of the unfit by terminating their reproductive capabilities. Such positions
demonstrate the scientific eugenic approach of some Negro thinkers in addressing social
non-conformity or -- in the case of Negro migrants - an unwillingness or inability to be
“uplifted.” Garth further asserted that being well-born (genetically) was not enough to
maintain fitness in the wake of rampant social deviancy. He wrote, “The well-bred
individual must have proper nurture else the excellent produce of nature will be made
inferior because of a poor bringing up.”137 Garth, like Reverend Reed, notes here the
136
137
Thomas R. Garth, “Eugenics, Euthenics, and Race,” Opportunity (July 1930), 207
Garth, 207.
146
potential of bad parenting to offset the natural evolution and propagation of “fit”
Negroes. Arguably, in his reference to “bringing up”, Garth warned of the dangers of
exposing children to disease, urban popular culture, vice and other societal ills that race
leaders argues would lead to the degeneration of the race. .
Opportunity was not alone in taking up the birth control debate in the Black
community. By June 1932, the position of many New Negro leaders on the role of birth
control as an essential component to social, economic, and racial progress became clear
in the pages of the Birth Control Review’s Negro Number issue. Comprising voices from
educators, sociologists, ministers and reformers, the issue solidly placed eugenic
practices like better breeding, quality or birth control, and sterilizations among acceptable
population control measures.138
George S. Schuyler, for instance, fastened his argument for Negro birth control to
the quality of offspring produced by unfit working-class women. In his work for the
issue, “Quality or Quantity” Schuyler referred to women biologically as child factories
that required certain ingredients of a certain quality “to produce a healthy child under
proper conditions of rest and security… If these are absent, the child will usually be an
inferior product.”139 The eugenic nature of Schuyler’s comments is made all the more
clear in his conclusion that asks if the Negro should approach the birth control
scientifically and choose quantity or quality in children. He answers: “Most Negroes,
138
139
Editor, The Birth Control Review (June 1932): 163.
George S. Schuyler, “Quantity or Quality,” The Birth Control Review (June 1932):166.
147
especially the women, would go in for quality production if they only knew how.”140 It is
unclear given the state of genetic research how black women would be able to determine
which pregnancies would produce “quality” children.
W.E.B. Du Bois’ contribution to the edition, “Black Folks and Birth Control”
reiterated his earlier Talented Tenth platform, casting a sharp line between the fit ten
percent and the ignorant masses making up the remaining ninety percent. Du Bois
asserted, “The mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the
increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites, is from that part of
the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear their children properly.”141
Du Bois goes on to suggest that the American Birth Control League and other reformers
seek audiences with Black church congregations or make their positions known through
black newspapers. While acknowledging a general disapproval of birth control as
immoral among those striving to achieve middle class standards, Du Bois counted the
working-class as ill informed. He invoked the quality versus quantity argument, like
Schuyler, mocking the uneducated for being “cheered by a census return of increasing
numbers and a high rate of increase. They must learn that among human races and
groups, as among vegetables, quality and not mere quantity really counts.”142
Charles S. Johnson, a sociologist with ties to both the Chicago School and
Howard University, like Du Bois and Schuyler, recommended a scientific approach to
140
Schuyler, 166.
W.E.B. Du Bois, “Black Folks and Birth Control,” Birth Control Review (June 1932):166.
142
Du Bois, 167.
141
148
birth control be employed that required the same eugenic discrimination applied to white
women with reference to selective fertility among Negroes.143 Johnson’s hereditarian
position, though, was coupled with a belief that social environment – particularly
economic and social parity – could improve Negro defectives where biology failed.
Johnson concluded that “birth control as practiced today among Negroes [was] distinctly
dysgenic”, meaning that the rate of birth control use among Negro women would
promote the survival of biologically inferior children. 144 After spending several years in
Alabama, Johnson found that minor health conditions developed quickly into chronic
issues and diseases among rural populations because of an inability to pay for medical
treatment. Office visits averaged $2.50 to $3; with home visits from the physician
averaging $12.145 Folk remedies and conjures – including “Black Draught,” “666,” salts,
castor oil, White Wonder salve, calomel, and quinine146 -- tended to replace or
supplement advised medical treatment leading to advanced stages of illness and
eventually death. These illnesses could be easily transmitted from pregnant mothers to
their offspring, thereby increasing the “defective” black population. Presumably,
encouraging birth control among these Southern populations would stem the tide of
Negro dysgenicism and degeneration.
Elmer Carter, Walter Terpenning, and Norman Himes, in contrast, provided the
strongest mainline eugenic approaches to Negro birth control in their respective articles
Charles S. Johnson, “A Question of Negro Health,” Birth Control Review (June 1932):167.
Johnnson, 168.
145
Charles S. Johnson, Shadow of the Plantation (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1934), 206.
146
Johnson, 206.
143
144
149
for the Birth Control Review Negro issue. Birth control takes on an antidotal property
among these writers, who advocated it as a potential answer the race problem and to
promoting race progress. For example, Carter stated that the race problem in America
was “infinitely aggravated by the presence of too many unhappily born, sub-normals,
morons, and imbeciles of both races.”147 The use of eugenic terms sub-normals, morons,
and imbeciles, aligns the argument to mainstream eugenic characterizations, and wraps
Carter’s position on birth control in a clearly eugenic discourse on better breeding.
Carter concluded that birth control as currently practiced was “confined to those whose
offspring would be best fitted to carry the lance of racial progress,”148 rather than among
those most in need of restrictive reproduction—namely, poor and “ignorant” Negroes.
Walter Terpenning’s piece, “God’s Chillun” insisted that a good share of New
Negroes constitute[d] a large percentage of human “scrap-pile” and made up the least
desirable stocks. Terpenning insisted that among the cases of degenerate Negroes
“propagation will be checked only by sterilization or institutionalization.”149 Norman
Himes’ assessment of birth control among Negroes in “Clinical Service of the Negro”
noted evidence that “while birth control may have operated somewhat dysgenically in the
recent past, it was increasingly becoming eugenic, as knowledge which was formerly
available almost exclusively to the upper classes percolates downward.”150 In other
words, as more poor and working-class black women used birth control, the number of
Elmer Carter, “Eugenics for the Negro,” The Birth Control Review (June 1932):170.
Carter, 170.
149
Walter A. Terpenning, “God’s Chillun,” The Birth Control Review 1 (June 1932): 171.
150
Norman Himes, “Clinical Service of the Negro,” The Birth Control Review (June 1932):176.
147
148
150
their offspring would decrease, while the number of children birthed to the “upper
classes” would reach parity with or surpass that of their lower-class counterparts. Indeed,
women’s magazines had promoted birth control as feminine hygiene products (usually
douches) to white women as early as 1875; however, the cost of these products limited
their access to middle and upper class women. As scientific eugenics splintered into
social (health and reform) and popular eugenics (baby and beauty contests), increased
numbers of women from other races and socioeconomic backgrounds gained access to
similar material.
Writings by the largely male contributors to the Birth Control Review Negro issue
epitomized the eugenic approach to population control and better breeding that social
reformers embraced whether they were hard line eugenicists or not. Cathy Moran Hajo
notes that these shared approaches had the benefit of securing funds and educational
support for Negro-run reform organizations. Hajo states some “activists used
hereditarian eugenics instrumentally – that is, simply to secure support, without
necessarily believing in it. Others make a real distinction between birth control and
eugenics, ignoring the many issues of contention between them.”151 Hajo’s analysis is
spot on in its critique of Black reform organizations opting for an “ends justify the
means” approach to acquiring necessary funds to support larger agendas of racial uplift.
This can be readily seen in Margaret Sanger’s attempts at promoting birth control among
Black hereditarian thinkers with the establishment of the Negro Project. Sanger enlisted
151
Cathy Moran Hajo, Birth Control on Main Street: Organizing Clinics in the United States, 1916-1939
(Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 105.
151
the help of black leaders, including W.E.B. Du Bois, E. Franklin Frazier, Mary McLeod
Bethune, and Adam Clayton Powell152 – all of whom sat on the Negro Project advisory
board - to help promote birth control among black women. While many black leaders,
voiced concerns over working-class fecundity and “the first privilege of a citizen to be
well-born,”153 Bethune never promoted sterilization and abortion, touting behavioral
reform, as a chosen method of reducing the numbers of births among the poor.
Contemporary reactions to Review articles authored by Negro professionals
tended to splinter almost exclusively along class lines with migrant Negroes largely
opposed to birth control and the black middle and professional classes, in support.154
Some leaders, including Marcus Garvey, openly denounced birth control as religiously
immoral and socially suspect. Garvey went so far as to put birth control to a Universal
Negro Improvement Association vote. His plea to the members to avoid birth control
methods named it “not only criminal to practice birth-control in the forms suggested by
its advocates, but a direct attempt to hinder the spreading of God’s spirit which generally
is acknowledged to be a part of the embodiment of man.”155 Garvey captures the spirit of
autonomy and the right of African Americans to govern their own bodies. Uplifting an
individual in his estimation could not be achieved by eliminating the progeny of that race
ad hoc. In the same manner as many of the UNIA members began life in lowly or
152
Ellen Chesler, Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 388.
153
Mary McLeod Bethune, Mary McLeod Bethune: Building a Better World, Essays and Selected
Documents (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 209.
154
Carole R. McCann, Birth Control Politics in the United States, 1916-1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University,
1999), 155.
155
Hill, 603.
152
humble beginnings and increased their lots in life – through God’s will, their children
deserved that same right. Garvey submitted that no man had a right to end what God
began. Yet, Garvey clearly is not opposed to all forms of birth control—arguably
withdrawal, abstinence, etc.—but to the medical “forms” advocated in the Review.
John Cornwall, writing for the Crisis magazine months after the Birth Control
Review’s Negro Issue, summarized the general confusion with which the average New
Negro approached eugenics and birth control.
If so-called natural forces will not eliminate the American Negro, can we
anticipate the possibility of a deliberate attempt to discourage, drive out,
or even kill 12 million people? Should the Negro marry and raise
children? And at what age should they marry, and whom should they
marry? Should they marry white people, or should they marry lightcolored folk, or should they marry black folk? Should they practice birth
control and space their children, or even stop them?156
Cornwall acknowledges that opinions and positions abound with regard to black
reproduction and that each position carried an agenda that may have little or nothing to
do with the desires of individual members of the race. He does not call God by name or
evoke evolution as forces, but in mentioning natural forces, he hints at the predicted
“natural” extinction of the black race around 1900, which did not occur. In the face of
steady natural increase among African Americans, Cornwall asked could anyone – Negro
race leaders included – predict the future of a race that did not die.
One 1930s study found that white-collar workers relied heavily on the condom,
which could be purchased for 73 cents a dozen; those on relief relied on douches costing
156
John A. Cornwall, “Problems of Birth,” The Crisis, January 1933, 9.
153
between 49 cents and $2.89; and the poor tended to practice the unreliable, but free,
withdrawal method.157 Female household servants’ wages averaged between $2 and $18
per week158 with rents in places like New York and Chicago averaging $50 per month,159
making the cost of birth control exorbitant for many. And with their respectability in
peril due to extramarital or premarital pregnancies, “a substantial number of women from
all economic and ethnic backgrounds actively sought sterilization.”160
Recent scholarship on black women’s reproduction has revealed that contrary to
Gunnar Myrdal’s assertion that black reformers rejected sterilization as did most Negro
communities “except to prevent the reproduction of the feeble-minded, the insane, and
the severely malformed when a hereditary causation can be shown,161 some black women
did not shun sterilization. Johanna Schoen suggests Negro women, especially migrant
classes, actively sought sterilization. “About 70 percent of those seeking sterilization
electively were African American, while African American women made up 38 percent
of the Eugenics Board’s overall caseload and about 30 percent of North Carolina’s
population.162 In the latter case, from 1929 to 1947, more than 1,900 sterilizations (on
157
Rosemarie Petra Holz, The Birth Control Clinic in a Marketplace World (Rochester: University of
Rochester Press, 2012), 49-50.
158
Erna Magnus, “Negro Domestic Workers in Private Homes in Baltimore,” Social Security Bulletin,
(October 1941):15.
159
Chicago Commission on Race Relations, 163.
160
Johanna Schoen, Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and
Welfare (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 163.
161
Gunnar Myrdal, Black and African-American Studies: American Dilemma, the Negro Problem and
Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1944), 176.
162
Schoen, 164.
154
both races) were performed under the laws of the state; 1,494 upon females. A majority
of these women (770) were under the age of 20 at the time of the procedures.163
Schoen’s data represents a larger untapped history of African American women
choosing to forego motherhood or cease having children. It reveals that many migrant
class women, like Liza Bramlett, Fannie Lou Hamer, and the unnamed house servant,
when faced with the same inability to check unwanted sexual advances or resulting
unintended pregnancies, but charged with upholding a level of respectability, determined
it was better not to breed than to be bred. Reformers did not witness the rapes, and with
women choosing to keep silent, sexual sterilization helped these women socially shake
off the eugenic stigma of being intellectually driven to impulse and lascivious. Noting an
overrepresentation of black women among those seeking elective sterilization, Schoen
attributes the numbers to a disparity in accessing birth control devices and gynecological
services. Voluntary sterilization among migrant Negro women may actually have
functioned as a means of reclaiming control over their bodies and gaining a level of
social mobility normally restricted by childbearing. Black women’s voluntary use of birth
control and consent to sterilization, however, should not obscure the eugenic politics
behind some black leaders’ support of the Birth Control Movement.
163
Helen I. Clarke, Social Legislation (New York: Appleton Century Croft, 1957), 209.
155
CONCLUSION
Support for birth control – whether presented as a vehicle of female
empowerment and freedom from the mental and physical toll of childbearing, or as a
mechanism for racial progress through the securing of better quality progeny – helped
shape some New Negro uplift agendas. A conspicuous number of Negro reformers
readily used eugenic and hereditarian thought to determine the fitness of migrant, rural,
and urban women, though the tenuous nature of urban living (including poor housing and
the financial instability of migrants,) made uplift objectives only marginally achievable.
Were the construct of urban living the only consideration, reformers may well have stood
a chance in restructuring suspect southern attitudes towards childbirth and cultures of sex,
marriage, and child rearing, into New Negro codes of respectability. However, with the
spread of socially acceptable vice and a reliance on employment in less-than respectable
venues, illegitimacy, broken families, and wayward children supposedly became the
hallmark of migrant family life. The number of children produced by Negro women
became inextricably linked to their level of education, their “moral” aptitude, and, in
some instances, their respectability in the minds of reformers. Eugenically speaking,
black female fertility evinced Negro woman’s sexual wantonness and depraved
indifference toward motherhood, given that any children she produced in an unstable
environment would potentially live lives susceptible to crime, poverty, and disease.
Negro reformers and eugenicists, alike, targeted teenaged girls as the most likely
to spread venereal disease, produce illegitimate children, require county or state support
to feed themselves and their children, and fall prey to the appeal of sexual vice. With
156
entire courts set aside to manage wayward girls, sociologists and scientists worked to
mutually exclusive ends to identify, segregate, and study migrant girls. In some
instances, those studies supported the establishment of special (vocational) training
schools, or interceded when clear patterns of familial abuse and neglect surfaced. Other
studies, however, used these results to project future Negro dysgenicism and ward it off
through sterilization, as a condition of the girls’ probation. This chapter notes that
sterilization often operated as a birth control method and offered a social and scientific
solution to crime, poverty, the congenital spread of disease, illegitimacy, and social
degradation (in the forms of near-prostitution and child abandonment).
The support of birth control methods by New Negro leaders and scholars like Du
Bois, Frazier, and Bethune demonstrated a marginal support of eugenic theories and
hereditarian thought, despite mainstream beliefs in Negro inferiority. In fact, inferiority
as Negro reformers saw it, resulted from a lack of socio-economic and educational
opportunity, which in many instances was stymied by the birth of children. While
mainstream birth control advocates positioned their efforts as championing the cause of
“put-upon” white women whose husbands were to blame for weakened health, Negro
women were simultaneously cast as hypersexual and the births of their children as the
result of casual and reckless sexual encounters with various men. To answer the
“alarming” rate of illegitimacy and number of children birthed by migrant Negro women,
Negro leaders worked with The Birth Control Federation of America and the Race
Betterment Society to familiarize themselves with more scientific methods of family
planning.
157
Despite the wholesale support of birth control by some factions of New Negro
society, there was no evidence that the efforts of the NAACP, NACW, reformatories, or
prisons to reduce the number of births among migrant Negro women actually succeeded.
Illegitimate births between 1918 and 1928, for instance, showed a relative increase from
110 per 1,000 births in 1918 to 136 per 1,000 births in 1928. With the exception of a
marginal decline between 1922 and 1923 (dip from 127 to 123 per 1,000 births) and from
1924 to 1925 (a decline of 4 points from 120 to 116 per 1,000 births),164 the numbers
remained on the incline.
The Negro intelligentsia’s concern with dysgenic bodies among the Negro
population blossomed during their years as students at Negro colleges and universities
beginning in the 1920s. At these universities, philanthropic organizations (most notably
the Rosenwald Fund and the Carnegie Institute of Washington) with strong connections
to eugenics, financially supported the academic research of future New Negro leaders.
Benefactors of the Rosenwald Fund included biologist E.E. Just, scientist Charles Drew,
and political scientist Ralph Bunche – all of whom espoused hereditarian thought and
introduced racial hygiene into black college curriculum.
164
S.J. Holmes, “The Negro Birth Rate,” The Birth Control Review (June 1932): 173.
158
CHAPTER THREE
“CREATING THE COLORED 400: EUGENICS AT D.C.’S DUNBAR HIGH SCHOOL
AND HOWARD UNIVERSITY”
“I am fully persuaded that this Howard University group is typical of like elements throughout the race so far as
fecundity is concerned. The upper class is headed towards extermination, unless reinforced from the fruitful mass
below.”1
– Kelly Miller
When Kelly Miller addressed the Howard University graduating class of 1898 and
charged them with uplifting the race, he had already spent several years examining Social
Darwinism and hereditary theories of fitness by men of science like Herbert Spencer,
Lionel Beale, and Francis Galton. Miller, who would go on to become Founder and Dean
of the Howard’s Department of Sociology, told graduates to view their knowledge as part
of their moral and mental anatomy or an instrument of power to uplift the world.2
Largely coded in the language of evolution, eugenics, Social Darwinism, and
hereditarianism, Miller’s words represented a shift in black thinkers’ beliefs about
African American intellectual agency. For not only did Miller assess and reinterpret the
works of the world’s consummate men of science – geneticists, anthropologists,
biologists, and anthropologists – to build a science of manhood particular to the Negro,
he also used scientific theories of race that defined blacks as inferior to form social
Kelly Miller, “Eugenics of the Negro Race,” The Scientific Monthly 5, no. 1(July 1917): 8.
Miller, who was born in Winnsboro, SC in 1863, developed an early aptitude for mathematics and
earned a scholarship to Howard University in 1880. He studied Latin, Greek and Mathematics at Howard
and later joined their faculty. From 1895 to 1907 Miller was taught mathematics and sociology and from
1915 to 1925 served as head of Howard’s new sociology department.
1
2
159
science inquiries (test, surveys, research) that established possible environmental
causalities for that inferiority.
In Miller’s speech to the Howard graduates he asserted:
It [Your knowledge] must not only be chewed and swallowed, but
digested, assimilated, and changed into flesh, blood, muscle, and bone;
and, by the mysterious process of vital action, transmitted into the finer
phases of thought, sentiment, passion, and power. Character is the
assemblage of qualities which stamp the individuality and give it dignity,
purity, and power, and make it more efficient for service.3
By situating purity alongside dignity and power Miller solidified the connection he and
other Black eugenicists made between the transformative power of education to not only
bolster the social conditions that created dignity and power, but also alter germ plasm to
manufacture purity where it did not previously exist. When Miller speaks of the
“mysterious process of vital action,” he most likely referenced evolutionary rhetoric
encouraging students to renew nerve centers or the “mechanism” of higher brain power
suspended during slavery. Lionel Beale’s 1875 On Life and on Vital Action in Health
and Disease, describes a process in which bioplasm (cell material) interacts with the
body’s electrical currents. If the bioplasm is damaged or “deranged, the action of the
mechanism (in this case, intellectual / mental ability) is disturbed; if it ceases for a time
the action is suspended, and if the bioplasm dies the mechanism is destroyed. Vitality
therefore, comes into play in the construction of the apparatus out of bioplasm, and in the
preparation of the substances, by chemical change in which the nerve current is
3
Kelly Miller, Commencement Address, Howard University, June 1, 1898. http://www-history.mcs.standrews.ac.uk/Extras/Miller_graduation_address.html
160
established.4 Miller’s vitality may have been describing a regeneration of natural
intelligence and morality lost through enslavement, giving a verbal nod to Darwin’s
theory of a constantly evolving humanity.5
Miller refers to Negroes as a race of people rapidly acquiring civilization –
positing either an inherited inferiority or crippled ability to manifest civilized behaviors
following enslavement. He empathizes with their supposed naturally strong faculty of
imitation and love of the superficial, (marking it a condition of “birth’s invidious bar”6),
but warns students of a “struggle for the higher phases of existence which require finer
qualities of fitness and a moral endeavor to achieve it.”7 The concept of race fitness in
Miller’s address provided a subtle promotion of Darwin’s natural selection, which held
that the biologically fit adapted to changing environments, where the weak did not and
perished as a result. The natural environment for the Howard graduates had shifted in
terms of social and intellectual expectations from the previous generation and required a
consistent exercise of vitality to sustain the advance of the race. The intellectual advance
of the students positioned them as the first line of newly evolved Negroes – perhaps
adding a scientific pronouncement to the term New Negro.
4
Lionel Smith Beale, On the Life and on Vital Action in Health and Disease (Philadelphia: Lindsay &
Blakinston, 1875), 101.
5
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored
Races in the Struggle for Life (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1859), 379.
6
Miller, Commencement.
7
Miller, Commencement.
161
Herbert Spencer’s Survival of the Fittest theory8 (which bent natural selection to
an economic framework and placed races of men in genetic competition against each
other) was not evident in Miller’s call for students to struggle for higher phases of
existence. Instead, those higher phases to which Miller alludes call to mind Francis
Galton’s better breeding rhetoric. Galton, Darwin’s cousin and the architect of eugenics,
offered a biological interpretation of evolutionary theory and natural selection that
distinguished races of men as inferior and superior with whites at the top of the racial
hierarchy. Galton noted the mental and moral characteristics of a race made the race, and
moreover, that those characteristics were hereditary (and would take many generations of
positive breeding to change). Galton also believed social reformers and institutions
interfered with natural selection by aiding the life chances of inferior people and races –
which allowed them to reproduce their inferiority through childbirth. In the 1880s,
Galton promoted a national agenda to increase the proliferation of “well-born” whites and
ushered in the popularization of better breeding efforts in America.9 Miller believed that
every race produced men of superior, average, and inferior intellect. As such, Miller
appropriated Galton’s better breeding campaign, advocating increased breeding of wellborn Negroes.
8
In The Social Organism (1860), Spencer compares society to living organisms, arguing that, just as
biological organisms evolve through natural selection societies similarly evolve and increase through a
division of labor. Herbert Spencer, Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative. New York: D. Appleton
and Company, 1892.
9
Nancy Gallagher, Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State
(Hanover: University of Press of New England, 1999), 1.
162
Malinda Linquist’s Race, Social Science and the Crisis of Manhood, 1890-1970
characterizes Miller’s position in the middle ground between ideologies of white
manhood and those of black intellectual articulations of the science of manhood. In the
latter, the scientific maxim of white male supremacy, cultivated by Social Darwinists,
was challenged by black scholars who promoted “alternate theories of manhood that
contested the hegemony of white male supremacy without necessarily troubling the idea
that manhood was the fundamental engine of progress and social change.”10 There is a
rejection among Du Bois and Miller of racialist reasoning that African Americans are
inferior and that black manhood is somehow retarded; however, black intellectuals
readily embraced the gendered reading of progress as a male endeavor, placing black
women in traditional role of mothering the race. Linquist is correct in pointing out that
black male social and economic mobility disrupted racialized concepts of manhood, and
thus, required a scientific understanding of inheritance, environment, and fitness from a
black perspective. Miller, and later E. Franklin Frazier and Charles S. Johnson redefined
black manhood through scientifically-tested methodologies (tests, surveys, and research),
creating what Linquist terms black scientific manhood in the process. She queries, “Who,
but the manly scientist – the modern arbiter of truths capable of transforming white
actions – could be trusted to do this most important work?”11
10
Malinda Alaine Linquist, Race, Social Science and the Crisis of Manhood, 1890-1970: We Are the
Supermen (New York: Routledge, 2012), 45.
11
Linquist, 50.
163
Miller supported both industrial and classic liberal arts instruction at black
colleges, asserting at an 1897 Hampton conference that the masses of Negroes required
manual instruction; however they also required an intellectual leadership that embodied
scientifically-constructed ideals of manhood. Scientific manhood dictated that the
biologically-capable, use science to improve the race. To a call by Hugh Browne (later
principal of Cheyney Institute in Pennsylvania), for the training of “better barbers, better
coachmen, better butlers,” Miller responded, “Each is efficient; but neither is sufficient.”
Arguing that the Negro had missed the “grand process of evolution” he argued that, it
was the job of higher education “to bring him up to civilization.”12
Miller, in keeping with the concept of black scientific manhood, viewed Howard
University as a laboratory where instructors could ingrain ideas about racial fitness or
race regeneration into its students. He surmised that the fundamental aim of Negro
education was to “develop man as an instrumentality,” with the “chief end of the socalled liberal education to develop man as a personality.13 Miller spoke often of
personality, character, and morals as biologically-determined and crafted a language that
explained theoretical genetic concepts in social, bodily or agricultural terms. Fitness and
uplift were benchmark concepts in Miller’s speeches, sociological research and materials,
and natural science courses. In one lecture, later developed into notes for the 1914 article
“Out of the House of Bondage” Miller wrote:
12
Kelly Miller, The Primary Needs of the Negro Race (Washington: Howard University Press, 1899), 6.
Kelly Miller, “Education and Manhood,” Kelly Miller’s Monographic Magazine (Washington DC:
Murray Brothers Printing, 1913), 8.
13
164
In spite of constitutional compacts or written pledges the strong will rule the
weak, the rich will control the poor, and the wise will dominate the simple. In
such contingencies we can always foretell the outcome with the predictive
decision of natural law, and we may rely upon the prediction with the same
assurance as we expect sparks to fly upward, or water to seek its level.14
Students gained from this passage an understanding that manhood or racial uplift could
not be legislated through courts or laws, but only achieved through the natural laws of
fitness – the weak and poor controlled by the fit. The appeal is one of individual health
and collective race uplift reaped by those who nature sets aside as fit. To ensure that his
Howard students met the mark of fitness Miller, extended to them similar instruction in
biology, eugenics, and race/social hygiene as received by students at Ivy League
institutions, white public universities, and a handful of other black colleges.
Miller’s approach to educating his students at Howard for race betterment came at a time
when educational opportunities were expanding for New Negroes. Black students
enrolled in record numbers at primary schools, high schools, normal schools, and
colleges. The education of Negroes, however, was not lauded in and of itself at advancing
the race. Race leaders and intellectuals battled over the very nature of Negro instruction,
often influenced by white philanthropists in determining the parameters of black
curriculum. This chapter focuses on the experiences of black students at both Dunbar
High School and Howard University in Washington D.C.—arguably one of the elite high
schools and the “capstone” college for blacks in the nation. This project reveals that
eugenic pedagogy became increasingly central to educating black students as some black
14
Kelly Miller, Out of the House of Bondage (New York: Neale Publishing Company, 1914), 132.
165
elites and educators, as well as their white supporters began to believe that that
imperatives of racial uplift required a biological understanding of race betterment.
NEW NEGRO EDUCATION, WHITE PHILANTHROPY, AND RACIAL UPLIFT
Following Emancipation, educators struggled to justify the amount of money
necessary to educate Negroes based on their propensity to learn. Most used the Hampton
Model, a system of industrial and vocational instruction (named after Hampton
University where it originated) that produced teachers and preachers en masse, to educate
the black masses. The instruction consisted of 10 hours of daily chores, followed by
instruction in cleaning, sewing, agriculture (picking, hoeing, etc.) and morals.15 Samuel
Armstrong, a white minister who helped found Hampton and served as its principal from
1868 to 1893, once said “Let us make the teachers, and we will make the people.”16 But
what exactly was Armstrong making?
Negroes educated under the Hampton model read from the Bible, memorized
rules of civic responsibility, and developed just enough rudimentary skills “needed for
manual or industrial labor.”17 Embracing this curriculum implied that Negro children
were mentally incapable of learning (or mastering) the academic curriculum offered
White students at state universities, Ivy League institutions, and liberal arts colleges. The
15
Sarah Knopp, Jeff Bale, Education and Capitalism: Struggles for Learning and Liberation (Chicago:
Haymarket Books, 2012), 51.
16
Isaac Edwards Clarke, Art and Industry: Industrial and Technical Training in Schools of Technology and
in U.S. Land Grant Colleges (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1898), 624.
17
W. Watkins, “Black Curriculum Orientations: A Preliminary Inquiry,” Harvard Educational Review, 63,
no.3 (Fall 1993): 321.
166
belief reflected eugenic theories of inherent mental Negro atrophy. The goal of industrial
education was to create a New Negro and make him fit for society in a manner similar to
Captain Richard Pratt’s 1892 call to “kill the Indian and save the man” through industrial
training boarding schools. While Pratt’s methods forced Native American children from
their homes and into training camps and boarding schools (including Hampton), African
Americans actively sought education as a means of mobility. Both efforts reflected a
belief in the social evolutionary effects of industrial training.
Opponents of the Hampton Model, most notably Du Bois, found its curricula to
be little more than a means to manufacture a permanent underclass. In contrast, racial
advancement at Howard University during President Wilbur P. Thirkield’s tenure (19061912) was hindered by an ongoing attempt by white board members to transform Howard
curriculum to fit the Hampton-Tuskegee model of industrial instruction, at the height of
the Washington-Du Bois conflict over how best to educate and uplift the race.
Washington preferred institutions to provide vocational education that taught useful skills
and social etiquette to students, making them congenial and useful citizens. Industrial
education fit the immediate needs of the race in assimilating into society where most
needed. Du Bois, on the other hand, supported a classic liberal arts education that
included math, science, literature, and classic languages, such as Latin and Greek.
167
Dependent on personal contributions such as that of Andrew Carnegie to build a new
library, Howard administrators were largely dependent on the personal agendas of the
contributors and the Board of Trustees, which oversaw the budget.18
The debate over Negro mental and intellectual ability would rage for decades
between Washington and Du Bois; however it was not until late in life in 1940, that Du
Bois offered a clear rationale for rejecting what Washington believed was a practical
approach.
I believe in the higher education of the Talented Tenth who through their
knowledge of modern culture could guide the American Negro into higher
civilization. I knew that without this the Negro would have to accept white
leadership, and that such leadership could not always be trusted to guide this
group into self-realization and to its highest cultural possibilities.19
Du Bois points to the tenuous relationship between African Americans and whites
following Emancipation and the potential of the black race to be exploited by their former
owners as freedmen. His Talented Tenth, by virtue of attained educations, business
acumen, and social mobility would serve as sympathetic and conscientious race
representatives – moving the entire race forward a little at a time.
However, what Du Bois termed the Tuskegee Machine, an all-encompassing
publicity campaign orchestrated by Washington that supported Negro newspapers and
discredited the endeavors of those who might challenge him, worked against the Talented
Tenth model. Millions of dollars would funnel into Tuskegee and Hampton based solely
18
Moore, 121.
W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (Piscataway:
Transaction Publishers, 2011), 604.
19
168
on their connections to Washington. The Tuskegee Machine and the Hampton Model
correlated well within the emerging practice of scientific philanthropy that funded
specific eugenic endeavors to achieve social objectives, (such as priming a servant class
skilled as laborers and domestics), and both institutions – Tuskegee and Hampton were
the main beneficiaries of this generosity.20
Du Bois’ Talented Tenth also benefitted exceptionally from white philanthropy.
As the intellectual answer to the Hampton Model, Howard University quickly became the
jewel in the crown of elite Negro institutions of higher learning. Founded in 1867 as a
theological seminary for emancipated slaves by General Oliver O. Howard, the university
was funded largely by the Freedmen’s Bureau, for which Howard served as
commissioner. In 1879, Congress approved a special appropriation for the University that
in 1928 was amended to authorize an annual federal appropriation for construction,
development, improvement and maintenance of the University. Where Hampton, which
was founded in 1868, a year after Howard, sought to create preachers and teachers,
Howard’s aim was to develop a professional class of Negro that included physicians,
scholars, lawyers, and scientists.21
As historian of black education James Anderson noted, the reliance on white
philanthropy forced many Negro colleges to work with administrators and benefactors
whose missions were diametrically opposed to racial uplift. In fact, the receipt of money
20
Lawrence J. Friedman, Mark D. McGarvie, Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 172.
21
Rayford Whittingham Logan, Howard University: the First Hundred Years, 1867-1967 (Washington,
D.C.: Howard University Press, 1968), 21-22.
169
by Negro schools was “almost always predicated on teachings of political
disenfranchisement, civil inequality, and training black youth for certain prescribed
positions,” 22 such as teaching or preaching. White resistance to the establishment of
black education began in the 1910s as the demand for normal schools increased. White
southerners in particular found little value in educating an inferior race or an
impoverished class for anything other than manual labor. When whites did fund black
schools, according to Charles H. Poe, editor of the Progressive Farmer, it was with the
control of the black race in mind.
The Negro is a child race and both races would suffer if the guiding hand of the
white man were removed from the educational work of this children race. The
Negro would suffer because of his inability to choose wise leaders; the white man
would suffer because of the improper training of this people whose destiny is to
be somehow interwoven with that of the South… The real result of the suggested
change in the division of the school fund would be not fewer educated Negroes,
but fewer Negroes educated under proper influences, and a vastly larger number
educated beyond the control of the Southern white man and in an atmosphere
calculated to produce constant friction between the races and between the
sections.23
As a result, blatant inequalities grew in the development of facilities and distribution of
resources for black schools. Black schools’ increased dependence on donations from
northern industrial philanthropists, made it nearly impossible for them to accept
philanthropic gifts and assert simultaneously that the political and economic aims of the
philanthropists were in congruence with the fundamental interests of the black masses. 24
22
Editor, 52.
Clarence H. Poe, “Should Southern Whites Aid Negro Schools?” New Outlook, August 23, 1902, 1012.
24
James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1988), 276.
23
170
Arguably, classism and the belief in their own superiority led a conservative body of
Negro intellectuals to support the eugenic aims of white philanthropy to improve the
general condition of Du Bois’ ninety percent. What Anderson describes as a “certain
amount of compromise, indifference, apathy, and even fear” 25 among Negro college
educators and students toward their benefactors, grew from fears of losing financial and
professional support.
By the 1920s there existed more than a hundred colleges and universities in the
United States dedicated to educating Negro students. While a vast majority of these
institutions were established and funded by local Negro churches or national inter-racial
Christian-based governing bodies like the American Missionary Association
(Presbyterian), white philanthropists financed eight schools that they deemed elite and
thus, deserving of generous monetary support. Those colleges were: Howard University
in Washington, D.C.; Spelman and Morehouse colleges and the Atlanta University and
School of Social Work in Atlanta; Fisk University and Meharry Medical College in
Nashville; and Dillard University and Flint-Goodridge Hospital in New Orleans. Among
the most dedicated supporters of Negro elite colleges were the Julius Rosenwald Fund,
the Slater Fund, and the Rockefeller’s General Education Board.26
Rosenwald, the Sears & Roebuck president along with his financial administrator,
Edwin Embree, helped create these Negro elite colleges by offering start-up funds and
25
Raymond Blaine Fosdick, Adventures in Giving (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 46.
Peter M. Ascoli, Julius Rosenwald: The Man Who Built Sear, Roebuck, and Advanced the Cause of Black
Education in the American South (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 95
26
171
matching grants for all eight schools. Utilizing Du Bois’ Talented Tenth rhetoric and
Booker T. Washington’s belief in industrial education as the best remedies for uplifting
the Negro, Rosenwald supported educational attainment for the offspring of both the
African American middle-class and the masses.27 His association with Washington began
in 1911 when they agreed to build six rural normal schools near Tuskegee as a pilot
project to improve primary Negro education. In 1912, Washington named Rosenwald to
Tuskegee University’s board of directors. Rosenwald supported Atlanta University (one
of the elite eight), where Du Bois taught sociology. Additionally, Rosenwald later
financed Du Bois’ two-year book project beginning in 1931 that culminated into his work
Black Reconstruction in America (1935). Rosenwald began funding advanced degree
work and scientific research among Negro students, dispensing grants-in-aid for
advanced training to a small number of Negro nurses, physicians, and social workers
from 1920s through1936.28 Even with such levels of support, it is impossible to
determine the influence (if any) that either Washington or Du Bois had on Rosenwald or
Embree’s ideas about social fitness or race progress. Embree, who oversaw the approval
of Rosenwald funding, supported eugenics and the idea of improved breeding practices.
In a 1930 Scientific Monthly commentary, Embree promoted eugenics as another of
man’s attempts to conquer the natural world.
The whole story of medicine is a history of triumphs over natural forces. And now
man is beginning to take an interest in even more vital elements of control. He
practices birth control; he makes it impossible for certain of the insane or feeble27
Ascoli, 95.
Jayne R. Beilke, “The Changing Emphasis of the Rosenwald Fellowship Program, 1928-1948,” The
Journal of Negro Education, 66, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 7.
28
172
minded to reproduce their kind. He is beginning to inquire about the possibilities
of breeding not only better horses and dogs, but even a finer race of men. Against
such proposals many cry, "It is a perversion of nature." Certainly; but no more so
than flying in aeroplanes [sic], using milch cows, growing grapefruit or wiping
out the cause of yellow fever.29
Embree held eugenics and birth control as a natural progression in man’s dominion or
control over the elements around him.
Rosenwald helped manufacture African American race representatives by
funneling philanthropic support to elite Negro universities that demonstrated proven race
regeneration, and providing matching funds for the erection of normal schools throughout
the rural south. By encouraging schools to consolidate and removing financial support
from others until they shuttered their campuses, the Rosenwald Fund brought about the
merger of Straight College, New Orleans University, and a nurse-training facility in New
Orleans to form Dillard University and the one-hundred bed Flint-Goodridge Hospital.
The Fund became the major financier of Howard University (Washington, D.C,),
Tuskegee Institute (Alabama), Fisk University (Tennessee), Meharry Medical College
(Tennessee), Tougaloo College (Mississippi), and Atlanta University (Georgia).30
The Rosenwald Fund’s philanthropic support of Negro colleges was matched by
the General Education Board (GEB), a Rockefeller family-funded organization. GEB
contributed more than a million dollars for purchasing land and erecting new buildings on
the campuses of the same institutions that Rosenwald funded. The John F. Slater Fund
Edwin R. Embree, “Human Biology,” The Scientific Monthly 31, no. 2 (Aug., 1930): 176-177.
Alfred Perkins, Edwin Embree: Foundation Philanthropy and American Race Relations (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2011), 99.
29
30
173
for the Education of Freedmen, established in 1882, was administered by Atticus
Haygood and J. L. M. Curry. According to Lawrence Friedman, both men supported
slavery before the Civil War, and Curry continued to believe all Negroes remained
“ignorant, immoral, indolent, improvident, wasteful, and given to base, instinctual
desires.”31 The Slater board sought to teach morality and work discipline by
transforming the behaviors of the Negro into “habits of industry and temperance in the
virtues of punctuality, order, and good behavior” alongside useful skills that fit lives of
servitude.32 In addition to providing start-up financial support and structural funding for
HBCUs, Rosenwald, Slater, and GEB provided direct salary support and departmental
funding for key faculty members – most notably those in the biology departments of
Howard, Tuskegee, and Meharry, as well as for professors Miller, Ernest Everett (E.E.)
Just, and Horace Mann Bond, who also taught at Howard.
E. Franklin Frazier and scholars working with the Urban League criticized
Rosenwald’s contributions and administrators often as highly paternalistic and
manipulative, with Rosenwald dictating terms and restrictions of funding. Rosenwald’s
support, then, was a means to developing a better society; however, his attitudes towards
Negroes “were at best condescending”.33 Editors for the National Urban League’s
Opportunity journal, for instance, printed a jab at Rosenwald in a 1937 column, “The
Report of the Rosenwald Fund” in which the unnamed writer acknowledged “if at times
31
Friedman, 171.
Friedman, 171.
33
Bill Gates, “Julius Rosenwald: The Great American Philanthropist Who Decided What Blacks Should
Teach,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 24 (Summer 1999): 55.
32
174
there has been criticism of the Rosenwald Fund on the part of Negroes, and there has, this
criticism has arisen from disagreements as to its methods rather than its fundamental
aims.”34
Negro elite colleges received $62,520,491.98 (19.3 percent) of Rockefeller’s
General Education Board funding. Additionally, research studies under an appropriation
for ‘The Science of Education’ received an additional $25.8 million,”35 and allocated
more than $41 million exclusively for medical education with $5 million going to Atlanta
University, $5 million to Fisk University, $3.8 million to Tuskegee Institute, $3.5 to
Spelman College, $2.15 million to Dillard University, $1.9 million to Morehouse
College, and $1.1 million to Clark College.36
While the funding numbers appear particularly extravagant, when compared to
the budgets established for Negro education by individual states, they are even more
remarkable. Throughout the early 20th century, states eliminated the budgets established
by the Freedmen’s Bureau to support black schools. Mississippi, for instance, withdrew
its subsidy to Tougaloo University’s normal department, and in 1904 vetoed the annual
appropriation to Holly Springs State Normal School. Instead of having a negative impact
on the numbers of Negro teachers gaining teaching qualifications, it had the opposite
effect with the numbers of Negro women gaining teaching certificates increasing from 39
Editor, “The Report of the Rosenwald Fund,” Opportunity, January 1937, 4.
Raymond Blaine Fosdick, Adventures in Giving: The Story of the General Education Board, Established
by John D. Rockefeller (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 68.
36
Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 276.
34
35
175
to 51 percent in the state.37 This statistical increase was due in large part to private and
organizational philanthropy financing the tuition and research of the students through
individual scholarships. Other states, like Virginia, allocated 95 percent of its spending
for colleges and normal schools to predominantly white institutions, and sought to keep
Negro education “poor and bad.”38
A great portion of the medical education funds from philanthropists provided
support for improving the health of the college students themselves, many of whom had
never been examined or treated by physicians. Professors worked closely with college
physicians to groom Negro students into socially hygienic citizens. Historian Helen
Munro Prescott argues that white schools used campus physicians to protect student
bodies from physical and moral dangers and regarded their function as “essential to ‘race
betterment’ among the better social classes. In this sense, college hygiene programs
overlapped with the broader eugenic movement.”39 Negro elite colleges, similarly
utilized their campus health centers and biology departments, as evidenced by the
thousands of mental and physical health studies conducted on Negro campuses between
1914 and 1935, including student Elijah Fitchett’s Temperamental Differences in Races:
A Study in the Physiological Foundations of Behavior (1927) and William H. Jones’
37
Adam Fairclough, A Class of Their Own: Black Teachers in the Segregated South (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2007), 1 70.
38
Fairclough, 173.
39
Heather Munro Prescott, Student Bodies: The Influence of Student Health Sciences American Society and
Medicine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 101.
176
Recreation and Amusement among Logical Analysis of the Negro in an Urban
Environment (1927).40
Such research did not function in a bubble, but competed for the social and
financial attention of philanthropists. For example, Clark Wissler, under whose direction
Boas conducted his Howard University research, sat on the board for the Eugenics
Records Office and in 1921 led a panel at the International Congress of Eugenics on the
migration of the races and how to best address the evolution of the Negro race. Wissler
used portions of Boas’ 1916 raw data, meant to disprove inherent inferiority of Negroes,
to encourage white education philanthropy.
Certain prejudices directed toward existing races will be removed when
allowance is made for the influence for their social and educational
environment, and their fundamentally sound and strong racial
characteristics are brought to light. On the other hand, limits to
development of certain races and the inalterability through education and
environment of the fundamental characteristics of certain stocks will be
considered. Finally, the advantages and disadvantages of the mingling of
races of unions which have proved fateful to social progress should be
discussed.41
Wissler is careful to note that no manner of education can alter the “fundamental
characteristics of certain stocks”. In other words, he was under no illusion that education
and changed social environment could change inherited racial traits—markers of racial
inferiority or superiority. Moreover, in keeping with mainstream eugenics, he alluded to
miscegenation as a wrong-headed approach to race betterment.
40
A Bibliography of the Negro in Africa and America (New York: H.W. Wilson Company, 1928), 580,
625.
41
Editor, “The Eugenics Review,” Eugenics Education Society, 13(January 1, 1921):509.
177
Inasmuch as their motives may have been to disprove previous research on Negro
aptitude that stressed black inferiority, Boas and Negro professors at Howard
unintentionally reinforced those claims, as interpretations of their data proved fluid when
used by some whites. Charles McCord, for instance, uses Miller’s writings concerning
the need for southern Negro students to improve their overall conditioning to rationalize
his own racist argument about the Negro’s poor character.
Kelly Miller says “[the Negro] pictures vividly, but reasons poorly. The Negro
youth need training in exactitude of thought. No one who is acquainted with the
race can fail to be impressed with his loose and slovenly mode of reasoning. The
fanciful and flighty, the ornate and extravagant are given preference over the
straightforward and direct.” The Negro is emotional and demonstrative rather
than judicial and conservative and seems incapable of any sort of accurate
comprehensive thinking. Their logic fails when the subject of thought becomes
involved or complex.42
Miller’s comments within an intra-racial space may have been understood as criticism
against a specific group or stock of African American; however, McCord makes no
distinctions and paints Miller’s comments as indicative of the race.
And while Negro campus research on the habits and skills of New Negro students,
which included studying differences in Binet scale results between pure-blood Negroes
(dark skin) and mulattoes, average height and weight of students, and habits of college
blacks, proved invaluable to social workers, public health proponents, and educators
42
McCord, 113-114.
178
alike, those researchers involved in data collection and testing reaped funding benefits
both individually and for their respective institutions.43
Several Rockefeller enterprises, including the Bureau of Social Hygiene, the
Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, and the Rockefeller Foundation, aided in the
promotion of eugenics on Black college campuses. The Rockefeller Foundation, in the
interwar years, was a private precursor to the National Science Foundation and National
Institutes of Health,44 offering individual endowments to Negro scholars at Black
colleges to fund studies to determine how Negro criminality and immorality could best be
curtailed. Eugenics was a personal and philanthropic interest of the Rockefellers. John
D. Rockefeller, Jr. pursued eugenics study beyond his biology curriculum received at
Yale, with supplemental independent reading courses in Malthusian theories of dysgenic
inheritance. Motivated by the limitations of government intervention to address social
ills, Rockefeller Jr., created the Bureau of Social Hygiene (in New York City) in 1910 to
privately fund social reform institutions and provide college fellowships for social
research. Upon graduation from Princeton in 1929, John D. Rockefeller, III accepted an
appointment by his father to the board of directors of the Bureau of Social Hygiene,
which was subsidized by the Rockefeller Foundation. The Bureau’s primary function
Alfred Perkins, “Investment in Talent: Edwin Rogers Embree and the Rosenwald Fellowships” in A
Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund ed. Daniel Schulman (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2009), 1865.
44
Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1985), 208.
43
179
was social science research in areas of criminology, sex education, and birth control –
three topics integral to eugenics and social hygiene courses taught at Black institutions.45
Medical historian Jennifer Gunn argues that for the Rockefellers, “the science of
eugenics, particularly the tool of selective breeding, offered a therapeutic approach to the
problems of the social order through the biological and social control of the
population.”46 Gunn presents the range of philanthropic endeavors undertaken by John
D. Rockefeller, his son John Rockefeller, Jr., and grandson John Rockefeller, III, as part
of a larger family-shared eugenic agenda to aid population control and management as a
permanent solution to social problems. Social disorder among Negro populations in the
South, according to Rockefeller, Jr., could be curtailed by an informal system of white
supremacy; however, the mass migration of rural Negroes into Northern cities required
social intervention based on science.47 It was in this context that Rockefeller and
Rosenwald-funded Black colleges and their students not only learned the basic tenets of
eugenics, but also utilized their campuses as eugenic laboratories and fellow students as
control groups in hereditarian research. The campuses also served as incubators for
social evolution.
45
Donald Critchlow, Abortion and Birth Control in Historical Perspective (University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1996), 40.
46
Jennifer Gunn, “A Few Good Men: The Rockefeller Approach to Population 1911-1936,” in The
Development of the Social Sciences in the U.S. and Canada: The Role of Philanthropy, ed. Theresa
Richardson and Donald Fisher (Stamford: Ablex Publishing, 1999), 98.
47
Gunn, 97.
180
DUNBAR HIGH SCHOOL, HOWARD UNIVERSITY, AND THE EUGENIC
“DOUBLE JIM CROW”
Understanding the classist mentality, color consciousness, and preoccupation with
behavior at Dunbar and Howard must be contextualized in the historical development of
the post-Civil War D.C. black community and the power wielded by a small elite class of
African Americans in the city. The changes in the composition of the historic community
as a result of migration, increased job opportunities, and overall upward mobility elicited
anxiety in members of the black elite, who were looking to safeguard their positions as
race leaders and interlocutors between the white and black communities. What emerged
was a complex interplay between white philanthropists, established black elites, and
black educators who worked in concert (to some degree) to direct the masses of workingclass and migrant blacks into programs of racial uplift. High schools became the first site
where this uplift would be framed in biological and eugenicists terms. As this chapter
demonstrates, Howard University supported this efforts, specifically by fostering a
special relationship with Dunbar High School.
The District’s Negro population before 1920 consisted primarily of a small, but
powerful Negro elite, and a burgeoning middle class that took shape initially under
President Grover Cleveland’s Civil Service Commission. During Cleveland’s first
administration, 1885-1889, there was a numerical increase among Negro Federal
employees from 620 to 2,393. Theodore Roosevelt, at that time a Civil Service
Commissioner, helped recruit thousands of Negroes into the clerical ranks of government
181
service. By the time the U.S. entered World War I, there were 9,717 Negroes employed
in D.C.’s federal halls earning annual salaries between $3,200 and $6500.48
Unlike employment in private industry or local government, D.C.’s federal
government offices offered African-Americans an opportunity to work for above-average
wages in a secure industry. As a result a steady flow of Black job seekers from around
the country moved to D.C. to work between 1870 and 1890. The more educated African
Americans gained appointments to clerical work in the Office of Printing and the
Treasury Department, while the less educated worked in service oriented occupations,
usually cleaning or doing grounds work. Most of these Black workers were able to
purchase homes, creating a self-sustaining black neighborhood and a small, but
prosperous middle class.49
A small contingency of native Washingtonians, The Syphaxes, Shadds, Grays,
and Wormleys – actually arrived in the city in the early 1800s and comprised the mulatto
descendants of white politicians. The Syphax family, for instance, traced their lineage to
Martha Washington’s grandson and became leaders in Negro education. William
Syphax’s mother was the half-sister of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s wife and
inherited roughly eighteen acres of Arlington, Virginia owned by the family. William,
educated in white, private schools, earned an appointment to the Interior Department
(1851) and a clerkship reporting directly to the Secretaries of the Interior in 1885.
John A. Davis and Cornelius L. Golightly, “Negro Employment in the Federal Government,” Phylon 6,
no. 4 (4th Qtr. 1945): 339.
49
Genna Rae McNeil, Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1983), 19-20.
48
182
Syphax was appointed by the Secretaries to the Board of Trustees of the Colored Public
Schools of Washington, D.C. (1869) through which he appropriated funds to erect the
elite M. Street School, later Dunbar High and managed budgets for the development and
maintenance of all black public schools in D.C.50 The Shadds, Grays, and Wormleys all
began as caterers or restaurant owners, and educated their children to become physicians
and pharmacists.51 In 1880, elite blacks based their social status on their ties with
prominent whites, their skin color, and their family backgrounds. They were obsessed
with being seen as distinct from the masses of the race and therefore acceptable to the
white community. Their primary concern was assimilation.52 In the process of
separating themselves from the growing black middle class, the District’s black elite
published editorial columns and pamphlets chastising the unsuitable behavior among
working-class Negroes arguing that it reflected poorly upon the rest of the race.53
Working class blacks constituted those whose color, background or lineage excluded
them from “blue vein society” – a term used to denote blacks whose skin color was light
enough to make the blue veins in their arms apparent and whose heritage included
prominent members of white society. Jacqueline Moore writes in Leading the Race, that
the more diverse the black population of D.C. became, the more self-conscious the city’s
light-skin elite became about their status and relationship to white power structures. As
E. Delorus Preston, Jr., “William Syphax, a Pioneer in Negro Education in the District of Columbia,”
The Journal of Negro History 20, no. 4 (October 1935): 457-458.
51
Jacqueline Moore, Leading the Race: Transformation of the Black Elite in the Nation’s Capital 18801920 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), 11.
52
Moore, 3.
53
Moore, 12.
50
183
the 1890s ushered in increased Jim Crow efforts, she writes “the social distance that the
light-complexioned upper class had traditionally placed between itself and other blacks
tended, under the deteriorating racial climate, to confirm the suspicion of dark-skinned
critics that their preoccupation with a light skin color was the cause of this obnoxious
practice.”54
On occasion the assimilation agenda of the D.C.’s black elite elicited controversy
over skin color and social mobility, as they flirted with eugenic beliefs to advance their
ranks. For instance in an 1884 editorial from the Washington Bee, the editor W. Calvin
Chase, a member of the black elite, attacked members of his own social set for promoting
integrated education as a means of their sons socializing with and marrying white girls to
strengthen the Negro intellect.55 After hearing one conversation in this vein, Chase
wrote:
Should we not honor our American Colored women? Should we not prefer them
to all others? Some of the advocates of mixed schools have deemed it wise to
marry white women, believing they say that it will tend to strengthen the intellect.
This is something beyond skill of scientists. By mating a grasshopper and a toad
you cannot strengthen the frog. There is but one thing the advocates of mixed
schools regret and that is no one has been smart enough to invent a remedy to
make Negroes white.56
54
Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920 (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1990), 158.
55
Chase, a prominent, free-born, and educated Washingtonian, often appeared catty and malicious in his
attacks of any black person offending his class or intellectual sensibilities. The paper’s motto, “Honey for
Friends; Stings for Enemies” revealed its sentiments on outsiders.
56
W. Calvin Chase, “Editorial Reply to George H. Richardson, of the Advocate and R.S. Smith of the New
York Globe,” The Washington Bee, May 24, 1884, 3.
184
Chase, who founded The Bee, saw the parents’ eugenic attempts at producing a
line of intellectually superior grandchildren from their children’s school integration as
dishonorable to black females. Chase attacked what he identified as a desire among his
class to shake off their race through intermarriage and produce white progeny. Whether
Chase’s suspicions were accurate or not, his commentary revealed the color and class
consciousness that came to define the black elite’s presence in D.C., and attendance at
both Howard and Dunbar.
By 1914, in the midst of debates over black inheritance and evolution, a mass
northern migration of blacks from the Deep South to D.C. occurred, unsettling the
relative social comfort of the city’s residents. With little room for migrants, makeshift
and substandard housing was erected in alleyways in the Southwest swamp to
accommodate them. Other migrants gained access to better housing through
unsuspecting landlords, who based on the general good nature of the city blacks in years
past, could not imagine any difference between them and their Southern counterparts.
Yet, long standing middle-class black communities complained about and grew weary of
the fights, loud noise, and loitering, that took over their quiet tree-lined streets. A March
14, 1914 Washington Herald editorial decried the loss of quiet respectability among
blacks in the post-reconstruction era when an “enormous inflow of ignorant negro
population settled in the city and upset the equilibrium of affairs.” 57 Embarrassed and
annoyed by their new black neighbors, one hundred Negro families in D.C. proclaimed
57
Editor, “Outcry Against Tax,” The Washington Herald, March 15, 1914, 3.
185
themselves “The Colored 400”, taking exception to poor, unimproved blacks moving into
the city from the Deep South. The former demanded respectability and lavish homes
with servants, while the poor lived in alley dwellings. In response, the Colored 400
embraced the “challenge” of “uplifting” the new arrivals.58
One way that the elite sought to solidify their own class and color status was to
send their children to the elite Dunbar High School. Originally named Preparatory High
School for Colored Youth and later known as M Street High School, Dunbar was the first
Negro high school in America. Similarly, working-class and migrant blacks sent their
children to Dunbar to advance their social mobility and economic opportunities. Dunbar
served as a pipeline to Howard University, so that if one’s child performed wells at the
school and graduated with relatively high grades, they were all but assured entrance into
the university. Indeed, what the eugenically-conscious Howard professors found with
each entering freshman class from1880 to 1920 were increased numbers of
undereducated, migrant-class students. The number of Negro students enrolled in high
school nationally increased more than six-fold between 1917 and 1932 – from 19,242 to
135,981,59 and those entering high school were often over-aged, poorly equipped, and
came largely from servant classes new to the District. The term over-aged identified
students who were older than their mental grade level, and could include those with a two
to four year disparity between the physical and mental grades. In other instances, with
Garrett Peck, Prohibition in Washington, D.C.: How Dry We Weren’t (Charleston: The History Press,
2011). 64.
59
Henry N. Drewry and Humphrey Doermann, Stand and Prosper: Private Black Colleges and Their
Students (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 72.
58
186
Southern students beginning school late (if at all before migrating) students as old as 18
or 19 were present in second and third grade classes.60 There is no specific data for
Dunbar, so it is likely the overage reference is to aptitude versus physical grade level, as
opposed to a wide age disparity.
Howard University founders envisioned the school as an institution of agricultural
and industrial training, although the professors – made up of well-established black elites
– argued for a more liberal arts curriculum throughout the 1920s. Arguably with the
increased numbers of undereducated students entering the schools, the administrators
thought it prudent to educate the students in industrial, agricultural, and technical fields,
believing that they were intellectually incapable of mastering classical education.
However, such instruction may have offended the sensibilities of black elites who
increasingly saw Howard as the “Negro” equivalent to schools like Harvard and
Princeton. Fearing the school was being transformed into another Tuskegee Institute,
Howard faculty used a stealth amount of political pressure and social activism – using
The Washington Bee and The Colored American newspapers, and associations with white
associates -- to force liberal academic instruction at the university. Course of study also
became more intense between 1910 and 1925 as members of the faculty and the board of
directors standardized curriculum – adding residencies to M.A. degrees, calling for an
examination and dissertation on an approved subject for the College of Arts and Sciences,
60
A Social Study of Mental Defectives in New Castle County, Delaware (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office, 1917), 17.
187
and requiring a level of scholarship (research and publishing) from its faculty equal to
that at white institutions.61
When the leadership of Howard or Dunbar offended members of the Colored 400,
The Colored American and The Bee editors used their pages to mount swift, unrelenting
campaigns against them. Kelly Miller, found himself under constant attack beginning in
1900 after refusing to take sides in the Du Bois-Washington debate over how best to
educate New Negroes. Though he meant simply to remove the debate from public
spectacle and offer both men a middle ground, members of D.C.’s black elite, considered
Miller weak and indecisive. When the Washington Post, which had a reputation for
racialist comments, celebrated a lecture Miller conducted in their pages, the Colored
American took extreme offense.
The Washington Post, a venomous advocate of Afro-American inferiority and
servility pats Prof. Kelly Miller on a recent lecture delivered in this city. His
attitude of thought is utterly out of keeping with his environment and with the
possibilities of the race, nowhere more conclusively demonstrated than in his own
mental equipment, from the technical point of view. We are not surprised that the
Post should pat Prof. Miller on the shoulder, and we are sure that he appreciates
the patting because as far as the estimate of the mental limitations of the race are
concerned, the editor of the post and Prof. Kelly Miller of Howard University
eat mud through the same quill.62
The attack on Miller came directly from its publisher Edward Cooper, an Indianapolis
native who founded the newspaper in 1893 and counted himself a staunch supporter of
Booker T. Washington. The assault on Miller proved particularly cheeky with Cooper
invoking the very language of Miller’s scientific and eugenic theories about environment
61
62
Moore, 121.
Edward Elder Cooper, “The Colored Newspaper,” The Colored American March 17, 1900, 8.
188
and mental capacity. Describing Miller’s thought process as incompatible with his
environment, Copper likened Miller to the mal-adjusted migrant. Despite the attack on
his intellect, Miller remained steadfast in his efforts to provide the students at Howard
with rigorous, scientific-based instruction.
It was in this climate of color consciousness and class striving, and migrant
adjustment, that Dunbar and Howard University attempted to fortify their efforts to
produce the next crop of race leaders. Howard registrars, usually able to attract
competitive black freshmen, imagined that with admission of the new group of less
exemplary students would come some undue social pressure among the elite students to
be more socially inclusive. In previous years (1896-1916) ambitious and competitive
students who graduated from Paul Laurence Dunbar High School gained almost
exclusive entry into the ranks of Howard freshmen. Staffed almost exclusively with
Howard University graduates, Dunbar graduates included Sterling Brown, Nannie Helen
Burroughs, Charles R. Drew, William H. Hastie, Charles Hamilton Houston, Robert H.
Terrell, Carter G. Woodson, and Kelly Miller.63
Dunbar’s training intake ritual, including health and I.Q. testing, reveals that like
Howard, it maintained a decidedly eugenic mission. The all-classical pedagogy at
Dunbar, which prided itself on being a space of social and intellectual selection or social
eugenics, earned it the nickname “Little Howard.” Mary Hundley, Dunbar’s college
bureau chief, kept “copious notes about which faculty had gone to what colleges and how
) Amber N. Wiley, “The Dunbar High School Dilemma: Architecture, Power, and African American
Cultural Heritage,” Buildings & Landscapes 20, no.1 (Spring 2013): 99.
63
189
many students received Rosenwald grants. She even tracked student I.Q.s.”64 For the
most part, the students who entered the M Street School (Dunbar) were not ordinary
children; they were as many saw it, the future of the race.
Examining the social theories of instructors like Otelia Cromwell, the first African
American to graduate from Smith College, speaks to Dunbar’s 1920s elite environment.
Cromwell often expressed to colleagues that too many Negro students were entering high
school rather than the workforce or apprenticeships. The result was a saturation of spaces
once reserved for the intellectually and financially-able with those who were “deeper
down the scale socially, economically, and intellectually.”65 Cromwell, along with her
daughter, Adelaide (Dunbar Class of 1936) embraced the image of Dunbar as an
institution for fair-skinned, wealthy blacks. It was not the same environment for those
with different skin tone and economic backgrounds. For instance, in 2004 during the
Dunbar celebration of Brown v. Board of Education, many Dunbar graduates, including
Colbert King (Class of 1957) and W. Montague Cobb (Class of 1921), criticized the
school’s history of colorism and acts of encouraging the less desirable to attend
vocational or business schools.66
King described the social atmosphere at Dunbar similar to that of Howard with
fair or light-skinned instructors and students setting the pace and those outside their
Alison Stewart, First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America’s First Black Public High School (Chicago:
Lawrence Hill Books, 2013, 137.
65
Stewart, 91.
66
Colbert I. King, “The Kings of Foggy Bottom,” The Washington Post Magazine, Sunday, (Feb 1, 2004),
W.08.
64
190
cliques, snubbed or segregated from many activities. In one instance, King recalls a
light-skinned biology teacher asking students to stand and identify themselves and their
previous schools and having her recoil when he mentioned he had attended Francis Junior
High.
She looked as though she had encountered a bad odor… It is not that the lightskinned elite at Dunbar openly ridiculed those of us who dared to try to make it or
that our efforts went unrecognized by the teachers. But for the most part, they
weren’t going to invite us into their swirl. I am not sure we want to preserve
those traditions of segregated education and Black elitism for which Dunbar
stood. Many of us remember well when Dunbar was a school for the children of
the black bourgeoisie when light skin and good hair, and family were paramount
prerequisites for admission and success.67
King’s use of the urban term “swirl”, usually set aside to describe social or
intimate interracial contact, when describing being kept from social activities with the
mostly light-skinned student body, suggests he was eliminated from a pool of potential
suitors for Dunbar’s female students due to his skin tone. It also alludes to the power of
eugenic instruction in biology courses to trickle into social spaces where mate selection
and notions of better breeding may have subconsciously been at play. And despite seeing
himself as highly intelligent, King considered himself among Du Bois’ 90 percent due in
large part to the social segregation he experienced at Dunbar. Similarly, W. Montague
Cobb, a Dunbar graduate who served as chair of the anatomy department at Howard
viewed D.C. and the Dunbar experience as a “double Jim Crow” wherein he was
discriminated against by whites and looked down upon by highly educated Negroes.68
67
68
Stewart, 221.
Stewart, 162.
191
Perhaps more important than the classical instruction at Dunbar, were the lessons
in social etiquette prescribed through annual Dunbar handbooks. One advised the
avoidance of “girls and boys who fail in lessons, were unsatisfactory in deportment, or
careless in their habits,”69 as potential companions. Two pages of the handbooks were
dedicated to behavior in public and included such maxims as “avoid loud talking,
boisterous laughter or familiar actions. If you desire to converse with a friend, walk with
her a little way but don’t loiter. Leave the street corners for traffic.”70 These
admonishments, in and of themselves, appear to be little more than attempts at redressing
potential poor behavior before it happens; however, a majority of the directives actually
attempted to set Dunbar students apart from migrant-class Negro youth.
3.1 Neighborhood outhouse in D.C.
69
70
Stewart, 91.
Stewart, 92.
3.2 Migrant children S.W. DC
192
3.3 Typical dilapidated migrant-class home in Washington, D.C.
193
3.4 Howard University students at university football game
3.5 Children of D.C.’s Black Elite (Colored 400) exercise fingers before piano class.
194
For example, invoking Booker T. Washington’s Gospel of the Toothbrush,
Dunbar promoted absolute cleanliness above all other instruction. Cleanliness and
deportment superseded earned letters for both elite and migrant Negroes, and functioned
as a critical component to citizenship. Although soap and water, perfumes and tinctures
were considered luxuries few migrant families could afford, the toothbrush served as the
one civilizing commodity all Negroes needed. Dunbar administrators instructed students
that being “exceptionally clean and neat was at least one thing a Dunbar student could
control to knock down assumptions about his or her hygiene that were based on skin
color.”71 Dunbar was also not immune to the behavior-conscious residents of black D.C.
Distaste for working-class behavior could be found in both the Bee and the Colored
American newspapers from the mid-1800s. The scope of criticism often labeled working
class blacks, the “ignorant class” and bemoaned their habits of going outside “with bare
feet, hair not combed, faces not washed” and hanging their heads out of windows –
suggesting if they ceased these practices, whites would be more inclined to provide them
better housing.72
While Dunbar heeded the politics of respectability, which included personal
hygiene measures, they concentrated most of their efforts on providing education to
students that would cultivate middle-class sensibilities and position them for employment
as urban professionals. Dunbar was the first obstacle on the training course that led to
Howard. However, gaining admission to Dunbar required students to pass and survive a
71
72
Stewart, 94.
Moore, 13.
195
constant battery of scholastic and social testing. Otelia Cromwell wrote in a 1936
English Journal report that testing was necessary to sidestepping the perennial problem
of achieving a selective process of acceptance.
In December the students who had been subjected to the remedial teaching were
tested again, a Beta of the test administered in September being used. By this
method the retarded student was given opportunity to make up deficiencies while
he was being permitted to carry the minima of the first semester course in
English.73
Cromwell’s use of such terms as “retarded” to define overage high school students from
the South (enrolled as third or fourth graders as old as 16) embraced a eugenic view of
aptitude and often unfairly marked as intellectually inferior those students whose
previous educational experience was limited. Intelligence Quotients and Mental aptitude
tests, whether administered to gain entry into the military, primary and secondary
schools, or college or university, or to determine the level of social inadequacy in prisons
and reformatories, contained labels that categorized individuals on a eugenic scale. In this
context, a child being tested in school for learning problems or placement, could be
labeled (with dysgenic language) as a moron, imbecile, idiot, or feebleminded, and have
those scores used to predict his or her social mobility or hereditary taint. Even as
administrators allowed these students to “carry the minima,” being able to study migrant
ability against that of old settler D.C. Negroes proved irresistible to eugenic researchers.
Otelia Cromwell, “Preparation for Freshman Composition,” The English Journal, 25, mo.7 (Sep.
1936):553.
73
196
One such study, conducted by Alice McAlphin and published in the Journal of
Negro Education, found that Dunbar students born in the District scored better on
Intelligence Quotient examinations by an average margin of 6 points. Those 6 points –
however minor they appear, were used to segregate students according to ability. Those
children born outside of the District who in the third grade were 11 to 16 years, faced
Cobb’s double Jim Crow, and were labeled “dull children who would be substantially as
much retarded mentally in the states as they are in the District.”74 The study mimicked
social eugenic attempts to segregate the weak within the race and thus, further strengthen
the social and economic path of the Negro fit. McAlphin’s data on pronounced
tendencies to start migrant children in lower grades, regardless of their abilities, reflected
the Negro elite’s acceptance of southern inheritance as both genetic and social.
The National Committee on Mental Hygiene led the way in examining
disenfranchised communities – Indian, Mexican, Mixed Indians, and migrant blacks – as
they assimilated into mainstream culture through public schools. Children in their
surveys were often labeled as “dullards” and average children as bordering the mentally
retarded because their ages could not be definitively determined and they were presumed
older than the prescribed age for a particular mental level. In the Mental Hygiene Survey
with Recommendations taken in 1922, for example, Mexican, Indian, and Black students
were overwhelmingly labeled dullards because of their supposed lack of “imaginative
Alice S. McAlphin, “Changes in the Intelligence Quotients of Negro Children,” The Journal of Negro
Education, 1, no. 1(Apr., 1932): 45.
74
197
power or rather the power of imagery.”75 The authors of the survey believed that the
respondents may have been able to feed their animals the set amount of food, but not be
able to count figures without visually seeing examples of them. Using both Yerkes and
Binet exams, test scores lead to diagnoses ranging from Superior and Normal, to Dullard,
Borderline Mental Defect, Psychopathic, Psychoneuroses, Epileptic, Endoctrine Disorder
or Unascertained.76 It is here that determinants of academic (or mental) ability led to
diagnoses of inherited dysgenicism, like psychopathy.
In the Dunbar students, those labeled “average” were well-behaved, polite, and
capable of learning, but either slow to assimilate into the classroom environment, or
unable to comprehend instruction quickly. Given the climate of social eugenics
undergirding Dunbar and Howard curriculum and fraternization policies, and the student
tracking attached to each child, being labeled a dullard or retard on an I.Q. test was
tantamount to being declared socially unfit for integration. The use of these tests proved
all the more ironic in that Howard University and the Negro elite developed decades-long
testing of Negro populations with the express purpose of negating results previously
established in Army I.Q. tests of Negro men. The original results, examined by Paul
Popenoe in 1922, showed that the average Negro draft had a mental age of 7, making him
the scientific equivalent of an imbecile or low-grade feeble-minded. White military
officers provided comments on Negro soldiers that included: “The Negro lacks initiative,
75
Thomas A. Haines, Report of the Arizona Mental Hygiene Survey with Recommendations, a Report
conducted by The National Committee for Mental Hygiene, Inc. (New York, 1922), 82.
76
Haines, 95.
198
displays little or no leadership, and cannot accept responsibility; the Negro is a cheerful,
willing soldier, naturally subservient. These qualities make for immediate obedience,
although not necessarily for good discipline, since petty thieving and venereal disease are
commoner than with white troops.”77 The test conclusions noted the “defects are greater
in the Southern Negro.”78
Utilizing the Stanford-Binet tests on Dunbar students identified migrants with
mental and moral defects and segregated them from the Negro elite and middle-class. In
strictly eugenic terms, McAlpin’s study set apart the old settler, well to do black
community from that of newly arriving migrants. Her conclusion that “the migrant
children have been of inferior mental calibre, but Washington children of the past were of
very superior stock,”79 alludes to her assertion of a biological difference between the
largely mixed-race (e.g., mulatto) Negro community that migrated to D.C. after the Civil
War and the supposedly pure-Negro stock arriving decades later. Environment, in her
estimation, had little to do with aptitude; only the industriousness and wherewithal of
genetically superior stock mattered.
In still another study, conducted by Negro educator Maudelle Bousfield, the
inquiry involved migrant maladjustment and sought to determine how children from the
South functioned within largely dysgenic households (e.g., single-parent or
impoverished). At the crux of Bousfield’s argument lay the theory that Negro students
Paul Popenoe, “Intelligence and Race: A Review of Some of the Results of the Army Intelligence Tests
II – The Negro,” The Journal of Heredity, 13, no. 7 (July 1922): 298-299.
78
Popenoe, 298.
79
McAlphin, 47.
77
199
born in the South negatively impacted the overall academic standing of the northern
schools they attended. She cited their academic demotion upon entering Northern
schools, their broken homes, their household income of less than $20.00 a week, and their
receipt some form of charity support, as evidence of their social unfitness.80 As the need
for charity constituted a form of dysgenicism – pauperism -- a student household’s
reliance on or need for supplemental support indicated mental and social inadequacy.
The schools from which migrant students came were poorly equipped, irregularly
supported, shortened in comparison to the Northern school year, and in many cases
poorly taught;81 however, Bousfield still insisted on utilizing five standardized tests: the
New Stanford Reading, the New Stanford Arithmetic, the Otis Mental, the Pintner
Mental, and the McCall Multi-Mental examinations,82 in testing D.C. and Chicago
students. Bousfield ended up with inconclusive data that forced her to acknowledge
“conclusions as to the relationship between mentality, achievement and home conditions
cannot be drawn with any degree of certainty.”83 The term “home mal-adjustment”, a
form of dysgenicism linked to character impediments like laziness, that kept individuals
Maudelle B. Bousfield, “The Intelligence and School Achievement of Negro Children,” The Journal of
Negro Education, 1, nos.3-4 (Oct. 1932):395.
81
Bousfield, 388.
82
Bousfield, 389 Note: Bousfield wanted to establish the capacity of the children to learn. The series of
five tests – organized as three, would help determine the social and economic environment of the child, as
well as their comprehension. Bousfield’s notes report that in order to obtain the best possible index of
mentality and at the same time to compare results from different types of mental tests, three very different
group mental tests were used, namely, the Otis Self-Administering Test of Mental Ability, the Pintner NonLanguage Mental Test, and the McCall Multi-Mental Scale. The Otis test very largely depends upon
reading ability (as shown by correlations) and general school achievement, the McCall is designed to
measure mentality through vocabulary relationships, and the Pintner is entirely non-linguistic, being made
up of imitations, picture completions, reversed drawings, matching pictures, etc. The achievement tests
used were the New Stanford Arithmetic and the New Stanford Reading.
83
Bousfield, 395.
80
200
from “puling themselves up by their bootstraps” was used to explain the sub-standard
achievement of these students. Bousfield’s study, while attempting to link poor
performance to outside influences and environment, could be interpreted as evidence that
dysgenic, mal-adjusted homes or inferior Negroes were biologically responsible for poor
mental acuity. Bousfield alternates between using the terms mental ability and mentality,
the latter which more appropriately examines emotional and behavioral responses to ones
surroundings. In so doing, Bousfield made a solid case against the average migrant’s
ability to achieve academically based on his home environment, noting “It is not
sufficient simply to conclude that home environment and economic status do affect
mentality and achievement, but some technique should be developed which will
determine which particular home factors affect mentality and achievement and to what
extent.”84 Though she cautioned examiners to exercise restraint in indexing the mentality
of any group, Bousfield nonetheless concluded that non-linguistic examinations – those
that require matching pictures, imitation or memory exercises, or “do not depend on
manners, customs, or the background of the individual,”85 should be used when
attempting to test migrant students. Segregation of these students from fit Negro
students, then, could also be viewed as both prudent and eugenically vital.
The mission of elite black high schools was to create the race’s professional class
(physicians, scholars, and attorneys) became increasingly tied to internal classifications
of fit, capable, and deserving to which colorism and pigmentocracy were attached. The
84
85
Bousfield, 395.
Bousfield, 395.
201
world in which Colbert King described relative whiteness as the litmus test for character
or industriousness, found weight and measure beyond academics. D.C. Colored 400
picked their friends, attended church, worked, and ate and slept with each other on the
basis of skin color. Subsequently, King wrote, skin color was the “basis, [light skinned
professionals] passed on their color inheritance.”86 The school system's Division II, part
of the body headed by Syphax was heavily populated with light-skinned administrators,
principals and teachers, providing the track upon which lighter-skinned education
professionals solidified the academic, social and professional ascension of members of
their color class to the exclusion of others.
Dunbar produced some of the nation’s most revered professionals and race
leaders in black America, grooming them for the academic rigors of Howard University
or white Ivy League institutions. The success of Howard and Dunbar at grooming an
unprecedented number of scholars and race leaders have been documented in works like
Stewart’s First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America’s First Black Public High School;
however, accounts of the mental and intellectual testing that segregated underachievers,
and ensured ratios of success, are few. Dunbar served as a clearinghouse of sorts for
Howard University, with many students moving from Dunbar to Howard and later
accepting teaching posts at one or both institutions. This natural production and
matriculation of black scholars suggested that intellect It is clear, however, that colorism
served as the backbone of black D.C. power structure and aided in determining the
86
Colbert I. King, W.09.
202
suitability and capability of students, along with prescribed tests of intellect and mental
acuity.
EUGENIC INSTRUCTION AND RACIAL HYGEINE AT HOWARD UNIVERSITY
In 1918 Louis Dublin, statistician for Metropolitan Life Insurance, lamented that a
discouraging trend among college educated whites of having fewer or no children
encouraged the proliferation of unfit foreign race stock. Dublin cites birth rates among
Harvard and Yale University graduates as fallen from about 3.25 in the decade 18501860 to a little over 2 in the decade 1881-1890.87 He wrote:
The best blood of America is being constantly thinned out by the exercise of a
conscious limitation of births and is being replaced by a stock of a different order.
Our national standards are being leveled to meet more and more the lower quality
of our population… Our educational system must make our various racial groups
conscious of their best traditions and instill desires to see their better strains
strengthened and increased as a foundation of the greater democracy of the
future.88
As if answering Dublin’s call to educate “our various racial groups” about race
betterment, by the 1920s elite colleges like Columbia, Brown, and Cornell, as well as
Midwestern and eastern state institutions integrated eugenics into biology, sociology,
zoology, and psychology courses. Howard, Fisk, Tuskegee, and a handful of Rosenwald,
Slater, and General Education Board-funded Black colleges 89(i.e. Clark Atlanta, Dillard,
Louis I. Dublin, “The Significance of the Declining Birth Rate,” Science 47, no.1209 (March 1918): 207.
Dublin, 209-210.
89
A number of individuals and interracial organizations began funding public education for Blacks between
1865 and 1896. Among them, The Peabody Education Fund (1865), The John F. Slater Fund (1878)
established by a Connecticut textile manufacturer, and the Anna T. Jeanes Trust (1896) and the Virginia
Randolph Fund (1907) allocated millions of dollars to provide rural Negro schools in the South with
87
88
203
and Lincoln) also introduced eugenics into their curriculum in the 1920s, believing it to
be a vehicle for achieving assimilation, full citizenship, and racial uplift among Negroes.
Eugenic instruction on Black college campuses opened wide the debate on heredity
versus environment as a determinant of mental, social, and moral fitness.
Eugenicists, like Paul Popenoe and Charles Davenport set the parameters of the
debate by hypothesizing whether social improvements to an individual for the better,
improved their germinal quality, through a process called euthenics.90 Ellen H. Richards,
a reformer, coined the term euthenics in 1910 to define the betterment of living
conditions through conscious endeavor for the purpose of securing efficient human
beings. She posited that human vitality depended upon two core conditions – heredity
(conditions before birth) and hygiene – (the living conditions during life). Eugenics deals
with race improvement through heredity; euthenics deals with race improvement through
environment. Popenoe asked in his biology textbook, Applied Eugenics, “Could
prospective parents who have thoroughly and systematically disciplined themselves,
physically, mentally, and morally, transmit to their offspring the traits or tendencies
which they have developed?”91 Popenoe, mainline eugenicists, and HBCU professors
like Kelly Miller, Charles S. Johnson, and Howard Hale Long, rejected the belief that
genes could be changed through environment; however, they did note that heredity could
schoolhouses, teachers, and a suitable curriculum. By 1932 the Peabody Fund, Slater Fund, Jeanes Fund
and the Virginia Randolph Fund merged to become the Southern Education Foundation, Inc.
90
Works by Richards on Euthenics include: Food as a Factor in Student Life (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1894); The Cost of Living as Modified by Sanitary Science (New York: John Wiley & Sons,
1900); and Euthenics: The Science of Controllable Environment (Boston: Whitcomb & Barrows, 1910).
91
Paul Popenoe. Applied Eugenics (New York: MacMillan Company, 1920), 33.
204
be impacted by environmental stimuli. For instance, a child who has a genetic
disposition to alcoholism because both parents are alcoholic, cannot change his inherited
predisposition; however, if his environment is changed – (he is moved from the parental
home and placed among teetotalers), he may be less likely to become alcoholic. His
genetic material however, remains unchanged. Long, for instance, acknowledged that
Jim Crow environments stifled natural mental and intellectual abilities by forcing
subservience in Southern Negroes. He noted that the stuff of which intelligence was
made, was susceptible to stimuli, causing Negroes in particular to inherit as a chameleon
the mechanism “to take on the color of [his] surroundings.”92 This suggests that what
appeared as inherited docility, ignorance, or poor character among Negroes was in fact a
reaction to outside, environmental stimuli. With this understanding, research conducted
on and by Negro college students and professors, beginning in the 1920s, sought to
answer a number of questions concerning the regeneration and evolution of black
migrants and those living in impoverished communities.
In examining how students adopted race fitness programs and adapted to them,
HBCUs identified those students whose natural inheritance they believed had been stifled
under white supremacy. From those students, they weeded out those whose scholastic
aptitudes evidenced weak genetic material in their estimation. When Kelly Miller
conducted his 1917 survey of Negro families from among the faculty at the illustrious
Black college (during his tenure as Howard University Dean of Arts and Sciences), his
92
H.H. Long, “Race and Mental Tests,” Opportunity, March 1923, 23.
205
goal was to determine if Dublin’s original findings among Ivy League whites applied as
well to educated Negro classes. Noting a pattern within the race of “breeding from the
bottom, but dying from the top,”93 Miller attributed it not only to middle-class desires to
maintain status through limiting the number of offspring, but also to d cowardice and
prudence in marrying and having children (as seen in the Howard subject) in fear of
white supremacy. On the latter point, Miller essentially argued that middle-class blacks
did not want their offspring to experience racism so they opted not to have children.
Miller used his study to address research by Dublin that speculated the demise of
the Negro race through retarded germination. As African Americans were still
categorized as a lesser form of animal or being by mainstream race scientists– the general
application of eugenic principles, such as germinal and environmental improvements –
did not necessarily apply. It must be understood that blacks were still considered a
subhuman, under-evolved, or sub-species of man and despite evolutionary advancements
in his overall qualities and social progression (education, language, etc.), those of African
descent remained inferior beings among men of science.94 Miller answered Dublin
directly in a 1927 New York Amsterdam News editorial, writing:
Mr. Dublin tells that thirty years ago there was much gloomy prediction
concerning the early extinction of the African on account of his inherent
degenerative tendencies. These are all discredited by more recent showings…The
Kelly Miller, “Is the Negro a Living or a Dying Race?” The New York Amsterdam News (Sept. 7, 1927),
20.
94
Text that address Africans and blacks as subhuman or a sub-species of man include: Sir Harry Hamilton
Johnston’s The Negro in the New World (New York: MacMillan Company, 1910), Sherlie L. Boone’s
Meanings Beneath the Skin: The Evolution of African Americans (Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), John S.
Haller’s Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority 1859-1900 (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois,
1971); and George F. Milton’s “The Material Advancement of the Negro,” The Sewanee Review, 3, no. 1,
(November 1894), 37-47.
93
206
harsh exaction of a slave regime did not impair his physical vigor; where either
weaker varieties, pine and die, he lives and multiplies and laughs.95
Miller asserts that the theories of inherited black dysgenicism and Negro extinction
promoted by Dublin proved fallible by the continued vigor and fecundity of the race.
Using a combination of scientific jargon and social reform rhetoric, Miller used
the date of his study to promote the propagation of better racial stock – namely the
students – through proper mate selection and the maintenance of proper personal hygiene.
Miller’s work was presented before several Black college alumni bodies, including
Howard and Hampton Universities. His review of Frederick Hoffman’s Race Traits and
Tendencies of the American Negro (1897) became a popular pamphlet used at both
universities.96
In his examination of fifty-five Howard University teachers, Miller noted a
process of social and genetic evolution among them that moved them from a state of
unfitness to fitness as a result of advantageous marriages (which produce morally and
intellectually superior offspring), educational attainment, and social mobility. This
evolution was measured by scrutinizing the decrease in offspring between the educators
and their parents who had a combined total of 363 children – or an average of 6.5
offspring per family. The eugenic problem Negroes faced, in Miller’s estimation,
stemmed from the fact that the fifty-five teachers in his study had only produced thirtyseven children -- or an average of .7 per family. Miller, did not set an average number of
95
96
Miller, 20.
Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind (New York: Oxford, 2000), 195.
207
children the fit should reproduce; however, with less than one child per “fit” household
statistically, the declining birthrate among the better “stock” of Negroes would eventually
lead the birth of less fit Black Americans. (Miller and his wife Annie May Butler, for
their part, produced five children.) Essentially, natural increase had not occurred among
this group, as they would have needed to birth at least 56 children among them to
advance (not replicate) their genetic pool. In contrast, rural, impoverished blacks
continued to reproduce at mass rates -- by 1930 averaging between six and 10 children
per household – leading Miller to conclude the race would die out from the top down. In
other words, the intellectual class of superior men would die out from lack of progeny or
too few; while the poor and weak would continue to produce at high rates, but die from
disease, degeneracy, and lack of vigor. His conclusion reveals that Negro eugenicists
readily bridged the scientific concept of genetic fitness with social evolution (the
economic, cultural and political factors that accompany biological and psychological
ones to transform human activity)97 to argue that a person or race could eliminate
dysgenicism through learned behavior, strategic marriages, and education.
Miller’s work reinforced Du Bois’ earlier class construct articulated in The
Philadelphia Negro, codifying moral fitness (viewed usually as an inherited trait) in
terms of economic and educational attainment and the frustrated growth of professional
classes from among the teachable of Du Bois’ ninety percent. Du Bois considered the 10
percent a breed of genetically-superior stock whose natural leadership ability was
97
Mario Bunge, Treatise on Basic Philosophy (Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979), 187.
208
suppressed during slavery, a state of repression Du Bois said brought about the “legal
survival of the unfit and the nullification of the work of natural internal leadership.”98 Du
Bois cast the 10 percent as Negro leadership, who “sought from the first to rid the race of
the awful incubus that it might make way for natural selection and the survival of the
fittest.”99 Du Bois positions the Talented Tenth as champions of Darwin’s survival of the
fittest within the race, determining that among members of the remaining ninety percent a
portion of them would die out through genetic weaknesses. Du Bois’ Tenthers, while
superior stock, faced extinction -- Miller’s race suicide from the top – based on decreased
fecundity. Without the artificial bracket of slavery in place to ensure all the survival of
the weak along with the superior, the natural laws of survival would realign.
Citing the decrease in births among Howard’s professional, educated class versus
that of the subjects’ parents (mostly laborers), Miller argued that educational attainment
actually functioned as a form of “social captivity” that impeded the natural sexual
impulses of the Negro, thus hindering the very proliferation of high achieving Negro
stock. If, however, the marginally weak could be strengthened, as Miller and other Black
eugenicists believed, through intense instruction within the proper environment, there
would develop an educated class of fecund Negroes who could bolster the number of
racially fit African Americans and simultaneously convince the lower-classes of the race
to limit their reproductive capacity. The fittest of the race, or what Miller termed the
W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative
American Negroes of To-day ed. Booker T. Washington, et. al, (New York: James Pott & Company, 1903),
35.
99
Du Bois, 35.
98
209
“new issue”, “scarcely produced sufficient progeny to perpetuate its own numbers.”100
Accordingly, Miller embraced and expounded eugenics as a means of race
regeneration101 and racial uplift. And while some of Miller’s participants chose not to
have children because of the financial burden children created or the racial inequality
their offspring would face in U.S. society, others faced health impediments, usually
venereal in nature, which prevented conception.
For Miller and other professors at HBCUs, the race regeneration instruction
integrated into their biology, health, social hygiene, and sociology courses also
functioned to decrease the proliferation of crime and sexually-transmitted diseases,
including syphilis among the students. The curriculum was designed to keep Howard
students fit – mentally, morally, and physically – and train them on how to regiment their
lives to produce healthy children. Many private philanthropists and governing boards
(such as the American Social Hygiene Association) with strong ties to the eugenics
movement expressly targeted black colleges as reform centers, where their monies could
be used to breed out the supposedly worst elements of Negro society allegedly
responsible for increasing rates of syphilis, crime, poverty and illegitimacy, high.
100
Miller, 58.
The concept of race regeneration grew out of social eugenics and emphasizes a shift from rescuing those
who were ill-born or dysgenic to preventing those who are dysgenic from breeding. Reverends James
Marchant, William Canon Barry, Eugenicists Havelock Ellis, C.W. Seleeby (physician), A. Newsholme
(physician), Mary Scharlieb (physician) were among early race regeneration supporters and authors of
seminal works on the subject. Among them, the New Tracts for the Times series The Methods of RaceRegeneration, edited by Saleeby, in 1911, offers one of the best introductions to the subject. Additionally,
Frederick Brotherton Meyer’s Religion and Race Regeneration (1921), Havelock Ellis’ The Problem of
Race Regeneration (1911), and R. Swinburne Clymer’s Race Regeneration: The Mystery of Sex (1921)
provide insight into varied approaches of religious and reform organizations in addressing race regeneration
efforts.
101
210
Examples of the relationship between black colleges and eugenic-concerned
philanthropic organizations can be found in the employment of Dr. Roscoe C. Brown and
Dr. Charles V. Roman as Public Health Service lecturers in Washington, D.C., and
Nashville (respectively) in the 1920s. Their express duties were to travel to black
colleges to lecture on social hygiene and venereal disease. The American Social Hygiene
Association (ASHA) founded in 1914 and publisher of the Journal of Social Hygiene,
organized programs targeting students at black normal schools and colleges that included
anti-venereal disease education as well as courses on preparing for marriage and
parenthood.102 Miller and ASHA instructors believed that as members of the future
middle-class, Black college students would become the hereditarian teachers of the next
generation. By incorporating, first, the instruction necessary to ward off venereal disease,
ASHA instructors secured the reproductive health of the group. Second, in providing
information on proper marriage selection and parenthood, the students learned how
environmental and hereditarian factors impacted the overall health of the race.
While Negro hereditarian thought ran the full gamut from mainline beliefs in
black inferiority to black superiority, HBCUs tended to embrace concepts of social
evolution and support selective breeding, which required class and skin tone segregation.
As social surveyors and instructors of eugenics, Howard, Fisk, Tuskegee, Atlanta,
Dillard, and Meharry professors developed advanced biology and social science courses
to both promote eugenic fitness, and to dispel or reinterpret eugenic data about Negroes
Christina Simmons, “The African Americans and Sexual Victorianism in the Social Hygiene Movement,
1910-1940,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 4, no.1 (July, 1993): 58.
102
211
authored by professors at predominantly white universities. Moreover, they saw their
work as necessary to for preparing their students to do “race work”. For example, Fisk
University’s 1912 catalogue directly declared social science and biology curriculum as a
prerequisite for its students to work with the National Urban League in studying the life
conditions of the urban, migrant, and rural negro populations.103 Some of the professors
at these HBCUs had received similar instruction as undergraduates.
Sociologist Horace Mann Bond, for example, initially became interested in
hereditarian thought while a student at Lincoln University, where he studied the
hereditarian links to the poor Intelligence Quotient test results of African American
military personnel. After finding that black northerners scored higher on Army tests than
white southerners, Bond espoused an environmental causality to the disparity of results
and began working to dispel the legitimacy of inherited intelligence.104
The intellectual must equip himself as an active agent against the insidious
propaganda which seeks to demonstrate that the Negro is intellectually and
physically incapable of assuming the rights which devolve upon him as a member
of modern society. Through ignorance of the facts, we have chosen to be silent
rather than to expose our naivete. That time has passed. No longer is there
justification for the silence of the educated Negro.105
It becomes a function of black scholarship to speak up and shake off the naïve posture
that the Negro was incapable, unqualified and unsuited for the modern society in which
103
Fisk University, Catalog of the Officers, Students, and Alumni of Fisk University 1911-1912 (Nashville:
Fisk University Press, 1912), 48.
104
John P. Jackson, Race, Racism, and Science” Social Impact and Interaction (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 2006), 145.
105
Horace Mann Bond, “Intelligence Tests and Propaganda,” The Crisis 28 (1924): 62.
212
he lived. As vocal opponents of theories of mental inheritance, Bond sets the black
intellectual as actively engaged in disseminating the truth about black mental ability.
Bond’s own work, including several articles supporting sociologist Frank
Freeman’s theory that “what heredity can do, environment can do also,” influenced own
curriculum at Fisk, Dillard, and Langston (in Oklahoma). Bond’s 1924, “Intelligence
Tests and Propaganda,” and “What the Army Intelligence Tests Measured,” appearing in
the June edition of the Crisis and the July edition of Opportunity magazines, respectively,
reworked some of Freeman’s 1920s work including “Mental Tests: Their History,
Principles and Applications.” Bond further theorized that if the intelligence tests were
based upon “native inherent ability” whites in areas around the country would exhibit
tests results superior to all blacks; however, he found that the “boasted superiority of the
white over the Negro stock does not seem so impressive when the Negro of Illinois
outscored whites in at least four Southern states.”106 The importance of Bond’s work lay
in its attack of the foundational structure of the tests. As V.P. Franklin asserted in “The
Tests are Written for the Dogs: The Journal of Negro Education, African American
Children and the Intelligence Testing Movement in Historical Perspective,” mental
examinations were initially designed by Alfred Binet and Theophile Simon in 1905
France to identify mental deficient children in French public schools. In American
hands, eugenicist Henry Goddard utilized the test by first administering it to white
students and producing scale of “normalcy” and then testing other races of children
106
Bond, 63.
213
against the ‘norm.’107 Bond challenged the concept of inherited intelligence and focused
his coursework on the environmental and social causes of poor mental performance,
including disease and diet.
Courses and studies like Bond’s, as well as courses in proper hygiene – especially
sexual propriety – were of great importance to both white philanthropists and Negro
educators through the 1920s as the rates of venereal disease soared. They deemed the
spread of disease the biggest challenge to keeping Negroes fit, and subsequently, during
the interwar years they increased the focus of their curricular efforts at Negro colleges to
student health problems. Recognizing that severe inadequacies existed in the early
education of most rural-born Negroes, arguably it was easy for the helping hand of school
health administrators to mimic the condescending posture of white supremacy, and
perhaps even embrace racial stereotypes. The work begun by ASHA, and the Public
Health Service in 1920 to create hereditarian thinkers through social hygiene instruction
expanded throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Student health and attitudes toward sex,
marriage, children, and disease, helped steer the curriculum, with professors using
student survey results as indicators of shifting beliefs and acculturation of eugenic ideas.
For instance, sociologist Grace Williams found in 1930 that 60 to 70 percent of college
women in the first year did not know the name of the female reproductive organs, while
85 percent did not know the names of venereal diseases, or how the infections were
V.P. Franklin, “The Tests are Written for the Dogs: “The Journal of Negro Education”, African
American Children, and the Intelligence Testing Movement in Historical Perspective,” Journal of Negro
Education 76, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 217.
107
214
transmitted.108 Molding these students into future race leaders required a defter
understanding among them of physical and mental defects caused by poor social hygiene.
Taking some of their cues from ASHA and the Public Health Service, black colleges
began providing more specialized course work in social hygiene, race hygiene, and
general fitness.
Whatever the motives of professors, administrators and philanthropists of
HBCUs, Negro students eagerly embraced eugenic concepts of racial fitness as critical to
personal and social growth. In examining the catalogues of several Negro colleges in the
1930s to determine the scope of science instruction offered Negro students, this study
reveals that most institutions offered survey courses in general biology that incorporated
social hygiene, anatomy, and eugenics. An investigation of required readings at HBCUs
in the 1930s showed quite a few schools, including Florida A&M, Virginia Union,
Dillard, Wiley, Hampton and Morehouse, offered surveys with eugenic pedagogy under
such names as Community Health, Intellectual Development, Human Inheritance, and
The Evolution of Man. Still, the specific nature and content of these courses remained to
some extent at the discretion of white administrators and funding boards, stifling the
academic freedom of instructors to devise their own syllabi. Adam Fairclough noted in
Better Day Coming : Blacks and Equality, 1890-2000 that in southern states especially,
state approved textbooks, “selected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy –
Grace E. Williams, “Some Outstanding Problems of Student Health,” Journal of Iowa State Medical
Society 20, no.543 (December 1930): 536.
108
215
defended slavery, eulogized the Lost Cause, and damned Reconstruction,”109 while black
college teachers decried their lack of academic freedom. One Bennett College professor,
writes Fairclough, commented, “The quickest way I know to become persona non grata
(their emphasis) in a college community is to exercise freedom of speech – to question
the existing order.”110 Similarly, Cynthia Jackson and Eleanor Nunn defined academic
freedom at black colleges through the 1960s as “virtually nonexistent; faculty was hired
by the president, who in turn served at the pleasure of the board of trustees or governing
board.”111 Curriculum was impacted by calls for specific instruction by philanthropists,
the board of directors, and the school’s president. For example, The Progressive
Education Association through its Committee on the Function of Science in General
Education, proposed teaching Negro students sciences that would address the specific
shortcomings of the race and included four topics of coverage: 1) Personal living:
heredity, sex education, maintenance of physical and mental health; 2) Immediate
personal social relationships; 3) Social-Civic relationships: Community health,
recreation, and human resources; and 4) Economic relationships: Use of machines,
conservation of natural resources, and wise consumerism.112 Black intellectuals were
successful in gaining academic autonomy following intense battles between white
presidents and black professors, students and the larger black community. Such was the
109
Adam Fairclough, Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890-2000 (New York: Penguin
Publishing, 2002), 175.
110
Fairclough, 175.
111
Cynthia L. Jackson and Eleanor F. Nunn, Historically Black Colleges and Universities: A Reference
Handbook (Santa Barbara: ABC – CLIO, 2003), 51.
112
Thomas P. Fraser, “Science Surveys in Accredited Negro Colleges,” Journal of Negro Education, 9,
no.1 (Jan. 1940): 20.
216
case with Howard University from 1920s when professors Kelly Miller, Lewis Moore,
William Cook, Rayford Logan, Alain Locke, and E.E. Just along with alumni and
administrators protested their lack of academic freedom and the dismissal of longstanding faculty by President James Durkee (1918-1926). 113 Durkee, appointed as the
twelfth white president of the university, had also been accused of accosting faculty with
whom he disagreed and his affiliation with a Whites-only school (Curry School of
Expression) in Boston. To force him out, the professors and alumni publicly ostracized
the university as “the Durkee plantation” in The Crisis, the Afro-American (Baltimore),
and The Nation. In March 1926, Durkee resigned and replaced by the first black
president, Mordecai Wyatt Johnson.114
There are no indications that Negro students rejected eugenic curriculum (at least
publically), despite having to use the same racial course materials offered at white
institutions. Yet, Howard University students voiced their concerns over other aspects of
the university curriculum and general social conditions of the District on several
occasions. In 1919, for instance, students protested in the streets against the riots and
Klan activity in the city; and in 1925, Howard students held a strike to protest required
Monday chapel, during which student were to “sing old Negro spirituals and plantation
ditties.”115 These students protested public displays of white supremacy and protested
113
Zachery R. Williams, In Search of the Talented Tenth: Howard University Public Intellectuals and the
Dilemmas of Race, 1926-1970 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009), 23.
114
Marybeth Gasman, Higher Education for African Americans before the Civil Rights Era, 1900-1964
(New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2012), 119.
115
Paul Finkelman, Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present, From the Age of
Segregation to the Twenty-First Century, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 467.
217
singing spirituals and “ditties” perhaps because they viewed them as remnants of the
“Old Negro”. Arguably, as modern New Negroes, they were less inclined to reject
scientific course curricula that offered a way out of race degeneration.
Mainstream high schools and colleges offered a steady supply of white
supremacist propaganda and science through textbooks, like We, Europeans, which asked
students to note Negro characteristics that were “ape-like” and to discuss how to
comparatively identify Negroes newly arrived from the South based on their physical
features, I.Q. and language.116 These lines of inquiry demonstrate how students easily
formed opinions of the racialized “Other,” based on biology instruction, while
simultaneously begging the question, how Negro students, using the same materials
responded? Conceivably, the evolving New Negro could separate racially from the
material by casting himself as a new and improved version of his direct ancestors. For
instance, textbooks often depicted African Americans’ immediate ancestors with
exaggerated Negro features like very dark skin (or with dark hair covering the body to
appear as dark skin), wiry or kinky hair, thick lips, and flat noses and modern Homo
sapiens as having light skin, straight hair, a flat forehead, a narrow nose and small lips.117
To the shifting sensibilities of the emerging Negro intellectual class, these savage-like
figures in no way represented them. Further, with a few cosmetic alterations (hair and
skin tonics), the New Negro could count himself as modern as his white counterparts.
116
John Dewey, Albion W. Small, The Pedagogic Creed (New York: E.L. Kellogg & Company, 1897), 7.
Maurice Bleiseld, “A Biology Unit Dealing with Racial Attitudes,” The American Biology Teacher Vol.
2, no.1 (October 1939): 7-8.
117
218
Those Negroes whose appearances fell in line with the “ancestors” could be viewed as
either evolutionarily stunted or an outlier of held theories.
As the Great Migration saw a flood of African Americans with more African
features and folk (or southern) mannerisms populating northern cities, black intellectuals
like Allison Davis, began studying the Southern stock of Negro and the impact migration
had on their ability to evolve in northern environments. Working alongside fellow
anthropologist Burleigh Gardner, Davis moved to Natchez, Mississippi to determine
through first-hand examination if inherent inferiority existed among Southern Negroes
and whether or not education could ameliorate their racial condition. Davis offered his
initial hypothesis of education as: a social process, and schools as extensions of the
community, collectively bringing “the child to share in the inherited resources of the race,
and to use his own powers for social ends.”118 Davis understood many schools developed
from church programs instilling the importance of literacy instruction to all interested
segments of the black community. Formal schoolhouses and the students required the
same level of social support and commitment. As education became important to
parents, children would embrace it fully and, in turn empower the community with better
economic and social support (improved employment opportunities, better wages, and
more social stability).
Having completed studies at Harvard and the London School of Economics,
Davis, found himself and his wife ill-prepared and ill-equipped to live among poor
118
Allison Davis, Burleigh Gardner, and Mary Gardner, Of Social Anthropological Study of Caste and
Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941), 69.
219
Southern Negroes. The class distinctions proved so acute among the Southern Negroes
that the Davises left the area and instead hired an apprentice to live among who they
termed the “deeply uneducated.”119 What is telling about this cross-cultural migration120,
was that Davis recognized a clear distinction between classes, or perhaps even “stocks”
of Negro.
Citing an inability to assimilate realistically into the neighborhood, Davis
concluded from afar that the IQ test he administered “did not measure intelligence, but
rather if a person was middle class.”121 Some might argue that Davis’ inability to
assimilate into a social class of Southern Negroes he chose to study resembles the
paternalism generally reserved for white researchers when engaging with “Others.”
Unlike fellow anthropologist (and author) Zora Neale Hurston, who lived among the
Negro denizens of several low-country Florida counties, Davis found the language,
customs, and habits of the Natchez residents “unbearable”. Further complicating his
attempts at assimilation, after a failed attempt at teaching Shakespeare to Southern
Negroes at an HBCU near Natchez, Davis determined something was “distinctly absent”
from Southern Negroes. Alison Stewart suggests Davis’ inability to instruct a second
group of black college students as an English teacher in rural Virginia in 1925 helped
spur his move into anthropology. Davis wrote that "teaching in the standard manner
Alison Stewart, First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America’s First Black Public High School
(Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2013), 102.
120
I consider the term cross-cultural because the North and South functioned socially as two separate
nations with values, customs, and laws set apart from each other. As such, they can be viewed in my
estimation as two separate nations that shared language, currency, and leisure, but practiced two distinct
methods of governing and social engagement (though they sometimes borrowed from each other).
121
Stewart, 103.
119
220
made no sense to these poor and poorly schooled rural blacks. I decided that I didn't
know anything to teach them since our backgrounds were so different, yet I wanted to do
something to affect such students.” 122 Following his failure to integrate into Natchez’s
black community, Davis sought to dispel beliefs that all Negroes were inherently inferior
mentally, socially, and intellectually to whites by examining intra-racial class and social
structures.123 Davis followed a common eugenic inquiry in his research that more aptly
attempted to discern what genetic and even environmental factors separated his genius
from his students’ lack. Davis found three self-prescribed classes of blacks in Natchez
that had developed systems of social segregation to isolate their class from the other two.
His desire to foster racial uplift through education required the support of a black
community that largely sat in condemnation and judgment of each other. In describing
field interview comments about class, Davis wrote:
Upper-class colored persons when angered by the behaviors of lower-class
individuals accused them of being black, boisterous, murderous, stupid, or
sexually promiscuous as a class. Middle-class persons were generally even more
severe in their criticisms of the lowest social group, regarding shiftlessness,
dirtiness, laziness, and religious infidelity as their chief characteristics. In the
same fashion, lower-class people accused upper-class persons (the “big shots,” the
“Big Negroes”) of snobbishness, color preference, extreme selfishness, disloyalty
in caste leadership, (“selling out to white folks”), and economic exploitation of
their patients and customers, They also accused middle-class persons, as a group
of sanctimoniousness, greed, miserliness, moral hypocrisy, and social
pretentiousness. To complete these reciprocal compliments, the middle class
regarded the upper class as sexually immoral…124
122
Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner, A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and
Class (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1941), xviii.
123
Stewart, 103.
124
Davis, 230.
221
Under such extreme attacks against personal and class character, Davis was faced
with the fact that the community did not function as a racial body with common goals –
including education – in mind. Those with the most did not necessarily feel compelled to
reach down and help their fellow black neighbor. Perhaps it was this understanding, once
Davis’ work was published, that made the development of hereditarian thinkers within
Howard University’s biology, social hygiene, and sociology departments that much more
critical. Allison Davis’ research, despite its eugenic undertones, concluded that it was the
stronghold of white supremacy that ultimately corrupted the Southern Negro’s ability to
attain and enjoy full citizenship. His raw data, like Hurston’s, unwittingly provided
support to opponents of Negro normal and common school by suggesting that Southern
Negroes were incapable of being integrated into the American body politic.
At the height of eugenic research Howard named its first Negro president, Dr.
Mordecai Wyatt Johnson in 1926. A Du Boisian “race man”, Johnson grew the
university from eight schools and colleges -- none of which held national
accreditation125—(black colleges in general were considered training institutions and not
proper universities worthy of accreditation until the 1920s) with an enrollment of 1,700
and its budget at $700,000 to 10 schools and colleges, all fully accredited, with 6,000
students, a budget of $8 million, and the addition of 20 new buildings including an
expanded physical plant.126 Johnson’s presence at Howard University coupled with that
of the largest contingency of prominent Negro scholars strengthened the belief among
125
126
Henry Louis Gates, African American Lives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 463.
Logan, 448.
222
Negro intellectuals that race regeneration was possible and that Howard was, indeed the
capstone of Negro education.
It is important to disabuse readers of the belief that African Americans were
simply the subjects or victims of eugenics and hereditarian thought, and make clear the
active role played by some Negro educators in introducing eugenic theories to students
and of Negro students in disseminating that information throughout their communities.
Although a wide range of eugenic organizations aided the dissemination of hereditarianthemed biology and sociology material on HBCU campuses, the instruction was as varied
as the instructors. On Howard’s campus alone, there were as many individual
perspectives on eugenics as there were methods of introducing it to students. For
instance, Thomas Wyatt Turner was, perhaps, the most unwavering mainline Negro
eugenicist of the 1920s. The son of former slaves, Turner was also a devout Catholic and
charter member of the NAACP. Turner taught biology and eugenics at Tuskegee,
Howard, and Hampton universities, having first encountered eugenics during the summer
of 1904, while studying alongside Charles Davenport at the Eugenics Records Office in
Cold Spring Harbor, New York.127
Law professor and scholars, including Paul Lombardo, position the contradictory
aspects of Turner’s institutional associations as an example of Negro intellectuals’ ability
to “exploit eugenics’ ideological flexibility to harmonize their racial, religious, and
127
Paul A. Lombardo, Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 77.
223
reformist beliefs.”128 Indeed, Turner’s instruction between 1902 and 1945 challenged
students to use theories espoused in Paul Popenoe and Roswell Johnson’s Applied
Eugenics (1918) and Davenport’s article, “Eugenics and Euthenics,” (1911) to determine
the role selective breeding played in racial uplift. Exam questions for his Sex Hygiene
course at Howard asked students to “Define Eugenics and Explain how society may be
helped by applying eugenic laws.”129 Lombardo argues that Turner used eugenics to
meet white norms on a biological level in order to eliminate cultural disparities between
the races.130
Similarly, Ernest Everett (E.E.) Just, took on what Kenneth Manning defines as a
“code of isolation” through which he separated himself as a black person from the masses
of Negroes in order to achieve clear, unbiased, scientific understanding of racial theories.
He explains the code thusly.
They carried on their work in a vacuum, far from the black reality and
outside the white mainstream. The frustrations of such a life were
enormous, and there was no way to deal with them even further into the
ivory tower. In the end, many black scholars and other educated
professionals became unproductive and apathetic interested only in
constructing an affluent little world for themselves, a phenomenon that the
black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier was later to analyze in his 1957 work
The Black Bourgeoisie.131
128
Lombardo, 77.
Lombardo, 77; Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson, Applied Eugenics (New York: MacMillan
Company, 1918) and Charles Benedict Davenport, “Euthenics and Eugenics,” Popular Science Monthly 78:
(January 1911):16–20.
129
131
Kenneth R. Manning, Black Apollo of Science: The Life of Ernest Everett Just (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1983), 162.
224
Indeed, Just in a request for Rosenwald funding described the design of his pedagogy as
embodying a “dispassionate scientific attitude,” that would be of “inestimable value for
the cause of Negro education”.132
Colorism and skin privilege factored greatly in the funding of Negro professors at
HBCUs and their perceived competence. The professional mobility of light-skinned
professors often influenced Rockefeller, Slater, and Rosenwald board members, as they
attempted to reconcile the need for eugenic instruction among Negroes with the
individual and departmental appropriation of suitable funds to those they deemed subhuman. Such was the case documented by Manning in his discussion of a particularly
tumultuous boardroom battle to fund Just.
Just envisioned a program that allowed him to teach basic zoology classes to
undergraduates, secure graduate students to tackle his research investigations as part of
their master’s work, and the establishment of the Rosenwald Institute of Zoology at
Howard University, through which he could devote his primary attention.133 Board
member Ralph Lillie was able to secure the $15,000 Just requested to fund his 1928-29
research by explaining to the other board members that Just did not have the “mental
qualities and intellectual outlook of the [N]egro, but rather the white man… and from his
appearance and other characteristics is a mulatto, racially, about three-fourths white.”
Embree and Rosenwald declined the 8-page proposal from Just to financially back
the plan, claiming they did not wish to build an institute at Howard that may not meet the
132
133
Manning, 134.
Manning, 211.
225
desires of its president (Johnson) or future biology or zoology chairs. However, the
Rosenwald Fund was prepared to streamline his proposal and as a result, pledged to
appropriate $15,000 during each of the four years 1928-1933 for the Department of
Biology of Howard University, if Dr. Just continued to direct that department and to
pursue scientific research and graduate instruction substantially in accordance with the
program outlined. The Fund allocated an additional sum $5,000 for purchasing scientific
equipment, including books and journals, for Dr. Just’s department during the five-year
period, 1928-1933. Just was the only black person in science to secure such backing
(roughly $80,000 over a five year period) for himself and the university with which he
worked.134
Just wished to conduct research that had educational value, but which also set him
apart from the masses of Negroes and allowed him to be judged squarely on the merits of
his work. He believed in and taught evolution and components of eugenics, the latter as
tools for social assimilation.135 Where Darwin positioned life as a struggle for existence,
Just submitted that life was actually a mutual cooperation between the living thing (man)
and the outside world (environment). Following the principles of Russian philosopher
Prince Peter Kropotkin, who argued that mutual aid and cooperation were the backbone
to biological-environmental research, Just taught Howard students that the boundaries of
the cells communicated with the outside environment. Ultimately, Just’s research sought
to find the “roots of man’s ethical behavior” by linking scientific and social theories on
134
135
Manning, 162.
Manning, 162.
226
human behavior. Because Just applied theories of evolution to daily life and transformed
tales of savages in deepest, darkest Africa into scientific theory, he taught his students to
think of the uneducated, the poor, the diseased, and the “unrefined” within the Negro race
as either biologically or socially dysgenic. 136
CONCLUSION
What felt like elitism and snobbery to Colbert King and some of his classmates at
Dunbar was a retooling of eugenic doctrine to address the shifting demographics of black
Washington, D.C.’s class hierarchies. Howard University and Dunbar worked to maintain
the superior social status of their institutions through the fitness of their student bodies.
The regimented codes of conduct fastened the tenets of proper mate selection, impeccable
personal hygiene standards, and racial pride to their students’ characters. Negro colleges
became boot camps of genetic fitness – identifying suitable race representatives to
perpetuate hygienic stock, weeding out the weak, and putting the students through
rigorous tests of skill. Race progress, as well as proper assimilation into the dominant
culture demanded each Negro fit into his proper station until the process of race evolution
moved the masses from the lowly state of disenfranchisement following the Civil War to
that of social equals to white Americans. White philanthropists easily supported Negro
institutions that made race regeneration a process of mutual cooperation, civility and an
(at least nominal) acceptance of Negro inferiority. Tied ostensibly to social eugenics, the
funding for Negro education served to create additional teachers, preachers, and
136
Ernest Everett Just, Biology of the Cell Surface, (Philadelphia: Blakiston, 1924), 367.
227
industrial workers. The Negro elite, however, was able to fashion a society within that in
many ways mimicked the white supremacist ideals of larger society, by recasting
dysgenicism and social mal-adjustment as a problem of the Southern and migrant class
members of the race.
Interjecting eugenics – whether scientific or social – into Negro education
introduced the supposedly marginally fit within the race to the concepts and behaviors
that showed them their weakness and subsequently “fixed” them. Instruction positioned
personal transformation as a collective race value with generational benefits. When
Negro educators began utilizing the very tools of eugenicists – I.Q. and Beta tests – to
catalogue the weak among them, it evidenced a social acceptance of eugenics and its
implications. Advising students planning their futures to adjust to the evaluations and
recommendations made by experts in mental measurement and education, Negro
educators at schools like Howard University and Dunbar High reinforced the ideology of
race regeneration. Testing in African American eugenic instruction linked biological
determinism to the ability to achieve life goals. In so doing, many otherwise competent
Negro students may have been steered into industrial schools and employment based on
eugenic labeling.
The benefits of racial uplift through the use of social eugenics, however, cannot
be overstated. The body of students prepared for leadership and authority among “the
race,” were influenced by the Rosenwalds, Rockefellers, and Stalters, as well as the
Negro elite who made fit those who otherwise would not have gained access to economic
and social independence. Even the studies of Miller, McAlphin, and Just, when
228
examined against Negro education reform, helped identify the need for federal or private
philanthropic intervention to provide more resources and better instruction in the South’s
Negro schools. Perhaps the social currency gained through adhering to social eugenic
mandates on cleanliness, mate selection, and public propriety far outweighed the methods
and insensitivity with which it was presented to high school and college students at
Dunbar High School and Howard University.
229
CHAPTER FOUR
“WHAT THE NEGRO NEEDS TO BECOME FIT””
POPULAR EUGENIC FRAMING OF BETTER HEALTH AND BEAUTY
“To absorb a handful of Negroes in America and leave the unbleached millions of Africa in their savage
blackness would be to deepen the gulf of racial cleavage as a world problem.”1
Kelly Miller, (1926)
“The man who dies and expecting to go to heaven and leaves his sorrowing wife and hungry children to
face the cold charities of the world…will deserve a seat away back behind the thief.” 2
Charles Spaulding, North Carolina Mutual Insurance (1906)
Institutions like insurance companies encouraged even the most socially
inadequate individuals to seek better health and racial advancement in the early twentieth
century. Records of the North Carolina Mutual Insurance Company, for example, note a
reticence on their part to write policies for certain classes of Negroes. Yet, they partnered
with Negro universities, the NAACP, and the Urban League in 1915 to establish Health
Improvement Week, (later National Negro Health Week). During this annual event,
nurses visited Negro neighborhoods to demonstrate proper housekeeping, ventilation,
and3 rodent and mosquito repellents methods. When necessary, these officials actually
took part in clean-up activities that included repairing and installing window screens and
door-to-door inspections. Arguably, while concerned with the real issues of infant
Kelly Miller, “Is the American Negro to Remain Black or Become Bleached?,” New York Amsterdam
News (September 1, 1926): 15.
1
2
Charles Spaulding, “Notes,” North Carolina Mutual Bulletin, January 1906, 1.
230
mortality, disease, and the business of meeting a positive return on policies, health
insurance agents and physicians sought to also build better families through discussions
on family planning methods, and eugenic standards of health management such as
personal cleanliness, proper diet, abstinence from drugs and alcohol, and the use of
physician-prescribed medicines (rather than folk remedies) at the onset of conditions.
Being able to manage one’s own health properly signaled a social eugenic shift from
child-like, irresponsible, and impulse driven behavior, to that of men and women capable
of maintaining their own fitness for generations. Building off of Samuel Roberts’
argument that historically black middle-class thought emphasized compensatory
(‘positive’ eugenic) strategies, which, like black moralism, implied human agency and
social organization over biological determinism;4 this study argues that positive
environmental (economic, educational, social) support or uplift characterized reform
efforts, even for those believed impacted by poor heredity.
Social reformers believed that by instilling in the weak the know-how to do better, they
would naturally begin to improve themselves.
The rampant rise of infectious disease among African Americans also suggested
that black physicians suffered a form of dysgenicism that made them effectual, or at least
inferior to white doctors. Combatting mainstream ideas about professional inferiority
based on their race, Black physicians had their professional efficacy tied inextricably to
4
Samuel Kelton Roberts, Jr, Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 53.
231
the racial health of their patients.5 Personal and collective survival of the race depended
on addressing medical and social ailments successfully. In 1933, Carter G. Woodson
charged Negro physicians with failing to direct “sufficient attention to the ante-bellum
background of the Negro, who still under that influence, indulges in superstitious and
religious practices which impeded the progress of medicine among them.”6 This
assessment deemed the allegedly culturally backward migrant responsible for the failures
of highly-educated black doctors. Resultantly, the physician-patient relationship between
the fit and the unfit was characterized by paternalistic frustration as seen in the accounts
of Dr. Hubert Eaton, a North Carolina doctor and local NAACP leader. Eaton and others
recalled their experiences to Carter G. Woodson, who wrote in The Negro Professional Man
and the Community that the “Negro physician has found it difficult to settle among people
who frequently fall back on such remedies as watermelon-seed tea, the concoction made
from sheep dung, sassafras, and home-made bitters produced from herbs.”7 This chapter
examines through the physician-patient relationship an elitist posture at work among
some physicians, a distrust of black professionals in general among some working-class
groups, and a social bias between both groups of African Americans based on education,
skin tone, and fitness.
5
Susan Burch, Unspeakable: The Story of Junius Wilson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2007), 115-116.
6
Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1933),
124.
7
Carter G. Woodson, The Negro Professional Man and the Community, with Special Emphasis on the
Physician and the Lawyer, 1934 Reprint (New York: Negro University Press, 1969), 16-17.
232
This chapter analyzes eugenic fitness and civility discourses as components of the
Negro beauty aesthetic as promoted by newspaper ads and models of race fitness as
shown in The Crisis and Opportunity magazines. As with Booker T. Washington’s
“gospel of the toothbrush,”8 social eugenicists believed dysgenicism could be viewed
from afar, leading African Americans to be categorized as either fit or unfit based solely
on their appearance. The 1920s witnessed the rapid growth of skin bleaching and hair
straightening products for African Americans, designed to correct the eugenic blemishes
of dark skin, kinky hair, and a supposedly overall unattractiveness. Eugenics connected
physical and aesthetic otherness to moral otherness and argued that character and
morality were situated within germ plasm as well. Kinky hair, dark skin, thick lips and
wide noses all constituted physical otherness – which viewed even from a distance,
categorized blacks as defective, inferior, and unappealing.9
The genetic correlation between inner moral character and exterior physiognomy was
commonly asserted by eugenicists in the late 1920s and into the following decade.
Eugenicist and University of Wisconsin professor Albert E. Wiggam, after judging a
1929 Miss Universe beauty pageant in Galveston, Texas stated, “Beauty is nature’s
flaming banner of her evolution… It is often said that ‘beauty is only skin deep.’ It is as
deep as protoplasm, as inherent as intellect, as vital as character… It is woven into the
8
Booker T. Washington, The Booker T. Washington Papers, Volume 5: 1899-1900 (Champaign-Urbana:
University of Illinois, 1976), 66.
9
Joan Rothschild, The Dream of the Perfect Child (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 40.
233
protoplasmic fabric of the race with all that is admirable and excellent.”10 Wiggam
attributes eugenic traits like character, intellect, and beauty itself, to evolution and
protoplasm, making a solid connection between science and social standards of
attractiveness. His assertion makes external appearance an indication of moral character,
intellectual capacity, and hereditary fitness.
Taking their cues from hereditarian thought on the suitability of mates, business
colleagues, and social connections, manufacturers of black beauty and hygiene products
commoditized reducing the appearance of “Negroid” features or negro-ness. In many
regards appearance superseded education in attaining social mobility. Employing studies
of Negro students’ attitudes towards visual negro-ness, between 1925 and 1935, this
project reveals the respondents’ widespread acceptance of light and brown skin along
with curly or straight hair, and a rejection of dark-skin and curly (or kinky) hair as the
ideal beauty aesthetic, irrespective of the respondents’ own physical traits. Further, this
chapter analyzes newspaper ads for “beauty” products that sell their wares as what I term,
“evolution in a jar”, as well as Lonely Hearts column personals that reveal an
overwhelming desire among Negro men and women for any type of mate who was not
dark-skinned. By selecting a mate that exhibited Wiggam’s protoplasmic beauty,
African-Americans could assert racial fitness, demonstrate social adjustment, and
promote the inheritance of those traits in their offspring. To enhance their desirability to
10
Christina Cogdell, Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania, 2004), 22.
234
potential mates, Black men and women attempted to mask those traits believed
unappealing by using cosmetic products.
While beauty, sexuality, and health constitute separate issues, the popularization
of hereditarian thought helped determine what was aesthetically beautiful, sexually
acceptable, and medically sound, making them occasionally overlapping categories and
concerns. Just as Wiggam proclaimed aesthetic beauty a component of biology, fifteen
years earlier in 1915, Army Medical Corps Major R.W. Shufeldt, proclaimed skin
bleachers useless in changing the dysgenic biological nature of Negro users.
The Negro is not responsible for his animal nature any more than for the
opportunities he takes to gratify the normal impulses which are a part of him. It is
not a changing of the spots on the leopard, although some, indeed many, think this
to be the case. For example, a writer in The New York Evening Telegram on
January 28, 1904, claims to have discovered a treatment for the Negro which will
have the effect of turning his skin white! Just as though all savagery,
cannibalistic tendencies, thievish propensities, mendacity, and the rest were in the
skin of the animal! Such an expedient might, if effective, prove to be of value
politically; but it would be worse than useless biologically, for the danger sign –
his color – would be removed, and the opportunity would be greater for this semimetamorphosed race to mix its cannibalistic blood with that of the unsuspecting
Anglo-Saxon in the United States.11
Eugenicists like Shufeldt, positioned health, beauty, and sexuality as coefficients of
overall hereditary fitness. Having labeled African Americans savages and cannibals with
an inherited propensity for degenerate living that was in the blood, Shufeldt dismissed
any potential claims these “animals” would have to physically attractiveness with the aid
of skin bleachers. Moreover, in his estimation, their sexuality would always be governed
Robert Wilson Shufeldt, America’s Greatest Problem: The Negro (New York: F.A. Davis Company,
1915), 151.
11
235
by their impulses to satisfy their desires without regard for the transmission of disease or
hereditary taint.
At the height of the eugenics movement (1905-1930)12 beauty, health and
sexuality converged through hereditarian-driven beliefs in fitness and desirability. Each
functioned through seemingly incongruous notions of race progress, social advancement,
and genetic purity and fed off of each other to produce lucrative consumer industries.
Insurance companies touted improvements to health and protection of germ plasm
through avoiding alcohol and drugs, proper diet, and reproductive control, and cosmetic
companies suggested beauty treatments that could mask indications of poor health and
promote the illusion of fitness.
According to Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, beauty plays a potent role in
proper selection for lower animals as well as humans. The biological effects of selection
for beauty obviously depend upon attraction, but not necessarily fitness. S.J Holmes and
C.E. Hatch in attempting to determine the relationship between beauty and native
intelligence among 600 college females hypothesized that:
A face that betrays that the mind behind it is an intellectual blank would hardly be
regarded as beautiful however regular might be its features. To a certain extent
indications of intelligence are marks of beauty. So also are facial expressions that
give the impression of good health, cheerfulness, and kindly disposition. In so far
as intelligence is correlated with good health and natural vigor one would expect
that beautiful women would be somewhat above the average in intellectual gifts –
the characteristics with which beauty is associated.13
12
Judith A. Baer, Historical and Multicultural Encyclopedia of Women’s Reproductive Rights in the United
States (Santa Barbara: Greenwood Publishing, 2002), 78.
13
S.J. Holmes and C.E. Hatch, “Personal Appearance as Related to Scholastic Records and Marriage
Selection in College Women,” Human Biology, 10, no. 1 (February, 1938) 66.
236
Holmes and Hatch concluded that the University of California scholastic averages among
the University of California females diminished as ratings for beauty increased, the
proportion of women rated as beautiful or good looking decreased with years spent in
college; and that marriages occurred most frequently among those rated beautiful,
showing evidence that beauty played a very important role in marriage selection within
the class of individuals studied.
DISEASE PREVENTION, HEALTH IMPROVEMENTS & EUGENICS
Americans became almost obsessive about the reproduction of unfit stock during
the 1920s. In fact, many of the social reform bills presented by states like Indiana, North
Carolina, and California had at their base some argument concerning the negative
economic or social impact of unfit citizen behavior on the fit. Temperance reform and
prohibition movements used eugenic arguments to suggest that the Weismann’s ‘germ
cell’ could be damaged by alcohol, causing ‘blastophoria,’ which would produce
feebleminded offspring.14 German biologist August Weismann theorized in 1893 that
germ plasm contained immortal, heredity-carrying genes and chromosomes transmitted
through successive generations.15 If damaged by alcohol or other drugs, the tainted germ
plasm would destroy any possibility of fit heredity in any successive generations.
14
Dorothy Porter, Health, Civilization, and the State: A History of Public Health from Ancient to Modern
Times (New York: Routledge, 1998), 169.
15
Stuart Pivar. One the Origin of Form: Evolution by Self-organization (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books,
2009), 4.
237
Similarly, support of immigration restrictions, such as the Quota Laws of 1921 and the
1924 National Origins Act each had eugenic fears as their foundation. Henry Fairfield
Osborn, President of the Second International Eugenics Congress at the American
Museum of History (New York) told The New York Times in September 1921, that the
melting pot did not exist and without passage of the Quota Laws being debated in
Congress, the U.S. would likely take on the moral character and family defects of the
worst immigrant elements.
We are engaged in a serious struggle to maintain our historic republican
institutions through barring the entrance of those who are unfit to share the duties
and responsibilities of our well-founded Government. The true spirit of American
democracy, that all men are born with equal rights and duties, has been confused
with the political sophistry that all men are born with equal character and ability
to govern themselves and others, and with the educational sophistry that education
and environment will offset the handicap of ancestry.16
The war against defectives was only partially addressed in minimizing immigration and
monitoring foreign populations within the country. The more immediate and challenging
battles for eugenic supremacy were fought in American backyards among families and
neighbors, searching for defective members of their own race and immediate kin.
Physicians and educators, like Pennsylvania State College Dean Arthur Holmes,
produced a steady stream of guides and manuals for parents to discern whether their
relatively normal children carried dormant deficiencies that lay in wait and ready to
attack. Holmes’ Backward Children (1915), offered social, pedagogical, and scientific
Henry Fairfield Osborn. “Eugenicists Dread Tainted Aliens, Believe Immigration Restriction Essential
to Prevent Deterioration of Race Here,” The New York Times, September 25, 1921.
16
238
standards of measurement that parents used as a base for measuring their own children’s
fitness, and described common causes of dysgenic offspring – chief among them:
unsanitary households. It is unclear if Holmes reads the dysgenicism as having occurred
(for instance in the case of tuberculosis) from an unhealthy environment or from a parent
who developed chronic conditions either through congenital defect or inheritance. His
sage advice to parents included having children tested immediately and often for social
and intellectual retardation, and if the slightest evidence of dysgenicism existed, finding
an institution where the child would be protected from himself and “prevented from
doing damage to society.”17
African American reform agencies, like the Urban League, were as equally
concerned as white reformers about the overall fitness of the nation, increasing their
efforts from talks about disease prevention in the 1910s to establishing free health clinics
in some cities, including New York in 1932. Their efforts were particularly timely with
mainstream health officials citing Negro servants as carriers of disease into white homes
following the First World War. Edwin Embree, whose administration of Rosenwald
education funds helped establish many of the nation’s premiere black colleges, was
especially concerned about the spread of disease from migrant class Negroes who served
white families in domestic roles. On several occasions, Embree recounted a story of
contagion, embellishing it often, to make his point:
A colored cook coming one morning to her fashionable white employer in
Virginia was anxiously warned by the mistress to stop at the gate since measles
had broken out in the manor house and germs might be picked up and carried
17
Arthur Holmes, Backward Children (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1915), 92.
239
back. “That’s all right,” laughed the cook, “My children have been having
measles for a month.18
Embree’s wrote that his well-laid irony caused audiences to gasp almost on cue, horrified
as the potential dangers of disease lurking in the black body of a servant with full run of
their homes and charge over white children, became evident.
In his numerous iterations of the story, sometimes Embree’s cook was a maid;
other times, the servant’s kids had fought off the disease for two weeks, rather than a
month. Embree’s conclusion that a properly eugenic white family could be plundered for
generations through the sheer ignorance of a single unhygienic servant, remained
powerful. It is Embree’s assault on the mal-adjusted Negro woman as life-giver and
sustainer, especially when placed against the loving, conscientious fitness of the white
mother that makes the two-sentence anecdote all the more harrowing. The servant had
not thought her own children’s illness was cause for concern, had not quarantined her
children or herself from others, had thought light enough of what could have easily been
a serious epidemic to laugh at her mistress’ distress, and finally, had (through
implication) been named the source of the white children’s illness. The eugenic thread to
Embree’s account supports the eugenic beliefs of physicians like J. F. Miller,
superintendent of Eastern Hospital in Goldsboro, North Carolina, who began as early as
1896 to explain increased incidents of disease among Blacks a result of emancipation.
According to Miller, the violation of natural laws governing his mental and physiological
18
Edwin Embree, “Negro Illness and the Nation’s Health” The Crisis, March 1929, 84.
240
capacity for servitude “left a slimy trail of sometimes eradicable disease upon [the
Negro’s] physical being… and brought upon him a beautiful harvest of mental and
physical degeneration and he is now becoming a martyr to a heredity thus established.”19
Embree also played on the fears asserted by Osborn in his remarks on the immigration
bill by arguing that diseased immigrants and Blacks – through ignorance – could destroy
Whites’ superior germ plasm and bring the Anglo-Saxon race to ruin. Embree surmised
that the poor general health and a neglect of personal hygiene made African Americans
“liabilities and dangers not only to him and his group, but to the entire country.”20
Embree’s accounts, however alarmist, generally preceded his solicitation of funds from
whites to help Negro organizations carry out medical testing, establish health clinics, and
provide rudimentary health education classes to migrants. And he was not alone in his
appeals.
Mercy Hospital Superintendent Algernon Jackson, lamented as early as 1919 that
the health and fitness of the Negro was thwarted by “efforts to humiliate them, and make
their sojourn both unpleasant and unprofitable with no thought of effecting in them
perfect Americanization.”21 Jackson notes that very little care or study was given to the
question of the Negro’s health beyond a “rather indifferent generalization which declared
the race decadent and reeking with sickness and death”22 until it was believed the Negro’s
J. F. Miller, “The Effects of Emancipation upon the Mental and Physical Qualifications of the Negro in
the South,” North Carolina Medical Journal, 38 (Nov. 1896): 287.
20
Edwin Embree, 84.
21
Algernon B. Jackson, The Man Next Door (Philadelphia: Neaula Publishers, 1919), 12.
22
Algernon B. Jackson, “The Need of Health Education Among Negroes” Opportunity, August 1924, 235.
19
241
health was somehow arresting white fitness. Sharing Embree’s belief in the power of the
unfit to upset the race progress of the Negro professional class, Jackson spoke often to
Negro reformers of casting aside and wrestling the unfit. Claiming “no amount of
intelligence can possibly save the educated from the menacing effects of the uneducated
unless that intelligence is wisely used to dethrone ignorance and superstition,”23 Jackson
campaigned vigorously against folk cures, including a common one for syphilis that
included making a paste of the ashes of one good cigar, fifteen cents worth of blue
ointment; mix and put on sores24 utilized by Negro migrants.
The concept of social fitness among individual Negroes, however, was a matter of
subjectivity and often depended greatly upon factors outside of their control. For
instance, according to T. J. Woofter, despite constant attempts at keeping working-class
Negro homes clean, unsanitary conditions [were] found almost universally among Negro
renters.25 Additionally, accommodations in urban tenements was characterized by
inadequate “sewage, drainage, ventilation, chimneys, halls, staircases…and space for all
occupants,”26 making a comfortable and sanitary space near to impossible to maintain.
Researchers and reformers attempting to discern the personal cleanliness of a Negro
family living in such squalid conditions surmised that the Negro either deserved no better
or had, through his own dysgenicism made the dwellings uninhabitable. Jensen’s
23
Jackson, 235.
Wayland D. Hand, American Folk Medicine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 266.
25
Thomas Jackson Woofter, “Bulletin of the University of Georgia,” Phelps-Stokes Fellowship Studies
December 1913, 70.
26
William Loren Katz, The American Negro His History and Literature (New York: Arno Press, 1968), 61
24
242
Genetics and Education, noted that “more important than the issue of racial differences
per se [was] the probability of dysgenic trends in urban slums.”27
Slums, in the minds of eugenics proponents like Caleb Williams Saleeby,
constituted breeding grounds for dysgenicism. – Saleeby writing in 1914, argued:
[Slums] are the breeding-places of mental disease, such as alcoholic insanity and
general paralysis of the insane, which is now proved to be a form of syphilis.
Slums are not needed for the extermination of the defective members of the race.
Even if that argument were regarded as morally admissible, in point of fact, we do
not send our feeble-minded, insane and grossly diseased populations to the slums,
but make them there, find them there, and then remove them to fine asylums,
hospitals, and country colonies. The slums provide the conditions which actually
originate degeneracy, and though they are well provided with lethal chambers –
they have none other – these are not often effective, in their hideous way, until the
poisoned life has already been passed on to a new generation.28
Saleeby essentially makes the condition of the slums an extension of the character
of its inhabitants. Naming them as morally, socially, and inherently defective, Saleeby
makes an argument that once the migrant Negro took residency in urban areas, his
diseases, hardships, and overall condition sojourned with him and transformed the space
into a slum. As a result, the poor sanitation and structural quality of urban areas set aside
for Blacks through segregation would not be blamed for the incidents of tuberculosis,
typhoid fever, cholera, and other diseases associated with poor sanitation – even when
evident. Typhoid fever, for example, is an infectious disease caused by ingesting
contaminated water or food. Tuberculosis is a contagious infection caused by bacteria. By
the 1920s scientists had isolated the causes of typhoid and tuberculosis, identified
27
28
Arthur Robert Jensen, Genetics and Education (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 331.
Caleb Williams Saleeby, The Progress of Eugenics (New York: Cassell and Company, 1914), 115.
243
treatments, and developed preventive measures, primarily in the form of vaccines
(typhoid and smallpox) and hygiene mandates (tuberculosis). Nonetheless, both diseases
still proved deadly for many migrant patients who had limited access to those preventive
measures or to health care facilities.29
Further complicating the medical dissemination of eugenic fitness and its
principles was the reliance among Negroes -- both North and South -- on spiritual, folk,
and traditional African remedies, cast collectively by both the black middle class and
black intellectuals as the Hoodoo Complex. Aided by midwives, herbalists, morticians,
and root workers (or conjurers) in the Deep South, migrant populations transplanted this
belief system in urban areas using Dream and Numbers books, curio shops (shops where
spiritual and items for rituals purchased), holiness churches (sanctified and spiritual-led
worship), psychics, and a small contingency of root doctors (holistic practitioners using
prayer, herbs, roots, and spells to cure). Their roles included diviner, healer, and
manipulator of worldly and spiritual events.30 Dream and Numbers books assigned
numbers to the themes of dreams or waking occurrences and offered interpretations of
them. The numbers could be used to play “policy,” an illegal lottery game of three digit
numbers. For instance, if a person were to encounter a cross-eyed person, Policy Pete’s
Dream Book would provide them with the three-digit number 285. Theme or image
29
H.E. Lee, The Red Book of Houston: A Compendium of Social, Professional, Religious, Educational, and
Industrial Interest of Houston’s Colored Population (Houston, Texas: Sotex Publishers, 1915), 148.
30
Katrina Hazzard Donald, Mojo Workin’: The Old African American Hoodoo System (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 2013), 57.
244
interpretations like dreaming of fish signaled the pregnancy of a relative or
acquaintance.31
Even the physical manifestation of disease, in many Negro minds, resulted from
curses, spiritual possession, or another person working hoodoo on them. The holistic
approach to life meant that even as New Negro reformers promoted scientific causes and
cures for making sense of disease, particularly among migrant classes, the traditional
beliefs and practices continued. When Black physicians Homer E. Nash, James W.
Martin and Hubert Eaton encountered what they diagnosed as tuberculosis, typhoid, or
syphilis in migrant patients, members of these communities interpreted the cause of their
sickness as supernatural. Hoodoo or conjuring was believed to be able to cause all types
of illness, as well as unusual physical and mental symptoms including: paralysis,
miscarriage, breathing problems, prolonged constipation (locked bowels), unexplained
body pains, fits, insanity, swelling of limbs, and ugliness.32 And for most physical or
emotional concerns, the hoodoo conjurer remained more viable than the physician.33 But
Policy Pete’s Dream Book (New York: Lewis Hartmann Printers, 1933), 93.
Donald, 136.
33
Further intersections between modern and traditional Negro medicine can be found in a number of texts.
Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men (J. B. Lippincott, 1935) provides a non-fiction look at hoodoo and
folk culture. First-hand accounts of her experiences with the supernatural and the African Americans fully
indoctrinated into the Hoodoo Complex provide one of the most useful accounts of how eugenic efforts
could fail miserably among those who believe in a spiritual cause of their ailments. Also, see Hurston’s
work with The Federal Writers Project in Florida. The Negro in Florida, 1528-1940. [unpublished
incomplete ms.] [n.d.,circa 1940]. Additionally, N. W. Newell’s “Reports of Voodoo Worship in Hayti and
Louisiana”, Journal of American Folklore., 2(1899), 44; Edward T. Clayton’s "The Truth About Voodoo"
Ebony Magazine, 6 April 1951; Daniel Webster Davis’ "Folklore and Ethnology: Conjuration" Southern
Workmen and Hampton School Record 27: December, 1898; and Lewis de Claremont’s Herb and Oil
Magic(Oracle Publishing Co., 1936.) provide reasonable examinations of the hoodoo belief system and the
impact the shift to modern medicine, and the Great Migration had on the Hoodoo Complex. Claremont’s
work, as a side note, is particularly interesting as the author -- a Jewish American -- operated one of the
31
32
245
with an escalating phobia over Negro germs and the often whispered battle-cry, “germs
cannot be segregated” the great task before the teachers and preachers of the race [was] to
“inculcate higher standards of personal and family life.”34
Louis Dublin, a Jewish-American statistician who served as Vice President of
Metropolitan Life Insurance from 1931 to 1932, charged Negro physicians with taking on
the role of the new and improved conjurer, suggesting that in addition to caring for the
sick, he “serve his people as educator and teacher of a better and more hygienic mode of
life; he can be a leader in disease prevention.”35 Arguably, the classically trained Negro
physician found it difficult to treat those he only marginally understood. Having cast the
people, as well as their beliefs, into a category of primitive and folk, the idea of teaching
them disease prevention and social fitness, seemed futile.
The general health of the Negro race served as a point of contention in
pronouncements of collective race fitness beginning in the 1920s when demographers,
insurance companies, and health providers noted their abnormally high rates of
tuberculosis, syphilis, and other social diseases. While death rates from tuberculosis
decreased (from 344 to 232 per 100,000 in the North, and from 229 to 130 in the
South,36) the incidents of infection and the likelihood that Negro servants were carriers of
it and other communicable diseases, positioned Negroes as the nation’s most pressing
earliest and most prolific mail order hoodoo supply companies. His books, reportedly, had a tremendous
impact on urban hoodoo.
34
Louis I. Dublin, “The Health of the Negro,” Opportunity, July 1928,199.
35
Dublin, 200.
36
Gunnar Murdal. Black and African-American Studies: American Dilemma, the Negro Problem and
Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1944), 142.
246
health threat. An examination of housing in the proliferation of tuberculosis among
certain classes of Americans during the early 1900s became critical to halting its spread.
The U.S. looked to Dr. Lawrence Flick, a white Philadelphia researcher (and later
founder of the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis) to
determine causes of disease and courses of treatment.37
Flick concluded that a subtle distinction existed between the Irish immigrant and
the Irish in Ireland in their ability to fight off tuberculosis that hinged on their bodies’
emanating either hypersusceptibility or hypoimmunity. With hypersusceptibility there
existed an innate physical constitution that easily contracted the tubercle bacillus;
whereas, hyperimmunity uncovered a lack of acquired resistance or the person’s failure to
develop an adequate resistance to the bacillus once infected.38 Flick determined that Irish
Americans fell largely into the latter category, as did Negroes, whose rates of tubercular
infection were attributed by Flick to “the shortness of time since his ancestors have left
the jungles of Africa.”39 On the surface, Flick’s assessment suggests that while
tuberculosis certainly existed on antebellum slave plantations, it was the inability of the
Negro to fend off the disease on his own or to have adapted an immunity to it that caused
the high mortality from the disease. Flick did not believe in the power of heredity over
environment; however, a due course of time had elapsed in the evolutionary development
of Africans to make their susceptibility to diseases less pronounced. With rates of
37
Lawrence F. Flick, Transactions of the Sixth International Congress on Tuberculosis (Philadelphia:
William F. Fell Company, 1908), 475.
38
Roberts, 246.
39
Roberts, 246.
247
infection fewer under slavery, Flick makes an argument that either the growing immunity
against the disease was interrupted by emancipation or a degeneration of the immunity
gained under bondage had taken place. Flick’s theory was in keeping with other
physicians like Thomas McKie who believed that tuberculosis impacted Negroes as a
neurosis born of fighting their evolutionary downward spiral. Tuberculosis contained a
eugenic component in McKie’s estimation that made it a test of civilization, making it the
“strain of trying to be civilized that broke a black person’s health.”40 The majority of
tubercular disease cases, though, originated in the airborne travel of the tubercle bacillus
to the lungs, thereby making conditions of poor housing a fundamental cause of the
disease.”41 Poor nutrition, stress, and overwork were considered contributing factors as
well.
Other researchers, both Negro and white, believed at least fundamentally, that
syphilis was the real culprit in the proliferation of tuberculosis, which began as
pulmonary weaknesses. Eugene Harris, a Fisk University professor, for instance posited
that pulmonary diseases attacked Negroes with “enfeebled constitutions broken down by
sexual immoralities.”42 But for every physician or scientist claiming a direct correlation
between sexuality and disease, there were as many claiming the opposite. A.L
Bramkamp concluded that “there are some who believe that syphilis exerts a retarding
Thomas J. McKie. “A Brief History of Insanity and Tuberculosis in the Southern Negro,” Journal of the
American Medical Association 28 (1897):537-538.
41
Roberts, 4.
42
Eugene Harris, “Social Conditions or Environment,” (paper presented at the Second Conference for the
Study of Problems Concerning Negro City Life, Atlanta, Georgia, May 25-26, 1897).
40
248
and in some cases curative influence over the tuberculosis, while others hold that
tuberculosis is distinctly aggravated by its association with lues –another name for
syphilis.”43 It was not uncommon for working-class Blacks to be diagnosed with more
than one medical condition – often tuberculosis and syphilis. In instances where both
conditions occurred simultaneously, it was not rare for a patient to exhibit a corrective
tendency over the other – with one disease going into remission while the other got worst.
The more likely cause for both diseases being present in the same subject, however, was
a weakened immunity.
In urban areas like Baltimore, the rates of infection for tuberculosis and syphilis
tended to occur in the worse neighborhoods and among the most impoverished, causing
the Baltimore Housing Authority (BHA) to partner with public health and reform
agencies to pinpoint the causes. Historian Samuel Roberts notes that urban blight
actually became an indicator of tuberculosis, infant mortality and syphilis, among both
white and Negro populations. Studies and surveys to determine if Negroes caused the
blight or if blight caused diseases among them began in the 1920s and continued through
the 1960s with varying results. The BHA, for example, noted that health surveys “show
tuberculosis, syphilis [and] infant mortality occur most frequently in areas which also
contain many sub-standard houses ... implying either that syphilis was a disease of
housing or that rates of venereal disease indicated blight.”44
A. L. Bramkamp, “Associated Syphilis and Tuberculosis,” Cal State Journal of Medicine 21, no.
2(February 1923):54.
44
Roberts, 216.
43
249
John A. Kenney, head of the nursing school at Tuskegee (1902-1922) and founder
of the Journal of the National Medical Association (1908), believed that the survival of
the Negro race depended on cleansing the race of the weak and infirmed. As increased
infant mortality and deaths from preventable diseases began to weaken even communities
believed immune from such conditions, Kenney used the campus as a platform to inform
the larger Alabama Negro community about social eugenics. He also feared racial
extinction by tuberculosis, advising Negroes to “avoid the cities and stay in the healthy
countryside, adhering to ‘primitive, Puritan virtues,” or else in two to three centuries they
would vanish from the earth. Kenney declared “Marriage of the unfit or those who
cannot comply with the eugenic test transmits a hereditary predisposition or susceptibility
to consumption.”45
Heeding Kenney’s call, in 1913, Robert Russo Moton, Tuskegee’s principal,
instituted the first Negro Clean-Up Week in Alabama, which eventually became a
nationwide observance. For one week the entire local Negro community worked to clean,
mend, throw away or replace any items in their homes that created health hazards. These
efforts sent college students into the homes of laborers to address bad drainage, insectborne bacteria and household agents that caused infectious diseases. By 1921 National
Negro Health Week saw inter-racial partnerships between The National Tuberculosis
Association, The American Red Cross Association, The United States Public Health
Service, The Commission on Inter-Racial Cooperation, The National League on Urban
,45 George Hutchinson, In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2006), 103-104.
250
Conditions, and The American Social Hygiene Association, to name a few. Activists
cleaned black neighborhoods, repaired buildings, educated black communities about
health issues and conducted health clinics, examinations and inoculations. They also
pushed for public health services to hire African American nurses and physicians.46 The
interracial, multi-faceted focus of National Negro Health Week demonstrated the
common desire nationally, among reformers, to improve the overall health, fitness, and
awareness of working-class Blacks.
Cleanliness, however, depended on who was doing the examining and in what
capacity, leaving little room for individual standards. For many Negroes coming from
rural counties in the Deep South, for example, even the most dilapidated, overcrowded
tenement could be viewed as comparably better than the tin roof, shotgun houses they
had left behind. Geographer Charles Aiken in his study of post-bellum black life on
cotton plantations describes 1920s tenant farmer (sharecropper) housing as: drafty in
winter and full of vermin in summer, covered in magazine pages or cardboard to block
out breezes, prone to catching fire, and generally without indoor or outdoor toilets. In the
absence of toilets, “adults relieved themselves behind bushes and the house; children
frequently squatted in the yard.”47 Urban tenement dwellings proved marginally better
with laws in places like New York mandating at least one outdoor toilet for every twenty
residents in the rear of tenements and access to water through aqueduct systems. For
46
Johanna Schoen, Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and
Welfare. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 45.
47
Charles S. Aiken, The Cotton Plantation South Since the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1998), 137.
251
migrant Negroes and middle-class strivers, several factors necessary to become fit,
required that they remain under the constant scrutiny of others and quietly insecure about
not meeting the expectations of reformers. Reformers often made a distinctions among
those in need, utilizing the concept of the “deserving poor” (working and therefore
respectable, versus the underserving poor, whose poverty was consistent with pauperism,
immorality and a dependence on public assistance)48 to determine how to dispense
services. A September 1915 NAACP Crisis editorial titled “Begging” addressed the
informal system of aid by the organization and its members. Saying the NAACP
members and their friends were literally beset with pleas for aid “which are impossible to
grant even to deserving ones. A considerable number of cases, moreover, are not
deserving. One young writer in this city has begged of your friends so frequently and
needlessly that the editor has had to speak plainly of his character.”49 The unnamed
editor hints to unspoken rules of aid that demonstrate how the character of the vulnerable
dictated the ability to receive assistance from reform institutions. Determining the
character of the migrant required observations and interpretations of behaviors from
friends and neighbors. Among the institutions that instituted health reform efforts to help
uplift African Americans, the North Carolina Mutual Insurance Company, the oldest (still
operating) black accident and life insurance provider offered unique, life extension
programs to improve the overall health of their policyholders. John Merrick, its founder
48
49
Peter Robson and Asbjorn Kjonstad. Poverty and the Law (Portland: Hart Publishing, 2001), 109.
Editor, “Begging,” The Crisis, September 1915, 232-233.
252
believed that the conspicuous failings of the few would inevitably be imputed to the
entire race and cause the group to be regarded as a whole as inherently inferior.50
INSURANCE, NORTH CAROLINA MUTUAL & FITTER FAMILIES
Crucial to the overall livelihood of working-class Negro families was economic
support for the family in certain times, particularly with disease and death rampant.
While insurers like Metropolitan Life and Prudential covered the expenses of workingclass whites who suffered industrial on-the-job accidents and paid death benefits to those
whose heads of households had met untimely deaths, supposed Negro dysgenicism posed
a challenge to mainstream insurance companies to underwrite them. With African
American mortality and disease rates two to three times higher than white Americans,
mainstream insurance companies opted to either deny Negro workers coverage altogether
or provide policies at higher premiums and lesser payouts.51 As Heen argued, the
concept of Negroes as substandard mortality risks was “adopted after the rise of scientific
racism and rationalized during the ascendency of the eugenics movement52 further
widening the gulf between the fit and unfit. With one unexpected illness, or the loss of
the head of house, a working-class Negro family slipped into poverty.
50
Robert McCants Andrews, John Merrick, A Biographical Sketch (Durham: The Seeman Printery, 1920),
128.
51
Richard W. Thomas., Life for Us is What We Make It: Building Black Community in Detroit 1915-1945
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 84.
52
Mary L. Heen, “Ending Jim Crow Life Insurance Rates,” Northwestern Journal of Law and Social Policy
4, no.2, (Fall 2009):362-363.
253
Negro insurance companies existed initially as free black mutual aid societies
during in the early Republic and antebellum eras. They collected monies weekly to
provide burial, widow, and survivor benefits to members, but operated mostly as
benevolent societies or lodges, benefitting only their members. It was Prudential and
MetLife’s race-based classification for coverage and benefits that helped usher in
hundreds of Negro-owned and operated insurance companies to meet the needs of Negro
clients in the early twentieth century. The racial differential that cast all Negro applicants
as “substandard” adopted in 1907 by most insurance agencies was not revised until
1941.53
North Carolina Mutual (hereafter NCM), which became the largest and most
successful black insurance company in 1898, had as its motto: Merciful to All and was
instrumental in formulating a corporate consciousness that channeled a portion of policy
premiums back into neighborhood education and health reform. John Merrick, its
founder, Aaron McDuffie Moore, a humanitarian who helped build the financial coffers
of the institution, and Charles Spaulding, its general manager, are generally credited with
building the institution into the premiere community institution it remains. In the hands
of its Medical Director, Clyde Donnell, (serving from 1916 to1960), North Carolina
Mutual built an institution that successfully promoted eugenics among all classes of
53
Heen, 379.
254
Negro, while meeting the challenge of writing policy for the superstitious and hoodoo
adherents.54
In one 1922 NCM bulletin, Donnell documents that the company “paid out during
1921 in death claims over $100,000.00 for tuberculosis. This amount of money was paid
for 289 deaths; forty-one (41) Ordinary and two hundred and forty eight (248) Industrial
claims.”55 The payout, though great, firmly established NCM as an insurer who would
pay. With working-class housing conditions marginally sanitary and the heads of
household working in industries conducive to contracting tuberculosis (railroad, shipyard,
agricultural and mining work), records never ascertained how the diseases were acquired,
only that the monies for sick and death payouts had been received in a timely fashion.
This is also particularly significant, in that at the times these policies were written and
paid, demographers found that approximately 80 percent of all Negroes were employed
as agricultural workers, domestics, and unskilled workers; all classes of workers excluded
from social security or unemployment compensation benefits.56
54
Walter B. Weare, Black Business in the New South: A Social History of the NC Mutual Life Insurance
Company (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 5.
55
Clyde Donnell. Medical Bulletin - Subject: Tuberculosis, February 3, 1922. North Carolina Mutual Life
Insurance Company Archives, ca, 1885-2008 and undated, BOX 29. North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance
Company Archives, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, and
University Archives, Records and History Center, North Carolina Central University.
56
L.C. Blount, “Cooperative Steps Which the Association May Take for the Improvement of Labor
Conditions Affecting Policy-holders and Prospects of Member Companies,” (paper presented at the
Eighteenth Annual Session of National Negro Insurance Association, ,Chattanooga, Tennessee, August 1517,1917).
255
As if answering questions from his board of directors about the number of claims
paid out rather than denied or investigated, Donnell offered only the following
explanation for the payouts in his notes:
These are facts and we must face them like men and remedy them. The Negro
means much to the economic welfare of the southern white man and any
condition that tends to cause the Negro insecurity naturally militates against the
latter. It is time for the cities and states of the South to start an intensive drive to
conserve the health of the southern Negro to improve his surroundings, to teach
him the value of wholesome food, domestic hygiene, and other aids which may
assist them in taking a short cut [to] the shrine of a healthy existence.57
Donnell takes a holistic approach to racial uplift by moving that the board of
directors to work to improve the overall health of African Americans which would in
turn, improve their environments. By improving their health, Donnell suggests the rural
Black family could ward off some environmentally-linked diseases (tuberculosis) and
train their children avoid ailments (ringworm) through proper hygiene. With the better
health, the stereotype of Blacks as naturally susceptible would diminish.
NCM, in many instances, crafted the means by which racial fitness could be
achieved, by keeping those working class families gaining economic stability from losing
their footing through the illness or death of family members. Donnell followed this
report with a concerted effort to reduce tubercular infections, by developing a “Swat the
Fly” campaign for undereducated and migrant households. Believing flies to be the
57
Clyde Donnell, Medical Bulletin - Subject: Tuberculosis, February 3, 1922. North Carolina Mutual Life
Insurance Company Archives, ca, 1885-2008 and undated –BOX 29. North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance
Company Archives, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, and
University Archives, Records and History Center, North Carolina Central University.
256
culprit of the tubercular infections, NCM went door-to-door with easy to read, handdrawn flyers instructing how to keep flies from infecting family members.
Demonstrations were then performed in-house to reinforce the literature.58 It was this
demonstrative, one-on-one interaction with working-class and migrant blacks that
bridged the space between the intellectual Negro reformer and working class, and
eventually brought about a successful decline in incidents of tuberculosis among the
latter. NCM’s pro-migrant stance, however did not keep Donnell or its medical staff
from scrutinizing the eugenic health of its potential clients.59
The fitness of NCM’s workforce, from its secretaries to its field agents, aided in
the level of trust the migrant communities had in the authenticity of their policies.
Merrick upheld a strict dress code and touted his employees as “earnest, loyal, capable,
men and women in Home Office and Field knowing each other, working uprightly and
peacefully together for the best interests of the policyholder.”60 Other Negro insurers
upheld a conservative policy when interacting with migrant class consumers; however,
they did relax some rules for writing policies to afford all classes of Negro some level of
economic stability. In addition to eliminating the cost associated with the medical
examination, specially trained persons designated as company inspectors, and trained
Clyde Donnell, “Swat The Fly” Bulletin Life Extension Department NC Mutual Life Insurance
Company, Durham, NC – North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company – Clyde Donnell, M.D., Medical
Director. North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company Archives, ca, 1885-2008 and undated -- Box 29.
59
Clyde Donnell, “Notes” Bulletin Life Extension Department NC Mutual Life Insurance Company,
Durham, NC – North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company Archives, Greetings, statements, and
advertisements, 1924-1927, Box 78.
60
North Carolina Life Mutual Company. Box – 34. North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company
Archives, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, and University
Archives, Records and History Center, North Carolina Central University.
58
257
graduate nurses were used instead and the establishment of age requirements made
eligible those otherwise excluded.61 One example of the policy shift as set by the
National Negro Insurance Association stated “all applicants over 40 years of age applying
for $300 or less may be accepted on a non-medical basis provided there is nothing in the
medical history (provided by the client and attested to by the health department) showing
serious past illnesses, surgical operations or tuberculosis in the family.”62 Negro Health
Week and the efforts of NCM did prove successful in improving the overall heath and
condition of migrant Negroes. A summary of National Health Week from 1936 reported
the impressive participation of 30 states, 2,800 communities, 65,100 homes cleaned,
35,015 insect-rodent-control activities, 8,100 improvements made to home construction,
20,100 plant and flower activities, and 2,005 contests, pageants, plays and games.63
As tuberculosis numbers declined, reformers and public health, and social
programs began witnessing a steady rise in syphilis cases. The increase created a
particular public health concern because the disease potentially attacked the heart, lungs,
liver, spleen and kidneys. Hereditary syphilis was also believed to cause rheumatism and
in the lungs, the disease simulated pulmonary tuberculosis, complicating courses of
treatment. 64 Though syphilis rates among certain black populations had been higher than
considered normal for years, in the 1930s, medical professionals tied the infections to
Robert Greenridge, “Comparison of Methods in Selecting Industrial Risks,” paper presented at the
Eighteenth Annual Session of National Negro Insurance Association, Chattanooga, Tennessee, August 1517, 1917.
62
Greenridge, 163.
63
Roscoe C. Brown. “The National Negro Health Week Movement,” The Journal of Negro Education, 6,
no. 3 (1937): 553.
64
Burton Peter Thomas, Syphilis (Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger, 1922), 278.
61
258
heart disease, mental illness, infant mortality, and high miscarriage rates. Unlike
tuberculosis, typhoid and a host of other contagions, the eugenic classification
“feebleminded” or immoral sexual behavior supposedly undergirded each incidence of
syphilis. G. C. Hanna, Superintendent for Feeble-Minded in a 1916 report to the
Minnesota State Board of Control for State Asylum for the Insane, stated:
Since syphilis is spread by prostitutes for the most part and women of very low
social order, if those prostitutes are 50 percent, 60 percent, or 75 percent
feebleminded as indicated, we have the means of controlling the situation to the
extent that we have adequate provision for caring for the feebleminded. As fast as
these feebleminded prostitutes are brought to light through knowledge in the
community or through knowledge obtained by the physicians to whom they go, it
deems to me they could be dealt with immediately. 65
Hanna’s classification of prostitutes as feebleminded supported the belief that a lack of
sexual impulse control categorized the behavior of the enfeebled, leading them to formal
(brothels, street) and informal (exchange of sex for money, clothing, or gifts) forms of
prostitution.
The presence of syphilis, as identified through Wasserman blood tests, in the
bodies of virtually all age groups of Negro, made fighting the disease, and the behaviors
causing it, a priority among reformers. Insurance companies named “the greatest factor
contributing to [heart disease] as, of course, syphilis,”66 and encouraged insurance men
not to ignore it as it lay as the foundational crippler of the race. Syphilis, in essence,
65
Quarterly Conference of the Executive Officers of State Institutions with the State Board of Control at
the State Asylum for the Insane, (Anoka, Minnesota, 1916), 131.
66
Greenridge, 63.
259
provided a direct, scientific challenge to social evolution and racial uplift and reinforced
notions that Negro sex instincts were primitive and excessive.
Hundreds of articles written by reformers and published by the black press
announced syphilis as perhaps the most immediate danger to Negro racial uplift and
fitness. Among them, Howard University Professor of Syphilology H.H. Hazen’s (a New
Jersey-born dermatologist) “A Leading Cause of Death Among Negroes: Syphilis”
concluded that among the poorer classes, syphilis is twice as frequent in the Negro as in
the white…There are absolutely no records of any real value regarding the prevalence of
syphilis among the Negro teachers, professional men, business men, or students.”67
Hazen’s charge abruptly separates the professional intellectual class from migrants, as if
the spread of syphilis had a natural susceptibility among low-class blacks. At the core of
Hazen’s accusation against migrant-class syphilis rates were the immoral behaviors that
she believed produced them. Attacking the disease would mean challenging the sexual
mores and beliefs of migrant populations and convincing them that their moral obligation
to the race required they make personal self-improvements, namely the adoption of
respectable sexuality and sexual norms.
Making personal improvements became a foundational imperative among migrant
classes in the 1920s who attempted to assimilate into middle-class status through changes
in their appearance. Through two systems of intra-racial classification based on
physiognomy and tied directly to skin tone – colorism and pigmentocracy, African
H.H. Hazen, “A Leading Cause of Death: Syphilis” The Journal of Negro Education, 6, no. (Jul., 1937):
321.
67
260
Americans of all social classes utilized a central theme of light skin over dark skin to
assess the social fitness of its individual members. Health improvements went hand-inhand with self-improvements efforts and included the incorporation of diet and exercise,
into overall beauty regiments. Physical appearance according to black elites provided
evidence of mental, intellectual and hereditarian fitness, who championed beauty ideals
through behavior and public deportment.
COLORISM AND THE NEGRO BEAUTY AESTHETIC
The concept of improving inferior biology through education, migration,
improved habits, disease prevention, and the use of beauty products, encouraged millions
of African Americans to seek personal products and services to improve their physical
appearance. At the core of this desire was the scientific link made by race scientists and
eugenicists between appearance, health, physiognomy, and character. Within the race,
blacks often navigated a rough terrain of assumptions about their character based upon
their hair and skin as well as their clothing. Where colorism posited the notion that black
people, particularly women with light skin were more attractive than those with dark
skin, pigmentocracy focuses on the intertwined structuring of society based on race and
social class, where lightness is afforded with a higher level of social and political
capital.68 Pigmentocracy correlates skin tone with intelligence – “the lighter the skin, the
68
Kalwant Bhopal and John Preston, Intersectionality and Race in Education (New York: Routledge,
2012), 57.
261
smarter the woman,”69 and was tied inextricably to black women’s self-esteem. Kalwant
Bhopal and John Preston’s Intersectionality and Race in Education notes that black
women experienced bias at the “intersection of sex, race, and class. Physical attributes
and practices having to do with the body including physiognomy, pigmentocracy, dental
care, nutrition, mortuary practices, and skeletal distinctions, are intimately related to class
status.”70 Both pigmentocracy and colorism grew out of slavery and colonization in the
Americas and historically held that alleged inferior genetic stock improved by mating
with whites. Considered a global phenomenon, whiteness in areas of Latin America, for
instance, became a form of social capital, the “aesthetic eugenics of whiteness sought to
render away darker traits.”71 Even as the courts of England debated the close of the
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the so-called unnatural appearance of the African lay at the
center of pro-trade pronouncements. One Liverpool merchant, presenting an 1805
argument in favor of the slave trade commented:
Many other eminent philosophers are of opinion that the Negroes are not of the
same family with ourselves indeed how can they be, when they are black and
ugly, and stupid? For, granting that the sun could produce the black colour, how
could it possibly make a flat nose or thick lips? We may just as well believe that
we are connected with the oran outangs, as the negro savages are of the same race
with ourselves.72
69
Karen Teel, Racism and the Image of God. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 60-61.
Teel, 65.
71
Zeus Leonardo, Critical Pedagogy and Race (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 61.
72
Arthur Aikin, The Annual Review and History of Literature (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme,
1805), 644.
70
262
His characterization of the Africans as black, ugly and stupid was further
undergirded by his aversion to flat noses and thick lips, which he described as “monkeylike”. Such harsh assessments of appearance migrated across the Atlantic and into
American social and political thought, waxing in the laments of whites who found the
simplest way to compliment whiteness was to hold it up in stark contrast to that of
Africans or Negroes.
Following the Chicago Riots in 1919, several examples colorism can be found
wherein dark-skinned African American were blamed for the racial unrest. Judge Hugh
Stewart, for instance, when asked about any change in the character of crime due to
migration, not only identified the culprits, but shaded them “guilty” parties according to
their skin tone:
A great many of the colored people from the South are very dark skinned, and
there is a larger proportion in my estimation of offense among dark-skinned
colored people than among those of the light color…I think there is a difference
between offenses committed by colored persons from the South and colored
persons who have resided for a long time in the North. I think there are more
hold-ups and burglaries committed by men who come from the South than by the
colored population before the influx.73
Stewart’s comments largely reflect the consensus of court officers in urban areas that the
majority of crimes being committed by Negroes involved dark-skinned migrants. It was
in response to such overt racial classification of crime that reformers advised migrants to
talk in lower tones and appear less rough in public, to avoid more white hostilities. The
correlation between migrants and uncivil behavior can also be viewed as an aversion
73
Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race
Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 192.
263
among whites and some blacks to dark skin, which was racially linked to primitiveness.
However, it was the dark-skinned migrant female who often bore the brunt of
physiognomy-based bias and criminalization.
Even as migrant-class women attempted to move into middle-class spaces through
education and employment, colorism and pigmentocracy had a way of blocking their
efforts. Mary Mebane described a practice by black colleges through the 1950s of
required photos of students accompany their applications for admission. The commonheld pigmentocracy belief was that dark-skinned blacks had no business in schools.
Their dark tone and coarse hair supposedly made them less suited for academics no
matter their desire to learn. Mebane recalled that when she did well on a test during her
first days at North Carolina College for Negroes in the 1920s, she was called into the
dean’s office. Mebane, who was dark, said the “faculty assumed that light-skinned
students were more intelligent and they were always a bit nonplussed when a darkskinned student did well, especially if she was a girl.”74 Schools like Fisk, Spelman, and
Howard were rumored to require a photo with applications to ensure enrollment was
limited to only mulatto and light brown-skinned applicants. Alice Dunbar-Nelson, for
instance, while visiting South Carolina State College for Negroes, informally investigated
the rumor that they required photos for physiognomy purposes, believing it was a joke,
only to remark that “from the looks of the student body it looks like a reality.”75 The
74
Blain Roberts, Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth Century South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 181.
75
Roberts, 182.
264
practice was proven true at schools including Howard; however, proponents of the
measure insisted the rationale behind requiring photos with applications was to match the
student to the photos upon their arrival on campus. However, the fact that prospective
students readily believed these rumors points to the reality of light-skinned privilege in
Negro institutions.
Blain Roberts’ Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the
Twentieth Century South notes that consequences of pigmentocracy “became selffulfilling, as poorer, dark-complexioned women were more likely to pursue an industrial
curriculum that prepared them for manual labor and domestic service.”76 The social
stigma of dark skin and coarse or tightly coiled hair as markers of defectiveness and
barriers to social ascension ushered in an era beginning in the 1920s where skin bleachers
and hair straighteners became common household items in black homes. Social pressure
promoting visual eugenic fitness (i.e., light skin and straight hair) emerged in public as
early as the 1880s in advertisements for products promising to diminish “negative” black
features. These manufacturers reasoned that if to the naked eye, a migrant-class Negro
appeared visually fit, then social, educational, and economic opportunities would abound
for him or her. The success of the Negro beauty industry, for both men and women,
points to a shift culturally among all classes of African American about what constituted
beauty, fitness, and desirability. Except where dark skin and natural hair took on
elements of exoticism or resistance to white supremacy and the dominant intra-cultural
76
Roberts, 182.
265
aesthetics, light to brown skin and straight to wavy hair became the ideal of Negro
beauty. Perhaps with no conscious thought for the science behind social eugenics, Negro
men encouraged their sons and daughters to “marry light” for the sake of their progeny;
believing that light-skinned children would be shielded from the crude ostracizing from
within the race and from larger society, as their features, would not mark them as unfit
and thus bar them from life’s success.
Social commentator Gustavus Steward, provided an ode to dark-skinned Negro
women, whom he claimed were relegated to pass into extinction. Steward, whose works
appeared in Opportunity and The Crisis, wrote that “she is being forced out of the domain
which for centuries has been conceded to by woman’s particular heritage, namely the
home.”77 Steward writes that Negro men who regardless of the shade of their own
complexions, whether they be ‘pink’ or ‘purple,’ almost unanimously shun the black girls
for mere ‘society’ purposes.”78 Squeezed out of middle-class employment because of
industry preferences for light and brown-skinned female employees, the darker-skinned
black woman was forced to seek employment in the most debased professions within
domestic service. It was Steward’s estimation that educated dark-skinned Negro women,
forced by their skin color into white households as servants, eventually made up the
number of sexually-assaulted servants producing illegitimate mixed-race children. They
become barred, as Steward names it, from “propagating her own kind.” Steward
introduces a byproduct of dark-skin female rejection in his lament: the Sweetback, a
77
78
Gustavus Adolphus Steward, “The Black Girl Passes” Social Forces, 6, no.1 (September 1927): 99.
Steward, 101.
266
light-skinned male gigolo who made a living sleeping with dark-skinned black women.
Calling him a parasite, Steward characterized him as a “male prostitute who, finding
among this group of socially and economically defeated women a forlorn host of sexstarved, plies his profession extensively. He may be often met in the cities, well dressed,
well fed, well satisfied.79
Excluded from socializing and dating in many black elite circles, dark-skinned
Negroes looked expectantly to skin whiteners, hair straighteners and grooming tonics to
alter their appearances. Dark-complexioned men could even their chances of social
mobility by marrying a light-skinned woman and siring light or brown skinned children.
Thus, the dark black man’s individual social currency stemmed from his education and
ability to provide a comfortable life for a wife and children. Where a light-skinned
female may find his skin tone unappealing, the financial security he could provide evened
the playing field. By contrast, dark-skinned Negro women came to embody the concept
of genetic and social imperfection.
Popular culture and beauty product hawkers made clear to dark-skinned women
that their color was a dysgenic marker. Newspaper articles published from New York to
Chicago all affirmed the lowly status of the dark-skinned female. One Chicago Defender
writer declared, “Coal blacks often find themselves pariahs among their own people. So
the highly educated black girl cannot hope to cope socially with her most illiterate lightskinned sister.” 80 Ward Greene’s 1929 novel Cora Potts, finds a would-be heroine
79
80
Steward, 102.
Ben Franklin Gardner, “Harlem’s White Black Folks,” The Chicago Defender, July 13, 1929.
267
Amanda Cobb, bewailing, “My skin was an ugly dark brown and my hair kinked in spite
of all efforts to wave it. Often I envied my fairer friends their ivory skin and long,
straight, lovely tresses. I wished that I, too, had a complexion men admire and women
envy.”81
Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry, (1929), demonstrates how physical
traits become scientific and social markers even among dark-skinned people striving for
middle-class acceptance. Thurman’s Emma Lou, who is dark and from a family of
professionals, labels a fellow college student a barbarian based on her looks.
No doubt her mother had been a washerwoman. No doubt she had innumerable
relatives and friends all as ignorant and ugly as she. There was no sense in having
a face as ugly as Hazel’s, and Emma Lou thanked her stars that though she was
black, her skin was not rough and pimply, nor was her hair kinky, nor were her
nostrils completely flattened out until they seemed to spread all over her face. No
wonder people were prejudiced against dark-skin people when they were so ugly,
so haphazard in their dress, and so boisterously mannered as was this present
specimen.82
Emma Lou is constantly concerned about her social station and finding a light-skinned
husband, who will ensure her children are not black like her. Thurman codified the
character’s job prospects, housing opportunities, and desire to marry and have a family in
the extreme darkness of her skin and the ability of her appearance to devaluate the social
currency of her education and class status. In one telling moment, Emma Lou recounts a
series of caustic comments and experiences she’d experienced in her Harlem community:
No one liked black anyway…
Wanted: light-colored girl to work as waitress in tearoom…
Wanted: Nurse girl, light-colored preferred (children are afraid of black folks)…
81
82
Ward Greene, Cora Potts (New York: J. Cape & H. Smith, 1929), 129.
Wallace Thurman, The Blacker the Berry (New York: The Macaulay Company, 1929), 17.
268
I don’t haul no coal…”
It’s like this, Emma Lou, they don’t want no dark girls in their sorority. They
ain’t pledged us and we’re the only two they ain’t, and we’re both black.”
She should have been a black boy. A black boy could get along, but a black
girl…83
Thurman narrates the discrimination many African Americans faced in hiring and leisure
based on the perceived aversion to children and middle-class tastes. The assertion that
black skin frightened children suggests an unnatural, boogeyman-like quality, perhaps
even grotesque, that would render the dark-skinned person defective and unsuitable for
jobs, social clubs, or neighborhoods alongside, the fit.
Thurman, a dark-skinned man, introduced a fictionalized representation of
Steward’s Sweetback, in the character Alva, who while characterized as a man about
town, used Emma Lou for money, alcohol and leisure. Dark-skinned prejudice is fixed to
everyday life (landlords, employers, and potential suitors) as well as leisure and
entertainment in The Blacker the Berry. As if white actors in blackface (painted dark with
shoe polish), a group of black actors offer a stage performance to Harlem’s late night
crowd that jeers dark skin as ugly and socially crippling and finishing with a black girl
riding a mule across the theater stage singing mournfully: “A yellow gal rides in a
limousine, A brown-skin rides a Ford, A black gal rides an old jackass, But she gets
there, yes my Lord.”84 It was the extreme and all-encompassing nature of dark-skin
prejudice (affirmed by Thurman in Blacker the Berry) that led the health and beauty
industry to produce and market entire lines of cosmetic aids designed to transform the
83
84
Thurman, 84-85.
Thurman, 124.
269
appearances of dark- skinned, kinky-haired blacks in order to give them “healthy” and
“beautiful” countenances.
Beauty culturists have long prided themselves on being able to uplift the
countenance of everyday women and either instill or revive the esteem of men for women
like Thurmond’s “Emma Lou” and Greene’s “Amanda Cobb.” For Negro consumers,
whether visiting a salon or tending to their beauty needs at home, “commercialized
beauty was not only an aesthetic, psychological, and social matter, but from the outset,
explicitly a problem of politics. Cosmetics were never far removed from the fact of white
supremacy, the goal of racial progress, the question of emulation.”85 When Annie
Turnbo Malone and Madame C.J. Walker began selling preparations to straighten hair at
the turn of the century, the initial mission was to treat hair that had been damaged, kept
covered under scarves for work, and un-groomed. Straightening hair entailed using a hair
preparation cream and a heated comb instrument to untangle the tight curls of black hair
and lengthen the hair by stretching (or straightening) it out.
As straight hair was considered a visual marker of social (and for some blacks
biological) evolution, millions of Negro women, irrespective of class, moved away from
braiding and twisting their hair (common among agricultural workers), and towards
unraveling their kinks to produce straight or curly styles. The use of soap, goose fat,
heavy oils, butter and bacon grease or the carding combs designed for sheep was
abandoned for perfumed pomades that eliminated scalp irritation, healed hair follicles,
85
Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 203.
270
and promoted hair growth. During this same time, inventor Garrett Morrison, (who
invented the stop light and gas mask) produced the first chemical hair relaxer which he
packaged and sold primarily to black men. African American newspapers and bulletins
overflowed with advertisements of mail order preparations that would grow short, coarse
hair to the waist, using images and language that fused science, eugenics, medicine, and
social mobility. White cosmetic companies in the 1920s and 1930s portrayed dark skin
as ugly.86 These ads implicitly assumed that black women, deep down, believed they
were ugly87and played upon their sensitivity to other people’s interpretations of her
beauty. Susannah Walker asserts in Style and Status that the goal of white advertisers
was to convince blacks that their products would lighten a dark-skinned person. They
also claimed that a “fair-skinned or mulatto person can rid her skin of all traces of an
African heritage.”88 Noliwe Rooks asserts that because manufacturers positioned skin
lighteners and hair straighteners in the same context as an imperfection that can be fixed,
they equated natural “black” features to diseases or blemishes.89 Black women who
chose not to straighten their hair, especially, could be marked by community standards as
being unhygienic or diseased for not fixing an impediment to a healthy appearance.
Similarly, the same dirty, unhygienic labeling placed on women’s homes that made them
86
Susannah Walker, Style and Status: Selling Beauty to African American Women, 1920-1975 (Lexington:
The University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 110.
87
Walker, 40.
88
Walker, 40.
89
Noliwe M. Rooks, Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture and African American Women (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1996), 29.
271
unhealthy and breeding grounds of diseases like tuberculosis, found a living embodiment
in a mass of kinky, uncombable hair.
Companies like Brownlight, claimed an ability to lighten the darkest skin by
addressing the eugenic taint of poor breeding. “You can’t change the GERM PLASM, but
you can bleach the coloring matter of the pigment cells, which makes you dark of
countenance.” By touting a remedy to signs of poor germ plasm – the inherited traits of a
cell passed on during reproduction – Brownlight mixed social and scientific language to
present as picture of a very light woman, with flowing hair smiling broadly as a black
beauty ideal. FanTan, declared: The Demand to Social Entry: A Smart, Clear, Whitened,
Faultless Complexion; and Madame Mamie Hightower’s Golden Brown Beauty
Preparations insisted “Pride in Our Race demands that we look Light, Bright, and
Attractive.” The 1928 Chicago Defender ad for Hi-Ja hair pomade took disarmed black
female readers by asking, “Your sweetheart -- your husband is not blind. If you have
short, ugly hair, he knows it. Suppose that girl whose picture is above should take a
fancy to your sweetheart. Could she get him away? Would he fall for that long, wavy,
beautiful hair?”
Negro advertising images became central to the marketing strategies of the
advertising industry following Emancipation, and were displayed on products as varied as
coffee and axle grease. Generally using stereotyped Old Negro caricatures, these
advertisements used exaggerated features, extremely dark skin tones, and positions of
servitude to denounce both Negro advancement and beauty. Additionally, dark skin was
tied inextricably to dirt in ads for leading household cleaning agents and personal hygiene
272
products. Kyla Wazana Tompkins’ Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century
examines the connection between black skin and the stove blackening product Rising Sun
Stove Polish in a series of advertisements, noting its use of dark-skinned characters that
create a “reductive and objectifying connection”90 between their skin and the black stove
polish. The transfer of this imagery (albeit softened) to beauty products targeted at black
consumers lay at the heart of uplift efforts among Negro middle class and intellectual
reformers who embraced mainstream stereotypes of dark-skinned Blacks as unattractive,
unrefined, and beastlike .
While migrant behaviors such as hanging out of windows and loitering on street
corners were less apt to change through middle-class criticism, the personal attacks on
low-class appearance – unkempt hair, tattered clothes, and dark or ashen skin – appeared
in advertisements, newspaper articles, and public performance, pressuring those who fit
these descriptions to change their appearance and behavior. Examples of collective race
fitness and beauty filled newspapers, magazines, and beauty contests to such an extent,
that by the 1910s modern black manhood and womanhood dictated the use of certain
health and beauty products, most notably, the hair straightener. Similarly, skin bleach
advertisements connected light skin with femininity, beauty, and romantic success.
However, using skin lighteners along with cleansers and moisturizers and taking
measures to prevent and heal breakouts were portrayed unquestionably as equally
important parts of a black woman’s daily skin regimen
90
Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (New York: New York
University Press, 2012), 174.
273
The early twentieth century saw the rise of White-owned companies peddling
products to “fix” the hair and skin of black women. Portraying black women as naturally
ugly and inferior, many of these companies advertised in black newspapers, exploiting
both the insecurities of black women about their appearance and the financial needs of
black newspapers to earn advertising revenue.
274
4.1 Board of Directors for the North Carolina Mutual Insurance Company, 1912
4.2 NCM Field workers (1930s)
4.3 NCM Swat the Fly Campaign (1920s)
275
4.4 Golden Brown Skin Bleach (1920s)
4.5 Inventor Garret A. Morgan’s Hair Refining Company ad for men (1890s)
276
4.6 Exclusive ad for Hi-Ja hair pomade, “Vamp” (Chicago Defender), 1928
277
Although advertisements aimed at black women in the 1920s and 1930s
increasingly stressed the glamour and sexual attractiveness imparted by hair and cosmetic
products, many advertisements used an older pitch that promoted personal grooming,
including hair straightening, as a route to racial uplift – as a way for African American
women to use their appearance to help raise the collective and individual fortunes of
black people.91 The Madame C.J. Walker Company was among those touting racial
uplift. For instance, the company ran ads in 1928 that directly linked the progress of the
race to “pride in the race, applied industry and better appearance.” Kathy Peiss calls
Walker’s language and imagery a “sweeping historical, psychological, and political
interpretation of the role of beauty in everyday affairs.”92 This project builds off of Peiss’
assessment by addressing the hereditarian belief that wooly-haired African Americans
represented those with a savage inheritance, and revealing that such images went a long
way in suggesting racial evolution was possible through applied cosmetics.
In essence, these ads supported the eugenic belief that the darker a Negro’s skin,
the less he was genetically evolved. Advertisements for Brownlight, FanTan, and Golden
Brown were forms of social and consumer coercion designed to make genetic fitness
attainable through beauty treatments and preparations. Branding soaps, creams, and
lotions as able to change dark skin to light exploited Negro insecurities about skin tone,
social acceptance, and fitness. The preparations for skin bleachers, hair growers, and
face powders, generally made false promises about beautification, often with dangerous
91
92
Walker, 9.
Peiss, 204.
278
results. As with the images of uncivilized savages in Black college textbooks, the
“before” images of dark-skin, unruly hair, and sour countenance appearing in cosmetics
ads represented the unrefined, uncivilized, oftentimes Southern migrant Negro, in need of
“fixing.” The images offered as “after” often used mulatto women (and men) with
flowing or wavy hair, and happy dispositions to signify race evolution and betterment.
The use of hair straighteners – hot combs, texturizers, and relaxers - from a social
standpoint did reinforce notions of fitness, and did have a positive impact on the overall
self-esteem of Negro men and women. By the 1930s the beauty aesthetic had shifted
enough that the norm among was African American women was straightened hair. Yet,
as evidenced by ads in the Lonesome Hearts section of the Afro American newspapers,
the most desired physical traits for many blacks still remained straight or wavy hair, and
light skin.
WANTS REFINED LADY I am seeking a lady of refinement, good looking
mulatto, or brown skin about 40 or 50 years, who loves a real loving companion
and can be contented with a real husband who likes home and good care. I am a
high class professional man.
WANTS A TRUE LOVING WIFE I am a hard-working man, educated dark
complexion and would be glad to find a woman light brown or light, who would
make a nice true, loving wife, between the age of 30 or 38. Not more than 150
pounds in weight…93
SHOWMAN WANTS TO SETTLE DOWN I would like to meet a young lady
between 25 and 40 years of age, light complexion, someone who cares for
friendship and not the big sprees of life. I am at present in the theatrical business.
I am 6 feet tall, age 40, chocolate color, traveled extensively, both here and
abroad. I am going to quit show business and going into beauty culture and
producing business.
93
“Lonesome Hearts,” The Afro-American, Week of July 7, 1934.
279
REMINTHA, SCHOOL MARM I am a poor young woman trying to find a real
he-man… I am 27 years old, light ginger color, very good grade of thick black
hair, very long before bobbed; 5 feet 4 inches tall, weigh 125 pounds, and
somewhat cute in size, a public school teacher, seamstress and a very good
housekeeper and cook.
LONELY BLUE MOON I am a girl, 18 years of age, 5 feet 5 ½ inches tall,
weigh 145 pounds; light complexion, black wavy hair, not hard to look at, but not
pretty. I would like to correspond with a Spanish type of man, neat ambitious,
with nice hair, ages between 22-35 will explain and give name and information in
detail when you write.94
The language of these personals hints to an unspoken association of desirability to
skin tone. The aversion of some African Americans for dark skin becomes evident in the
selection of terms used to describe what each person believes is valuable and worthy
sexually and socially. Providing criteria for the height, weight, and age is relatively
common in personal ads, however, the addition of skin tone by ad placers suggests that
the only women deserving of real loving husbands, hard-working and well-educated men,
or a good woman, were those with light to brown skin tones and straight to wavy hair.
The female respondent “Remintha,” even acknowledges that while she has bobbed her
hair (cut into a short face-framing style), it was once very long and could be again should
that feature make her more attractive to a potential mate.
Whether African Americans consciously embraced the popular aesthetic of lighter
skin and straight or wavy hair over more African features as eugenic cannot be stated
definitively. These preferences may have grown as much from social acceptance and
peer pressure to date and marry someone whose appearance met a particular ideal, as
94
“Lonesome Hearts,” The Afro-American, Week of July 20, 1935.
280
from an effort to follow a eugenic ideal of fitness. The results of choosing not to
socialize, partner, or mate with dark-skinned individuals, most likely grew from social
pressure to uphold ideas about the physiognomy of dark-skinned individuals and a loose
acceptance of the eugenic beliefs that mulattoes were genetically superior to brown and
dark-skinned blacks. As demonstrated by the initial reaction Richard Bruce Nugent had
to fellow Harlem Renaissance writer Wallace Thurman’s dark skin, pure-black stock was
uncommon enough in intellectual circles to repulse Nugent. Describing the incident to
historian David Levering Lewis in 1976, Nugent claimed he could not eat and left the
room after being introduced to the “the little black boy with a sneering nose… I thought
to myself, ‘how dare he be so black.”95 That dark skin would cause such a visceral
reaction from another person of the same race suggests that despite collective race
identity and theory, African Americans largely subscribed to notions of beauty,
competence, and fitness, similar to that of mainstream thinkers on race.
Dark skinned black men, like Thurman may have navigated colorism with slightly
fewer concerns than their female counterparts. Jacob S. Dorman asserts in Skin Bleach
and Civilization: Racial Formation of Blackness in 1920s Harlem that in addition to their
color being tied to their marriageability, the concern over women’s skin shades,
“reflected the fact that African American women and their bodies were central to
Richard Bruce Nugent, interview with David Levering Lewis, “Voices from the
Renaissance” Box 1, David Levering Lewis MS, Schomburg Center for Research in Black
Culture, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
95
281
discussions of civilization and its meanings.”96 Migrant-class African Americans did not
always take kindly or readily to reformer insinuations that their womanhood and
femininity were somehow tainted. Women with dark skin and coarse hair found a home
of sorts among socially rebellious blues women. There were of course exceptions,
however, working-class music, especially the blues, often took the tone of overt sexual
innuendo as a show of sexual freedom and a rejection of middle-class, codes of moral
conduct. Sara Martin”s “Mean Tight Mama,” for instance, reinforces the opposition
between the middle and working class women’s ideas of respectability. Signifying, first,
on middle-class standards of beauty that reject the nappy-headed and dark-skinned
woman as black and ugly, Martin in turn rejects middle class decorum by overtly
pronouncing her sexual availability and its power as the “sweetest milk” precisely
because it is attached to her negro-ness. Martin, billed as the Famous Moanin’ Mama,
while not a dark-skinned or unattractive woman, was a big woman, allowing her to
legitimize sexualized representations of womanhood outside of the middle-class beauty
aesthetic.
Now my hair is nappy and I don't wear no clothes of silk,
But the cow that's black and ugly has often got the sweetest milk.
Now when a man starts jivin' I'm tighter than a pair of shoes,
I'm a mean tight mama, with my mean tight mama blues.97
Jacob Dorman, “Skin Bleach and Civilization: The Racial Formation of Blackness in 1920s Harlem,”
The Journal of Pan African Studies, 4, no. 4 (June 2011): 55.
97
Giles Oakley, The Devil’s Music: A History of the Blues (Jackson, TN: Da Capo Press, 1997), 108.
96
282
Similarly, Bessie Smith’s “Young Woman's Blues,” culled middle-class notions
of respectability by scoffing at the idea of marriage and settling down. Smith endorses
premarital sexual relations by searching to her right for ‘her man’ who has gone; and
rather than bemoan his departure, counts it no loss as she “ain’t done running around.”
Finally, Smith plays on the colorism of the day by denouncing light-skin (high yella) and
defined her own skin tone as deep “killer” brown.
Woke up this mornin' when chickens was crowin' for day
Felt on the right side of my pilla', my man gad gone away
By this pilla' he left a note readin', "I'm sorry, Jane, you got my goat
No time to marry, no time to settle down"
I'm a young woman and ain't done runnin' 'round
I'm a young woman and ain't done runnin' 'round
Some people call me a hobo, some call me a bum
Nobody knows my name, nobody knows what I've done
I'm as good as any woman in your town
I ain't no high yeller, I'm a deep killer of brown
I ain't gonna marry, ain't gonna settle down
I'm gonna drink good moonshine and rub these browns down
See that long lonesome road
Lawd, you know it's gotta and I'm a good woman and I can get plenty men.98
Blues women like Ma Rainey not only gave agency to dark skin and short, coarse hair
(though she straightened her own), they also embodied a kind of celebrated Otherness
away from the physical and aesthetic codes of acceptable black beauty. Buzzy Jackson’s
A Bad Woman Feeling Good describes Rainey as antithesis of the middle-class beauty
aesthetic:
Everything about her contrived to make her seem larger than life: a full figure;
lush lips; wide –set and heavy eyes made larger with an outline of kohl; and a
sweet smile of big, irregular teeth, many of which were gold and shone against
Bessie Smith, Young Woman’s Blues, Copyright 1927(Renewed), 1974 Frank Music Corp. All Rights
Reserved by Frank Music Corporation.
98
283
her dark skin, which distinguished her from the fashionably lighter-skinned
women with whom she shared the vaudeville stage.99
The eroticism attached to Rainey in this passage demonstrates that what many
southerners saw in Rainey was feminine and sexual authenticity – bad teeth, dark skin
and big. Often described as ugly at first sight, Rainey’s appearance was said to grow on
audiences until both men and women were eating out of the palms of her hands. And
while she recognized she ran counter to prevailing beauty standards – and by all
measures, could be considered defective through her physiognomy, Rainey celebrated the
absolute contradictions in her persona as freedom and passion. Rainey was “big and sexy,
both maternal and erotic. She was fully alive to the varieties of sexual experience and
expression; bisexual herself, she sang publicly of lesbians and homosexuals, joked about
her motherly / incestuous attraction to younger men, and reaffirmed in her songs the
centrality of passion in human affairs.”100 To a migrant-class urban dweller, Rainey
reaffirmed womanhood that encompassed all of the elements of defectiveness they had
been asked to side-step – overt sexuality, lesbianism, dark skin (by using lighteners), and
an aggressive posture. The threat Rainey and other blues women had on reform efforts
could not be fully calculated; however, as the popularity of blues women grew in urban
areas, reformers began shifting their focus to include younger members of the migrant
population.
99
Buzzy Jackson, A Bad Woman Feeling Good: Blues and the Women who Sing Them (New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, 2005), 14.
100
Sandra Lieb, Mother of the Blues: A Study of Ma Rainey (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
1981), 170.
284
As blues music and its competing values migrated into areas like Chicago and St.
Louis by way of New Orleans, Mississippi and Memphis, in the 1930s, middle-class
reformers began shifting the focus of their interventions to incorporate younger migrantclass girls. Using the juvenile and family courts to access those in jeopardy of becoming
dysgenic (through their home environments), Negro reform agencies, like the Negro
Organization Society (hereafter NOS) advocated erecting facilities to reform degenerate
Negro youth. Under the leadership of conservative Negro attorney T.C. Walker, the NOS
pushed “for the segregation of degenerate Negro children into reform schools and homes
for the wayward.”101
Walker’s views on how best to deal with criminal migrant behavior was decidedly
eugenic and entailed incarcerating the offspring of degenerate adults to counter the
genetic and environmental criminality he believed they were sure to inherit. In a 1915
Afro-American newspaper article, Walker declares three reasons for large criminal rolls
among Negro children: “First, the parents are too negligent in the training of the
child...Second, the inherited criminal tendencies of the parents; and Third, the degenerate
and feebleminded parents.”102 Walker reasoned that black criminality was a foregone
conclusion for Negro youth because criminality was part of their genetic heritage.
Moreover, she professed to have the answer for rooting out the dysgenic genes of these
children and their parents. In 1915, the NOS began placing homeless Negro children and
101
102
T.C. Walker, “Letter to the Editor, Afro-American, November 13, 1915, 1.
Walker, 1.
285
those charged with offenses into detention homes or private homes rather than in jail.103
Negro reformatories and private homes, under the NOS became the training grounds for
eliminating dysgenic behaviors in the offspring of unfit migrant parents.
Two of the manuals utilized by reformatories and families charged with reforming
migrant youth were E. Azalia Hackley’s The Colored Girl Beautiful (1916) and Josie
Briggs Hall’s Halls Moral and Mental Capsules (1905). Hackley, a celebrated soprano
presented her tips for Negro uplift in a series of talks following concerto performances,
normally at Negro colleges. Following one such talk at Tuskegee, Booker T. Washington
suggested she publish a guide book to aid those without the benefit of college training.
Among Hackley’s sage advice were calls to embrace and exhibit beauty culture as a way
of eliminating physical spots and developing beautiful souls. Spots constituted physical
characteristics, such as poor posture, which Hackley suggested appeared to others as
mental or emotional deficiencies and caused the individual ridicule. While an upright
posture not only relieved the perception of grown men as children, it also created a visual
challenge to white authority and pulled the Negro working-class out of what was literally
a posture of servitude. Hackley admonished readers, as well, to remove the biggest spot
of thick lips and a leaking mouth from their appearances.
A large mouth is supposed to be the sign of generosity, but if it has thick lips and
is a leaking mouth? Permitting the lips to hang thickens them. They grow too
heavy to hold up. Too much grinning and loud laughter will widen the mouth and
loosen it. Our mouths are improving. In the schools and college pictures we find
unmistakable evidence that Thought is working wonders with the Negro mouth.104
103
Cynthia Neverdon-Morton, Afro-American Women of the South and the Advancement of the Race, 18951925 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 121.
104
Hackley, 134.
286
Hackley places the inherited facial features of blacks as self-imposed physical
weaknesses brought on by their own behavior. By placing the ‘spot’ of thick lips as a
taint caused by too much laughing and grinning, Hackley attributes the defect to a lack of
intelligence. Her comments can be read as linking thick black lips to a genetic mental
deficiency, as thought – the use of intellect by school and college students – proved
effective in diminishing thick lips. Hackley’s comments read as environment
overcoming inherited traits, or perhaps a physical evolution of features coinciding
(Darwinian or Kelly Miller’s vital action ) with the awakening of mental abilities.
Hackley’s read of Negro features is a middle-class assessment that in many ways
lends itself to a rejection of the “African” features of Negroes. At times, her prose is full
with great pronouncements, such as the beauty of Negro eyes lay in their ability the
“think” away dysgenic traits. Yet, she cautions that “Beauty is a matter of personal
opinion, to a savage African, a baby with a black skin and flat nose is the ideal.”105 To
some migrant adolescents in the care of reformatories and strangers, such characterization
of black skin and flat noses as beauty only a savage African accepted, informed the youth
that he or she was not only undesirable according to American beauty standards, but also
perhaps irredeemably savage.
Hall, a Texas schoolteacher, who married Fisk professor J.P. Hall, penned a guide
to raise the moral standards of children by educating their parents. Hall asserted, “Tis
105
E. Azalia Hackley, The Colored Girl Beautiful -- A Guide in Voice Culture" and "Public School Lessons
in Voice Culture (Kansas City, Burton Publishing Company, 1916), 63.
287
true that as a race we are morally and intellectually weak, but I feel that many of the vices
of our people are brought about from a lack of knowing how to find a remedy.”106 Hall’s
Capsules proved less overt in characterizing the physiognomy of Negroes. Hall, instead
of pushing for remedies to fix the migrant class, promoted the middle-class disassociation
from them. Writing that the criminal class was “frequently so loud-mouthed, so
indifferent to public opinion, so lost to self-respect, so lacking in the shame that even a
dumb animal might have, that the enemies of the race can wag their heads and exclaim,
‘Aha! What did I tell you about the Negro’s morals? Don’t you see the proof right before
your eyes?’”107 Hall notes that the Negro race was judged by its weakest, rather than its
strongest elements. However biased, she nonetheless suggests in her characterization of
the weak, that they are deserving of white attack and Negro criticism. Since the crimes of
the criminal class are not presented, only their loud manner and disregard for public
opinion, the true infraction of the migrant Negro, at least in the eyes of the middle-class,
was an inability to assimilate to ideals of racial fitness.
As if frustrated by the “terrible tide to contend against,” Hall suggested low class
behavior threatened the construct of middle-class purity.
If our good associate with our bad, what wonder is it that we are charged with
uncleanness? However much we may pity a rascally man, we lower our character
and injure our reputation by becoming his companion. However much we may
pity a swinish woman, we commit a crime against our race when we put her on a
level with the good and pure by associating with her.108
106
Josie Briggs Hall, Hall's Moral and Mental Capsule for the Economic and Domestic Life of the Negro,
as a Solution of the Race Problem (Dallas: Rev. R.S. Jenkins, 1905), 4.
107
Hall, 83.
108
Hall, 83.
288
For many black women, including Katherine Williams, editor of the Half-Century
magazine (which ran from 1916-1925), and Julia Ringwood Coston, the editor of
Ringwood’s Afro-American Journal of Fashion beauty could not be separated from
morality or behavior. The writers and editors offered models for behavior and physical
appearance that were believed to lead to improve the condition of black women –
particularly those migrating from the south.109 Noliwe Rooks writes in Ladies Pages that
Ringwood’s Afro-American Journal of Fashion provided an “uplift strategy” designed by
elite (black) female writers that linked fashion with bodies of light-skinned African
American women with white features.110 The ideas was to demonstrate the differences in
class and status among black women; and second, to promote fashion (appearance) as an
“armor that proved to the outside world (both African American and white) that the
wearer, while an African American servant, was still a woman and deserving of
respect.”111 Appearance, especially hair, clothing, and behavior counted as visual
markers of fitness and desirability. Williams wrote in the August-September 1920 issue
an editorial “Are We Our Brothers’ Keepers,” in which she describes migrants in the
summer heat as “half naked men and women, some minus their shoes and stockings
sit[ting] around in the windows, on the porches and steps, or loung[ing] on the curbstone
109
Denise H. Sutton, Globalizing Ideal Beauty: Women, Advertising and the Power of Marketing (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 62.
110
Sutton, 63.
111
Noliwe Rooks, Ladies Pages: African American Women’s Magazines and the Culture the Made Them
(New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 2004), 49.
289
in front of the house.”112 The migrants’ behavior and appearance suggest low-class and
ugliness.
Similarly Edward Green, a D.C. federal worker, suggests middle-class Negroes
segregate themselves from migrant classes in his National Capital Code of Etiquette. In
addition to equating bright colored clothing among certain shades and ages of Negroes as
“a matter of poor breeding,”113 Green introduces readers to a garish insufferable type he
names the “Don’t Care Girl.”
Haven’t you ever see a ‘don’t care’ girl? She is nearly always reckless in manner
and speech; she is bold and defiant; she is imprudent beyond mention; and
she is very fond of ridiculing girls who do care a great deal what others think
about them. No matter whose children they are – no matter what schools they
have attended – these ‘don’t care’ girls are no good, and good girls ought not to
associate with them.114
What appears as sound advice for parents and young adults to refrain from
dealings with someone who may be a bad influence, takes on eugenic overtones when he
pictures the child as a minstrel throwback with dark skin, uncombed hair, ragged clothes
and her mouth stretched agape. As discussed earlier, the belief that migrants represented
a biologically backward and ignorant group of low-class blacks contextualizes Green’s
assessment, as a middle-class federal worker, as more than simple codes of respectability.
The child stands in mocked defiance with her hands on her hips, scoffing from the page.
This image, along with Hall’s characterization of black migrants as animals, and
112
Rooks, 72.
Edward S. Green, National Capital Code of Etiquette (Washington, D.C.: Austin Jenkins Company
Publishers, 1920), 20.
114
Silas X. Floyd, Short Stores for Colored People Both Old and Young (Washington, D.C.: Austin Jenkins
Company Publishers, 1920), 269.
113
290
Hackley’s of them as dark savages, demonstrated middle-class notions of poor breeding
or upbringing among Southern blacks and their failure to evolve.
CONCLUSION
The incorporation of hereditarian and eugenic principles into health and social
messages proved invaluable to the abatement of diseases like tuberculosis, typhoid, and
syphilis. Such stringent methods as undertaken by North Carolina Mutual and Tuskegee
to clean and instruct through demonstrations kept thousands of African Americans from
being negatively impacted by death and disease. While methods and manners of
engagement by middle-class reformers may have embraced paternalistic, insensitive, and
condescending postures, at times, such interaction with Du Bois’ 90 percent ultimately
had a corrective impact on the bedside manner of Negro health professionals. And the
aversion by the 90 percent to theory-saddled black physicians led many doctors to reexamine cultural and class bias in order to pursue collective race improvement. The
health disparities of the impoverished impacted not only the poor community in which he
lived, but also, by extension, his employer and the physician treating him. North
Carolina Mutual Insurance Company worked diligently from its inception in the 1880s to
instill in the mass of southern blacks trapped in sharecropping and service positions
(including butlers, maids, and drivers) a sense of race pride through including them
among the insurable, offering accident insurance specific to agricultural injuries, and
tailoring insurance services and prevention outreach to address health concerns impacting
them disproportionately (tuberculosis, hookworm). NCM’s Life Extension programs
291
worked to increase the life expectancy of the policyholder, requiring fewer policy
payouts, but also held seminars and provided door-to-door delivery of pamphlets to
ensure the health economic security of each household. By attaching manhood and
responsibility to purchasing insurance (that would keep poor black families economically
secure in times of illness or death) NCM established a system of positive environmental
stimuli that offset some aspects of Jim Crow discrimination (unstable sharecropping
economy, hazardous work conditions). NCM approached poor and working-class
families as cooperative authority, rolling their sleeves up and demonstrating cleaning and
mosquito abatement techniques, as well as producing literature in common, familiar
language or pictures to ensure their understanding.
While NCM addressed race fitness through preventative health measures, others,
including a wave of black social reformers prescribed better health and race (purity)
through attacks on dysgenic behavior including alcohol and drugs, poor hygiene and
sexual immorality. Challenging social and sexual behaviors required also challenging
long-held mores about who controlled one’s body and under what circumstances. African
American reformers joined with health care officers and social scientists to educate
working-class black women on a suitable decorum of sexual engagement, including birth
control, reproductive fitness, and personal hygiene. Migrant-class women sought to gain
control over their bodies and develop their own individual set of acceptable habits.
Despite their deportment being analyzed through physiognomy and stereotypes, migrantclass women continued to exercise sexual freedom and sexual choice. Moral guides from
reformers like E. Azalia Hackley and Josie Briggs Hall’s did much to fuel the nascent
292
misinterpretations of migrant-class behavior and attach moral and eugenic classification
to black urban appearance. In the 1920s and 1930s, in places like Chicago and New
York, interpretations of migrant behavior cast as feebleminded those black women who
resisted behavioral reform efforts. Classifications of migrant behavior ultimately made
crime and disease rate increases a result of the poor moral constitution and social maladjustment.
Comparisons between the indifferent manner in which whites viewed Negro uplift
and health as a whole and the similar notions and approaches undertaken by middle-class
black reformers dealing with migrant is crucial to understanding the construct of black
inferiority in the early twentieth century. Far removed from folk ways to which they’d
grown accustomed, and older family members who could aid them in childrearing,,
young migrant parents often did the best they could only to be told that they were not
only unfit for the challenge of parenting, but served as a ready danger to both their own
children and the white families who may employ them. Their lack of sophistication,
while not a crime, led them and their children to vice, poverty, disease, and sexual
immorality. Negro Baby Contests served as reinforcing agents socially, mentally, and
psychically to Negro women that they were capable and their children were eugenically
sound.
As for black women’s concepts of personal fitness and beauty, many utilized the
expanding popular culture ideals set forth by hair culturists and images of professional
black women in newspapers and magazines. Natural (un-straightened, unprocessed) hair
among black women and some black men had all but disappeared by the 1920s.
293
Considered a modern, healthy, and progressive way of styling hair, straightening, came to
represent a woman’s overall good health and fitness. Certain segments may have felt
compelled to straighten their hair and even bleach their skin based on biological and
social beliefs equating dark skin and kinky hair with unattractiveness, ignorance, and
poor health. Discrimination against dark-skinned women in particular was found in
hiring practices in both mainstream and black-owned businesses irrespective of the
applicant’s education level. Evidence of light-skin preference can be found in access to
education, housing, social organizations, and advertisements for dating. Eugenics as a
science has long moved from laboratories and into the social realm through health, social
work, education, as well as the popular in beauty contest and collective racial ideals of
fitness. My research supports the assertion that as a matter of both collective race
aesthetics and popular eugenic beliefs in the inferiority of African-ness (dark skin, coarse
hair, thick lips, wide nose, etc.) some black women may have bleached their skin and
straightened their hair. Paradoxically, black collective beauty aesthetics, while
undergirded by eugenic beliefs in fitness, attractiveness, and character, inverted race
purity to apply ultimate fitness to those farthest removed physically from the pure black
(African) phenotype. In so doing, black eugenics operated as a disjointed cultural
ideology rather than an actual science and was concerned most with social and economic
assimilation into mainstream America.
294
EPILOGUE
THE LEGACY OF POPULAR EUGENICS AMONG AFRICAN AMERICANS
In 2011 North Carolina Congressman Larry Womble and Governor Bev Perdue
listened to testimony from nearly 200 victims of the state’s forced eugenic sterilization
program that performed 7,600 procedures (on mostly poor teens) between 1929 and 1974.
Having used the North Carolina penal system, courts, social services and public health
administrators to locate individuals and families impacted by the procedures, Womble
announced a bill to provide a formal apology and reparations to those who could provide
documentation or testimony of the procedures. The testimonies of the survivors like Lela
Dunston and Naomi Shanks, recounted ordeals similar to that of Carrie Buck, where rape
and poverty resulted in their being labeled feebleminded and sterilized for the betterment
of the state. On the heels of North Carolina approving a $10 million settlement in July
2013, a special report from the state of California revealed that nearly 250 female inmates
in Corona and Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla had been given tubal
ligations, without their knowledge between 2006 and 2010. The private doctors paid to
perform the procedures considered them necessary to keep the state from having to pay
welfare benefits to a criminal class that reproduced more crime and poverty.
These cases evidence how a science initially concerned with making a fitter race
of men grew into a movement that continues to encompass social, medical, and popular
thought on the role of heredity in social fitness. From the 1880s when the hard science of
295
eugenics gained social ground through its incorporation into high school and college
biology courses, through the 1930s, when popular culture more directly linked
hereditarian fitness to appearance, segments of the African American population readily
embraced its various components. This research demonstrates that African American
reinterpretations of eugenics as the science of being “well-born,” actually served to
disprove the genetic inferiority of their race when infused with class and environment
data. By reading environment, race regeneration (evolution), and socioeconomic class
into hereditarian theories, black eugenicists sidestepped about the paradox of engaging a
science that largely held them as subhuman. Whether in Kelly Miller’s use of evolution
to inspire Hampton and Howard students to regain their vital energies or W.E.B. Du
Bois’ cultural assessments against black migrants in Philadelphia, black intellectual use
of eugenics as a theoretical girder to make sense of the “state of the race” allowed them
to set themselves apart from the masses as a distinct group. Du Bois utilized labels like
feebleminded, degenerate, and defective, in addition to establishing his own system of
social “grades,” the Talented Tenth and the submerged tenth. These operated well within
the constructs of Charles Davenport’s mental grades – moron, imbecile, insane,
feebleminded, and idiot and were further attached to social stigmas such as crime and
poverty. Du Bois argued that enslavement had hindered nature’s design of weeding out
weak blacks by artificially nurturing them alongside the fit. His retooling of evolution’s
survival of the fittest theory made it popular among men (and women) irrespective of
their ethnic origins. Simply, there would be weak, normal, and superior men within each
race, but not superior and inferior races based on color.
296
While eugenics moved fluidly from science to social and to popular culture, the
scale of black hereditarian fitness often had more to do with middle class standards than
the actual science of inherited traits and germ plasm. In addition to establishing the
diverse range of intellectual and social beliefs about race, purity, and fitness among
blacks, this work documented how white supremacist thought about race influenced
internal standards of fitness, beauty, and competency (or ability). Those beliefs ushered
in colorism (beauty based on a light over dark skinned paradigm) and pigmentocracy
(intellectual ability based on a light over dark skinned paradigm). Establishing a schema
of black eugenic fitness that coded the value of hair and attached social currency to
gradations of skin tone in many ways mimicked the science of phrenology where
measurements of heads, noses, thickness of lips, and other parts of physical anatomy,
determined the exceptional, the normal, and the defective within a group.
The value system of hair and skin, as well as the scrutiny placed on appearance
and public deportment provided a visual context for theoretic principles among black
eugenicists. In the move from science to social and popular eugenics, the use of colorism
and pigmentocracy to classify individuals or vast segments of the group (southerner, the
poor) proved critical as the Great Migration introduced a mass of blacks from the rural
south to those in the urban north. This research revealed colorism as an extension of
mainstream eugenic assertions that pure blood blacks (dark skinned) had yet to fully
progress from a primitive state of evolution, rendering them incapable of racial or social
autonomy. Only the hereditary integration of white blood (germ plasm) offered the
genetic and subsequent mental acuity necessary to achieve and exhibit social adequacy.
297
Racial amalgamation advanced Negro evolution, in that the offspring of black-white
unions, often termed “hybrids” or “mulattoes” constituted a genetic variant believed
superior to the full-blood parent, but still inferior to whites in general. Assertions by
scientists like E. B. Reuter that the great men among blacks were to be found exclusively
among mulattoes, gave legitimacy to pigmentocracy and colorism and provided the
burgeoning black intelligentsia a springboard from which to construct intraracial
hierarchies of social adequacy.
There seemed always at play a push-pull between denying theories of black racial
inferiority and accepting them but providing explanations for it. When mainstream
eugenicists used intelligence tests to denote behavioral and intellectual weaknesses of
blacks, African American intellectuals conducted similar tests or series of tests to
establish a different result or an environmental causality that challenged mainstream
results. The established ‘fit’ could then be further nurtured into race men and women and
the unfit segregated and aided by middle class reformers. Similarly, when mainstream
universities introduced eugenics and race hygiene into biology curricula to teach the
rudiments of hereditary fitness and establish white over black fitness values, black
colleges did so as well. Largely ignoring the implications of racialist thought, black
professors like Kelly Miller, Charles Johnson and E. E. Just, coded the instruction to
classify its students as the fit (by virtue of their presence at university) and the masses of
uneducated blacks as the unfit. In this manner, students developed an “us” and “them”
system that determined who was fit to date, marry, and with whom to produce children.
298
Colorism and pigmentocracy worked within this structure through the use of admissions
filters, including the requiring photos of students accompany applications.
The complicated and sometimes contradictory presence of African Americans in
fields of eugenics was exacerbated by mainstream charges of increased criminality,
disease, and reproductive increase among unfit southern and migrant blacks. Black
reformers attempted to answer each of these charges as members of Du Bois’ Talented
Tenth and leaders of the race; however, beliefs about southerners, especially those with
dark skin, poor educations, and other than middle-class sexual habits, led to social
policing and efforts to eliminate loose behavior. Public health campaigns to address
personal hygiene, household cleanliness, and sex education (family planning) became
benchmarks to achieving eugenic fitness. Middle-class reformers challenged charges of
dysgenic migrant living by attacking the white image of blacks as animalistic and
simultaneously situating rules of etiquette that specifically addressed migrant behaviors
deemed animalistic. My research demonstrates that eugenic-minded Negro reformers
often offered sympathetic support to migrant families, despite regarding them as
permanently unfit. Du Bois’ Talented Tenth would procreate from the top and would
consistently lead the ninety who would reproduce from below. There was no
transmigration from unfit to fit, only a range of socially adequate persons who still
technically belonged to the lower class. Low birth rates among the black fit and increased
birth rates among the unfit, challenged black eugenicists to address the inheritance of
poverty through the moral habits of the ninety percent. High rates of venereal disease
and illegitimacy among African Americans led black intellectuals to partner with
299
Margaret Sanger and others to address the social implications of moral degeneracy.
Black reformers celebrated the work of homes for the feebleminded and wayward whose
job it was to segregate, study and treat the behaviors that led to poor sexual morals. In so
doing, they gave a cursory nod to eugenics as a means of weeding out those who could
harm the uplift and social evolution of the race. While Black leaders who supported the
work of reformatories may not have aligned themselves wholeheartedly with Charles
Davenport and members of the larger eugenics movement, the use of eugenic language
and classifications did, in fact, aid efforts to promote race hygiene and fitness.
Finally, my work traced the popular progression of eugenics into beauty culture
with the advent of hair and skin preparations designed specifically to diminish or correct
flaws in appearance. By utilizing long-held beliefs about dark skin and kinky hair, a
trade in skin bleachers and hair straighteners proved lucrative to a primarily white
cosmetic industry. Tying products like Golden Brown and Nadinola to racial uplift,
marriageability, and personal hygiene, coaxed black women and men to accept that their
heredity was flawed. Advertisers branded products, (and in the case of Overton Hygienic
Company, their name) with words like “hygiene” and “healthy” to promote the idea that
they contained medicinal or curative properties for germ plasm.
I initially theorized that African Americans simply followed the set science of
eugenics, taking from it what could be used as uplift rhetoric and discarding its racialist
views when convenient. Instead, I found that a very complex system of hereditarian
thought operated within black America that held few hard and fast rules. For instance,
some black eugenicist accepted notions of black inferiority based on the inability of some
300
of its members to completely evolve. Political hindrances to natural development
(racism), the allegedly primitive nature of some Negroes (e.g., those still using folk
medicines, etc.), and a disorganization of family life (E. Franklin Frazier’s studies of
family illegitimacy and poverty), served as evidence of social inadequacy. It could be
argued that black intellectuals felt threatened by the presence of so many migrant-class
African Americans and systematically set out to define and then disassociate themselves
from the group. It is more likely that black reformers felt compelled to engage the
growing science of eugenics, but also a need to attack its theories by finding its fallacies
and limitations. Scholars like Frazier, Johnson, and Miller, in hindsight advanced their
careers through scientific inquiries that helped define sociology and legitimize black
institutional research. Their work disproved the existence of collective racial inferiority,
though it may have opened a larger class-based argument to hereditarian theories of
inherited fitness.
301
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