CLASSROOM
Visions of Racial Equality and Inclusion
Lower Southern politicians and journalists began to play major roles in this subversive political effort during the mid- to late 1880s. Among the most notable figures were Carlyle McKinley, a reporter for the News and Courier of South Carolina; Henry Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution of Georgia; and John Tyler Morgan, United States senator from Alabama. Collectively, these men argued for Black expatriation with a level of vigor comparable to that evinced by the Blairs during the late 1850s and 1860s. As they applied colonization rhetoric to the ongoing project of repudiating the Fifteenth Amendment, these Lower Southern propagandists frequently used phrases like “Negro Problem” and “Negro Question” as shorthand references for their messages. These were not phrases, to be clear, that they created or that only they invoked. Such word combinations—and variants of them, such as “Race Problem” and “Race Question”—had circulated for years as Americans with a range of racialized attitudes had publicly debated the institution of enslavement and the prospect of Black civic equality. However, during the mid- to late 1880s, McKinley, Grady, Morgan, and other Lower Southern propagandists sought to turn these terms into exclusionary slogans, phrases that called to mind the colonization movement’s Black-freedom-as-a-problem ideology. A chief purpose of this rhetorical move was to take the fight against Black suffrage to another level by discrediting the perceived legitimacy of the Fifteenth Amendment.
One of the pivotal moments of this “Negro Problem” propaganda campaign was the publication, in 1889, of An Appeal to Pharaoh: The Negro Problem and Its Radical Solution, authored by Carlyle McKinley. This popular two-hundred-plus-page book went through three editions, the last of which was released in 1907, by which point many Southern states had enacted laws that effectively disfranchised Black Americans. The “radical solution” recommended by McKinley was federally sponsored colonization, an act of “practical patriotism” that, he insisted, it was the “duty” of all white Americans to support. Central to his arguments in favor of colonization was his claim that the Fifteenth Amendment had proven, without doubt, to be a failed “experiment.” The federal government had disregarded the “law which from the beginning has commanded and compelled the separation of the races,” and the nation was “now groaning under the consequences of our transgression.” He added: “Does any man believe for a moment, that, if the Negro were not here, and if it were proposed by any person or power to bring him here now to take his place among us, to share our heritage and citizenship, to be established here on the footing now conceded to him . . . he would be allowed to set foot on American soil on any terms?” While it was clearly impossible to change the past and to prevent the decisions that had brought the Black race to North America, McKinley observed, there was something very real to be “gained . . . if we accept the broad principle that it would be our duty, clearly, to deny him a place among us, if he had not already secured a foothold on our territory.” Acceptance of this exclusionary principle enabled a clear view of the proper path forward, he insisted. White Americans, irrespective of party and region, must give up on all this legal “experimentation” and commence the process of restoring the United States to “the exclusive control of the white race.”...
In three documents published during the 1890s, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Anna Julia Cooper asserted a vision of the nation’s racial future that had, as its foundation, the principles of inclusion and equality. One of their chief objectives was to coopt and counter language that colonization advocates, and white Americans more broadly, had used throughout the nineteenth century to promote a contrary vision, one rooted in exclusion and inequality. From the beginning, Black activists had fought against the colonization movement fully aware that words, not just political victories, had great capacity for harm. As Frederick Douglass—one of the greatest rhetoricians in American history, not just as a composer of eloquent, precise, and compelling language but also as an analyst of others’ compositions—observed in early 1894, as he denounced, once again, “Negro Problem” discourse in all of its aspects: “Words are things . . . a very bad thing in this case, since they give us a misnomer . . . [that] has a strong bias against the negro.” This insidious linguistic “formula,” he added, effectively “handicaps his cause with all the prejudice known to exist against him.”
For every bit of the colonization movement’s eighty-year existence, prominent and influential white advocates, Black activists had consistently pointed out, had propagated and strengthened anti-Black prejudice throughout the United States. Whether the movement’s early leaders had intended this effect or not was, from the perspective of Black Americans, largely immaterial. The rise of anti-Black prejudice, with its myriad oppressive consequences, was an empirical fact, and the colonization movement’s significant role in fostering this rise was, as Black activists had repeatedly indicated, one that required an act of self-delusion to miss. At one point during his 1894 speech, Douglass made the following terse and conclusive observation on the matter of intention. “When [white Southerners] . . . prefixed ‘negro’ to the national problem, . . . [they] knew that the device would awaken and increase a deep-seated prejudice at once, and that it would repel fair and candid investigation.”
The contrary visions that Douglass, Du Bois, and Cooper asserted during the 1890s were not identical, as noted, but they did share a common attitude. They looked to the future with a sense of faith rather than fear—specifically, faith in the human capacity to adapt and progress, in contrast to fear grounded in rigid, backward-looking assumptions. The ideology of the colonization movement originated, most directly, in white anxiety and uncertainty regarding the institution of slavery. Jefferson had theorized that during the long period in which racialized slavery had spread throughout North America, the capacity of white and Black Americans to coexist on terms of equality had been irrevocably impaired. From that theory—which many white colonization advocates, especially those from the South, took to be a fact—the colonization movement had deduced the necessity of Black expatriation or, at a minimum, legal exclusion. If neither of these paths were taken, the consequences, they claimed, would be dire: a war of racial extermination or, at a minimum, a perpetual racial conflict. Douglass, Du Bois, and Cooper rejected this way of thinking, claiming that it had no substantive basis in human history and that it posited an unnecessarily constrained view of human potential. Why was it impossible to overcome racial prejudice in the future? Just because it had been a prominent feature of the American past did not predetermine its continuation. If it persisted in the United States, it did so because various groups of Americans, for reasons of self-interest, caused it to persist. Human agency was essential.
[probably need to edit the above -- need to make sure Negro Problem propaganda campaign is mentioned]
DOCUMENTS (choose excerpts)
Cooper, Anna Julia A Voice from the South 1892
Douglass, Frederick Lessons of the Hour 1894
Du Bois, W.E.B. "Strivings of the Negro People" 1897
FILL IN WITH QUESTIONS