New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition

By Keisha N. Blain, Christopher Cameron, Ashley D. Farmer

Northwestern University Press

Copyright © 2018 Northwestern University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3812-4

Contents

Introduction: The Contours of Black Intellectual History Keisha N. Blain, Christopher Cameron, and Ashley D. Farmer,
Part I. Black Internationalism,
Introduction Michael O. West,
"Every Wide-Awake Negro Teacher of French Should Know": The Pedagogies of Black Internationalism in the Early Twentieth Century Celeste Day Moore,
Afro-Cuban Intellectuals and the New Negro Renaissance: Bernardo Ruiz Suárez's The Color Question in the Two Americas Reena N. Goldthree,
"To Start Something to Help These People": African American Women and the Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934 Brandon R. Byrd,
Part II. Religion and Spirituality,
Introduction Judith Weisenfeld,
Isolated Believer: Alain Locke, Baha'i Secularist David Weinfeld,
The New Negro Renaissance and African American Secularism Christopher Cameron,
"I Had a Praying Grandmother": Religion, Prophetic Witness, and Black Women's Herstories LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant,
Part III. Racial Politics and Struggles for Social Justice,
Introduction Pero Gaglo Dagbovie,
Historical Ventriloquy: Black Thought and Sexual Politics in the Interracial Marriage of Frederick Douglass Guy Emerson Mount,
Reigning Assimilationists and Defiant Black Power: The Struggle to Define and Regulate Racist Ideas Ibram X. Kendi,
Becoming African Women: Women's Cultural Nationalist Theorizing in the US Organization and the Committee for Unified Newark Ashley D. Farmer,
Part IV. Black Radicalism,
Introduction Robin D. G. Kelley,
Runaways, Rescuers, and the Politics of Breaking the Law Christopher Bonner,
Conspiracies, Seditions, Rebellions: Concepts and Categories in the Study of Slave Resistance Gregory Childs,
African American Expats, Guyana, and the Pan-African Ideal in the 1970s Russell Rickford,
Contributors,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

Black Internationalism

Introduction

Michael O. West

In his own lifetime Booker T. Washington earned the ire of many African American intellectuals, as much for his perceived anti-intellectualism as for his accommodationist politics in the face of US apartheid, or Jim Crow. After discursively casting down his bucket at the Atlanta Exposition of 1895, the event that brought him fame, Washington went on to cast a long shadow over the discourse on black liberation in the United States. Directly and indirectly, and to varying degrees, his legacy helps to frame the three essays in this section of the book, all of which are set in the decades immediately following his death in 1915.

Celeste Day Moore's essay on "pedagogies of black internationalism" begins with one of Washington's more famous reproaches to what he regarded as black misguided priorities, which necessarily doubled as a dig at liberal arts education. A convinced germophobe as well as a champion of industrial training and wealth accumulation, Washington laid into the apocryphal black young man, "sitting down in a one-room cabin, with grease on his clothing, filth all around him, and weeds in the yard and garden, engaged in studying a French grammar." How absurd indeed!

Moore's task, and it is a formidable one, is to transform Washingtonian absurdity into black internationalism. Hers is a deft undertaking, accomplished by focusing on French language instruction at historically African American institutions of higher learning, notably Howard and Atlanta universities, in the interwar years. Amid the political, intellectual, and spiritual incarceration that was Jim Crow, Moore shows how black teachers and students gained entry into a wider world by studying French, which they directly linked to the larger struggle for black liberation.

A key figure in Moore's narrative is Mercer Cook, who taught French at both Howard and Atlanta. Cook had previously pursued graduate studies in Paris, where his larger education included attending the salon of the Martinique-born sisters Jane Nardal and Paulette Nardal, seminal if largely unsung figures in the making of négritude, the key expression in Francophone black internationalism in the interwar years. Cook's informal studies under the auspices of the Nardal sisters put him in good stead for teaching in the United States, where the great majority of his students, including at the graduate level, were African American women. These women, and others who similarly populated French-language classes at black universities and colleges, offered a sharp contrast, and rebuke, to Washington's caricature of a male autodidact, oblivious to the mess around him as he consumed his French grammar book. Furthermore, Moore argues, the labor of the female students, including their unpublished master's theses, formed an indispensable scaffolding for the publications that cemented the reputations of Cook and other African American male French scholars.

Literature in French about Haiti, some of it written by Haitian writers, was standard fare for Mercer Cook and his African American fellow French-language instructors. Haiti, with its glorious revolution and storied place in the global antislavery struggles of the nineteenth century, dramatically returned to Pan-African consciousness in the early decades of the twentieth century. The reason was not far to seek: the United States invaded Haiti in 1915 and occupied the country for a generation, until 1934. In what one biographer calls "one of the frankest articles he ever wrote," Washington, in failing health and with only a few months left to live, offered a qualified endorsement of the invasion and — this is the frank part — admonished the US government against turning Haiti into a "white man's country."

A good many black people in the United States, Brandon R. Byrd shows in his essay, labored to end the occupation and ensure that Haiti would not become a white man's country. Among those protesting the occupation was Washington's widow, Margaret Murray Washington. Indeed members of her race, gender, and class, meaning middle-class African American women, are the main subjects of Byrd's essay.

Much has been written on the Pan-African reaction to the occupation of Haiti, most of it privileging male voices and activities. In locating a specifically "female domain" of opposition, Byrd has earned himself a place in the vanguard of scholars who are "gendering the occupation." His larger argument is that the interwar period was a transformative moment in the evolution of black internationalism — witnessing as it did a shift from an elite-led, sacred-based, racial uplift tradition to a more proletarian-driven, secular-grounded emphasis on opposition to imperialism and capitalism — and that the Haitian antioccupation movement was a crucial factor in that transformation. As with the interlocution between the study of the French language and black internationalism charted by Moore, so too with the opposition to occupied Haiti discussed by Byrd: history, notably the history of the Haitian Revolution, was summoned to bear witness to the crime and to speak truth to the Yankee occupiers.

The women whose antioccupation activities he chronicles, Byrd informs us, inhabited a "liminal" space between the old and new forms of black internationalism. Except they seem more committed to the former than to the latter, their Protestant missionizing zeal in...