Exhibit Paper

Following emancipation and suffrage for black men after the Civil War there was an unprecedented growth in power for the black community as they were able to cast ballots for other black men to public positions. The rapid increase of people of color in offices alarmed the previously-helpful white allies, who mainly saw them as new voters, not new competition for offices. As aid from allies waned, oppression from enemies grew, as the KKK and other white supremacists sought to quell the new "uppity" black people through lynchings and other gruesome spectacles. From this era arose four major viewpoints from the black community on how to address the trends: Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, and Arturo Schomburg, all of whom looked to preserve the rights and lives of the black community in this time of aggression and a lack of support. While all four thinkers most definitely have strong claims to support their belief system and their proposed method to aid the black community, I personally feel that Schomburg’s plan of displaying and educating people on the achievements of black culture.

            The Reconstruction Era began with a great deal of promise for the recently freed people of color in America. The millions of bondpeople not only had their humanity finally recognized, but also the men had the power of the vote. What the white abolitionists most likely believed would occur thereafter would be the appreciative blacks whisking them into higher positions of power with their vote. This view can be seen in the work of Thomas Nast in Harper’s Weekly, specifically that of Columbia, the anthropomorphic representation of the United States, wondering why one should trust the surrendering Confederates with the right to vote and not a black Union veteran.[1] While abolition allowed for black men to now also run for public office, what was glorified in major magazines was only their ability to vote, seen also in Alfred Waud’s The First Vote[2]. Two years after Nast’s piece Waud shows four black men who have served the country as laborers, soldiers, and small-time businessmen not looking to serve through public office, but by putting another man in office. These images reveal what the establishment expected to occur with these new millions of voters, and the events that would actually occur would startle them immensely.

            The white hegemony must have expected that, with the enfranchisement of black men, there would be a decent amount of black men to reach elected offices, but not o any major positions of power. There would probably be some county representatives, a handful of mayors, but never someone in a federal position. This viewpoint would be a horrible understatement to what actually occurred in the ten years following abolition, where at least 1510 men of color served in a public position, with the actual number assumed to be around 2000[3]. These people were also not those who had acclimatized to or were a part of traditional Western legislative discourse; some of these men lacked what we would consider basic steps to higher education. This included men such as John Lewis, who held office in the Georgia House of Representatives. Lewis, according to the 1870 US census, owned no property and was unable to write, describing his profession as “wagon maker”[4]. In fact, while the majority of officials whose income is known (23% of officials) earned over $1,000 per year, 15.8% of officeholders reported zero income, revealing just how little respect these new voters had for the power of education that ensured the dominance of the white hegemony.

This boom was also not regulated to one particular area of the nation with pockets of politically-active blacks; according to Eric Foner’s studies “blacks held office in every part of the old Confederacy (as well as in Missouri and the nation’s capital)”[5]. Furthermore, those 1500-2000 positions were not all petty positions in some backwoods town. The majority of officials became state legislators in both the House and Senate, along with five mayors, eleven judges, and most notably 16 members of the Federal Congress, two of which served in the US Senate[6]. The era of Reconstruction marks one of, if not the only, time in US politics where people could actually vote for any man of their choice and disregard what has been previously defined as required for good legislation.

Unfortunately, the effects of Reconstruction would instill fear into the white hegemonic power that their position of power is at risk. To this end, two modes of suppression arose: weakened support from previous abolitionist and Republican allies and outright violence from radical Democrats and white supremacists. Regarding the former, one among their number would be the aforementioned Thomas Nast. Not ten years after his approval of black voters does he then ridicule the idea of black men in legislative positions in his piece Colored rule in a reconstructed(?) state[7], portraying black officials in their traditional buffoonish caricatures completely failing at running a country. Nast’s change of heart reveals again the want for black suffrage by Republican whites, but only to vote for the white allies and not the black candidates; the hegemony is willing to bring them up to the point that they maintain and not destroy said hegemony. One can also assume that the man those black men were voting for in Waud’s The First Vote was a white Republican rather than another black man.

Regarding the second form of aggression, the Ku-Klux Klan and other white supremacists main form of suppression came from effects caused by the spectacle, most notably lynchings. Often disguised as righteous vigilante justice against black criminals, lynchings worked as revealing both the power white men held over black bodies by murdering them, but they also revealed where the justice system worked for, as very few ever saw heavy punishment for lynchings. According to statistics Ida B. Wells received from the Chicago Tribune, “not less than one hundred and fifty have been known to have met violent death at the hands of cruel bloodthirsty mobs during the past nine months [of 1892]”[8]. One aspect of the Klan attacks that truly caused terror among the black community reflects aspect that provided so much hope in Reconstruction; just as any black man could reach public office no matter his education level or occupation, so too could any black official be subject to the Klan’s aggression. One of the more powerful men to die at their hands was Benjamin F. Randolph, who served in the South Carolina State Senate and led the Republican state executive committee. As Foner puts it, “from constables and justices of the peace to members of constitutional conventions, no black official was immune from the threat of violence”[9]. Despite the massive number of black officials in the Southern US, without the aid from their old white supporters they lacked the protection required to maintain their establishment in society. The most terrifying aspect of lynchings for the black community was the fact that the government, under pressure from the dominant society, would not seek justice for the victims and instead side with the mobs. One of Wells’ specific examples notes that of Guthrie, Oklahoma, where “a white man…two months ago inflicted such injuries upon another Afro-American child that she dies. He was not punished, but an attempt was made in the same town in the month of June to lynch an Afro-American who visited a white woman”[10]. And even when the government acknowledge the evils of lynchings they did nothing to punish those who commit the act[11]. Not only were black men more likely to be tried and convicted for crimes put against them by the white community, white men who committed similar crimes to those black men were accused of would go unnoticed and unreported.

The first voice for the oppressed black community I will discuss is the previously mentioned Ida B. Wells. Working as an investigative journalist regarding mob violence in the United States, she published her findings in the 1892 pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases, which served both as a journalistic piece that elucidates the terrible nature of the lynchings and as a proposal to rescue the black community from continued oppression through unlawful murder that goes unpunished. After acknowledging all the information she had gathered regarding the unlawful murder of hundreds of black men, she concludes that the correct reaction and opposition to the lynch laws is one that is uniquely Afro-American; it does not require the approval of a sympathetic white Republican. By using the sheer numbers of black people in Southern states Wells urges the community to remove themselves from the white machine of capital: “If labor is withdrawn capital will not remain. The Afro-American is thus the backbone of the South…The appeal to the white man’s pocket has ever been more effectual than all the appeals ever made to his conscience”. Channeling the communal power used before to elect over 1500 public officials, the millions of black people do have the power to fight the institutions of segregation and oppression in a meaningful way. By both seceding from their part of white hegemonic interests and publicizing the oppressive systems and actions against the black community Wells saw a path to large-scale betterment for her people.

Three years after the original publication of Southern Horrors, one of the most notable and inarguably the most universally accepted method of resisting oppression at the time was elaborated upon by Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute and one of the most dominant figures in civil rights. As opposed to Wells’ call for distancing the black community from white society, Washington wishes for a reconciliation between the two in a manner that also soothes the hegemony’s fears of the “uppity blacks” who reached public office. During the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta (which did recognize the contributions of people of African descent to cotton production in the United States) Washington delivered what would be known as the Atlanta Compromise, which urged a less active and more bridge-building method of achieving acceptance. In fact, in pacifying the fears of the hegemony he outright states that the black community “[is not] prepared for the exercise of these privileges [of the law]”[12]. His major metaphor, “cast down your bucket where you are”, serves as a direct attack to the black men who looked to legislation following abolition, as he claims the best way to eliminate the destructive force of slavery was to ingratiate oneself with those around them of other races:

To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbor, I would say: ‘Cast down your bucket where you are’—cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded.[13]

Washington, not much unlike Wells, also seeks to dismantle the suppression of blackness through education, but instead of educating the world on the injustices faced, the black community educates the white community on who these people that are being lynched and beaten without consequence truly are.

While Washington enjoyed a great deal of praise from all races for his proposal and rhetoric, there were obviously other black intellectual leaders who disagreed with his more conservative policy. W.E.B. Dubois, one of the most well-known critics of Washington, elucidates his own form of combatting the suppression in his 1903 essay “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others”. In his essay he recounts the process of late slavery in the US to black enfranchisement, praising the “self-assertion, especially in political lines”[14], which directly attacks Washington’s sentiments regarding those officials. His main critique of Washington lies in the belief that, by ceding the power gained in the political sphere as well as black activism and higher education for the black community, the opposite has occurred[15]. By relying upon the kindness of the white hegemony to offer them a step up, Dubois sees the black community in a vice with the hegemony slowly tightening its grip over them. Dubois’ words also echo those of Wells before him, who also notes how “thoughtful Afro-Americans…urged the race to sacrifice its political rights for the sake of peace…But the sacrifice did not remove the trouble, nor move the South to justice”[16]. Dubois’ conclusion on how to better the standing of the black community comes from both the reestablishment of rights lost in Reconstruction (enfranchisement, civic equality, and the option for higher education[17]) and the continued critique of all guilty parties in the oppression of blacks.

Unlike the previously mentioned thinkers, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg did not grow up in the continental United States, instead immigrating to New York at age 17. When in New York he associated himself with Cuban revolutionary fraternities that claimed to hold nationality as the most important identifier instead of race. However, their rhetoric differed very much from their actions: “As black and mulatto participants in the struggle in Cuba learned, White allies frequently held them to a higher standard on any ostensibly neutral qualities of ‘merit’”[18]. Ingratiating himself more with black Harlem community than the white-passing Latin@ immigrants, Schomburg saw that black suppression is not a uniquely US matter; in fact, it affects all people in any Western society due to the perception of Africa itself. In his essay “The Negro Digs up His Past”, he notes how the African community has experienced a social death due to enslavement throughout the Western world that has irreparably tarnished black and African history, creating the myth of “backwards Africa”: “History must restore what slavery took away, for it is the social damage of slavery that the present generation must repair and offset”[19]. Therefore, in order to both restore the lost culture and technology found in Africa and restore the ability to have pride in one’s African descent, one must remember what Eurocentric history has made society forget. What Schomburg seeks to create is more or less a public scrapbook, as Ellen Garvey views the in Writing with Scissors:

Like the black people who made scrapbooks on African-American topics, women activists understood the press not as a simple record but as a set of voices and conversations to be read critically and culled by the scrapbook maker who ensured that the correct view, as she saw it, survived.[20]

Unlike the scrapbooking that Garvey analyzes, Schomburg does not wish to use white society’s pieces to recreate black history; he looks to rediscover black culture that has been lost because of white society and piece together a history from that. When the Public Library of Harlem mounted an exhibition of literary works by black writers Schomburg notes the reaction of the viewers: “to proud black and astonished white, ‘Here is the evidence’…Such things and many others are more than mere items of curiosity: they educate any receptive mind”[21]. By bringing recognition to black contributions to the contemporary world society would then be more or less indebted to them as well as the recognized European and Asian cultures, bringing people of African descent under the protection of historical relevance.

Schomburg’s method of recognizing black contributions seems to me the best candidate of the four proposed schemas in the fight against white hegemony. Washington’s proposal of ceding ground back to the hegemony seems to only result in a moments respite until the coil is wrapped even tighter around the black person’s neck. I agree with Dubois’ sentiments, but he lacks a clear way to put his goals into practice, and what he does bring up in terms of methodology is what he is echoing from Wells. And while Wells’ theory does have historical backing both at the time of writing and seventy years later, her proposals do not answer the deeper issue of respecting the black community that, if done correctly, would be a requirement for the Schomburg tactic, is not only a plan that will educate people in a white hegemonic society about the achievements of the black community, but it will also demand the respect of people of African descent by the hegemony (as Washington had desired) due to the now known African influence upon their culture.