Abstract
White supremacy during the first quarter of the twentieth century was especially virulent. One of its advocates, Thomas Pearce Bailey, wrote in 1914 that the “more white men recognize sharply their kinship with fellow whites,” the more “the negro is compelled to ‘keep his place’ — a place that is being gradually narrowed in the North as well as in the South.”3 In Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, a book written in 1896 and widely read at the time, Frederick L. Hoffman held that “a low standard of sexual morality is the main and underlying cause of the law and anti-social conditions of the [black] race at the present time.” James Kimble Vardaman was even more pernicious, declaring that the African American is a “lazy, lying, lustful animal,” which “no conceivable amount of training can transform into a tolerable citizen.”5 William Hannibal Thomas was likewise a good example of overt racism, claiming in 1901 that African Americans have “no ethical integrity, no inbred determination for right-doing, and consequently no clearly defined and steadfast aversion to wrong-doing.” Thomas Nelson Page, who alleged in 1904 that black people “appear not only to have no idea of morality, but to lack any instinct upon which such an idea can be founded,” also put the moral argument forward.7 In his history of the United States, Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer wrote in 1917 that the “laziness and immorality” of black people is a belief grounded “in a good deal of truth.”8
America should not be a “melting-pot” for the diverse races gathered on her soil bat that each race should maintain its essential integrity and contribute its own special and particular gift to our composite civilization: not a “melting-pot” but a symphony where each instrument contributes its particular quality of music to an ensemble of harmonious sounds.
— Montgomery Gregory (n.d.)1
Every civilization produces its type.
— (Alain Locke ( 1916)2
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Notes
Alain Locke, Race Contacts and Interracial Relations (1916), ed. Jeffrey C. Stewart (Washington, D. C., Howard University Press, 1992), 88.
Thomas Pearce Bailey, Race Orthodoxy in the South (New York: Neale Pub. Co., 1914), 40.
Frederick L. Hoffman, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (New York: MacMillan Co., 1896), 95.
James Kimble Vardaman, Greenwood [Mississippi] Commonwealth, quoted in Albert D. Kirwan, Revolt of the Rednecks: Mississippi Politics, 1876–1925 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1951), 146.
William Hannibal Thomas, The American Negro: What He Was, What He Is, and What He May Become (New York: MacMillan, 1901), 180.
Thomas Nelson Page, The Negro: The Southerns Problem (New York: Charles Scrib-ner’s Sons, 1904), 78.
Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, The History of the United States Since the Civil War, Vol. 1 (New York: MacMillan Co, 1917), 73.
Lothrop Stoddard, “The Impasse at the Color Line,” The Forum 78.4 (October 1927), 511–12.
Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933; Washington, D. C: African World Press, 1993), 81.
For information on Johnson’s life, see Gloria T. Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 155–211.
Willis Richardson, “Introduction” to his play, The Broken Banjo, Crisis 31.4 (February 1926), 167.
For discussions on race relations and the history of African Americans in Wash-ington, D.C, see, for instance, James Borchert, Alley Life in Washington: Family, Community, Religion, and Folkllfe in the City, 1850–1970 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980)
Constance McLaughlin Green, The Secret Society: A History of Race Relations in the Nations Capital (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967).
Herbert Aptheker, Afro-American History: The Modern Era (New York: Citadel Press, 1971, 1992), 175.
Paul Laurence Dunbar, “Negro Life in Washington,” Harper’s Weekly 6 (January 1900), 32
Mary Church Terrell, “Society Among the Colored People of Washington,” The Voice of the Negro 1.1 (March 1904), 151.
Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920 (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 2000), 348.
Alain Locke, “Values and Imperatives,” in American Philosophy: Today and Tomorrow, ed. Horace M. Kallen and Sidney Hooks (New York: Lee Forman, 1935), 314.
Charles Scruggs, The Sage in Harlem: H L. Mencken and the Black Writers of the 1920s (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1984), 144
Christine R. Gray, “Recovering African American Women Playwrights,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Women Playwrights, ed. Brenda Murphy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 246.
For a discussion on the relation between Locke and Pragmatism, see George Hutchinson, Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995)
Alain Locke, “Critical ‘Race’ Theory, and the Politics of Culture,” in The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture, ed. Morris Dickstein (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 157–175
Locke, “The Ethics of Culture,” Howard University Record 17 (1923), 178.
Locke, “Who and What is ‘Negro?’,” Opportunity 20 (1942), 36–41
Dale E. Peterson, Up From Bondage: The Literature of Russian and African American Soul (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 154.
Locke, “Harlem,” Survey Graphic 6.6 (March 1925), 630.
William B. Harvey, “The Philosophical Anthropology of Alain Locke,” in Alain Locke: Reflects on a Modern Renaissance Man, ed. Russell S. Linnemann (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 20.
Leslie Catherine Sanders, The Development of Black Theater in America: From Shadows, to Selves (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 30
Jurij Striedter, Literary Structure, Evolution, and Value: Russian Formalism and Czech Structuralism Reconsidered (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 170.
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© 2002 David Krasner
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Krasner, D. (2002). The Wages of Culture: Alain Locke and the Folk Dramas of Georgia Douglas Johnson and Willis Richardson. In: A Beautiful Pageant. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06625-1_7
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