The Unseen Truth, page 28
The response to Birth of a Nation shows that details mattered, and too few had changed. Most critics argued that efforts to counter the overriding narrative of racial domination in the film had failed.157 Protests over the film would bolster the sense of urgency to enact change through policy measures. In 1918, for example, Republican Missouri congressman Leonidas C. Dyer would introduce in the House an antilynching bill that built on the painstaking, pioneering work of the crusader journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and earlier attempts to get Congress to pass antilynching legislation.158 The furor over the detailed misrepresentation of black people in Birth of a Nation is one example that fueled Murray’s belief that politics and aesthetics were irrevocably fused on the racialized grounds of the United States.159
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Murray’s book begins by addressing silences. He focuses on the conflict at the seat of federal power—the Capitol’s reflection of the tension between slavery and freedom. After an analysis of one of the most well-known works of American sculpture central for the discourse on slavery in the United States, Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave, he cues the reader to omissions. He focuses on a single term, “white silence,” a line at the end of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem inscribed on the sculpture itself, what he calls “a scathing—and I think, sarcastic—arraignment of Powers’ American countrymen for maintaining slavery here.” His aim was to analyze not only the messages sent through representation, but also “what they leave unsaid.”160
After taking the reader on a tour of monuments, he arrives at his main point: the lack of “adequate representation” of Emancipation constitutes a significant problem for the racial depiction of figures in the United States.161 He then takes his reader on a second tour of works by major figures such as sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, whose oeuvre modeled new possibilities—the accurate portrayal of denigrated black lives.
Murray called for a specific form of interpretation: “careful” and “perspicacious.” He emphasized, “we can hardly press” its importance of such a form of interpretation “too strongly.”162 He stressed that the force of details has an outsized impact on the messages of works of art. “It is not out and out caricature—bad as its effects may be and sometimes are—that needs to give us the most concern,” Murray wrote. “But it is the lethal poison—often only a suggestion; sometimes the mere breath of an insinuation—which lurks in art, particularly in what purports to be serious historic art.”163 What it demanded was observation as a civic skill. “I am convinced that, for Black Folk—in America, at least—this is of paramount importance.”164
By 1909, Murray had been identified as a progressive leader. He would join the American Negro Academy, entering with Carter G. Woodson and Arturo Schomburg, after five years of entreaties.165 His blunt, frank style would cost him allies, but offered him a singular vision. He found a way to steward the movement with a focus on cultural forms. Yet his perspective about the merger of aesthetics, politics, race, and interpretation would take decades, if not nearly a century, to be understood.
Murray’s method of writing modeled the form of racial detailing he thought was critical for seeing during segregation—and he managed to complete the book while continuing his work as a federal clerk. He wrote to the librarian in New London, Connecticut, asking how, exactly, they have honored the soldiers on the Colored Soldiers memorial he heard had been erected on Gorton Hill. “What I seek to know is, what sort of recognition have these colored soldiers (and the others) on this monument? Is it sculptural (reliefs or figures) or is it in the form of inscription showing names—the colored being listed with the rest?”166
He wrote boldly to the foundry on West 27th Street in New York City that produced the statue he found listed “in the Catalogue of the Art of the Panama-Pacific Exposition” with the title “the ‘Nigger.’ ” He asked to see a picture of it. He noted that he knew it was now owned by Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney (Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney). This work is now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, with the new title, Ethiopian, part of the history of renaming, discussed earlier, that structurally, however inadvertently, silences such histories. Murray also wrote to famed artist Daniel Chester French in an extended exchange about his sculpture personifying “Africa” installed in front of the Custom House in New York City. She is rendered as if “dozing, napping,” her right arm on the rendering of the head of a sphinx, her left arm on a rousing lion.167 Murray urged an expanded focus on the tactic of detailing being used to cement racial dominance. He aimed to ensure that the expendability of black life was not reflected in a damning omission of representation in public life. The landscape of culture would become an interpretive training ground for understanding the tactics and full scope of the political weapons used to enforce Jim Crow rule.
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Early drafts of Murray’s book show his frustration that Du Bois himself had not made this argument about the force and power of detailed interpretation and representation. In the early twentieth century, Du Bois was the most influential scholar, critic, and thought leader in Black America, and Murray had the opportunity to identify any blind spots in his colleague’s work as his editor at The Horizon.168 Murray was disappointed in what he saw as Du Bois’s “pitifully inadequate” focus on visuality in the journal The Negro’s Progress in Fifty Years, where Du Bois’s essay contained only two sentences on the topic of race and visual representation. To omit any rigorous discussion of visual representation—of the symbols, signs, and markers erected to instantiate Jim Crow rule and to declaim it—was, Murray argued, “a golden opportunity lost,” for Du Bois and for the nation.169 Murray was not about to lose that opportunity completely. There were fatal consequences for ceding the ground of interpretation given the pervasive symbols and propaganda of white supremacist rule.
At the time, Du Bois had, of course, gestured toward the need to require careful visual interpretation to contest segregation. Du Bois had experimented with the idea in a work of speculative fiction, The Princess Steel (1908–1910), originally titled The Megascope. The plot centered on the wonder of a machine that presents the “Great Near”—the view that aggregates details. Du Bois described these details as the “always present but usually invisible structures … that shape the organization of society.” The machine is the invention of a black sociologist, Professor Hannibal Johnson, whose megascope looks at data gathered over “200 years.” The story, which revolves around how to make sense of a horde of details streaming across centuries, remained in his papers, unpublished.170
Du Bois had also created new forms of interpretive scrutiny of the American social and political economy in this racial nadir in his award-winning Paris 1900 Exposition. As discussed earlier, the display consisting of charts, books, maps, and photographs created with his students at Atlanta University examined everything from the value of household and kitchen furniture to the “rise of the negroes from slavery to freedom in one generation.” The show began with a map, a sendup of the narratives of white racial supremacy. Du Bois included photographs of black Americans in Georgia along with unusual, innovative charts, a mode of data visualization that let him visually describe and measure progress. Each tackled a racial stereotype: black intellectual capacity; black fertility; “black progress” defined by business, home, and land ownership; and more.
Today, the aim of data visualization is to make information legible at a glance, but the charts in Du Bois’s display repudiate that scheme. Each prevents data from being interpreted too quickly. Each forces the viewer to decelerate to understand the demands on black life. It was, he emphasized, a display of progress “made by African Americans in spite of the machinery of white supremacist culture, policy, and law that surrounded them.”171 To make that clear required the gearshift Murray had articulated.
Consider the chart showing the value of black property held by African Americans in Georgia. He includes on the graph paper the words “Ku-kluxism,” “lynching,” and “political unrest,” as if to create a more vivid, more fully representational, picture of the physical terrain by including the social landscape for the property holders (Figure 5.10). It was not enough to chart the change in prosperity. Du Bois’s data portraits were not only innovative in their design, but also reflected the burgeoning forms of detailed interpretation necessary to understand modernity and progress in American political life.172
Du Bois anticipated that marrying hard data to deeply engaging visual presentations could be a weapon to combat hardening racial boundaries. Yet Murray argued that Du Bois, as one of the few who could impact public discourse, had not gone far enough.
This critical history has been lost in part due to Murray’s decision not to call out Du Bois, one of the foremost thought leaders in the United States, by name. He refers to Du Bois only as “the man generally regarded as the leading literary man of the race in America.” It was as far as he would go. Murray had been advised by sculptor Warrick Fuller and former Atlanta University president Horace Bumstead to cut down the opening section of his book where he openly critiqued Du Bois. Murray, who had fallen out with Du Bois, protested at first, but ultimately followed their advice.173
Yet Murray’s views on the civic function of racial aesthetics would have been impossible for Du Bois to ignore. Du Bois owned a copy of Murray’s Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture. It remained in his personal library for decades.174 Murray’s book was seen as landmark during an era when critical debates about the “New Negro aesthetic” were taking place, as proclaimed in the Washington Bee, the city’s nationally respected weekly focused on black life. Murray himself was in high demand as a speaker. In 1923, he gave a speech surveying racial representation in the United States at the American Negro Academy (ANA), the same night as the annual speech by Arturo Schomburg.175 The day before, Alain Locke had given a talk on his journey to Egypt as a member of the ANA. Having traveled for the meeting, Locke was likely to have been in attendance for Murray’s presentation, especially since Locke would serve on the executive committee of the academy. The president of the academy years earlier was John Wesley Cromwell, a good friend of Locke’s who had also written the introduction to Murray’s book.176
5.10. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Valuation of Town and City Property Owned by Georgia Negroes,” in The Georgia Negro, Paris Exposition Universelle, 1900, ink and watercolor, 28 × 22 in.
Murray had chosen the wrong target in Du Bois, but by 1916, he could not have known that the right interlocutor was instead forming in the young Locke. Well before Du Bois wrote his famous 1926 essay “The Criteria of Negro Art,” he had delivered an unpublished lecture at Wilberforce about his tour of “The Art and Art Galleries of Modern Europe.” In it, he focused exclusively on non-black art and beauty in the surrounding world.177 By 1924, Locke would become the “renaissance architect of Black culture,” after the publication of the New Negro anthology and with it the community, momentum, and vision for the cultural flowering that indelibly rooted black aesthetics and modernism.178
Murray’s book Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture is now seen as constituting the headwaters of the study of race and aesthetics. One of the posthumous reviews by Richard J. Powell, writing as editor-in-chief of Art Bulletin, offered an incisive retrospective account that telegraphs the foundational impact of Murray’s “ahead of its time and even visionary” work nearly a century later.179
Yet the long unheralded significance of Murray’s work requires no less than a full reconsideration of what truly prompted Du Bois’s interest in the art-versus-propaganda debate about race and representation, what influences propelled Du Bois’s cultural leadership, and the full scope of the tactics of cultural resistance during segregation. Scholars such as David Levering Lewis have framed Murray emphatically as a “Du Boisian loyalist.”180 He was, but only for a time. The idea of Murray’s productive break with Du Bois’s thinking and cultural leadership has not been fully considered, to say nothing of Murray’s foundational role in the discourse on race, representation, and propaganda in the United States.
By the time Du Bois penned his speech about the force of propaganda, discussed earlier, he had lived out the hope of Murray’s argument. At that point, Murray had fallen out of prominence. He was leading the Washington Tribune newspaper, which would thrive even through the Great Depression, but was also attending to health issues and was not frequently on the public stage.181
Racial Detailing as Protest
The kind of racial detailing and interpretation that Murray argued was a critical weapon of exposure would continue and make plain even one of the most horrific acts of Jim Crow rule: lynching. Public lynchings during this period were governed by the same principle of composite sight—an aesthetics of expulsion. As Bryan Stevenson and Sherrilyn Ifill have argued, lynchings were not isolated incidents, but deliberate acts tolerated, supported, and frequently photographed by state and federal officials to reinforce a racial hierarchy. Until 1952—the first year to pass with no record of lynchings in the United States—these acts were extrajudicial, distinct from mob violence or hangings that follow a criminal trial.182 They were a form of domestic terrorism carried out with impunity.
The NAACP’s anti-lynching campaign addressed how conditioned unseeing governed the nation. For years, each day after a lynching took place, a flag proclaiming “A Man Was Lynched Yesterday” hung over the organization’s headquarters on 69 Fifth Avenue in New York City (Figure 5.11). Its capitalized block-type letters were a call to force the public to pay attention to a particular group of citizens, using a script that rhymed with the routine, near mechanical dehumanization of killing men, women, and children. The flag transformed each murdered human being into an icon in the sky, a counter-veneration.
5.11. Flag, announcing lynching, flown from the window of the NAACP headquarters on 69 Fifth Ave., New York City, 1936. Photograph print (gelatin silver). Visual materials from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Records.
Unseeing had so desensitized the nation to the terror and violence that advertisements for lynchings could run casually in main city newspapers. Consider the announcement in the Jackson, Mississippi Daily News of June 26, 1919, trumpeting the lynching of John Hartfield as if a popular entertainment in headlines from New York to New Orleans (Figure 5.12). Lynchings were public spectacles, organized with tacit or explicit municipal support. Mississippi Governor Theodore Bilbo told Jackson Daily News reporters that he was “powerless” to stop the lynching, but that “a committee of Ellisville citizens” had been “appointed to make the necessary arrangements.”183 Hartfield, who had been accused of assaulting a white woman, had been shot during the manhunt that lasted eleven days and, after receiving medical treatment for his shoulder, was scheduled to be burned alive at 5 P.M. The timing meant that the newspapers that day could offer promotion for the event. As many as ten thousand people attended. His fingers were amputated, passed around the crowd. He was shot after he was lynched. Postcards of the event sold for twenty cents.184 The countless images of lynching that circulated—detailing “the hellish work of negro persecution,” as Frederick Douglass would call it; a practice that “had assumed all the functions of civil authority”—would make clear how immune the country had become to the inhumanity of racial terror.
5.12. “John Hartfield Will Be Lynched by Ellisville Mob at 5 O’Clock This Afternoon,” New Orleans States, June 26, 1919.
Appeals to Wilson’s White House to stem the tide of racial terror were met with pregnant silence. Wilson would give letters he received to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who answered by appealing to state’s rights, a code to permit the practice to continue: “The law, as laid down by the Supreme Court of the United States, is to effect that lynching is a crime which can be dealt with only by the State authorities and over which the Federal Government has no jurisdiction.” His letter would include the defense of the precedent: “See Hodges v. United States.”185 It was not a misstatement. Lynching had become a states’ rights issue. But to have the highest legal authority in the country, alongside the president, use both silence and a reference to a legal case shows the degree to which racism had inured leadership from even recognizing that citizens were being murdered, as entertainment at picnics and as public spectacles, literally in broad daylight.
The history of detailing translated into counter-visual tactics for one of the most significant events in the early civil rights movement: the Silent Protest Parade of July 28, 1917. Conceived by James Weldon Johnson and organized by leadership of the NAACP, including Du Bois, this public rebuke of lynching featured nearly ten thousand black Americans marching in total silence down the main thoroughfare of Fifth Avenue in New York City, with women and children wearing white to emphasize their dignity and nobility, and men following in somber dark suits. Placards indicated the pointillist aesthetics at work. “The First Blood for American Independence Was Shed by a Negro Crispus Attucks,” one sign read. The replication of a phalanx of whiteness and the decision to spotlight granular facts—as if to counter the aesthetics of Arthur Mole—demonstrates how critical this strategy of racial detailing was both for deploying the regime of racial domination and for repudiating it. A letter from the parade organizers to President Woodrow Wilson only emphasized this tactic of racial accounting. It emphasized the exact number—2,867—who were known to have been lynched by 1917 (new research suggests even more were killed). The letter pressed on, using precise numbers to bring home the personal, unjust nature of the horror and counter the efforts to dehumanize black citizens: “less than a half dozen persons of the tens of thousands involved have received any punishment whatsoever for these crimes, and not a single one has been punished for murder.”186 The document’s details were a countermeasure to the attention to precise fragments that had eased the dehumanization of black life (Figure 5.13).
