The story goes that a fight broke out between three of the owners of the People’s Grocery—Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart—and rival white grocers. In the gun battle, the white men were shot. Moss was said to be in the store at the time of the shooting, and rumor had it that he fled when he heard gunshots. True or not, the three black men were locked up in the county jail, where for the next few days they would await trial, guarded by the black militia the Tennessee Rifles. The men inside would never make it to the courthouse.
By the night of March 8, it was clear that there would be no murder charges; all the white men had lived, and the Rifles left their post. Within hours, on March 9, a white lynch mob stormed the unguarded jail and dragged Moss, McDowell, and Stewart from their cells. The white vigilantes transported the three men north of the city limits, where they killed them in cold blood. In life, Thomas Moss had been a believer in hard work and business as the right route for African Americans to follow; when faced with death, he left a message to his fellow black neighbors, embracing the political stance he had previously eschewed. Eyewitnesses reported that Thomas Moss begged for his life for the sake of his wife, their child, and their unborn baby, but it was in vain. When asked by his murderers if he had anything more to say, Moss said, “Tell my people to go west. There is no justice for them here.”2
The grisly lynching could have become just another statistic—or not even been recorded. Records of lynching were notoriously inconsistent, fragmentary, and underreported, for obvious reasons. But Moss and the others had a close friend who would not allow their tragic deaths, or Moss’s last words, to be forgotten. While their names have been lost to history—at least to the history that is widely taught in classrooms—that friend’s has not. Her name was Ida B. Wells, the outspoken anti-lynching activist who was introduced in the previous chapter.
BORN INTO SLAVERY IN MISSISSIPPI IN 1862, IDA B. WELLS WAS THE CO-OWNER OF THE NEWSPAPER THE MEMPHIS FREE SPEECH AT THE TIME OF HER FRIENDS’ LYNCHING. Galvanized by that atrocity, the teacher turned journalist used her paper as a platform to crusade against lynching, gathering statistics and collecting testimony. She published impassioned editorials, urging people to leave the city that had so gravely disappointed them: “There is … only one thing left that we can do; save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.”3
So many African Americans took her blunt words to heart and fled Memphis, largely for Oklahoma, that their absence deprived whites of household help and brought some of the city’s businesses to a standstill. When white representatives of the City Railway Company came to Wells’s office to ask her to use her newspaper’s influence to sway black readers positively, she replied, “The colored people feel that every white man in Memphis who consented to [Moss’s] death is as guilty as those who fired the guns which took his life, and they want to get away from this town.”4 Shortly thereafter, her business manager was run out of town by a committee of “leading citizens,” who left Wells a note saying that anyone trying to publish the paper again would be killed.
After three months of constant agitation following the grocers’ lynching, the office of the Memphis Free Speech was burned to the ground. Wells bought a pistol to protect herself in the South, then, out of desperation, took her anti-lynching crusade to the North. She settled in Chicago, and it was here where she wrote the pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. She later wrote in her autobiography, Crusade for Justice, “They had made me an exile and threatened my life for hinting at the truth.”5 An uncompromising advocate for civil rights and a gifted speaker, Wells traveled across the country and Europe to draw attention to the issue of white violence against black people in America.
Ida B. Wells, from Irvine Garland Penn, The Afro-American Press and Its Editors (Springfield, MA: Willey & Co., 1891). Engraving. Library of Congress.
Once in Chicago, Wells’s scope widened to include the tensions confronting African Americans in their new urban world, one that included competition for housing and jobs, often with poor white immigrants, in a way they had not experienced before. Her interest was also focused on issues confronting women particularly, and in 1896, she founded the National Association of Colored Women. Wells believed the struggle of black women was part of the greater struggle of American women, and in 1914, she formed the Alpha Suffrage Club. Her goal was to show African American women “that we could use our vote for the advantage of ourselves and our race.”6
Lynching of Jesse Washington, May 15, 1916, by Fred A. Gildersleeve. Photograph. Library of Congress. Known as the “Waco Horror,” the 17-year-old farmhand was convicted of raping and murdering a Waco, Texas, white woman named Lucy Fryer. Whites seized him from the courtroom, threw a chain around his neck, and dragged him to City Hall. He was hoisted by the chain over a tree limb, doused with coal oil, set over a fire, and roasted. From 1882 to 1930, 492 such lynchings took place in Texas.
Ida B. Wells’s influence on turn-of-the-century African American society was powerful. She had forsaken the South for a major northern city and called on others to join her. She was not alone. Beginning in the 1890s, African Americans began to leave the South in large numbers, headed north and west—the start of what we now call the Great Migration.
Economic opportunities beckoned in the northern cities certainly; but for many African Americans, the decision to flee was made in response to the concerted white-supremacist effort to roll back the gains of Reconstruction, an effort that combined the constant threat of violence with economic exploitation to put an end to black political participation in the South.
The flow of African Americans northward that began in the 1890s became a torrent in the first decades of the 20th century. Between 1910 and 1920, northern cities saw an unprecedented explosion of growth in their black populations. In New York, the black population grew by 66 percent; in Chicago, 148 percent. In Philadelphia and Detroit, the number of blacks making new homes for themselves was off the charts, with 500 and 611 percent growth respectively.7 The Great Migration was one of the largest mass movements of citizens in American history, one that permanently changed not only African American society, but the larger American society as well.
As black people from the South arrived in the North in ever-greater numbers, class and regional tensions flared up within the African American community itself. Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the descendants of the free Negroes in the North were horrified by the arrival of such a large number of their uneducated southern brothers and sisters, whom they saw as English-torturing country Negroes crowding into their black Mecca and embarrassing them in front of the white elite. The sociologist Charles S. Johnson, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance in 1925 (which we will visit again later in this chapter), described them in Alain Locke’s anthology, The New Negro, as “the slow moving black masses.” In the essay, which is included in Locke’s section aptly called “The New Negro in a New World,” Johnson expressed sympathy for these newcomers leaving the “old strongholds,” who, “with their assorted heritages and old loyalties, face[d] the same stern barriers in the new environment.”8 These barriers were erected not only by northern whites, but by the northern blacks long settled there as well.
This class split between the descendants of slaves not freed until the end of the Civil War and the descendants of free northern Negroes had been expressed in print as early as 1865, when a black journalist writing in The Christian Recorder said that “the colored people down South are not so dumb as many suppose them to be.”9 And these class tensions only became exacerbated as Jim Crow practices deprived the former slaves of education and economic opportunities for advancement. By the time the Great Migration began in 1890, there were dramatic differences between the social and economic status of the northern black middle class and the southern working classes, and these differences would come to the surface in var
ious ways as more and more southerners moved north.
One of the most interesting manifestations of this unfortunate phenomenon, as we shall see later in this chapter, was cultural: Ragtime and the classic blues and jazz were art forms sustained in the main by the popular support of “the masses,” regular, working-class black people, many of them the recent migrants, while the “higher arts” of literature, painting, sculpture, and so forth were art forms aimed at the black middle class, the group that W. E. B. Du Bois had defined in 1903 as the “Talented Tenth,” by which he meant the “college-bred Negro.” The Harlem Renaissance artists advocated the creation of these “higher arts” as a way to fight anti-black racism. Popular vernacular forms were often felt to be vulgar and somewhat embarrassing, thereby hampering the goal of using the arts to transform the image of the race among middle-class white Americans.
Some northerners blamed the new migrants for increased racial hostility from whites, while some of the newcomers accused the light-skinned northern elite of being “would-be whites” and “sellouts,” harsh opinions that Marcus Garvey—the leader of a massive movement of black working-class people in African American history, including many of the recent migrants—would voice in his speeches over and over, especially in his denunciations of his archrival and nemesis Du Bois, whom he characterized both as an elitist (which he was) and as a mulatto who both wanted to be white and who despised darker-complexioned black people (neither of which were true). The arrival of southern blacks in such large numbers in the North exposed class, cultural, and political differences within the African American community and revealed competing views about how black people could best navigate the era’s obstacles.
It was in this agitated environment that the term Uncle Tom gained popularity as a damning one. When Harriet Beecher Stowe first published her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, it was met with near-universal praise, including from black critics. Uncle Tom himself was viewed as noble and brave, certainly not an object of contempt and derision; after all, he died protecting two black female slaves. Frederick Douglass took issue with Stowe’s advocacy of returning black people to Africa, and the writer William “Ethiop” Wilson criticized the novel’s celebration of “nonresistance” in his book review in the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. But these criticisms were leveled more at Stowe and her novel than at Uncle Tom himself. That would all change, though, around the turn of the 20th century. As early as 1893, the Indianapolis Freeman editorialized that “the trouble with the Negro has been, and is to-day, he’s got too much ‘Uncle Tom,’ good ‘humble darkey’ stock in his rank; and not enough of the Nat Turner blood, without which he need not look to be respected or go forward.”10
Marcus Garvey brought the term to the fore in 1919, frequently brandishing it at Du Bois in their ever-escalating war of words. (The term retained its power over time, and Malcolm X famously branded Martin Luther King, Jr., an Uncle Tom in 1963.) The Reverend George Alexander McGuire, a follower of Garvey, drew a line sharply in the sand between the “old Negro” and the “new Negro,” as Locke would do in The New Negro a few years later. And guess which side of the line poor Tom stood on? “The Uncle Tom nigger has got to go,” spewed McGuire, “and his place must be taken by the new leader of the Negro race … not a black man with a white heart, but a black man with a black heart.”11
Distinctions were drawn not only between northern and southern, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, but also on perceived personal traits that apparently had everything to do with the aforementioned. And just as the arrival of southern blacks in the North was met with mixed feelings at best by their northern counterparts, their arrival was not cause for celebration among northern whites either. Those northerners who may have once looked upon southern racists with contempt did not exactly welcome the black southerners pouring into their cities. One manifestation of this was the transformation of Harlem from white to black between 1920 and 1930, as its traditional white and often Jewish residents fled to other all-white neighborhoods to escape the onslaught of the African American migrants and West Indian immigrants who were moving to this country willingly. The migrants soon discovered that the racism they were fleeing in the South was present in the North and West as well. It just took different forms.
OVER THE COURSE OF THIS BOOK, WE’VE SEEN HOW AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY WAS PROFOUNDLY INFLUENCED BY KEY INVENTIONS AND TRANSFORMATIVE TECHNOLOGIES. The sextant, the slave ship, the cotton gin—each shaped history by helping to make slavery possible and profitable. In the Jim Crow era, another influential, albeit overlooked, technology was at work: chromolithography, the new color-printing process that made it possible and inexpensive to create the racist Sambo-style depictions of African Americans that appeared in a wide array of American communications media, from advertising and popular novels to sheet music and postcards. Degrading racist images of blacks could now be distributed to every corner of American society, cheaply and to a degree unimaginable before 1890. They were disseminated to an astonishing degree as the visual, popular-cultural wing of the war to limit black rights in the South, and indeed throughout the North. The onset of Jim Crow laws and cultural practices was a complex effort to erase completely the gains and promise of equality that Reconstruction held out for the black community. And it was devastatingly effective, in part because of the efficacy of the huge proliferation of millions of these Sambo images. Virtually everywhere a white person saw an image of a black person, it was a Sambo figure. The powerful—and lasting—subliminal effects of this veritable campaign of anti-black racist propaganda cannot be underestimated.
In the harsh era defined by Plessy v. Ferguson’s doctrine of “separate but equal,” these images of deracinated, stupid, lazy, and clownish Negroes played a critical role. The ubiquitous racist caricatures justified Jim Crow by graphically illustrating why the separation of the races was necessary and turned the idea of racial equality into a joke. These images shaped whites’ perceptions of black people and sometimes distorted blacks’ perceptions of themselves.
“Jim Crow was more than a series of ‘Whites Only’ signs. It was a way of life that approximated a racial caste system,” wrote David Pilgrim, the curator of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia in Big Rapids, Michigan. “The Coon character, for example, depicted black men as lazy, easily frightened, chronically idle, inarticulate, physically ugly idiots…. The Coon and other stereotypical images buttressed the view that blacks were unfit to attend racially integrated schools, live in safe neighborhoods, work in responsible jobs, vote, and hold public office.” Pilgrim, who refers to himself as a “garbage collector,” said these and other similar images were a source of shame to the African Americans who had nothing to do with their production. “With little effort I can hear the voices of my black elders—parents, neighbors, teachers—demanding, almost pleading, ‘Don’t be Coon, be a man.’ Living under Jim Crow meant battling shame.”12
In segregated turn-of-the-century America, demeaning racial stereotypes were not confined to print media. They had long been an integral part of American popular entertainment, evident in the tradition of blackface performance, which began well before the Civil War. In the Jim Crow era, black entertainers had little choice but to bring the popular racial stereotypes onstage, and many made a living by what white performers had done for decades: performing “coon” songs and minstrel acts. Still, some African American performers found ways to subvert the stereotype, turning blackface into a subtle vehicle of social and political commentary, even an expression of shared humanity that the Sambo image was meant to deny.
Bert Williams was one such performer, among the most popular comedians of the vaudeville era, black or white. His star shone, it seemed, in spite of his skin color, at a time when the color line in entertainment was still extremely bold. The historian Fitzhugh Brundage said of the great performer: “Williams humanized blackface by transforming his blackface characters into surrogates for anyone who was down on his luck, who never caught a bre
ak, or who shuffled from one mishap to the next. That Williams performed in blackface and turned his character into a forlorn everyman that audiences, white and black, empathized with was a feat of remarkable and subversive artistry.”13
In the aftermath of Emancipation and Reconstruction, whites intent on restoring the status quo used Sambo as a part of a broad attempt to undermine any legal, cultural, and psychological steps taken toward racial equality and black self-assertion. The production and dissemination of demeaning caricatures of black people, many of which appeared in advertisements, were part of a broad and unprecedented campaign to harness the power of mass communications and mass consumption to stigmatize and marginalize an entire race. Looking back, the concerted effort to dehumanize black people amounted to an American rehearsal for many of the propaganda techniques that the Nazis would use a few decades later as part of their extermination campaign against the Jews.
The assault on blacks in the Jim Crow era was not merely psychological, nor was it merely the province of an extremist fringe, as many today might like to believe. Many leaders of the nation’s educational and political establishment accepted the deeply racist assumptions of the day. We need look no further than at the man who occupied the highest office in the nation for proof. President Woodrow Wilson, a respected intellectual and former Princeton professor, segregated his administration and admired the virulently racist D. W. Griffith film The Birth of a Nation, which he proudly screened at the White House.
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