Stamped from the Beginning: Chapter 27: Old Deal Summary & Analysis

In 1933, nine Black teenagers who come to be known as the “Scottsboro Boys” are falsely convicted of gang raping two white women in Alabama. Du Bois, now 65 and almost entirely committed to antiracism, believes that this is exactly the kind of case the NAACP should support. He has also been increasingly incorporating Marxism into his thought and trying to address Marx’s inadequacies on the question of race. By 1940, he will publish a book devoted to his vision of “antiracist socialism,” Dusk of Dawn. At the time, there is still much conflict over whether Black professors and the study of Black people should be part of the curriculum at HBCUs.

Between 1933 and 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt publishes a series of relief and labor rights bills that are collectively known as the New Deal. In order to pass this legislation in Congress, Roosevelt capitulates to the segregationist desires of Southern Democrats. Abandoned by the government, Black people in the South develop their own secret unions. Northerners are able to benefit from the support of some unions but are turned away from others. Across the country, Black people are devasted by pervasive housing discrimination. At the same time, the limited support that Roosevelt (a Democrat) offers Black people as well as the 45 Black people in his administration (nicknamed the “Black cabinet”) do persuade a number of Black former Republicans to become Democratic voters.

If Roosevelt hadn’t been so “beholden to his party’s segregationists,” 1933 could have been a year of landmark progress against racism in the U.S. In this same year, Du Bois publishes an essay entitled “On Being Ashamed” in which he rejects his previous assimilationist thinking. He acknowledges that Black people’s voluntary segregation is not at all equivalent to the forced segregation racists implement. The reaction to this essay is one of shock; assimilationists of all stripes feel betrayed by Du Bois. Yet he remains resolute; from this point forward, he never advocates for uplift suasion again. After his new views get him dismissed from the NAACP, Du Bois travels to Berlin, where he witnesses the ascent of Nazism with horror.

After traveling through Germany, Japan, China, and Russia, Du Bois returns to the U.S. in 1937. White American intellectuals, disturbed by the specter of Nazism, feel increasingly uncomfortable about Jim Crow segregation. In 1938, the American Anthropological Association unanimously votes to condemn biological racism. The term “racism” is itself an invention of the anthropologist Ruth Benedict, who had been a student of Franz Boas. She defines racism as “the unproved assumption of the biological and perpetual superiority of one human group over another.” This definition notably only includes segregationists, not the assimilationists who at this point have taken “the helm of racial thought.”

Another significant assimilationist book published during this era is E. Franklin Frazier’s The Negro Family in the United States, which draws on research Du Bois conducted years ago in order to pathologize Black families as “disorganized” and immoral. Frazier recommends assimilation into whiteness—including via intermarriage—as the solution. Kendi notes that many Black people have internalized racist ideas about the superior beauty of white features. Starting in the 1920s, Black people straighten their hair. Reflecting on the first time he did so in the early 1940s, Malcolm X will pronounce that this was his “first really big step toward self-degradation.”

The year 1939 sees the release of Gone with the Wind, a film that—like the Pulitzer Prize-winning book it is based on—depicts white enslavers as benevolent and the enslaved character Mammy as happily submissive and loyal. Once again, Black people protest the movie while white viewers adore it. Du Bois, meanwhile, is heartened after meeting a young writer named Richard Wright, who in 1945 will publish the autobiography Black Boy. Wright expresses some racist ideas about the lasting impact of slavery’s dehumanization on Black people, but he also refutes the idea that African culture is somehow less “resilient” than European culture.

Zora Neale Hurston is singular in her steadfast antiracism. Yet she struggles to make a living, despite writing “the finest collection of Black folklore ever recorded,” Mules and Men (1935), and the majestic novel about Black Southern life, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Despite positive reviews in the white press, Their Eyes does not sell well. Wright critiques the novel as resembling a minstrel show. Yet Hurston is defiant in her antiracism and pride in being a Black Southern woman; Their Eyes is eventually recognized as “one of the finest—if not the finest—American novels of all time.”

In 1940, Wright publishes Native Son, the story of the tragic Bigger Thomas, a Black man caught “unwanted between two worlds.” This bestselling novel is celebrated by white and Black critics alike until James Baldwin critiques it as a “protest novel” in the tradition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.