The idea that Walker’s hair-care and cosmetic products were designed to allow black women to model themselves after whites by straightening their natural hair dogged her throughout her career, but she balked at the notion. Her own hair loss early in life, she said, came from the substandard living conditions of black homes, which led to substandard hygiene, caused especially by a lack of nourishing shampoos and hair conditioners and ointments. The result was severely dry scalp, which led to hair loss. “Let me correct the erroneous impression that I claim to straighten hair,” Walker said. “I deplore such impressions because I have always held myself out as a hair culturist. I grow hair. I have absolute faith in my mission. I want the great masses of my people to take a greater pride in their appearance and to give their hair proper attention.”17
Booker T. Washington openly criticized Walker’s operation, claiming that her products promoted white standards of beauty over black. In fact, although he would ultimately have a change of heart, according to Washington’s biographer Louis Harlan, he “first opposed membership in the National Negro Business League for … cosmetics manufacturers on the ground that they fostered imitation of white beauty standards.”18 Ironically, though, the words Walker used to describe her larger goals and aspirations for the social condition of black women were firmly rooted in the beliefs and teachings of Washington himself and of the clubwomen. Walker believed that to gain traction in white society and ultimately achieve economic success and independence, blacks needed to make themselves appealing to white society, and attention to appearance was one means of doing this.19
Walker’s business acumen enabled other black women to improve their own station in life as well. She herself had been helped and inspired by the National Association of Colored Women, members of which had supported her in her early efforts to sell her hair-care products. Walker in turn lifted up thousands of other African American women—erstwhile farmworkers and domestic help—by hiring them as saleswomen, whom she would eventually call “hair culturists.” With what began as peddling scalp treatments and cosmetics such as cold cream and face powder door-to-door across the Midwest, Madam C. J. Walker amassed a fortune and achieved a prominence that defied all expectations of what it was possible for an African American woman to achieve—or, for that matter, what it was possible for African Americans and women in general to achieve—at the turn of the century.
Walker’s wealth gave her access to the halls of power denied to the majority of African Americans. She was outspoken against the practice of lynching that had been rampant in the years since Reconstruction, and she was an advocate for the rights of black soldiers; that cause took on new meaning for her when the architect of her mansion Villa Lewaro, Vertner Tandy (1885–1949), one of New York’s first black architects, became a major in the 15th Regiment, widely known as the Harlem Hellfighters.20 Her political activism brought her and a handful of other Harlem community leaders all the way to the White House for a meeting with President Woodrow Wilson, in which the group planned to discuss the incongruity of black soldiers’ fighting for rights abroad while being denied civil rights at home. The president, who became notorious for the segregation of his White House after promises in 1912 to the African American community of “absolute fair dealing” with them, canceled the meeting.21
Advertisements for Madam C. J. Walker and her hair-care products printed by Alco-Gravure, Inc.; Chicago, New York, Baltimore, Kansas City, Atlanta; undated. Collection of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Interpreted one way, the aphorism “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” underscored Madam C. J. Walker’s notion that attention to one’s appearance could help to elevate one’s stature. In 1900 at the Paris Exposition Universelle—the World’s Fair—a remarkable exhibit of photographs curated by W. E. B. Du Bois opened at the Exposition des Negrès d’Amerique, allowing white audiences to see images of beauty that they would likely never have expected: 363 images of “dignified, well-dressed men and women, living in comfortable and even lavish homes, whose furnishings reflected the occupants’ sophisticated tastes and refinement.” These were among the earlier images of a “New Negro,” a concept or a metaphor—in the words of the time, an ideal “race type”—intentionally created and chosen by black leaders at the turn of the century to counterbalance and implicitly “refute the extremely popular images of blacks as deracinated Sambos, lascivious thieves, and oversexed ‘coons.’”22 It was one of the first, if not the first, of a series of definitions—visual and textual—of this so-called New Negro; the first installment, as it were, of a series of redefinitions that would appear next in the pages of the literary journal The Voice of the Negro in two articles in 1904 (one on “The New Negro” man, the other on “The New Negro Woman”), and culminate in Alain Locke’s complete redefinition of a New Negro as an elite artist, the man or woman of letters as the heart of a racial upper-middle-class vanguard, an implicit leader of the race.
Du Bois’s Paris exhibition presented photos of the middle-class, college-bred African Americans who embodied the social and intellectual equality of the race—the revered Talented Tenth, mentioned earlier in this chapter. This was the term that he popularized in a seminal essay published in a September 1903 volume entitled The Negro Problem and edited by, of all people, his rival Booker T. Washington.
Although often attributed to Du Bois, the term Talented Tenth was first coined by Henry Lyman Morehouse (the man, who happened to be white, for whom Morehouse College was named). He used it in an essay published in 1896, first in The Independent magazine and reprinted under the same title only two months later in The American Missionary. Morehouse’s definition shaped Du Bois’s use of the term; according to Morehouse, “An ordinary education may answer for the nine men of mediocrity; but if this is all we offer the talented tenth man, we make a prodigious mistake. The tenth man, with superior natural endowments, symmetrically trained and highly developed, may become a mightier influence, a greater inspiration to others than all the other nine, or nine times nine like them.”23
Morehouse’s unapologetic elitism was mediated somewhat in Du Bois’s famous redefinition of the concept as applying to the “college-bred” African Americans, but it could never escape its elitist origins, no matter how much Du Bois would later try, including in a masterful reconsideration of his own essay nearly 50 years later, “Talented Tenth Memorial Address,” delivered at the Nineteenth Grand Boulé Conclave of the Sigma Pi Phi fraternity, and reprinted in The Boulé Journal in October 1948.
Du Bois’s own family was not wealthy or distinguished, but they had been free from the shackles of slavery for more than 100 years. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He ventured south for school, studying at Fisk University in Tennessee, then matriculating at Harvard, where he earned an A.B. degree and an A.M. degree in history in 1890 and 1891, respectively. In 1895, he became the first African American to earn a Ph.D., also in history, from the university. Initially a supporter of Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Exposition speech (Du Bois even sought employment at Tuskegee), he would soon decide that Washington’s philosophy was accommodationist, and that political and economic rights were not only inextricably linked, but that, in fact, political rights might even precede the promise of economic mobility for African Americans. Du Bois’s critique, titled “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” and published in The Souls of Black Folk, was devastatingly searching, and it set in motion a war of words and actions that pitted the two as leaders of rival factions within the race.
Du Bois charged that Washington’s emphasis on vocational education and his call to tolerate racism in the short term would consign black people to menial labor forever. In its place, Du Bois argued for a radical agenda of political action that would be achieved by mobilizing an elite vanguard of race leaders. In 1905, he convened a seminal gathering of black intellectuals, predominantly northern, urban, college-educated black men—representatives of Du Bois’s Talented Tenth of African Am
erican society and the leaders of what became known as the Niagara Movement. This group believed that political agitation, not accommodation, offered African Americans the key to achieving true rights of citizenship. The Niagara Movement defined what would become the modern civil rights agenda: unrestricted suffrage, freedom of speech, and equality before the law.
W. E. B. Du Bois, by Carl Van Vechten, July 18, 1946. Photograph. Library of Congress.
As the champion of the Talented Tenth, Du Bois’s philosophy was proudly elitist—though again, not in the naked and unapologetic form that Morehouse’s definition took. The Harvard-educated scholar saw himself and his peers not so much as distinct from the mass of African Americans—especially the seven million black people who lived in the rural South, often working the same land as their slave ancestors, who made up 90 percent of the nation’s turn-of-the-century African American population—but as the natural leaders of the race, the “vanguard,” as Alain Locke called it. But after the 1906 Atlanta race riot, when Du Bois and his family lived through four days of terrifying racial violence, Du Bois changed course, convinced now that the fates of all black people, educated and uneducated, were inextricably linked.
In 1909, the year after another bloody race riot in Springfield, Illinois—the hometown of Abraham Lincoln—Du Bois and Ida B. Wells joined a group of white activists and philanthropists to create a new biracial association dedicated to the fighting for the rights of black Americans, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAACP’s emphasis on political action drew heavily on the goals of the Niagara Movement and represented another public and defiant rejection of Booker T. Washington’s policy of accommodation and political quietism.
WHILE DU BOIS AND WASHINGTON AND THEIR SUPPORTERS ARGUED ABOUT THE RIGHT PATH TO RACIAL UPLIFT, the most famous African American of the era paid little heed to either side. Battering white men in the ring and bedding white women out of it, Jack Johnson made it clear that he cared little about elite opinion, black or white.
The son of former slaves, Jack Johnson (1878–1946) became the world heavyweight boxing champion in 1908, at the height of the Jim Crow era. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that just about everything about Johnson drove most white Americans to distraction: He was strong, athletic, virile, independent, audacious, exhibitionist, and a gadfly. And he was black. Johnson’s flamboyant persona aggravated white anxieties about black male sexuality and economic competition—the twin roots of anti-black racism, oppression, and discrimination, from slavery to the present. His victories triggered race riots and brought widespread calls for a “Great White Hope” to strip him of his title. His interracial marriages and affairs produced a national outcry from whites that ultimately resulted in a stunning 21 bills banning interracial marriage being introduced in Congress. Johnson was arrested twice and convicted once for “transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes,” in alleged violation of the Mann Act, the commonly used name for the White-Slave Traffic Act.
Jack Johnson, Bain News Service, undated. Glass plate photograph. Library of Congress.
Black officers of the 367th Infantry Regiment, 92nd Buffalo Division, circa 1917–1918. Photograph. W. E. B. Du Bois Collection, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The unit arrived in France on July 18, 1918, and went into battle in the Meuse-Argonne.
It wasn’t only whites who feared Jack Johnson. “With his unfettered hedonism, contempt for race taboos, and lack of patriotism,” the Oxford University American history lecturer Stephen Tuck observed, “Jack Johnson was Booker T. Washington’s worst nightmare come to life—in pink pajama shorts.”24 He confounded the clubwomen, who saw his dalliances with white women instead of black women as an affront against them. Yet he hardly lacked for black admirers. His victories had thrilled both the people in growing black urban neighborhoods, far outside the parlors and studies of the Talented Tenth, and the noble, hardworking souls who figured so prominently in the speeches of Washington, in areas Tuck described as “places … that reformers couldn’t reach, and where [the NAACP journal] The Crisis wasn’t read.”25
Even Du Bois, no fan of Johnson, would be moved to write editorials defending him, first in a Crisis editorial called “Intermarriage,” in which he argued in favor of the practice (which was distasteful to the majority of both blacks and whites) on “physical, social, and moral” grounds, most notably that “to prohibit such intermarriage would be publicly to acknowledge that black blood is a physical taint….”26 Du Bois wrote about Johnson again 18 months later, this time lashing out at the white press for suddenly smearing the sport of boxing as immoral and brutish. Why now, when boxing had been wildly popular for more than a century? The supposed disdain for the sport, Du Bois stated plainly, was thinly veiled disgust for its preeminent athlete:
The cause is clear: Jack Johnson … has out-sparred an Irishman. He did it with little brutality, the utmost fairness and great good nature. He did not “knock” his opponent senseless. Apparently he did not even try…. Why then this thrill of national disgust? Because Johnson is black. Of course, some pretend to object to Mr. Johnson’s character. But we have yet to hear, in the case of white America, that marital troubles have disqualified prize fighters or ball players or even statesmen. It comes down, then, after all to this unforgivable blackness.27
No amount of black support or boxing prowess could prevent Johnson’s fall. After his conviction, he jumped bail and fled the country by way of Canada, making his way first to Europe, then to South America, and ultimately to Mexico, where his seven-year exile finally came to an end. He publicly promoted the idea of an exile community for African Americans. Advertisements for Johnson’s Land Company appeared in black newspapers: “COLORED PEOPLE: You who are lynched, tortured, mobbed, persecuted and discriminated against in the boasted ‘Land of Liberty,’ the United States … BUY A HOME IN MEXICO where one man is good as another and it is not your nationality that counts, but simply you.”28
THIS WAS A TUMULTUOUS TIME FOR ALL OF AMERICA. With the outbreak of World War I, black Americans wrestled with the question of whether to join the military and fight overseas in the name of freedom when the United States had done so little to protect their freedom at home.
For some African American leaders, including the socialist and labor activist A. Philip Randolph (1889–1979), the answer was a definitive “No!” A promising actor who was brilliant, handsome, commanding, entrepreneurial, and something of an organizational genius, and whose interest in social equality was ignited by reading Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Randolph had abandoned what he saw as the too-moderate reform agenda of the growing civil rights movement, electing instead the more radical path of craft unionism and socialism. By near the end of the Great War, Randolph had split completely and publicly from the man who had once inspired him, editorializing in his journal The Messenger that African Americans were better off fighting on the battlefield at home instead of on the European one, to “make Georgia safe for the Negro.”29
Marcus Garvey, August 5, 1924. Photograph. Library of Congress.
In a controversial editorial in The Crisis, which he would regret ever publishing, printed four months before the war ended, Du Bois had reached the opposite conclusion. He urged African Americans to fight for their country for reasons not grounded in patriotism, but in Du Bois’s analysis of what he saw as a global struggle against colonialism and racial oppression. Convinced that the war would shatter the European colonial system and thereby liberate the oppressed people of color of the world, Du Bois called on African Americans to “forget our special grievances and close our ranks … with our own white fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy.”30 In the end, 375,000 African American men served in the United States Army during World War I.
When the African American soldiers came home from Europe, any hopes that their patriotic service would earn them better treatment were quickly dashed. There was a fier
ce and violent backlash to put black World War I veterans “back in their place.” The so-called Red Summer of 1919 brought some of the worst racial violence the country had seen since slavery, with 25 race riots and 70 reported lynchings. One horrifying statistic makes the point: In Europe, during wartime, 773 black American soldiers had been killed by German troops; back home, during the war and in the five years that followed, more than 1,000 black Americans were killed by white mobs.
Into this furious whirlwind came the charismatic Jamaican publisher and orator Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), with a bracing but divisive message of separatism, hope, and Pan-African racial pride. Garvey arrived in Harlem during the war. He was an ardent admirer of Booker T. Washington, although Washington died before they had a chance to meet. Following Washington’s death in 1915, Garvey anointed himself to fill the gap that the controversial leader’s death left. Appealing to the increasingly militant feelings of African Americans in the wake of the war, Garvey called on black soldiers who had fought for democracy in Europe to join his fight for equal rights at home.
Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) campaigned against Jim Crow laws, lynching, the denial of black voting rights, and racial discrimination. Unlike mainline civil rights organizations such as the NAACP, however, Garvey argued for segregation rather than integration, because he doubted that white America would ever treat African Americans as equals. The UNIA grew quickly after the war and boasted large chapters in southern states and Cuba; at its height, it claimed six million members around the globe, a figure no doubt heavily inflated. Nevertheless, the UNIA was the largest mass movement of African Americans up to that time and for years to come. In speeches and publications, including his popular newspaper?Negro World, Garvey preached a gospel of black pride and self-sufficiency and called on African Americans to return to Africa.
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