The Unseen Truth, page 27
The very presence of a handful of women whose bodies could not be assessed and read tied the color line in a knot. One woman being racially unregulated in the sea of humanity had been enough to send Florida Congressman Frank Clark, who sponsored a streetcar-segregation bill in Congress, “straight to the White House.” A “fair-haired, blue-eyed octoroon” had taunted him by saying: “I can go into any gathering in churches, theaters, or anywhere else you go,” and then did exactly that.129 In February 1915, this one woman tangling racial lines had “terrorized” him.
Figures who refused racial categories in this system of racial mapping disturbed federal segregation’s racial plot in bureaucratic management. The unclear boundaries of segregated space were a physical reminder of the fabricated fact of racial lines. That could be one woman in Washington’s public space, three women out of 3,800 workers in the Treasury Department, or an imagined woman from the Caucasus whose image was not yet mapped, determined, or fully known.
Interpretation as Countermeasure
During his time in the Wilson administration, Kendrick saw that two forces were required for racial contestation at the turn of the twentieth century—mass organizing and detailed interpretation. At first, Kendrick focused on large, bold gestures to make change; “mass meetings,” for example. He attended several. As he told Moyse, in “Washington people can’t vote, you know, and the mass meeting is the only means we have of letting public men, congressmen, etc. know what we think about things.”130 These more overt protests of racial domination are well known. They created part of the foundations of the political strategy of the NAACP, an organization that proved an effective eminent public mediator for cases of racial discrimination, alongside, for a time, Trotter’s National Independent Political League.
Yet winning the battles against racial oppression often required a more painstaking approach. Instead of attacking a central policy, one was forced to marshal every single example of a demotion without explanation—a job being “abolished” despite the clerk’s excellent service and lack of redundancy, for example—all in an attempt to make the discrimination plain. Archibald Grimké, the Boston attorney and president of the NAACP’s Washington, DC Bureau who protested the federal policy of discrimination, realized that effectively combating it meant attending to its pointillist structure, one infraction at a time.
Since the map that controlled the policy of federal segregation was hidden, visual reports were key. Eyewitness accounts by government workers poured into the office corroborating what was known but denied. The NAACP initiated physical tours of government offices. Assessing political changes from close range became invaluable data to combat unannounced, yet pervasive federal segregation. Those who offered information to counter White House denials of segregation as a federal policy took on a great risk. Kendrick was one of them. Grimké would frequently contact government officials, such as Hamlin, with “what amounted to laundry lists of complaints and grievances.”131 It is just one example of the oblique angle leaders were forced to run in order to make any direct progress.
The mechanistic nature of the procedure—the need to provide a racial mapping of injustices—was grating. Grimké’s diplomatic experience had prepared him for this cloaked work, but the administration’s tactic of assembling a mountain of barriers and practices, with no public policy of segregation on the books, was unnerving. “What I want is a human feeling toward these people,” he finally let out at the House Select Committee on Reform in the Civil Service, the only black employee to testify.132 The language of racial detailing had done its dehumanizing work.
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Kendrick spent his final years, the last years of Wilson’s presidency, anticipating the pointillist labor that would be required to combat this dehumanizing violence, to resee the unseen. When not at the War Department or the NAACP office, he analyzed articles and writing as part of The Correspondents’ Club, which organized to combat “all efforts in public or private, by speech or writings, to misrepresent, defame, or discredit our race” as well as “to note with equal promptness every favorable comment upon the achievements or character of our race, every generous defense of our rights, and every helpful suggestion for our guidance.”133 The members wrote carefully crafted letters to authors, organizations, and editorial boards. They hoped others would join their efforts.
Kendrick’s aim was to magnify the public’s conditioned, unexamined fatal acceptance of racial inequity. He began extensive letter-writing campaigns in well-known, mainstream publications of all kinds, tackling instances of representational injustice with missives sent to countless editors, authors, publishers, and stores. For example, on January 22, 1919, he wrote to the Red Cross Magazine to call attention to an article about the US Army that had used a picture of a man of African descent to represent “colored people as a species of clown.” He continued, “It seems to me that a magazine whose sole purpose and reason for existence is the development of humanitarian ideas should realize that we do not promote humanitarianism by fostering contempt or ridicule of our fellowmen, though they be black.”134
Soon thereafter, on February 23, 1919, he wrote to Samuel G. Blythe of the Saturday Evening Post about the racial epithets in the “otherwise excellent collection of war anecdotes.” At the time, it was not only “the nation’s most popular periodical,” but one that was a mouthpiece for nativism and anti-immigrant racism for nearly fifty years.135 “In every story relating to a colored man, with possibly two exceptions,” he argued, “there was in it that tendency to make of every colored man a sort of clown which intelligent colored people so thoroughly detest.”136
He would also write to M. A. Donahue & Co. that year about a Mother Goose nursery rhyme book that to his surprise contained racial epithets. He described reading the book with his wife to their children: “Mother Goose rhymes, so far as we could recall, have always been free of objectionable features. You can imagine our feeling of disgust, therefore, when in turning the pages for the eager eyes of two little brown babies, we came upon some half dozen pages of which the enclosed is a sample.” Even “the New Century dictionary,” he continued, defined the epithet as a “ ‘vulgar and opprobrious” term.137 He wrote to the store selling the book, Woodward & Lothrop on 11th and F street in Washington, DC, that same day.
The store wrote back explaining that his complaint about the book was “the first one we have ever received … in nearly sixty years,” but Kendrick’s work got the rhyme changed. M. A. Donahue himself wrote that despite being able to “justify having printed this rhyme as it was originally written,” they would now revise it.
Now that you have drawn our attention and emphasized the offense that might perhaps justifiably be taken, we have concluded to change the rhyme and wherever the word “negro / nigger” appears, we will substitute the word “black,” which we believe will be free of any taint of objection. If you can suggest a better word than “black” that would fill in, we would be glad to entertain it and include it in our future editions.”138
This illustrated children’s book is but one example of how Jim Crow rule extended far beyond government practices, but pervaded visual culture to its core, making such examples commonplace during the era.
Kendrick insisted on contributing to a dream that he would never live out. His letters were posted with the same frequency with which he had written to his wife during their courtship. On January 17, 1917, he wrote to an editor at the Washington Post about distortions in the paper. He stated:
I am inclosing herewith a clipping from the Washington Post of last Thursday morning, the 11th, and would respectfully ask the authority upon which you base the statements embodied therein … The disposition to charge colored people with all sorts of infractions of the law, to single them out as special subjects of criticism on every possible occasion, to make capital out of the faults of the few to the detriment of the many, to indict an entire race for the sins of a few of its members, has long been the chief stock in trade of a certain species of southern politician, but it is a distinct disappointment to find such sentiments emanating from one of whom the public has a right to expect a great deal better.139
He also wrote notes praising instances of fair, fact-driven, thoughtful writing, such as Ray Stannard Baker’s writing in The World’s Work. “It requires courage of a sort quite different from the ordinary for a popular writer to present facts as you did to a public,” he wrote, “which prefers by far the sort of history taught by ‘Birth of a Nation.’ ”140 (Baker had written about the need for justice both at home and abroad at a time during World War I, when such a view was rarely seen in print.) Kendrick would also praise an author at the Metropolitan Magazine for the “spirit of fairness and candor” in their article about black soldiers during World War I.141
Kendrick’s letters were part of a strategy used by early civil rights workers to combat discrimination. His pointillist approach would anticipate Du Bois’s attempt years later, at the end of World War I, to document the injustice he learned black soldiers had experienced, and how it had been hidden in letters, undisclosed, and obscured. In 1919, Du Bois would find his way to the front to hear firsthand from black troops in the 92nd and 93rd Divisions. There he received letters exposing the clandestine nature of racial domination in the US Army, as Chad L. Williams painstakingly recounts. He read one that “bluntly revealed the United States Army’s attempt to indoctrinate their French counterparts with the rules of American racism.” He stated that French officers needed to have an “exact idea of the situation of Negros in the United States,” including their status as an “inferior being” and sexual tendencies that made black men a “constant menace,” advising that they refrain from “ ‘spoiling’ the Negroes.” Du Bois recalled reading the memo. “I read it and sat very still.”142
Du Bois returned to the United States on a mission to use The Crisis to amass the full set of experiences of black soldiers returning from war and to write a book on the topic. He offered an impassioned plea to those who had put their lives on the line for their country: “Will every Negro officer and soldier who reads these documents make himself a committee of one to see that the Editor of THE CRISIS receives documents, diaries and information such as will enable THE CRISIS history of the war to be complete, true, and unanswerable?”143 Documenting this history of discrimination and segregation became the unfinished project of his life.
Kendrick’s exquisite letters conveying his trials make vivid what has gone missing from the history of racial formation in the United States. Detailed interpretation—exacting and labored—became a political force and tool. The work required to unsee this totalizing regime and legacy would become a weapon.
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During Wilson’s administration, the American landscape was receiving its first monuments to Emancipation, and with it, the contrasting narratives that made interpretation a national crisis. The Lincoln Memorial was under construction. Georgia’s Stone Mountain was dedicated to the Confederacy in 1915 and set on the world’s largest piece of granite, three miles at its circumference and just over six hundred acres. Its carved figures of Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson measure three acres across and nearly four hundred feet off the ground. The mass could support so much stone harvesting starting in the 1880s that the stairs of the East Wing of the U.S. Capitol are made with its granite, as are many courthouses and post offices across the country (Figure 5.9).144
One of the highest exponents of the fatal dangers of white supremacy, the Ku Klux Klan, enervated in the late 1880s, found its resurgence at the top of Stone Mountain on Thanksgiving night in 1915. Members of the Klan burned crosses at the summit in a fiery display of white supremacist rule, deliberately in advance of the Atlanta screening of D. W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation.145 The landmark sensation of a film was a blatantly racist narrative complete with countless myths about black ignorance, brutality, and venality that positioned Reconstruction as a failure after the Civil War and the Ku Klux Klan as the saving grace of the United States. This domestic terrorist organization, so vital to the history of white supremacy, the “single most dangerous domestic terror threat in our homeland,” as President Joe Biden has noted, was making a critical statement only recently understood: culture and symbols were not just a bludgeoning weapon to assert power in public, but also a means to declare the unspeakable truth.146
5.9. Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, Georgia.
In the history of segregation and the Progressive era, it is now common to focus on bold symbols of white supremacy and how they emerged, in policy and stone, to honor the Confederate Lost Cause, which gained full force at the turn of the twentieth century.147 Yet Murray wrote at a time in history when influential cultural critics such as Robert Musil would observe how state-commissioned monuments, seemingly hypervisible—bold, declarative, prominent—in the end became invisible. Despite their ubiquity, these public works are often largely unnoticed and unremarkable.148 These claims did not fully apply to the United States. As silence became policy and unseeing became conditioned, public works about racial politics had to warrant our attention.
The practice of unseeing the fractured foundation of racial dominance created a crucial legacy of indirection, a practice of speaking about racial life by proxy. It has meant that signs, symbols, and markers have had an outsized role and significance in constructing distinct narratives about national belonging and racial exclusion in American life. In a country built on equality and freedom and unspeakable forms of inhumanity and bondage, visuality and representation have long been vital to articulating the direction of representational democracy itself.
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After his meeting with Wilson, Murray saw it too, and decided to draft a project about interpretation—something was being left out of the conversation that would endure longer than any changes in the White House.149 An activist, he had also been a full-time civil servant in the federal administration since 1884. Nearing the end of his service, he noticed what few others would. Accounting for, and countering, the injustices of American racial policy now required more than law, more than norms, because they were being perpetuated not simply by the bold signs of Jim Crow rule, but also by subtle ones instantiated in ubiquitous misrepresentations in culture at large.
By 1916, Murray was working as a clerk in Wilson’s administration and would publish the widely influential, first interpretative study of racial representation in the United States. His book was not a detour from his political work but exemplified his insight that seemingly aesthetic concerns both managed and obscured racial politics. He understood how the visual could convey the unspeakable. Murray aimed for a wide readership for his work. Among other publishing houses, he sent his manuscript to Macmillan Company. “They did not seem to want it,” he said of his efforts. He would publish it himself.150
Murray anticipated that detailed interpretation would move out of the confines of the desks of art historians, critics, artists, and collectors and into the laps of political leaders, judges, businessmen, and educators—all in an effort to maintain federal segregation. Consider the response to Birth of a Nation, which Wilson screened at the White House in 1915, just as Murray was writing his book. Part of the film was not only based on The Clansman, a book written by a Johns Hopkins classmate and friend of Wilson’s, Thomas Dixon; the film also included intertitles drawn from Wilson’s 1902 publication A History of the American People.
Birth of a Nation—and the efforts to keep the film in theaters while pacifying protestors—intensified and broadened public consciousness around interpretation as a political force. Two days after the film premiered in Boston, the city’s mayor held a meeting to suggest precise edits that would allow the film to run. Charles Fleischer, a prominent rabbi based in Boston, requested statistics at the end of the film that would present “vital facts of the negro’s real progress since emancipation,” and Griffith agreed to include new elements to the film that would seem to many as “astonishing facts and figures” about “negro advancement.”151 There was also an appendix to the film, The New Era, composed of footage from Hampton Institute’s Making Negro Lives Count series. Hampton trustees had approved it. Birth of a Nation ran with this new ending in Boston’s Tremont Theater by April 21, 1915, after its premiere in February of that year in Los Angeles.152 Civic discussions assessed whether Birth of a Nation—“harmful and vicious” as well as “libelous” about black life—could possibly be made palatable through precisely calibrated revisions.
To explain why Birth of a Nation was banned in Ohio, the chairman of the state’s Board of Censors offered the kind of granular analysis that spilled over into civic critiques of all kinds. While “there are a few scenes on the end of the last reel of said film that show the colored race in a favorable light,” he wrote, the effect was “similar to forcing a very nauseating concoction down the throat of a man and then giving him a grain of sugar to take the taste out of his mouth.”153 Echoing this focus on precision, Leslie Pinckney Hill, principal of the landmark black educational institution the Cheyney Training School for Teachers in Pennsylvania, noted that “there might be a scintilla of good connected with the show,” in reference to the new addition of the Hampton images at the end. Still, she concluded, “nobody thinks of this when one considers the world of evil which it brings upon us all.”154 The urgent question became whether the new additions could possibly be enough to counter the film’s degrading stereotypes.
Assessment focused on fine calibrations to the narrative of Birth of a Nation. Boston mayor James Michael Curley, for example, requested the removal of particular lines in the film, with William Monroe Trotter chiming in as simply wanting more of Curley’s requests incorporated.155 Labor leader Eugene V. Debs was one who found this conciliatory approach exasperating. He wrote in frustration about “the chief commercial statistics exhibited at the close of the play to show the progress made by the colored race” and argued that it was just “a weak attempt to excuse the wanton insults heaped upon the race.”156
