The African Americans

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  The following section explores these images in greater depth.

  FROM THE EARLY 19TH CENTURY UNTIL WELL INTO THE 20TH, DEMEANING IMAGES OF AFRICAN AMERICANS PROLIFERATED THROUGHOUT THE ATLANTIC WORLD.

  In newspapers and magazines; on music scores; in advertising, handbills, posters, postcards, and trading cards; on boxed and canned foods; on every conceivable kitchen and household item, a flood of belittling and sneering images of black Americans cascaded over the public.

  Finding no end of inspiration in the untold number of late-19th-century stage versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin—most having almost no connection to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel—printers and lithographers manufactured hundreds of posters and playbills depicting gross distortions of the book’s title character. But no one was treated more unfairly than Topsy. She, more than anyone, in the late 1800s became the archetype for the foolish, impish, ugly, and ignorant black.

  It would be a serious mistake to assume that these depictions were the sole responsibility of white southerners—far from it. Such items were largely created in the North, printed in New York and Chicago and in other northern publishing centers, and could be found throughout the country, advertising everything from stove polish to food to tobacco. The Dixon’s Stove Polish advertisement that follows, for instance, promoted a firm in Lynn, Massachusetts, and was printed in Boston on January 24, 1861.

  Out of insult grew an industry. One man, however, was responsible for more disparaging images of African Americans than anyone else. Born in 1834 in Greenwich Village, New York, and living until 1917—his long life spanning an era of momentous change for blacks—the then-famous illustrator Thomas Worth sketched hundreds, perhaps thousands, of magazine covers and prints, many for the firm of Currier & Ives. Best known for its nostalgic images of 19th-century folk and pastoral scenes for middle-class Americans—images of Americana still available and treasured—Currier & Ives also bears the responsibility for one of the most damaging print series in American history.

  Worth’s “Darktown” series can be difficult viewing today. Meant to entertain middle-class whites with what were thought to be harmless lampoons, the series both exercised decisive influence and reflected popular white views of African Americans. By 1884, at least 84 different prints in the series had been published, 30 produced just in one year, and there may have been as many as 200 different versions in the series. Although the number of such Currier & Ives prints declined by 1890, still nearly one half of the firm’s entire output was taken up by the “Darktown” series. Worth himself estimated that the firm had printed at least 73,000 copies of his work.

  Worth and his many imitators employed humor to segregate people of African descent into a realm of subjugation and buffoonery, and with the advancements in the fields of print technology and photography, distributing such images became easy and ubiquitous. In them, as we can readily see, people of African descent are rendered as half-human caricatures dwelling in a shadow realm intended to prove their inability to live middle-class lives, or indeed any life not characterized by ineptitude and ignorance. The myriad depictions reinforced social and political values designed to economically and politically disfranchise an entire race. They systematically attacked every aspect of African Americans’ lives, from their political rights to family life, to their business enterprises, even their military prowess—an especially grievous act considering the indispensable contribution of black soldiers in the Civil War. Such caricatures effaced an entire people and their place in American culture.

  Dixon’s Stove Polish, by J. H. Bufford, Boston, November 23, 1860. Lithograph. Library of Congress.

  Liberty Frightenin de World, by Currier & Ives, “Darktown” series, New York, 1884. Lithograph. Library of Congress. This disturbing image, actually a mockup of the print that Currier & Ives published, came out two years before the erection of the Statue of Liberty and was entitled Barsqualdi’s Statue, a pun on the sculptor’s name and the corruption in the administration of New York Harbor. In the final version of the lithograph, the large volume held by the caricature of an African American was emblazoned with “New York Port Charges.” Thomas Worth simultaneously satirized black civil rights and the city’s administration.

  Additionally, for more than 100 years, minstrelsy served as the nation’s dominant form of public entertainment. Virtually every town of any significant size hosted a minstrel show, and usually several at the same time. The advertisements for the performances reprinted here are typical—and similar in intent to the “Darktown” series’. They could, however, as in the case of the George Thatcher’s Greatest Minstrels images, take on an extremely disturbing quality, depicting African Americans as gross, misshapen beings and as the aggregation of society’s stereotypes, which they themselves created. Equally important, as the Coon Hollow image—printed in New York—affirms, there was only one small step between the demeaning racial humor of the minstrels and lynching in defense of white womanhood.*

  A Political Debate in the Darktown Club, by Currier & Ives, New York, 1884. Lithograph. Library of Congress.

  Cavalry Tactics, by the Darktown Horse Guards, by Currier & Ives, New York, 1887. Lithograph. Library of Congress.

  A Darktown Wedding—The Parting Salute, by Currier & Ives, New York, 1892. Lithograph. Library of Congress.

  Initiation Ceremonies of the Darktown Lodge—Part First. The Grand Boss Charging the Candidate, by Currier & Ives, New York, 1887. Lithograph. Library of Congress.

  A Darktown Tournament—Close Quarters, by Currier & Ives, New York, 1890. Lithograph. Library of Congress.

  Tonsorial Art in the Darktown Style, by Currier & Ives, New York, 1890. Lithograph. Library of Congress.

  A Fair Start, by Currier & Ives, New York, 1884. Lithograph. Library of Congress.

  The Darktown Bowling Club. Watching for a Strike and The Darktown Bowling Club. Bowled Out, by Currier & Ives, New York, 1888. Lithographs. Library of Congress. These images were also used by the North Carolina Tobacco Company as an advertisement for its loose and plug cut tobacco.

  The Golf Crazy Coons, by Strobridge & Co., Cincinnati and New York, 1899. Lithograph. Library of Congress.

  Coon Hollow, by Strobridge & Co., Cincinnati and New York, 1894. Lithograph. Library of Congress.

  Hello! My Baby, by Strobridge & Co., Cincinnati and New York, 1899. Lithograph. Library of Congress. In one of the many disturbing images to advertise performances of George Thatcher’s Greatest Minstrels, stereotypes are fed into a machine to produce pickaninnies. While the image would appear to blame African Americans for the stereotypes that plagued them, upon closer examination, the master of the mill is actually a man in blackface, thus revealing the true author of the images.

  George Thatcher’s Greatest Minstrels, by Strobridge & Co., Cincinnati and New York, 1899. Lithograph. Library of Congress.

  Palmer’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Courier Co., Buffalo, New York, 1899. Lithograph. Library of Congress.

  AS AFRICAN AMERICANS IN BOTH THE NORTH AND SOUTH ARGUED OVER HOW BEST TO REFUTE DEMEANING STEREOTYPES, end white violence, roll back the rising tide of the passage of laws designed to set in stone Jim Crow segregation, and chart a path to racial progress and ultimate social and political equality, the example and message of one prominent African American largely defined the terms of the debate between 1895 and his death in 1915. Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), educator, author, and orator, exhorted African Americans to improve themselves by relying on the American values of thrift and self-help, as he had improved himself. His story of triumph over adversity, which he famously chronicled in his autobiography, Up from Slavery, had made him one of the most celebrated and influential black leaders in American history.

  Washington, born into slavery, saw himself as a black Horatio Alger—and with good reason: At 16, he walked 500 miles to Virginia’s Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, the South’s first black vocational school, to ask for an education. A brilliant student, he absorbed the educat
ional philosophy of Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the founder of the Hampton Institute, and made it his own, going on to found his own school, the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. (Both are well-respected universities today.) A gifted writer and speaker, Washington became a national figure and spokesman for the generation of African Americans that confronted the birth of Jim Crow segregation.

  He also became the focal point of opposition for all those who thought his strategy of valorizing economic development at the expense of the fight for political rights was deeply flawed and destined to fail. In a way, we can say that Booker T. Washington gave metaphorical birth to the political philosophy of his nemesis, the great scholar W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), a philosophy of engagement and agitation that would manifest itself in the birth of both the Niagara Movement and the NAACP, and in several other forms (including black nationalism, socialism, and communism) over the course of Du Bois’s long life. (Du Bois would die in 1963, in exile in Ghana, on the eve of the great March on Washington.)

  In September 1895, Booker T. Washington was invited to speak to an integrated audience at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. Rejecting an emphasis on politics or achievement in letters as the path to black advancement (as Du Bois and his mentor, Cambridge-educated Alexander Crummell [1819–1898], the founder of the American Negro Academy in 1897, would do), Washington stressed the importance of more prosaic endeavors like agriculture and industrial training. Whereas Du Bois embraced a concept of “race development”—a phrase he used frequently—based on the advancement of his so-called Talented Tenth, you might say that Washington targeted his philosophy to everyone else outside of the educated elite—the undeveloped but no less “talented nine-tenths.” He called on white America to provide black southerners with jobs and vocational education and told his people, “Cast down your buckets where you are,” essentially urging them to accept discrimination and segregation for the time being, eschew the political realm, and concentrate instead on elevating themselves through hard work.14 Washington was convinced that once African Americans established themselves as artisans, servants, and laborers, civil rights and social equality would eventually follow. Southern and northern whites alike lavishly praised his speech, which we know today as the “Atlanta Compromise.”

  Booker T. Washington at his desk in Tuskegee, Alabama, circa 1890–1910. Photograph. Library of Congress.

  While there were many dissenting African American voices, Washington’s accommodationist views found many followers within the black community and especially among the white business and political elites, which made him the dominant voice in black politics for almost two decades—so much so that during Theodore Roosevelt’s administration, Washington rose to become the president’s “race man.” Indeed, the legacy of his message of black economic empowerment and his focus on community development can still be felt today.

  In fact, had Washington been able to convince the leaders of the American business community to foster black economic mobility, especially in the trades and crafts, thus building a strong and broad middle class, he would be remembered, perhaps, as the father of the African American community. But alas, he was not able to do so, and he is not remembered in the way he most probably hoped he would be. (It may come as no surprise to learn that he had his fair share of “Uncle Tom” insults lobbed at him, and there is even a volume edited by Rebecca Carroll called Uncle Tom or New Negro? dedicated to reflections on Washington’s ultimate contribution to the African American struggle for civil rights.)

  His failure was to assume that American society’s economic self-interest—a rising tide to lift all boats—would trump anti-black racism. It did not. Black economic advancement was seen as competition for scarce resources; furthermore, white European immigrants were able to step into the role within the economy that Washington envisioned for the freedman. Anti-black racism—in the form of de jure segregation, racial violence, the proliferation of Sambo images, and disenfranchisement—ran rampant during Washington’s reign as the dominant voice of black political and educational leadership. The historian Rayford W. Logan named this period of African American history not “the Age of Washington” but “the Nadir.” And except for slavery, which is a category of evil and despair all its own, Logan was correct.

  Closely related to Washington’s call for self-improvement and racial uplift was the Negro clubwomen’s movement, which coalesced in Ida B. Wells’s founding of the National Association of Colored Women. The middle-class women who led these clubs were firmly rooted in the African American church, long a sustaining force in the black community, and sought to advance their people by upholding moral standards such as cleanliness, thrift, and education. Women like Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964), Nannie Helen Burroughs (1883–1961), Victoria Earle Matthews (1861–1907), and Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954) pursued a “politics of respectability,” as the historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has called it, one intended to provide a role model for lower-class women, while also demonstrating to whites that blacks were good, God-fearing citizens worthy of decent treatment.15

  While the clubwomen preached middle-class respectability as the road to uplift, an African American woman entrepreneur with a flair for marketing that very respectability followed Washington’s prescription of hard work to phenomenal success. Madam C. J. Walker (1867–1919) started out life as Sarah Breedlove, born in Louisiana to former slaves just two years after the Civil War ended. As Madam C. J. Walker, she became America’s first African American female business tycoon and self-made millionaire (one or two others had inherited this amount of wealth or were married to millionaires) and a prominent philanthropist and supporter of civil rights. Her success showed that there were opportunities to be seized, even in segregated America, and that adherence to the gospel of black self-reliance could bear fruit—at least for a fortunate few.

  Hers may be the ultimate rags-to-riches story. She started out her life in a cabin in the Deep South and lived her last days in an opulent 34-room mansion overlooking the Hudson River. After moving north to Missouri in 1889 at the age of 20, already a widow, she found work as a laundress, one of the few money-making options open to African American women at the time. For the next several years, she would struggle to support herself and her young daughter. But then her career—and wealth and influence—took off in a most amazing way.

  In 1903 as St. Louis prepared for the 1904 World’s Fair, Davis [her second husband’s name] supplemented her income by working as a sales agent for Annie Turnbo Pope Malone, whose newly created Poro Company manufactured hair-care products for black women…. With $1.50 in savings, the thirty-seven-year-old Davis moved in July 1905 to Denver, Colorado, where she … worked briefly as a Poro agent selling Malone’s “Wonderful Hair Grower.” In January 1906 she married Charles Joseph Walker, a St. Louis newspaper agent …. Adopting a custom practiced by many businesswomen of the era, she added the title “Madam” to her name, then began marketing a line of hair-care products as “Madam C. J. Walker.” …

  In September 1906 when Walker and her husband embarked upon an eighteen-month trip to promote her products and train new sales agents, the American hair-care and cosmetics industry was in its infancy. Settling briefly in Pittsburgh from 1908 to 1910, Walker opened her first Lelia College, where she trained “hair culturists” in the Walker System of hair care. In 1910 the Walkers moved to Indianapolis, then the nation’s largest inland manufacturing center, to take advantage of its railways and highway system for their largely mail-order business….

  In the midst of Walker’s growing success, irreconcilable personal and business differences with her husband resulted in divorce in 1912, though she retained his name until her death. The next year her daughter A’Lelia persuaded Walker to purchase a Harlem townhouse on 136th Street near Lenox Avenue as a residence and East Coast business headquarters. In 1916 Walker joined A’Lelia in New York in order to become more directly involved in Harlem’s burgeoning political and cultural acti
vities and entrusted the day-to-day management of her Indianapolis manufacturing operation to her attorney, Freeman B. Ransom, and factory forewoman, Alice Kelly. From 1912 to 1918 Walker crisscrossed the United States, giving stereopticon slide lectures at black religious, business, fraternal, and civic gatherings. In 1913 she traveled to Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, Costa Rica, and the Panama Canal Zone to cultivate the lucrative, untapped international market….

  By 1916 the Walker Company claimed 20,000 agents in the United States, Central America, and the Caribbean. “Walker,” according to historian Davarian Baldwin, “marketed beauty culture as a way out of servitude for black women.”…

  During the spring of 1919 Walker’s long battle with hypertension began to exact its final toll. On Easter Sunday while in St. Louis to introduce a new line of products, she became so ill in the home of her friend, Jessie Robinson, that she was rushed back to Villa Lewaro in a private train car. Upon arrival she directed her attorney to donate $5,000 to the NAACP’s antilynching campaign. During the last month of her life, Walker revamped her will, bequeathing thousands of dollars to black schools, organizations, individuals, and institutions, including Mary McLeod Bethune’s Daytona Normal and Industrial School for Girls, Lucy Laney’s Haines Institute, Charlotte Hawkins Brown’s Palmer Memorial Institute, Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, and numerous orphanages, retirement homes, YWCAs, and YMCAs in cities where she had lived. When Walker died at Villa Lewaro, she was widely considered as the wealthiest black woman in America…. At the time of her death, Walker’s estate was valued at $600,000 to $700,000, the equivalent of $6 million to $7 million in 2007 dollars. The estimated value of her company, based on annual gross receipts in 1919, easily could have been set at $1.5 million.16