320 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 15 illus., 2 tables, notes, bibl.,
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Published: Spring 2002
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Confronting
the Veil
Abram Harris
Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919-1941
by Jonathan
Scott Holloway
Copyright
(c) 2002 by the University of North Carolina Press. All
rights reserved.
Introduction
The Second Amenia Conference and Black Intellectual Genealogy: Changing
Faiths in Labor Politics, Social Science, and Race Leadership
Surely there shall yet dawn some mighty morning to lift the Veil and set the prisoned free. Not for meI shall die in my bondsbut for fresh young souls who have not known the night and waken to the morning; a morning when men ask of the workman, not "Is he white?" but "Can he work?" When men ask artists, not "Are they black?" but "Do they know?" Some morning this may be, long, long years to come. But now there wails, on that dark shore within the Veil, the same deep voice, Thou Shalt Forego! W. E. B. Du Bois
In The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois created a metaphor to describe the systematic separation of the races. At the symbolic level, "the Veil" did more than speak to the simple fact of racial segregation, it was its own commentary on the nature of the segregation. But even as the veil worked to segregate, it was also translucent and, as such, it gave blacks the "gift" of seeing white America while simultaneously remaining invisible to white America. As often as not, this gift was a curse. Du Bois was convinced, however, that the veil could be lifted; and he was equally convinced that black intellectuals were those most suited for the task.
Although Du Bois looms as a critical figure in the history that follows, he is not the central character. Rather, this book presents a history of Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunchethree "fresh young souls" who, though all too familiar with "night" and too experienced in America's racial ways to "waken to the morning," still strove to confront the veil that rendered workers and artists black or white. Teaching at Howard University from the late 1920s to the early 1940s, Harris, Frazier, and Bunche were pioneering social scientists and worked steadily, if in different ways, to reorient America's obsession with the Negro problem away from an answer based upon racial solutions toward one grounded in class dynamics. Their intense economic determinism struck some of their colleagues and many of the next generation of intellectuals as quixotic, but in the interwar era the three consistently attracted an audience for their ideas. Harris and Frazier, in particular, produced leading scholarship, and Bunche became an icon for the possibilities afforded by American liberalism. Harris was the most important black economist of his generation, Frazier was an influential, if at times controversial, sociologist from the start of his career until his death, and Bunche, eventually the most well known and influential of the three, was the first black to receive a doctorate in political science.[1] The trio's social science scholarship, their political activism, and the role that the racial veil played in their lives comprise the heart of this study. The legacies they left help us understand the often contradictory and always complex demands placed upon and claimed by race leaders and intellectuals in the twentieth century.
This history also comments on how deeply intertwined race dynamics are with class dynamics. As the preface points out, race and class have always been interconnected. Their intersection, however, has been anything but stable. In fact, following World War I a bevy of new ideas emerged that demonstrated the extremely fluid nature of race and class interactions.
Domestic economic criticism of American democracy reached its high point in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1919, the Bolsheviks formed the Communist International (Comintern) with the explicit purpose of furthering a world revolution. On these shores, the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) emerged as an amalgamation of smaller groups that split from the Socialist Party (SP). When it came to the issue of blacks, however, the earliest CPUSA line was remarkably like that of the SP and another early radical organization, the Industrial Workers of the World: racial discord was merely a manifestation of class inequality and antagonism.[2] Over the course of the 1920s, however, the CPUSA's approach to blacks changed. With an increasing acknowledgment that racial antipathy among white workers presented a significant obstacle to organizing blacks into unions, the CPUSA pursued a variety of strategies to improve the lives of black workers. The first major attempt came in 1925 in the form of the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC), an organization openly sympathetic to black nationalism and geared to black labor.
Developed at least partly in response to the growing popularity of Marcus Garvey's black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the ANLC sought to appeal to blacks' collective culture and memory and make evident to the black masses that labor offered the best avenue to better days.[3] The bourgeois values of the black leadership class and the imperialist rhetoric of the UNIA held no value for ANLC activists. Unfortunately, there never were many ANLC activists to spread their word, and the ANLC folded in 1930.[4] Two years prior to the ANLC's demise, however, a significant shift occurred in the Communist Party's (CP) approach to black Americans.
This shift was in large measure advocated and then engineered in 1928 by Harry Haywood. A grandson of a former slave and a rising star in the CP, Haywood made racial issues a centerpiece of the CP agenda by convincing the Comintern to declare that blacks represented an oppressed nation within a nation. The so-called Black Belt thesis declared that blacks living in the Deep South constituted a systematically oppressed population and had a moral claim to their stolen labor and land. Furthermore, as members of a nation within a nation, southern blacks had the right to self-determination, even to the point that they could secede from the United States.[5]
This new attention to southern rural blacks went beyond a recognition of their roles as peasants in a capitalist order. Communists now openly acknowledged the unique cultural position and contribution of southern blacks. So, even before Harlem Renaissance writers like Zora Neale Hurston began to hail the folk culture of the southern rural black, communists evinced a cultural and racial fascination with this American peasant class. Black sharecropper and farmer culture was an ideal rebuttal to an oppressive and capitalist national culture. The Black Belt thesis, then, brought race and a type of cultural nationalism to the fore and wed it to the more traditional communist class thesis.[6]
As James Smethurst points out, communists' fascination with and glorification of southern black culture came at the expense of northern urban black culture. This laboring population was, in effect, told that their culturewhich, in truth, essentially migrated with them from the South in the preceding decadesdid not matter and that the best way they could fight the capitalist bosses was to integrate with white workers. Going into the 1930s, then, the CPUSA race line embraced a strange mix of integration, labor politics, and cultural exceptionalism.[7] However, it was the Black Belt thesisthe idea that there was an authentic black culture and that it was oppositional by its very naturethat captured the imagination of the CPUSA rank and file. Race and class may have been in a fluid exchange, but race and a racial essentialism were finding increased favor among communists.
For much of the late 1920s and through the 1930s, Harris, Frazier, and Bunche took a position that came very close to the early CPUSA idea that racial antagonism was a manifestation of economic forces. Maintaining this position at this time meant that they were swimming against the popular progressive tide that embraced the Black Belt thesis. This evolution in radical thoughtfrom an unadorned class thesis to one where a romanticized notion of racial and cultural authenticity threatened to overwhelm economic analysesmade it more difficult for Harris, Frazier, and Bunche to challenge America's orthodoxy that declared race mattered more than anything else. Complicating matters further is that although the race/class intersection was in a constant state of flux, "race" and "class" still had concrete meanings in people's minds. As a result, Harris's, Frazier's, and Bunche's class-driven ideas often ran afoul of racial codes of conduct. Different forms of racialized expectations and plain and simple racism handicapped the reception of their ideas from the starteven among populations who seemed eager to cross racial lines in search of economic justice. When these scholars interacted with political movements, fellow radical thinkers, and institutions in Washington, D.C., and beyond, they were constantly reminded of others' absolute commitment to a racial world interpreted via racial politics. If, for some, class analyses of American society were a critical step in the march toward true democratic social progress and justice, doctrinaire race thinking always stood ready to hobble that effort.
The Second Amenia Conference
In the late spring of 1933 the final list had been drawn up and Joel E. Spingarn, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), mailed the invitations to those whom the leadership of the NAACP felt were the "young leaders, or potential leaders of the race." The thirty-three individuals who accepted the invitation were to confer for three days in late August at "Troutbeck," Spingarn's estate in Amenia, New York, to discuss with "perfect freedom and without publicity the present situation of the Negro race."[8]
The twenty-two men and eleven women who comprised this next generation of race leaders were attorneys, educators, university and betterment organization administrators, and intellectuals. They were college educated and many possessed graduate and professional degrees as well. Even without the recognition afforded them by the NAACP invitation, these were people who, if they so desired, had ready access to a comfortable middle-class existence. A random sampling yields the following individuals and careers: Marion Cuthbert served as secretary for the Leadership Division of the National Board of the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA); Emmett Dorsey taught political science at Howard University; Louis Redding and Edward Lovett practiced law in Delaware and Washington, D.C., respectively; Harry Greene directed the School of Education at West Virginia State College; Elmer Carter edited the National Urban League's (NUL) journal Opportunity; Mabel Byrd worked at the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA of Washington, D.C.; Frances Williams served as secretary of the Laboratory Division of the NAACP's National Board; Charles Houston occupied the dean's chair at the Howard Law School; and Ira DeA. Reid directed research for the NUL.[9] Joining this group were the three scholars whose work and activism form the nucleus of this study, economist Abram Harris, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, and political scientist Ralph Bunche.
The events that unfolded at this conference made clear that the foundations of problems previously construed as racial were now being examined for their class roots. That this approach was deliberately considered by an organization whose leadership was middle class and increasingly mainstream underscores its popularity. Furthermore, that Harris, Frazier, and Bunche emerged as leaders of this conference demonstrates their commitment to an economic understanding of racial conflict and their willingness to take a lead amongst their peers to propose class-based solutions generated by social science scholarship.
This was not the first time that Spingarn had invited black leaders to his estate. In 1916, he convened the "First Amenia Conference" hoping that the attendees could unite and formulate a collective plan of action regarding blacks' social and political conditions.[10] The announced purpose and the timing of this conference were very deliberate. Booker T. Washington, the famed "Wizard of Tuskegee" and the most influential black leader in America, had died only one year earlier, and thus the opportunity was available to forge a bond between southern race leaders and the northern-dominated NAACP. While some of the gathering's unity was cosmetic, there was a general sense that the conference resolutions "closed the era of Booker T. Washington and pointed hopefully toward cooperation in the years to come."[11]
Seventeen years later Spingarn demonstrated the same appreciation for timing. Already occupying the bottom of the wage and social scales, black Americans were particularly hard hit by the financial devastation of the Great Depression. The economic malaise of these years only exacerbated an attenuated decline in the quality of black life since the first conference. A handful of examples underscores blacks' crisis.
Blacks were leaving the rural South in record numbers, exhausted from the hard toil of sharecropping and tenant farming, the abiding political and social repression, the physical and psychological terror of the lynch mob, and the denial of economic opportunity. Between 1914 and 1916, a labor depression, the scourge of the boll weevil, and floods simply added to the long list of accumulating reasons for blacks to try life in the North.[12] Blacks' problems did not disappear with this move, however. Most importantly, the migration to northern cities put further burdens on an already strained labor and housing environment. In East St. Louis in 1917, no fewer than forty blacks died at the hands of white workers who were on strike at an aluminum factory. During the "Red Summer" of 1919, blacks fell victim to whites in twenty-five race riots, most famously in Chicago where housing tensions made for a tinderbox of anger.[13] In 1921, somewhere between 300 and 3,000 blacks died in Tulsa when white mobs, angry over economic competition, ransacked the black business district, destroying some 1,500 homes and buildings in the process.[14]
Politically, things were little better. Through the use of poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and literary qualifications, white registrars of voters regularly disenfranchised southern blacks. In places like Mississippi, for example, less than one-half of one percent of eligible black men were registered to vote.[15] The revival of the Ku Klux Klan and its explosive growth in the 1920s directly and indirectly limited black political participation. As John Kirby points out, the Klan was so powerful by 1924 that the National Democratic Convention failed in its attempt to curtail its influence. Calvin Coolidge, running on the Republican ticket, refused to comment on the problems raised by the Klan until he was in the White House. Even then, Coolidge made no effort to curtail the Klan's violence toward blacks. Collectively, the Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations worried little about the state of black political affairs.[16]
The crash of 1929 eliminated whatever economic advances some blacks might have been able to make. Black and white unemployment skyrocketed, and the welfare rolls blossomed. Blacks found times particularly tough as job shortages and racism combined. "No Jobs for Niggers Until Every White Man Has a Job," became a rallying cry for southern whites. Even in such major centers as Atlanta, 65 percent of employable blacks needed public assistance.[17] Herbert Hoover's belief in volunteerism and faith that the economic downturn was part of a larger cycle that would correct itself in time meant that federal government did little at first to address the depression. By the time Hoover realized the scope of the financial catastrophe, it was too late to fix it. Hoover's inability to solve the country's fiscal woes allowed Franklin Roosevelt to sweep into office with his promise of a "New Deal."[18]
The group of young men and women Spingarn brought together at Amenia in 1933, however, concluded that there was no guarantee that Roosevelt's New Deal program would alleviate the country's plight, much less blacks' troubles. Given these circumstances, this was a group that was prepared to consider new sociopolitical approaches to seemingly intractable social and economic dilemmas.[19]
As a result, the goal of the Second Amenia Conference was markedly different from that of the first. This time, Spingarn was not searching for a new and united leadership regarding only racial issues. Spingarn was aware that many blacks were dissatisfied with the very organization he had helped establish and now led. The NAACP, many believed, had focused too much on political liberties and civil rights and had proved unable to develop any plan to eliminate black poverty and unemployment.[20] Even for those who supported the NAACP's civil rights tactics, there was a growing sense that it was losing ground to organizations that linked civil rights reform to class-oriented strategies. The Communist Party and the International Labor Defense, for example, had won the respect of many blacks for immediately defending the so-called Scottsboro Boysnine black youths who, in 1931, were falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama and then were sentenced either to life in prison or deathwhile the NAACP lagged behind, worried that its bourgeois image would be stained by supporting possible rapists.
It was becoming evident to the NAACP, then, that blacks' concerns about civil rights were being eclipsed by an increasingly desperate search for economic justice. So, as stated in the memorandum sent to those invited to the conference, Spingarn sought answers not only to the ongoing Negro problem but also to the question of economic security. Spingarn wanted his guests to tell the "young, educated American Negro" what to do in regard to "occupation and income, racial organization, and interracial cooperation." Spingarn also hoped his guests would tell him and the other association leaders how white "friends and sympathizers" could participate in such a plan.[21]
Spingarn's memo is important in that it verbalizes a real concern for economic matters, thus articulating the possibility for an institutional shift in the NAACP's focus, and also because it points to a desire on behalf of the older, more established association leaders to hear from the next generation of "articulate" black Americans. This call to the "young leaders of the race" was significant. James Young argues persuasively that the generational difference between the NAACP leaders and the Second Amenia conferees is central to understanding the critique that the attendees made of the NAACP and like-minded organizations.
Young states that "the most important basis for the differences between the older and the younger generations is the fact that the older men were 'race men.'"[22] "Race men," according to Young, were those leaders like James Weldon Johnson and Walter White who came of age during the era of scientific racism, embraced nineteenth-century middle-class values, and maintained a deep faith in the curative powers of liberalism. Nothing was more important to these established blacks than their role as race spokesmen. Representing the race mattered more to them than their careers and captured their almost undivided attention. Public spokesmen, regardless of profession, these race men rarely strayed onto topics that did not relate directly to racial matters.[23]
The same could not be said for the people these race men and their white counterparts invited to the Second Amenia Conference. For example, while the race men and the attendees all struggled through the early years of the depression, the new economic realities affected the worldview of the younger set in a different fashion. Unlike the race men, the younger generation found it much easier to walk away from the race-based, gradualist strategies supported by groups like the NAACP and the NUL. Shut out at the national level by the Republican and Democratic Parties and meeting resistance from organizations like the American Federation of Labor, these younger blacks turned their attention and increasingly declared their open allegiance to alternative political parties and organizations. Whether it be Cyril Briggs's African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), Marcus Garvey's UNIA, Father Divine's evangelical Peace Mission movement, or the CP, the range of black political and social options was expanding.
Despite the breadth of political and social philosophies amongst these organizations, it was evident that this was an era when conceiving the world in economic terms was intellectually fashionable. When the ABB was founded in 1919, it articulated a program that was equal parts black nationalism and class radicalism. Beginning as a "revolutionary nationalist organization," the ABB quickly developed close ties to the CPUSA. The UNIA's vision of a new Africa for black Americans appealed to broad sections of the black community. Even though the romantic possibilities of Garvey's rhetoric overwhelmed any other facet of the UNIA, it is important to remember that the organization was, at its foundation, a capitalist venture.[24] Although Father Divine tried to keep his interracial movement removed from 1920s political and social activism, he nonetheless paid keen attention to economic opportunities and made the best of them. When one got past Divine's millennial sensibilities, one found an extremely efficient economic cooperative system.[25] The CP, of course, was committed to economically focused political theories that called for the equitable redistribution of society's wealth. Its inconsistent attention to and theories regarding blacks occasionally made it the era's most welcoming political home to blacks. Ultimately, the political project did not matterrace was now openly linked to class consciousness.
In addition to new political choices, there were new academic choices as well. To a significant extent, the blacks of this new generation completed their schooling when the scientific justification for racial categorization was being assaulted by advocates of cultural relativism and when new opportunities for employment were being found in higher education (although only at historically black colleges).[26] When coupled together, the new political options and new intellectual approaches made the older leaders' insistence upon racially constructed solutions to social problems seem provincial to the younger crowd.[27]
Despite the fact that both generations shared the same sort of professional possibilities and class standing, it is clear that the different approaches the two generations embraced for securing social justice overwhelmed their similarities. Yet at the Second Amenia conference, young and old were uniformly engaged in their effort to solve blacks' abiding social problems, regardless of whether they were a function of race or class dynamics. They understood, for example, that the goal of the meeting was ambitious and that the stakes were high. W. E. B. Du Bois, the director of research and publicity for the NAACP and the editor of its journal, Crisis, had raised the idea of such a gathering the previous summer and hoped that nothing less than "a new vision of the Negro's future, and a new programme [sic], will arise out of this independent discussion."[28]
Despite the attendees' sincerity and Du Bois's hope, one can only consider the meeting a mixed success, at best. Afterward, Du Bois glumly reported that a critical appraisal of the "Negro's existing situation" would not be forthcoming from the conference.[29] But though the Amenia delegates did not develop a concrete plan, they did enunciate a vision for the future of the race.
This vision was created within the context of an economically driven worldview that was shared by so many of the invited guests. The Amenia delegates acknowledged the older generation and the contributions that it had made in the struggle for equality but declared nonetheless the need for fresh ideas. The new vision for blacks' future, they argued, should not be limited solely to intraracial organization and civil rights liberalism. Instead, the conferees felt that in an era when "economic, political, and social values are rapidly shifting, and the very structure of organized society is being revamped," they offered the kind of leadership that was required to "integrate the special problems of the Negro within the larger issues facing the nation."[30]
These special problems involved more than race. Believing that leaders had overlooked the exploitation of black labor for too long, the attendees argued that the persistent economic problems facing the most oppressed must be addressed. Low wages, long hours, and job insecurity plagued black laborers. Deprived of the ability to gain financial security in a country that increasingly worshipped consumerism virtually guaranteed black economic, social, and psychological depression. The key to solving this problem, the conferees argued, was to unite black and white labor.
The delegates urged this approach because they believed that one could not afford to continue to divide the interests of the working class along racial lines. It was recognized, however, that achieving working-class interracial unity could not be accomplished overnight. The young intellectuals understood that their objectives could only be met by convincing white laborers that they shared many of the same concerns as black workers and that if the two groups organized into a politically active, industrially based labor force, they would be able to affect "such social legislation as old age pensions, unemployment insurance, child and female labor, etc."[31] In this regard, the Amenia delegates implicitly acknowledged the early Socialist and Communist Party platforms that insisted American social problems would be solved on workers' terms rather than racialized workers' terms. This was a platform, however, that by 1933 had fallen out of favor with a number of prominent black radicals due in large measure to the articulation of the Black Belt thesis, which, in itself, was an acknowledgement of the popularity of black nationalist sentiment developed by the UNIA.[32] The Amenia delegates, despite their dedication to a class thesis that acknowledged racial groups while simultaneously trying to transcend them, were not prepared to embrace a stance that emphasized race so strongly.
Labor movements, of course, do not exist in a vacuum. In order for them to flourish, a social, economic, or political culture must provide a sufficiently ripe environment for success. The Amenia delegates recognized this, and in articulating their desire for a new movement, they also hoped to increase pressure on the government to expand programs friendly to social welfare concerns. But when it came to developing labor-friendly social and economic programs, what was the ideal form of government? The conferees considered three possibilities: fascism, communism, and reformed democracy. They ruled out fascism immediately as it would only solidify blacks' position at the bottom of the social order. The attendees also dismissed communism, as they felt it would require too great a "fundamental transformation in the psychology and the attitude" in this country regarding race and labor. Reformed democracy, the conferees concluded, was the only political system that merited some attention.[33]
Although Franklin Roosevelt had been in office less than six months, the delegates were aware that under his direction the federal government was attempting to redefine its relationship with labor and business. The attendees were giving Roosevelt a chance when they declared their willingness to accept a "democracy that is attempting to reform itself." However, the delegates made clear that "in the process of reform the interests of the Negro cannot be adequately safeguarded by white paternalism in government." Black interests in agriculture and industry, to cite two examples, had to be safeguarded by black representation on government boards and field staffs.[34]
While these comments were part of a "Findings" statement that had no literal policy influence, the Amenia delegates were confident that a "reformed democracy" and their involvement in it would fix the problems left unsolved by the incomplete liberalism of the previous generation. The conferees found inadequate their elders' stress on universalist values and social mobility. Here, the young activists reflected a modern sensibility that called attention to the imperfection of social systems and the failed promise of Victorian era ideologies. Instead, the young critics advocated direct intervention into workers' lives. Like their older hosts, the young Amenia activists were motivated by noblesse oblige, but their notion of how this obligation would be fulfilled manifested itself differently. Where previous generations of black leaders and intellectuals believed that their visible hand would uplift the lower classes, the delegates' morality was imbued with an explicit sympathy for solving the workers' plight in workers' terms. In a sense, they replaced civility toward workers with sensitivity to workers' lives, even if this sensitivity developed out of an overwhelming sense of economic desperation.
The Second Amenia delegates' willingness to call for a new interventionist federal approach, to urge new strategies for the most prominent "betterment" organizations, to recommend the creation of a new labor movement, and to emphasize the critical role they could play in these spheres underlines the tenor of the times and their own sense of self. They felt that a critical moment had arrived for the nation and believed in the role that they, as self-anointed leaders, could and should play in restructuring society. Clearly, this was a group that was confident in its abilities because the vision they presented regarding an energized, racially aware, and yet transcendent, interracial labor movement would be close to impossible to implement. First, competition was fierce for those jobs that were available, and employers fostered racial enmity among their workers to prevent interracial alliances. Secondly, even if factories hired without regard to race, one had to convince white and black workers to discard their mutual suspicions.[35] The Amenia delegates never offered a specific plan to address these concerns, but their words suggested that they thought themselves the leaders who, in time, would be able to develop such a plan.
Post-conference correspondence between Spingarn and a number of Amenia delegates reveals the extent to which the guests felt prepared to accept the mantle of leadership for the race. Two examples are worth noting. In the first letter, Mabel Byrd of the Wheatley YWCA wrote, "It seems to me that in attacking together the problems of such importance that there emerged a new understanding and comprehension of the responsibilities that are ours." Marion Cuthbert, a member of the YWCA's National Board, added, "the experience . . . will be an impetus toward personal achievement and the definite acceptances of group responsibility which will have a compounding effect upon the way the racial group will develop in the next ten years."[36]
While noting the delegates' earnestness and eagerness, there is little if anything to suggest that NAACP leadership ever entertained the idea of relinquishing its role as the guardian of black America. Although Du Bois conceded that, given time, the conferenceand by implication, the guestsmight amount to something, he noted that the delegates were hobbled by the "difficulty of youth," moving too quickly to understand the past or to study the present.[37] Five years after the conference, Du Bois would reiterate his sense that the delegates' ideas were a manifestation of youthful zeal. He faulted them for letting "communistic dogmaideally right, and practically unworkable" invade their minds. "If the workers of the world," Du Bois continued, "would unite in unselfish cooperation to uplift the laboring mass, the millenium [sic] would be in sight. But we cannot expect of the age-long under-privileged worker, that which the educated and advanced have not envisaged; namely, the ignoring of race prejudice at just the era when it is being artificially stimulated by every human device."[38] Concluding his thoughts on the topic, Du Bois faulted the young delegates for "rushing down steep places into the sea of communistic dogma, without stopping to ask how far this dogma applied to [blacks'] situation."[39]
Other senior race leaders shared Du Bois's sentiments. Kelly Miller, a Howard professor and syndicated columnist, was among them. Even though he was not invited to the conference (he was of Du Bois's generation and even attended the First Amenia Conference but in 1933 was no longer a "young leader of the race"), Miller reported in the Washington Tribune that "The leadership of the elders was waved aside with condescending deference and accorded the respect of a decent burial." Miller faulted this impudent new leadership because it emphasized class problems and solutions and thus made an appeal "to the stomach instead of to the conscience. The gospel of benevolence is supplanted by the gospel of guts."[40] Whereas Du Bois expressed his disappointment with the Amenia delegates for their insensitivity to entrenched racial thinking and their headlong rush into communist dogma, Miller was concerned that the Amenia radicals paid no attention to religious morality.
Despite these and other critiques, the NAACP leaders wanted to hear more from the delegates.[41] To that end, they asked Abram Harris to convene a committee to examine the structure of the association and develop a plan to equip the group to relate better to the growing numbers of disaffected black Americans. Harris accepted the association's offer and, asking E. Franklin Frazier and Ralph Bunche to provide the committee with supplementary assistance, set out to produce the "Future Plan and Program of the NAACP." While Harris's efforts and the way in which they illuminate some of the social and political tensions of the era are explored in Chapter 2, it is worth considering for a moment why he was selected from the Amenia cohort. Most likely, the NAACP saw Harris as particularly fitted to the task at hand. He was a specialist in labor and race policy and had already published widely in the field. He was, far and away, the most influential black economist of his era and was absolutely committed to the idea that, properly applied, social science expertise could solve political, social, and even institutional problems. Furthermore, because the NAACP officials knew Harris as a social scientist, they probably expected he would bring a distanced and balanced approach to the topic. They quickly learned, however, that a social science expert did not necessarily assume a neutral political orientation in his work.
Little else remains to be told about the actual events of the Amenia Conference of 1933. Aside from a small amount of post-conference correspondence and the one picture featured here, there is a striking dearth of historical sources regarding the weekend meeting. That said, the Second Amenia Conference remains significant. As far as this book is concerned, Amenia serves two purposes. The first is that it marks the early intellectual careers of Harris, Frazier, and Bunche and their clear entry into a cadre of young leadership for black America. The Second Amenia Conference also serves as a metaphor for understanding the era and the roles these new leaders thought they could play in it. In their writings and speeches throughout the 1930s, Harris, Frazier, and Bunche remained true to what one might say for interwar era black intellectuals was the Amenia ideal: that class had to be considered at least as strongly as race as a causative factor in blacks' degraded position in American life; that social science provided the foundation for developing innovative ideas to solve social problems; and that intellectual activists were the individuals best prepared to uplift black and white laborers alike.
The Amenia ideal, it should be noted, was not without its problems. Most fundamentally, Harris, Frazier, and Bunche advocated a class line that, as Du Bois would note in 1938, ignored long-standing racial animosity between and among social classes and was too removed from other social realities. Although they sought interracial worker unity, the Amenia radicals had no clear plan about how they could facilitate such unity apart from general worker education projects. Whites as well as blacks had good cause to remain invested in racial politics. Du Bois, for one, openly acknowledged that even though the biological foundation of race had been proven a myth there remained social and political utility in racial categorization. For example, conceiving of and talking about blacks as a "cultural group" was important because they could then be seen as "units of social uplift."[42]
Despite the salience of Du Bois's critique, the Amenia ideal embodies meanings that resonate beyond the historical era around which this book revolves. While the Amenia ideal declared a faith in economic solutions to long-standing race problems it also operated as an idea expressed along a particular methodological trajectory. It was a manifestation of a growing faith in the powers of social science and its practitioners to solve negative processes that manifested themselves as political, social, or racial problems. However, even when methodological issues were removed from the conversation, there remained important lessons to be learned about the intersections of politics, social science, and race. The commerce at these intersections informed so many of the post-World War II intellectual discourses. The rise of so-called neoconservative race politics, the development of housing and welfare policy reforms, and the symbolic role and status of the Negro in domestic and international affairs have direct connections to the debates of the 1930s and to the figures who engaged in these debates. The debaters' legaciesthus the legacy of the Amenia idealand an examination of these intersections are taken up in the concluding chapter.
Genealogies of Politics, Academics, and Race Leadership
Confronting the Veil presents a history involving labor politics, social science, and race. In their early careers, Abram Harris, E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche had much to say about how these elements overlapped and then shaped their worldview. These three scholars established themselves during that moment in American history when an industrially based workers' movement that crossed ethnic, racial, and even professional lines seemed viable. Among other things, this was the era that witnessed the birth of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the development of the communist-led Popular Front movement. Therefore, part of this history is about a certain type of labor advocate: who they were, from what context they emerged, and in what context they operated.
This is also a history that involves the emergence of a mature and modern social science in America. Scholars like anthropologist Franz Boas and sociologist Robert Park, whose work helped lay the foundation of modern social science, trained Harris, Frazier, and Bunche.[43] It is of no little significance, then, that the three worked together to form the Division of Social Science at Howard University or that they developed the first graduate programs in their respective fields at Howard. The significance is not based solely or even mainly on the fact that they were the first to do sothere is much more to be said if and how a first begets a second, a third, and then, hopefully, a generation. Rather, the significance of their work at Howard in the 1930s is that it provides the bridge from the establishment of modern social science and its technocratic faith in objectivity to the emergence of the social science race relations expert who dominated the academic scene during the modern civil rights movement. Other black schools, with Fisk University a notable exception, developed social science programs with an eye toward solving social problems, but these schools' departments were chiefly organized to pay attention to local phenomena and to develop applied social science fields like social work.[44] Howard was different in this regard as it had a program in social work as well as the Division of Social Science. Howard's Division of Social Science was organized with a focus on the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of the social sciences as well as the training of social science scholars. The Howard social scientists, then, participated in the modernization and propagation of social science methodologies, training the teachers and experts of the next generation.
Finally, this is a history about the ways in which race affects (or, if one allows, "colors") the changing histories of labor and social science in the 1930s. At the heart of this study are the problems, obligations, and in certain cases, the benefits of the racialized thinking and racialized institutions that guided this country's history and that persist in ever-shifting ways to this day. Thinking about how race has been used as a construction to categorize certain populations in order to limit their possibilities is an increasingly common theme in histories of the United States. Yet there is another story to be told when one examines the persistent and retrograde effects of racialized thinking upon people like Harris, Frazier, and Bunche who wanted to think "beyond race," who envisioned a workers' movement that would eliminate racial divisiveness, and who used social science and its concomitant illumination of "the truth" to debunk common thinking that followed racial grooves. Ultimately, then, this history helps illuminate the ways that people have used "race" to constrain the possibilities of radical politics and social science thinking.
As much as this is a story of opportunity lost, one can not forget that for much of the 1930s it was a story of hope. Harris, Frazier, and Bunche were not alone in their political radicalism and their faith in the possibility of a new workers' movement. Nor were they alone in their belief that a pure and rational objective social science could accomplish great things. Lastly, although they were firsts of a sort at Howard and were pioneers within their modern social science disciplines, they had the benefit of following in the footsteps of other black intellectuals who had established a tradition of engaged political activism. Although some of those who cleared a path for Harris, Frazier, and Bunche later tried to sabotage the younger scholars' work, the 1930s can be remembered as an era rich with new possibilities for black intellectuals.
Two important caveats need to be presented here. The first has already been alluded to on several occasions; the Howard cadre was not alone in its radicalism or in its specific call to establish an interracial labor movement. Historians have long recognized that numerous others, black and white, battled toward these same goals. To cite only three very recent examples, Michael Denning has referred to the 1930s as the "Age of the CIO" and has described the wide-ranging efforts by whites, blacks, and recent immigrants to forge a new cultural identity that crossed racial and ethnic lines; Mark Solomon has detailed the shifting strategies and alliances that defined the relationship between the Communist Party and black Americans in the interwar era; and Keith Griffler has pointed to the alliance between black political groups and white labor during the same period.[45]
The second caveat is that although Harris, Franzier, and Bunche operated in a climate of academic freedom, the lack of institutional support beyond the campus meant that the potential for black intellectual leadership on the labor question was limited from the start. This point is critical and merits further discussion.
In the course of his study, Griffler argues that by the late 1920s the training ground for black radicalism split into two camps: the "practical" and the "intellectual." Labor activists like A. Philip Randolph and Socialist and Communist Party activists like Frank Crosswaith and Lovett Fort-Whiteman, respectively, remained convinced that, with time and internal agitation, labor and radical politics would become more responsive to the needs of blacks as workers. The intellectuals, on the other hand, believed that the new interracial labor movement would come about through a newly educated workforce and "reasoned persuasion."[46] This observation is critical because it points to two fundamental problems confronting the black intellectuals who are the focus of this book.
The first problem relates to their audience, the second relates to access, and both revolve around race. The social science radicalism advocated by Harris, Frazier, and Bunche reflected new trends in their fields and certainly resonated at those places where they were trained and on Howard's campus as well. Yet even though they worked hard to be public intellectuals, it remains unclear what kind of reception they enjoyed outside of select academic circles. Trying to convince black Americans that they should now look beyond white working-class racism in order to forge a new labor movement was a difficult, if not quixotic, task. Systemic racial discriminationin the form of housing, professional, and social segregationbred a racial logic that only perpetuated discrimination. Further complicating matters is that even though they frequently crossed racial dividesspeaking to white radical literary groups in New York one day and black student activists the nextHarris, Frazier, and Bunche rarely spoke to or were read by a truly interracial audience. The racial line was real, and they had to live and work according to its dictates. So, while their class analysis reflected their scholarship and belief systems, it came at a cost. The viability of class ideas was limited from the start in a world where race was the common currency.
The second problem relates to the way in which race politics put constraints on institutional access. One must remember that Harris, Frazier, and Bunche were intellectuals in the most modern and traditional senses of the term. They were modern in that they were engaged with a political sphere that pulled them away from merely intellectual pursuits and involved them in the bustle of everyday life.[47] At the same time, they were traditional in that they were tied to an institutional base, Howard University; these were not "free-floating intellectuals" who relied upon magazine commissions and wealthy patrons for subsistence. As this book reveals, however, as much as Howard functioned as a safe haven for the cadre, the racial politics that defined and allowed for the institution's existence severely limited the trio's independence. In the end, the segregation in academia that made Howard what it was also meant that black leadership on disciplinary and methodological questions was limited to racial spheres.
Political engagement and radicalism are expressed in different ways over time, space, and circumstance. And while the extent to which Harris, Frazier, and Bunche could be successfully engaged in fostering a new labor movement was constrained in part by institutional limitations and the race politics of their day, the fact remains that they could embrace a broader range of options than previous generations of black intellectuals. Furthermore, as much as these young radicals made it a point to distinguish and distance themselves from their predecessors, they knew they were part of a growing historical legacy of black intellectual political engagement. To appreciate the latitude the Howard cadre enjoyedthough limited in significant waysit is important to return to the start of the twentieth century and present a brief genealogy of black intellectual endeavor. Such a genealogy makes plain the evolving nature of the relationship of black intellectuals to political and social movements. This examination also demonstrates how black academic and political leadership was articulated in a patrilineal and masculinist narrative that wrote women out even when they were present.[48]
On March 5, 1897, in Washington, D.C.'s Lincoln Memorial Congregational Church, seventy-eight-year-old Rev. Alexander Crummell delivered the inaugural address to the American Negro Academy (ANA). His audience probably considered his speech, "Civilization, the Primal Need of the Race," the crowning moment of a great man's career. Born in 1819 to a free family of color, raised in an abolitionist environment, and ordained to the priesthood in 1845, Crummell had a speaking and writing career that spanned three continents and five decades.[49]
After returning in 1872 from an extended stint as a missionary in Liberia, Crummell was an active figure until his death in 1898. He built a prominent church in Washington, D.C., published two lengthy collections of sermons, rose to a position of leadership in the black community, and founded the American Negro Academy. Just as his move to Liberia helped fulfill that aspect of Crummell's sense of Christian duty that called on him to civilize the African natives, his work in the postbellum United States revolved around his notion of how to civilize, or "uplift," black Americans. Naturally, Crummell, as an intellectual and the founding father of the ANA, would be at the center.
Established during a period of remarkable change and crisis for black Americans in the United States, the ANA represented an attempt by black scholars to improve black America's intellectual life and the quality of its leadership. This new leadership, in turn, would be better equipped to disprove arguments about black social, cultural, and intellectual inferiority.[50] Certainly the founding members of the academy were motivated to act by notable and disturbing recent events. Frederick Douglass, the preeminent black activist, intellectual, and politician of the nineteenth century, had died two years earlier. The Supreme Court had just established the "separate but equal" doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson, a decision affirming states' rights to segregate the races that would not be overturned until the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. Furthermore, Booker T. Washington, whose views were antithetical to the moral and cultural mission of the ANA, had begun his ascent to power at the Atlanta Cotton Exposition of 1895 when he declared his support for social segregation.[51]
As the first president of the ANA, Crummell urged its members to join in his quest to uplift the race. He believed that intellectualsthose who had "secured the vision which penetrates the center of nature"would provide salvation for blacks: "In all the great revolutions, and in all great reforms which have transpired, scholars have been conspicuous; in the re-construction of society, in formulating laws, in producing great emancipations, in the revival of letters, in the advancement of science, in the renaissance of art, in the destruction of gross superstitions and in the restoration of true and enlightened religion."[52] The backbone of Alexander Crummell's agenda, then, was a clearly stated and unbending belief in a hierarchically ordered society where the enlightened intelligentsia guided the masses toward salvation.
When it came to the secular world of politics, Crummell was equally clear. Twelve years before he established the ANA, Crummell publicly lamented the "political ambitions which seem the craze of very many young minds" and would only "end in emptiness."[53] When he headed the ANA, Crummell was even more resolute. In an 1897 letter to his close colleague, journalist John E. Bruce, Crummell expressed his disdain for politics: "never have I been so disgusted with the black politician as now a days. The gross and abominable selfishness; the low cunning; the brazen and impudent effrontery; the open and heartless abnegation of Race; the skillful 'opportunism' of these creatures is something amazing."[54]
While Crummell railed against politics and opportunism, Booker T. Washington, the master of those practices, had solidified his standing as the most influential black leader of his generation. The founder of Tuskegee Institute, Washington accepted the social separation of the races and believed that black Americans must build themselves up largely through industrial and agricultural training. If nothing else, Washington's program was grounded in pragmatism. While he felt that blacks should be allowed to "secure all the mental strength, all the mental culture . . . that circumstances allow," Washington sincerely thought that "for years to come the education of the people of my race should be so directed that the greatest proportion of the mental strength of the masses will be brought to bear upon the every-day practical things of life, upon something that is needed to be done."[55]
Whereas Crummell acknowledged that higher culture was not for everyone, he also made clear that industrial education was not to be the cure-all for the race.[56] "The Negro problem in the U.S. is a problem of ideas," Crummell commented. "There is a present, but fleeting movement, to give it the respect of materialism; but they who are making this endeavor, will be just as successful as they would be who should attempt to turn the needle to the Equator, instead of to the pole."[57]
Over time, Crummell expressed a deepening disdain for the popularity of Washington's program. At the opening session of the ANA, Crummell, dripping with sarcastic indignation, wondered aloud if the champions of vocational training for blacks truly understood the black experience in America. "One would suppose from the universal demand for the mere industrialism for this race of ours, that the Negro had been going daily to dinner parties, eating terrapin and indulging in champagne; and returning home at night, sleeping on beds of eiderdown; breakfasting in the morning in his bed, and then having his valet to clothe him daily in purple and fine linenall these 250 years of his sojourn on this land. And then, just now, the American people, tired of all this Negro luxury, was calling him, for the first time, to blister his hands with the hoe, and to learn to supply his needs by sweatful toil in the cotton fields."[58] Crummell's exasperation showed as he watched the popularity of Booker T. Washington's program and its almost complete emphasis on pragmatic survival eclipse the spiritual and moral urgings of Crummell's ecclesiastical and intellectual worldview.
Crummell declared that the Negro problem was one of ideas and could be conquered by intellectual endeavor and moral fortitude. But beyond the realm of the ANA and a few other black intellectuals, Crummell's vision was irrelevant to the masses. Indeed, the very philosophy that Crummell proclaimed as the bedrock for the academy diminished the importance of everyday material survival for American blacks.[59] He scoffed at the notions that "property is the source of power" or that money commanded respect. The "greatness of peoples," he argued, sprang from their ability to "grasp the grand conception of being," not blood or lineage or office.[60]
As an organization devoted to civilizing the masses, the ANA was a failure. Unable to expand beyond its original purview, much less maintain it, the academy limped along quietly for thirty-three-years. Nevertheless, the ANA deserves attention for the people who were in the organization and for the roles they played later. Of particular note are Kelly Miller and W. E. B. Du Bois. These two men, both original members of the academy, became pivotally important in twentieth-century black social and intellectual life and, as it turned out, would be prominent foils to the Howard cadre of the 1930s. Although very different personally and philosophically, Miller's and Du Bois's lives and work reveal how Crummell's faith in moral uplift was lost in a wake of pragmatism.
Kelly Miller, a professor of sociology at Howard University, shared Crummell's respect for elitist, Victorian notions of civilization.[61] Despite this basic concurrence, a critical difference separated the two men; Miller was a true pragmatist, willing to engage in political maneuvering to win his argument. A prolific essayist and pamphleteer whose column, "Kelly Miller Says" appeared in the major black newspapers of the day, Miller was well known for being a "straddler," often acting as a mediator between Washington and the comparatively radical Du Bois.[62] Unlike Crummell, Miller did not hesitate to change his loyalties or affiliations for expediency's sake. Given blacks' degraded social position at the turn of the century, Miller felt that a mixture of Washington's and Du Bois's approaches would best serve colored America. An appeal to the "moral sense of the nation" was a waste of time.[63]
When Miller concluded that politics was a respectable and effective channel through which positive change for black Americans could be achieved, he proved willing to do what Crummell had considered unimaginable. For example, in 1923, Miller demonstrated his awareness of and sensitivity to the expanded role of the government when he declared that citizens could no longer afford to ignore the "affairs of government." He urged blacks to see in government a solution to current and future ills. Politics, he concluded, was war, and "to the victors belong the power of office, if not the spoils thereof."[64]
With these words, Miller issued his own call to arms for black leadership. He did not envision the kind of intellectual society that Crummell constructed. Rather, Miller wanted to create a much larger organization that could heal the rifts dividing politically minded black leaders. Miller's Negro Sanhedrina reference to the Great Sanhedrin, the highest court of justice in ancient Jerusalemwould not trespass on the terrain of established groups but would help create a national agenda for the race. In short, Miller was calling for a racewide and nationwide political interest group.
Miller wanted the Sanhedrin to reflect his middle-class, moderately conservative, and "pro-American" worldviews and thus did not invite "untraditional groups" like those supporting communist or socialist agendas.[65] Miller's all-race idea, then, embraced a narrow sense of whose views mattered most. Still, over 500 delegates attended the first conference held in Chicago in 1924. The Sanhedrin may not have been as exclusive as the American Negro Academy and it certainly sought to operate in a different realm of affairs, but even compared to the ANA, the Sanhedrin was a complete failure. Miller was too busy to dedicate his full attention to the organization, and it could not overcome serious financial and organizational inadequacies.[66] Either Miller was the wrong person for the job, or his vision, which embraced politics whereas Crummell's did not, was an inappropriate means to secure a better world for black Americans.
W. E. B. Du Bois's life and career suggest that the failure of the Sanhedrin did not reflect a failure in Miller's pragmatic belief that the practical results of ideas (the world of politics) mattered more than the philosophical nature of the ideas (the world of faith and spirituality). Indeed, Du Bois's life and work stand as a monument to politically driven intellectual activism. In 1905, for example, Du Bois helped organize the Niagara Movement, an all-black organization of middle-class professionals dedicated to garnering full civil rights for black Americans. Four years later, several Niagara Movement leaders accompanied Du Bois and joined the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Du Bois used his position at the NAACP as a bully pulpit from which he declared his support of or opposition to political or social events.
Easily the most important black intellectual of the twentieth century, Du Bois enjoyed a relationship with Crummell that was demonstrably closer than that of any other Crummell protégé. According to Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Du Bois "found in Crummell a spiritual father to take the place of the natural father he had never known."[67] To be sure, Du Bois was similar to Crummell; they both enjoyed formative experiences in Europe and at certain times shrouded their Victorian sensibilities with black nationalist rhetoric.[68] Moreover, Du Bois, like Crummell, had a famously antagonistic relationship with Booker T. Washington. Over time, however, Du Bois became more concerned with improving blacks' day-to-day existence through practical means, namely his work with the NAACP. Du Bois's keen sensitivity to politics and his social scientific training combined to set him apart from Crummell and perhaps made it easier for Du Bois to approach life from a more pragmatic viewpoint.
The difference between Crummell's and Du Bois's training is significant. Those black intellectuals who, like Du Bois, entered academia at the turn of the century enjoyed the opportunity to study in a widening variety of fields. This was an opportunity denied those who preceded them. No longer were black scholars limited to the study of theology or a few other disciplines. This newly found freedom surely helped increase black intellectuals' expectations of what society should be like. Indeed, when coupled with increased expectations this new training may have made a turn toward pragmatism inevitable. For many, Heaven was no longer the only place they had to look for salvation.[69]
The same could not be said for black women. The kinds of options available to the scholars of Du Bois's and Miller's generation were there only for men. To cite one example, the ANA, in its attempts to develop intellectual leadership and to save the race, refused to allow women in its membership.[70] In fact, only one woman ever presented work before the academy: writer and educator Anna Julia Cooper. Cooper, whose 1892 opus A Voice from the South predated the establishment of the ANA and embodied both Victorian uplift ideology and a sophisticated gender analysis of black leadership, was adamantly opposed to Booker T. Washington's vocational education schemes. While the famous speech that catapulted Washington to fame was still three years off, Cooper knew who he was and what his educational philosophy embodied. In fact, her anti-Washington opinions in A Voice from the South predate Du Bois's similar sentiments in The Souls of Black Folk. That Cooper's contribution has been ignored in what many historians consider the central black political and intellectual debate of the twentieth century only underscores the extent to which women have been systematically written out of history. This abiding historical amnesia, of course, is an accurate reflection of past and present sexism. Cooper perfectly summed up this willful forgetfulness in 1892: "It seems hardly a gracious thing to say, but it strikes me as true, that while our men seem thoroughly abreast of the times on almost every other subject, when they strike the woman question they drop back into sixteenth century logic . . . I fear the majority of colored men do not yet think it worth while [sic] that women aspire to higher education."[71]
In the early 1900s Cooper was the principal of M Street High School, the crown jewel of black Washington's famous public school system. In 1906, racist and sexist politics combined to force her from that post. Four years later she accepted an invitation to return to the school to teach Latin, but she doggedly pursued other intellectual goals. In 1925 and already sixty-seven years old, Cooper received her Ph.D. in French from the Sorbonne. She was the fourth black American woman to receive a doctorate. However, the university world that offered a professional home to Miller and at various times to Du Bois was closed to Cooper.[72]
In 1930, Cooper became the second president of Frelinghuysen University and endeavored to reinvigorate the struggling Washington, D.C., institution. Yet even in this role, Cooper occupied a world removed. The truth was that Frelinghuysen was a university in name only and was, in reality, an adult education school.[73] In short, Frelinghuysen could not provide Cooper the kind of intellectual stimulation and camaraderie one found only a few blocks away at Howard. While Cooper was the most prominent female intellectual in the District at the time, the record shows that there were women on Howard's faculty in this era. The question remains, however, as to where at Howard they were welcome. Although, given the era, there were a respectable number of women on the faculty at Howard, they certainly were not in the social sciences. Rather, one had to go to the Program in Social Work, the Departments of English, Education, Physical Education, and Home Economics, and the School of Music to find women teachers. In fact, twenty-seven of the forty-one women teaching at Howard in 1935 (out of a total faculty of 285) were in these fields. Of these forty-one only seventeen were professors.[74] In this one important regard, then, the Howard social science faculty was no different from that found on other campuses when it came to women's roles in academia.[75]
One must also question how their male peers and senior administrators treated the few women professors at Howard. Robert Stepto recalls that his aunt, Inabel Lindsay, whom Frazier recruited to run the Program of Social Work and who eventually became Howard's first female academic dean, was called "daughter Lindsay" in business meetings with Howard president Mordecai Johnson.[76] This book's silence on black women's place in social sciences in general and at Howard University in particular is a reflection of that era's gendered division of academic labor. This should not be taken to mean that social scientists at Howard and other places were unconcerned with females' position in society. The opposite, in fact, was true. Throughout the twentieth century social science studies focused upon solving the various manifestations of the Negro problem. Frequently at the center of these studies was the black woman, the pathological environment in which she raised her children, the ways in which she emasculated her male partners, and the cycles of poverty that resulted from her socially dysfunctional practices. For social scientists concerned about normative relationships and the processes through which disadvantaged and immigrant populations might join the mainstream of American society, the black woman was viewed as an obstacle. Her social condition, as interpreted by the social scientists, was a direct manifestation of her own inability to maintain stable relationships at home or in the workplace. The black woman's plight, the scholars concluded, was a result of flaws in her own moral character. One can only speculate how the tone of social science's view of women might have been different had more black women become social science theorists.[77]
Through this sketch of black intellectuals, one can discern a distinctive trajectory in their thought and activism from the mid-1890s to the mid-1920s.[78] Crummell's words and deeds were not apolitical, but they were expressed almost entirely in a fashion that suggested that black intellectual activity must exist in a plane above the masses they were destined to lead or "civilize." Crummell's intellectual enterprise was fundamentally idealistic. He did not pursue the pragmatic linkages between the mind and politics that scholars like William James emphasized. Crummell died before the founding of the NAACP and the NUL, but one can safely argue that he would have been hesitant to join either organization, removed as they were from the purely intellectual and ecclesiastical realms he preferred. Miller's vision embraced the morality that guided Crummell's worldview, but it also pursued a pragmatic, albeit politically narrow, course. While no enemy of the major betterment organizations, Miller's insistence upon his own solution, as embodied in the Negro Sanhedrin, emphasizes the extent to which he believed the best way to help blacks was to pursue his own organizational impulse. Miller's strong opinions easily lapsed into self-righteousness, a tendency that quickly poisoned his relationship with the young intellectual activists who followed him at Howard. The scope and character of their relationship is taken up in Chapters 1 and 4.
Crummell's morality was undoubtedly present in Du Bois as well, but for the protégé political action was the key and politics was the means to achieve a just and moral world. What mainly separated Miller from Du Bois was the latter's willingness, if not eagerness, to embrace an ever broadening range of political options. As such, Du Bois truly was a transitional figure from Crummell's idealism and the politically inclined intellectual activists of later years. As a founder of the NAACP, Du Bois, of course, fell squarely in the intellectual as political activist camp. Yet Du Bois's career within the association was never smooth or easy. In fact, his tendency toward political partisanship and independence, in general, and his open challenge in 1934 to the NAACP's uncompromising support of integration, specifically, compelled him to resign from the organization that same year.
On their own, Du Bois's deeds prove that neither the NUL nor the NAACP held a monopoly over black intellectual and social activism. Of course, one would do a disservice to American history to ignore either organization. Their respective efforts in terms of job training and political and legal reform aimed at integration merit attention by themselves. Furthermore, their journals, Opportunity and Crisis, kept a wide readership informed of the latest social, economic, political, and artistic developments in the national black community. All that said, there were other figures, publications, and locations of black intellectual and social activism in the early twentieth century. For example, it is increasingly common knowledge that if one sought the site of the greatest secular intellectual activity in black America during the first three decades of the twentieth century, one would look to the Harlem, or New Negro, Renaissance of the 1920s.[79] In the late 1920s, with the onset of the Great Depression and the rise of a new set of economic imperatives, the Harlem Renaissance withered. At that point, a similar search for the sites of greatest intellectual and social activity would lead one to the campuses of several black colleges and universities. This is not meant to claim that black schools were hotbeds of radicalism; on the whole they were not. Instead, between the first and second World Wars, there was a new kind of scholarly political activism in black America that was determined to push the limits of the emerging acceptable black protest tradition as embodied in the NUL and the NAACP.
It is in this context that Harris, Frazier, and Bunche produced their scholarship, consulted for agencies and philanthropies, and spoke to audiences eager for fresh ideas. The Howard cadre, then, operated in a long tradition of black intellectual activism that evolved with changes in the social, political, and economic fabric of American life. These three clearly worked in the same spirit as Du Bois and had much in common with his views of politics and activism. At various times in their young careers, however, they launched vicious attacks against the elder scholar.
Teaching together in the 1930s at Howard University, Harris, Frazier, and Bunche became the center of a small coalition of progressive black scholars who, through their intellectual production and political activity during the interwar era, extended the trajectory of the black intellectual activist tradition well into the 1940s and beyond. Howard University became the leading site, despite internal and external pressures to the contrary, of black intellectual radicalism in academe during the interwar era. Harris, Frazier, and Bunche represented the leading edge of social science radicalisma modernist project that brought the latest social science theories to bear upon lived conditions, organizational structures, and federal policy. Not only were they radicals for their time, they were also trendsetters in their fields. Harris's scholarship laid the foundation for future economic inquiries into black American life; Frazier's work catapulted him to the forefront of sociological debates of the 1930s and beyond; Bunche, though far less productive than his colleagues as far as scholarship was concerned, became the template for the social science consultant and, later, the social scientist as policy adviser. In the 1930s, other Howard scholars were also engaged in cutting-edge work that would influence American cultural sensibilities and improve opportunities for black Americans. Alain Locke and Sterling Brown, for example, represented the best in literary and cultural radicalism and offered new ways to think about blacks' contributions to American and world culture. Charles Houston and William Hastie were legal radicals who trained and mentored a generation of attorneys and jurists who reshaped society in profound ways, most famously, of course, through the work of protégés like Thurgood Marshall.
Intellectuals are individuals, who, by training and often inclination and necessity, stand removed from the commerce of human interaction. Or, more fittingly, to borrow Du Bois's own construction, intellectuals work behind veils that separate them from the worlds they wish to interpret. Their distance offers them the chance to reach for the mythical objectivity that has long been the grail of the academic enterprise. But what are we to make of those intellectuals who, instead of conforming to this model, fashion their careers by being critically and actively engaged in the social worlds of their time? What happens when we introduce race and social circumstance into this equation? How do being black and living in an era of near total academic segregation affect the peculiar vantage-point intellectuals enjoy or endure?
This work attempts to answer these questions by exploring the lives and minds of Harris, Frazier, and Bunche. Importantly, these scholars stood on the outer shells of many different spherespolitical, academic, and racialat a time when these spheres were shifting and intersecting in new ways. During their early careers, the alignment and sympathies of the two major political parties were changing in respect to courting the black vote while alternative parties and organizations fought for black support; the broad discipline of social science was struggling to enter its modern age by becoming independent of its more philosophical, religious, and moral roots; and the study of race was moving from an age of Social Darwinism and eugenics into one of cultural relativism. Harris, Frazier, and Bunche lived and worked in the midst of these shifting and clashing environments and saw in the turmoil an opportunity to create new solutions to the wide-ranging negative effects of what had been deemed the Negro problem. Their strong desire for class-based solutions was, in part, a reflection of the era's fascination with alternative political parties and also a manifestation of their faith that they could, using social scientific techniques and objectivity, illuminate the falsity of racial thinking. These three intellectuals crafted individual scholarship, but they also worked together to forge a new school of thought on the race problem that confronted America during the interwar era.
Harris, Frazier, and Bunche accomplished enough in their lifetimes that they easily merit separate biographies. Indeed, during the years that have gone into this project, work on a biography of Frazier and two of Bunche have been published.[80] This book, however, is a group biography. As such, it operates in a different mode, trying to explicate how people interacted with one another as individuals and as members of small and ever-shifting cohorts. This approach to biography offers fresh insights into how individuals and groups operate in a variety of contexts. By juxtaposing these intellectuals' ideas with peers on and off the Howard campus and with peers inside and outside "the race," one can illumine the strengths of their ideas as well as their weaknesses. Since this book looks at three intellectuals who clearly saw themselves both as individuals and as co-operating clients in a joint venture of social reform, it is imperative that they and their work be analyzed in different settings.
Chapter 1 illuminates black life in Washington, D.C., and the institutional development of Howard University. Both communities had a significant effect upon the Howard cadre, and the trio's activism demonstrates that the reverse was true as well. Unfortunately, because these three lived and worked in such close quarters, there is very little preserved material that documents their personal exchanges aside from holiday cards and invitations to parties. The technology of the telephone and chance encounters on campus or in the shopping district replaced a written record of events. That said, correspondence with colleagues at other schools, the accounts found in black newspapers, magazines, and journals, and a handful of interviews with the trio's students make clear that Harris, Frazier, and Bunche frequently worked together on topics that spoke to the local as well as the national black communities. This chapter also demonstrates the extent to which people saw Howard University as a place that embodied the best in black higher education. Howard's benefactors understood the special role that Howard played in blacks' and whites' collective imagination and, particularly in the case of the federal government, frequently used Howard's symbolic significance to their public advantage.
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 present intellectual histories of Harris, Frazier, and Bunche from the mid-1920s to the early 1940s. In addition to delineating their ideas, many of the themes presented in the introduction and first chapter are considered in more detail. These themes revolve around the tensions particularly germane to the black radical intellectual experience during the interwar era. The question of scholarly objectivity, the intellectual costs of academic segregation and racism, and the contingencies and compromises that were associated with being a "race leader" are also discussed. Taken together, these chapters prove the fundamental weakness in the trio's arguments for an interracial workers alliance; Harris, Frazier, and Bunche wanted to work away from race and toward class but their personal and professional lives were lived most explicitly by race dynamics. Their economic standing relative to the rest of black America meant that they were comfortably middle class, but to the rest of the world they were, more than anything else, black.
The concluding chapter presents the splitting apart of the Howard cadre and briefly discusses their individual careers from the mid-1940s to their respective deaths in the mid-1960s and early 1970s. (Frazier died in 1962, Harris in 1964, and Bunche in 1971.) The conclusion examines their intellectual and personal legacies and investigates the changes in the terms of debate that had defined their early careers. After World War II, labor politics, social science, and race still interacted in important ways, but the nature of these interactions closed an era when many believed that a race-blind objective scholarship was possible and that an interracial workers' movement was around the corner. Even before the United States joined the war effort, it was clear that race and class would be linked in new ways. A. Philip Randolph's 1941 March on Washington Movement, for example, demanded an end to segregation in defense industry factories and the armed forces. Although Randolph's demands were not immediately met (Roosevelt established the Fair Employment Practices Committee in an attempt to appease Randolph, but the FEPC had no enforcement powers; the military remained segregated for the rest of the decade), the March on Washington Movement is significant in part for its race exclusivity: whites were not welcome in the organization. Blacks as workers would continue to fend for themselves, but now they would do so with a heightened political consciousness and sense of political organization.
By the 1950s, race consistently trumped class as the predominant organizing principle in American politics. The economism of the radical black intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s failed, and they then fell in line, foregoing or at least muting their earlier class critiques. To be sure, class politics continued to swirl about the civil rights protests throughout the South, but now they were subverted for the sake of the moral suasion that grew from racial cohesion.[81] Soon, the triumphs and then failures of the civil rights movement and the cultural renaissance of the 1960s came together in such a way that the new crisis of the black intellectual often revolved around the politics of cultural and racial authenticity. By the 1960s, if the new black intellectuals were not "black enough," they were, as the comment went, part of the problem.
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