Stamped from the Beginning: Chapter 26: Media Suasion Summary & Analysis

In March 1924, Du Bois attends an “artistic gathering” in New York with the Howard University professor Alaine Locke, who the following year will go on to publish The New Negro. Locke and others in attendance believe that “media suasion” is the best new method for fighting racism. These discussions are taking place in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance and also a wave of protests instigated by “New Negro students.” Throughout the 1920s, students at dozens of HBCUs protest the outdated, repressive, assimilationist policies at their institutions. During a protest at Fisk, striking students chant Du Bois’s name.  

However, there are also a group of young Harlem Renaissance artists who reject Du Bois and his ideas. Calling themselves the “Niggerati,” this group includes Wallace Thurman and Zora Neale Hurston, who at one time is a student of Franz Boas. This group may be “the first known fully antiracist intellectual and artistic group in American history.” Not only do they unequivocally denounce racism but all forms of prejudice, such as classism and homophobia. Among their members is the poet Langston Hughes, who in a 1926 article in The Nation denounces assimilationism among Black people, lamenting how common it is for Black people to orient their lives around a secret wish to be white. Hurston, meanwhile, points out that the desire to be white is less common among Black people of the lower classes.

In 1926, Hughes infuriates Du Bois by endorsing “Nigger Heaven,” a book by a white patron of the Harlem Renaissance, Carl Van Vechten. This novel, a melodramatic and sensationalist story of Black life filled with stereotypes, is praised by the white press and lambasted by Black reviewers. The novel attacks the Talented Tenth and “spoiled” assimilationists; it also suggests that Black talent is all instinctive rather than highly trained and honed. Following the book’s publication, white people begin flocking to Harlem in order to catch a glimpse of the world described in the novel. The assimilationist elite agonize over the depiction of poor Black people as hypersexual, wild, and vulgar. They desperately want to replace this image with an impression of Black people as refined, restrained, and chaste. 

The antiracist elite, however, defend poor Black people and choose not to worry about the supposedly “negative” stereotypes about Blackness circulated among the white public. Horrified by the representation of Black people in fiction of the time, Du Bois writes his own novel, Dark Princess: A Romance, which underlines assimilationist ideas in its effort to reject negative stereotypes. In 1928, a group of “leading race scholars” publish a special issue on “The Negro” in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. They argue that the Great Migration has disproved the belief that Black people should be segregated from the rest of the American population.

This same year, a number of American communists take up the issue of antiracism, declaring that the “central slogan” of the Communist Party should be “Abolition of the whole system of race discrimination.” After reading yet another false account of Reconstruction that accuses Black people of having literally tortured helpless white Southerners in the Reconstruction era, Du Bois begins writing what will become his personal favorite of his works: Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880. In this book, he characterizes Reconstruction as the only blip of true democracy that the nation has ever experienced. He also introduces the term “wages of whiteness,” which describes the privileges and benefits white people gain through racist structures.

The stock market crash of October 1929 and ensuing Great Depression was a difficult era for both the Republican Party and Black people in the U.S. In a period of mass unemployment, the Deep South adopted the slogan, “No jobs for niggers until every white man has a job.” With so little work available, employers are free to abuse and exploit workers with impunity. Meanwhile, a new academic discipline called physical anthropology—which attends to the physical variation of human beings—splits from cultural anthropology, which remains led by Boas. Using ideas from physical anthropology, the U.S. Public Health Service begins a study in 1932 in which it deliberately withholds medical treatment from Black sharecroppers infected with syphilis in Tuskegee, Alabama. The study continues for 40 years.

Racism in cinema continues with the release of King Kong in 1933, in which an enormous ape becomes obsessed with possessing a beautiful white woman. Black audiences can tell that the film has racist undertones, though at times struggle to articulate this as it is not explicitly racist.