New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South

New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South

SERIES EDITORS

Bryant Simon, Temple University

Jane Dailey, University of Chicago

ADVISORY BOARD

Lisa Dorr, University of Alabama

Grace Elizabeth Hale, University of Virginia

Randal Jelks, University of Kansas

Kevin Kruse, Princeton University

Robert Norrell, University of Tennessee

Bruce Schulman, Boston University

Marjorie Spruill, University of South Carolina

J. Mills Thornton, University of Michigan

Allen Tullos, Emory University

Brian Ward, University of Manchester

NEW NEGRO POLITICS IN THE JIM CROW SOUTH

CLAUDRENA N. HAROLD

A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication

This publication is made possible, in part, through a grant from the Hodge Foundation in memory of its founder, Sarah Mills Hodge, who devoted her life to the relief and education of African Americans in Savannah, Georgia.

© 2016 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Harold, Claudrena N., author.

Title: New Negro politics in the Jim Crow South / Claudrena N. Harold.

Description: [First edition] | Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, [2016] | Series: Politics and culture in the twentieth-century South | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016001697 | ISBN 9780820335124 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: African Americans—Southern States—Politics and government—20th century. | African Americans—Race identity—Southern States—History—20th century. | Civil rights movements—Southern States—History—20th century. | Labor movement—Southern States—History—20th century. | Black nationalism—Southern States—History—20th century. | African Americans—Intellectual life. | Southern States—Race relations—History—20th century. | Southern States—Politics and government—1865–1950.

Classification: LCC E185.61 .H249 2016 | DDC 323.1196/0730750904—DC23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016001697

TO THE BLACK STUDIES PIONEER VIVIAN VERDELL GORDON

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

One. The Hour Has Come

Two. Now Comes the Test

Three. Making Way for Democracy

Four. On the Firing Line

Five. The South Will Be Invaded

Six. New Negro Southerners

Seven. Stormy Weather

Epilogue. In the Whirlwind

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Several institutions and a host of family, friends, mentors, colleagues, and students played crucial roles in this book’s completion. The College of Arts and Sciences and the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia (UVa) provided financial support during the most critical stages of research and writing. I am particularly grateful for the history department’s administrative team of Kathleen Miller, Ella Wood, Jennifer Via, Whitney Yancey, and Kent Merritt.

This book also benefitted immensely from the expertise of archivists and librarians at Virginia Union University, Duke University, Howard University, Virginia State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and UVa.

A very special thanks goes to my colleague Thomas Klubock, who read the entire manuscript and provided much needed assistance. I also want to thank my colleague Grace Hale for her support of this project from its inception. She directed me to the University of Georgia Press, from which I was able to benefit from the keen insight of acquisition editor Walter Biggins, project editor John Joerschke, and freelance copyeditor Ellen Goldlust. I am also grateful to the editors of the Politics and Culture in the Twentieth-Century South series, Bryant Simon and Jane Dailey.

Davarian Baldwin’s scholarly example, as well as his insightful commentary on the manuscript, strengthened this book in numerous ways. I owe him a world of gratitude. Equally important has been the work of Corey D. B. Walker, who had a profound influence on my approach to the black intellectual tradition and my chapter on Virginia Union intellectuals. To call him a colleague and a friend is a privilege I do not take for granted. I also have a great deal of appreciation and respect for my colleague and friend Marlon Ross. His work on the gender politics of the New Negro movement has influenced me greatly; in fact, it is hard to imagine even getting to this point in my career without his unwavering support. My thinking on gender and women’s history has also been enriched by the scholarship of Cheryl Hicks, whose research on early twentieth-century America brilliantly captures the humanity of black working people. Long conversations about black intellectual history with Jonathan Fenderson also factored significantly in the completion of the book and helping me redefine my vocation.

Close reads and critical advice also came from scholars affiliated with the Working Group on Racial Inequality at UVa. In particular, Lawrie Balfour, Kim Forde-Mazrui, Mai-Linh Hong, Sophie Trawalter, Gordon Hylton, Derrick Alridge, Risa Goluboff, Kwame Holmes, and Andrea Simpson provided extensive commentary during my workshop on the book’s sixth chapter. Their incisive critiques and encouragement boosted my confidence in this project tremendously. Thank you as well to Vesla Weaver for conceiving this working group. I would also like to thank the Miller Center and my colleague Will Hitchcock for hosting a workshop on the book’s introduction. At that workshop, significant feedback came from Elizabeth Meyer, Guian McKee, Brian Balogh, Elizabeth Varon, Nicole Hemmer, Sarah Milov, Christina Mobley, Mel Leffler, Grace Hale, Lawrie Balfour, Joe Miller, and Andrew Kahrl.

On my journey toward the book’s completion, Kevin Everson and Kahlil Pedizisai assisted me greatly with their intellect, humor, and deft narrative skills. In the fall of 2012, Kevin and I embarked on a journey into the complex history of African American life at UVa during the 1970s. The end result has been two films, Sugarcoated Arsenic and We Demand. Working with Kevin on those two films provided me with the unique opportunity to continue my exploration of black southern life through the interpretive power of film. Through Kevin, I also had the chance to work with Kahlil, who, like Kevin, takes seriously black working-class history and politics. Thanks also to Madeleine Molyneaux for helping me navigate this process.

Working in film has provided me with much needed balance and perspective during the writing of this book. So, too, have good friends: James Collins, Dave Crawford, Stacy Davis, Reg Jones, Greg Carr, Mario Beatty, Valethia Watkins-Beatty, Sonya Donaldson, T. Chery, Roderick Smith, Natanya Duncan, Bonnie Gordon, Ian Grandison, Solome and Justin Rose, Brandi Hughes, James T. Roane, Deirdre Cooper Owens, Nicole Ivy, Greg Tate, Gary Gallagher, Shermaine Jones, Adom Getachew, and Yolanda Willis.

Enormous thanks to my greatest source of inspiration: my current and former students. Your brilliance, your commitment, and your love never cease to amaze me. I am particularly grateful for the students in my introduction to African American and African Studies, Black Fire, Motown to Hip-Hop, Black Power, and Sounds of Blackness courses, as well as those who participated in Sugarcoated Arsenic and We Demand. It would have been impossible to complete this project without constant words of encouragement from Ardonna Hamilton, Daryl Jennings, Lauren Coleman, Henry Coley, LaRoy Reynolds, Daquan Romero, Kamille Steward, Kristen Everett, Gabrielle Long, Roxanne Campbell, Jennifer Bowles, Joshua Adams, Elysia Griffiths-Randolph, Jessica Childress, and Renee Mattox.

I also derived great encouragement from the scholarly example set by my students in the distinguished major programs in the History Department and the Carter G. Woodson Institute: Khaosara Akapolawal, Jared Brown, Danaya Hough, Ashley Lewis, Naomi Himmelstein, Gregory Schaffer, Aleshia Dunning-Benns, Krystal Commons, Loryn Crittendon, Carmel Berhanu, Wintre Foxworth, Adair Hodge, Katie Schull, Kelsey Watkins, and Japaira Williams. Critical assistance also came from Sarajanee Davis, Shannon Davis, Niya Bates, Meagan McDougall, DeAnza Cook, Luann Williams, and Magdeldin Hamid. Late night phone chats with Dana Cypress about the New Negro and Southern Renaissances proved useful during the final stretch of writing. So did her beautiful spirit. Thank you to Mr. and Mrs. Cypress for sharing her with me and always keeping me in your prayers. I also learned a great deal from my graduate students Benji Cohen and Alec Hickmott, two young scholars whose provocative ideas always put me in revisionist mode. The same can be said of Julian Hayter, who kept me sane with our talks on music and Virginia politics. With the keen insights of Julian and other scholars, I feel confident about the future of African American Studies.

New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South

Introduction

On the morning of September 8, 1919, hundreds of African American trade unionists and left-wing activists packed the Colored YMCA in Washington, D.C., for the first annual convention of the National Brotherhood Workers of America (NBWA). Lauded by New York Age correspondent Jeannette Carter as the largest of its kind ever held in the city, the convention showcased the broad geographical reach of the New Negro spirit.¹ The three-day gathering attracted labor delegates from Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, Illinois, and Virginia. To the nation’s capital, these delegates brought not only their political grievances but also an unwavering faith in the righteousness of the NBWA’S cause. Founded in late March by a group of labor activists based primarily in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, the NBWA had ambitiously set out to establish itself as the revolutionary vanguard of the black labor movement.² Within six months of its founding, the Brotherhood expanded its membership to four thousand, challenged the racist structures and policies of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and submitted numerous complaints to the U.S. Railroad Association on behalf of aggrieved black workers. The union’s bold endeavors quickly captured the attention of A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, two New York–based socialists who heralded the arrival of the NBWA as further evidence of a broader shift in African American politics. There is a new leadership for Negro workers, Randolph and Owen editorialized in their monthly, the Messenger. It is a leadership of uncompromising manhood. It is insistent upon the Negro workers exacting justice, both from the white labor unions and from the capitalists.³ In their view, the Hampton Roads trade unionists who formed the backbone of the NBWA the radical spirit of the times. Not just concerned with the unionization of black workers, their political platform addressed a wide range of societal problems, including the South’s restriction of black suffrage, the federal government’s persecution of left-wing radicals, and U.S. imperialist designs in Haiti and Mexico.⁴ Randolph and Owen championed the NBWA for its sound, union principles and militant revolutionary methods.⁵ To assist the organization in its political endeavors, the enthusiastic activists not only volunteered the Messenger as the NBWA’S publicity organ but also agreed to serve on the union’s board of directors.

As Randolph and Owen institutionalized their relationship with trade unionists in Hampton Roads by supporting the NBWA, one of their chief nemeses in New York, Marcus Mosiah Garvey, also broadened his sphere of influence within the political world of coastal Virginia. By the summer of 1919, Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) claimed thousands of supporters in the cities of Norfolk, Newport News, and Portsmouth. Working-class blacks in particular heavily financed the UNIA’S chief economic venture, the Black Star Line Steamship Corporation (BSL). On a fall 1919 visit to Newport News, Garvey sold more than ten thousand dollars’ worth of BSL shares in a two-day span. Moved by this outpouring of support for the BSL, the UNIA leader developed a new appreciation for the revolutionary possibilities in the American South. Away down in Virginia, Garvey proudly informed his New York supporters,

I have discovered that the Negro of the South is a new and different man to what he was prior to the war. The bloody war has left a new spirit in the world—it has created for all mankind a new idea of liberty and democracy, and the Southern Negro now feels that he has a part to play in the affairs of the world. A new light is burning for our brothers at this end. They are determined that they too shall enjoy a portion of that democracy for which many of their sons and brothers fought for and died for in France.⁶

The political vibrancy of the Hampton Roads district in the aftermath of World War I illuminates the centrality of the South as an important incubator of black protest activity during the New Negro era. Operating in a variety of political arenas from labor conventions to college campuses, southern New Negroes fought valiantly against the structural forces that adversely affected African Americans’ life chances and experiences. Their political struggles significantly informed how blacks in other parts of the country, including Harlem and Chicago, imagined, constructed, and performed in material and textual sites of political contestation. Thus, an analysis of New Negro politics and culture confined to the North obscures the complexity of a historical moment in which black southerners provided exciting organizational models of grassroots labor activism, assisted in the revitalization of black nationalist politics, engaged in robust intellectual arguments on the future of the South, and challenged the governance of historically black colleges in ways that occasioned new perspectives on the potential sites of black radical activity.

With an eye toward these and other developments, this volume narrates the story of New Negro political culture from the perspective of the black South. It details how the development and maturation of New Negro politics and thought were shaped not only by New York–based intellectuals and revolutionary transformations in Europe but also by people, ideas, and organizations rooted in the South. The aim here is not to devalue the importance of the North or Europe during this period of black political and cultural renaissance. Instead, exploring some of the critical events and developments below the Mason-Dixon Line can sharpen our understanding of how many black activists, along with particular segments of the white American Left, arrived at certain theoretical conclusions and political choices regarding the politics of race, challenges to capitalist political economy, and alternative visions of nation.

On a related note, my work illuminates the central role of black southerners in the making and remaking of New Negro modernity. Anything but tragically mute objects in the highly contested project of racial modernization, New Negro southerners possessed clear ideas on how the modern black subject should relate to its employer and existing labor unions, perform in an ever-expanding consumer culture, and negotiate its relationship to the U.S. nation-state.⁷ Unlike many canonical Harlem Renaissance writers, these southerners envisioned their region and its native sons and daughters as critical to the making of a more empowering modernity for people of African descent in the United States and the world over.⁸ As Lucille Hawkins of New Orleans noted in a letter to Garvey’s Negro World, Great things are being carried on by the New Negroes in this section. We are constantly on the firing line—the line that leads to true and lasting emancipation.⁹ To better understand how Hawkins and other black southerners came to view themselves as central rather than marginal players in the unfolding political dramas of the 1920s, we must examine the political formations and movements birthed during the New Negro era. Accordingly, this book documents four important spaces in which the self-determinist spirit and modernist strivings of southern New Negroes surfaced: trade union politics, the electoral arena, the Garvey movement, and print media. The women and men attracted to these spaces had wide-ranging political perspectives and objectives. However, the common thread in all of their stories was an unwavering belief in the transformative potential of the moment. Like the literary figures discussed in Christine Stansell’s American Moderns, they were determined to contribute to a milieu that made democracy a palpable experience rather than a civic catchword.¹⁰

Nowhere was this determination more visible than in the labor arena. Throughout the New Negro era, black southerners engaged in work stoppages of varying lengths, initiated unionization drives at both the local and national levels, and pushed for substantive changes in the AFL’S organizing and funding policies. These class-conscious workers constituted a visible yet enigmatic presence on the New Negro political landscape. Less prone to the ideological rigidity that characterized certain segments of the northern black Left, they embraced strategies and visions reflective of the multidimensional nature of their oppression.¹¹ Though cognizant of the ways in which their lives differed from those of the white ruling elite, white workers, and the African American middle class, black working-class activists in the South were anything but isolationists. Their recognition of the specificity of their oppression did not preclude an awareness of how the profit-driven values, dictates, and relationships of the market economy dehumanized workers from various racial, ethnic, and national backgrounds. The common people of all nations have suffered great oppression, observed John Cary, a New Orleans activist intimately involved in labor and black nationalist politics during the 1920s. It was the common people, Cary continued, who bore the perils of war and had their lives and property taken away in order to satisfy the wicked and selfish ambitions of men.¹² Fully aware of the ways in which economic dislocation, financial hardship, and political marginalization engulfed so many members of the world’s working classes, Cary and many other black southerners recognized the need to eradicate poisonous racial divisions and chasms within the house of labor. Out of this recognition emerged significant attempts to forge alliances across racial lines with the express purpose of undermining the strength of the employer class.¹³

Frequently however, these biracial initiatives buckled under the weight of a labor movement unable to transcend the white supremacist ethos and dictates of the times.¹⁴ Thus, the majority of southern black workers and trade unionists subscribed to a politics of pragmatic flexibility in their approach to biracial coalitions within the labor movement. The same can be said of their dealings with the black bourgeoisie and the civil rights establishment, particularly the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The vitriolic attacks of Old Crowd Negroes so conspicuous in the writings of Randolph, Owen, and other New Negro radicals rarely appear in the public utterances of black southern workers and intellectuals intimately involved in trade union politics, in part because of the ideological shifts occurring among certain segments of the black leadership class. Across the nation, the labor provocations of black workers yielded subtle and sometimes drastic ideological changes within the larger African American community. Class struggle, as Earl Lewis and Barbara Foley note in their studies on World War I–era black politics, assumed greater importance among a select group of activists and institutions previously disposed to the idea that societal transformation depended on collaboration between the better classes of both races.¹⁵ Especially noteworthy in this regard were the labor engagements of the NAACP during World War I.¹⁶ Contrary to the myopic portraits of the NAACP found in some of the literature of the black Left, the organization was not invariably opposed to challenging the power of capital.¹⁷ Nationally and locally, several of its leaders incorporated leftist critiques into their political analyses, mediated arguments between black workers and white organized labor, initiated grassroots struggles against discriminatory employers, and pursued numerous legal battles on behalf of aggrieved workers. In turn, many black workers and several prominent black trade unionists identified the NAACP as an important ally in their protracted struggle for social justice.

By examining these coalitional arrangements and alliances, this book sheds light on the pervasiveness of leftist ideas within the African American community. It also considers how black southerners’ negotiation of those ideas laid the foundation for new nationalist articulations and enactments. Far too often, we treat leftist and nationalist formations in the black community as diametrically opposed during the New Negro era; however, the historical record abounds with cases in which working-class activists and organizations announced and articulated the existence of a national black community bound by shared material concerns. Especially as black trade unionists sought to secure a more powerful position within the world of organized labor, they increasingly identified themselves as national subjects and performed that subjectivity in ways that reflected their unique understanding of the intersectionality of race and class in their individual and collective lives. Not simply the rhetorical but the organizational strategies of blacks involved in the AFL as well as the NBWA and other independent unions assisted in the creation of what literary scholar Houston A. Baker Jr. identifies as a vocabulary of national possibilities.¹⁸

Turning our analytical gaze to the South provides us with a clearer vision of how the black nation as both an ideological construct and a political formation frequently developed within the crucible of intense labor debates and struggles. Many (though not all) New Negro activists in the South developed a very class-inflected understanding of the political meaning and responsibilities of black nationhood, an understanding based not on essentialist notions of race but rather on their struggles with employers, their contentious encounters with white workers, and their cross-regional attempts at coalition building. This important aspect of the story of black nationality formation deserves a critical hearing not only for its challenge to knee-jerk dismissals of nationalist discourses and politics as invariably rooted in biological determinism or bourgeois reformism but also for its illumination of how nonelite women and men utilized the labor arena to challenge the cultural, economic, and political protocols of race, class, and nation in twentieth-century America.¹⁹

Of course, the labor arena was not the only space in which black women and men scripted new collective identities, challenged the logics and practices of white supremacy, and pressed for greater autonomy over their personal lives. If we turn to such important urban spaces as New Orleans’s South Rampart Street, Jacksonville’s Ashley Street and Florida Avenue, and Norfolk’s Princess Anne Road, we will discover that New Negro women and men found outlets for cultural and political expression in a variety of activist organizations, social groups, churches, and entertainment dives.

With this incredible political and cultural diversity in mind, I have organized the book along chronological and thematic lines. The book’s first two chapters span 1917–20, examining the many measures black workers employed to exert more influence in their communities, democratize the political economy of the South, and confront the racist ideologies, structures, and practices pervading the labor movement.²⁰ I demonstrate the extent to which Foley’s argument about the existence of an ecumenical radicalism during the World War I era holds true in the South by looking at the ways in which various forms of grassroots labor activism pushed the larger black community further to the left in its response to racialized class inequalities and economic injustice.²¹

Moving from the labor world to the electoral arena, chapter 3 traces blacks’ organizing efforts during the highly contested U.S. presidential and congressional campaigns of 1920. The rising militancy associated with the postwar period, in conjunction with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in September 1920, influenced voter education and registration drives, reconfigured the gender politics of the black public sphere, and transformed local people’s expectations of and relationship to mainstream political culture. My work builds on the insights of historians such as Paul Ortiz, whose masterful study, Emancipation Betrayed, reminds us that the formal political arena was not left untouched by the New Negro movement. By examining black activists who challenged the hegemony of the Republican Party, ran for office, and sought to augment the political power of newly enfranchised African American women, this chapter demonstrates how a select group of black southerners occasioned a revitalization