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Chapter 2

Men of Science in the Post-Slavery Era

Evolutionists to Environmentalists: The Development of Modern Anthropology and Constructions of Race

In choosing to appropriate classical anthropology’s cultural pluralist, antiracist agenda, New Negro intellectuals intervened on a long history of antiBlack and anti-African rhetoric and practices that extended back before the nineteenth century, when the notion of a Great Chain of Being provided one measure of human civilization. This human taxonomy positioned Africans near or at the bottom of the social hierarchy and Europeans at the top, linking the status of the “lesser” races with their presumed fall from grace. When in the nineteenth century scientific rationales for theories of racial inferiority supplanted the theological frame that had previously been used to validate these ideas of social order, the scientific literature was often heavily intertwined with religious arguments to the extent “that it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began.”¹ The sense that Africans and their New World descendants deserved in some way their own subordination by virtue of divine ordination persisted even as scientific discourse began to supplant religious ideologies of social formations. The most popular explanation in the nineteenth century for the existence of racial stratification was social Darwinism, a theory that used biological evolution as a metaphor for social development. Lewis Henry Morgan, a New York lawyer who became an ethnologist, proved highly influential in this development because he “adapted Darwinian natural selection to a [Herbert] Spencerian notion of absolute cultural progress. Morgan concluded that the races were in different stages of physical and cultural evolution that could be linked to three stages of cultural achievement: savagery, barbarism, and civilization Not surprisingly, he positioned the Aryan race at the apex of civilization and Africans “in the middle stage of barbarism” (Hovenkamp 654). By 1908, most American experts on race were evolutionists who theorized that racial characteristics were biologically determined, but the racist ideologies of the previous era remained fixed in the nations consciousness.

Anthropology gained a prominent role in the construction of racial ideologies and, thus, underwent a significant shift in status at this historical juncture. The discipline situated itself as a science at a time when the sciences were preoccupied with new biological theories; as a result Darwinist analogies dominated the field for almost a century. This generation of anthropologists believed that “to explain man’s physical structure was to explain mankind” (Hovenkamp 652). Consequently race experts, led in the social sciences by ethnologists such as the Briton Edward Tylor and the American Lewis Henry Morgan, argued that some characteristics, such as intelligence, do evolve. Some even professed that Blacks might eventually develop an intelligence equal to Caucasians, but even these more progressive thinkers concluded that Africans’ cultural and intellectual development would take so long to evolve that racial differences were virtually permanent.²

Modern anthropology has left a mixed legacy in that it reinforced racialist discourses while also sowing the seeds for a more progressive and relativistic view of cultures. For example, although Tylor followed an evolutionary model of culture that prompted him to study “primitive” cultures as “exempla of the lower rungs of the human evolutionary scale,” succeeding generations of anthropologists were indebted to his definition of culture as a “complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Ironically, Tylor’s notion of culture as a complex whole comprised of “functional and integral parts” undercut the Victorian ethnologists’ belief that culture could be attained or exhibited through great works of art or displays of intellect.³ Moreover, the idea of culture as a “complex whole” would eventually lead the way to the cultural relativism proposed by Franz Boas in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Even as evolutionary ideas about race were gaining prominence, by 1880 another group of scientists was developing yet another theory of racial formation. This group, the environmentalists, argued for the influence of historical, geographic, and social factors in determining racial patterns and cultural behaviors. A generation after the abolition of slavery, African Americans were considered to be a national problem, and while the environmentalists might have shared with evolutionists the idea that Black communities fostered severe pathologies, they differed from them in that they considered their weaknesses to be caused by environmental factors.⁴

As these theories were being debated, anthropology was transformed from a field populated by individuals interested in natural history but trained in other fields such as medicine to, by the 1880s, a professionalized discipline with the standard characteristics of a specialized field, such as a national organization, a professional journal, and an institutional base in universities and museums. The 1880s saw a number of important developments in the history of modern anthropology, from the professionalization and institutionalization of the discipline, the popularization of anthropological ideas on race at Worlds Fairs, the entry of Franz Boas—who would become a major shaping force in the discipline within the next twenty years—into the field as an assistant to Francis Ward Putnam, and the introduction of African Americans, for the first time in significant numbers, working as ethnologists and folklorists.

These changes coincided with, and indeed facilitated, the formation of an organization dedicated to the collection and study of folklore at the Hampton Normal Institute, an industrial school for Blacks founded after the end of the Civil War to help rehabilitate former slaves and prepare them for the new societal and civic roles they were on the cusp of assuming. An examination of the Hampton Folklore Society (HFS) will give us a glimpse into the uses to which the environmentalists were putting their work, and it will also anticipate some of the goals and complications faced by Black ethnologists, who, in the 1920s, formed the next significant body of African American individuals loosely organized around their mutual interest in collecting and representing African American folk culture.

The Hampton Idea of Folklore Collection

The Hampton Institute, founded in 1868 in Virginia by the American Missionary Society, was designed to educate the state’s population of newly emancipated slaves. Its founder, Samuel Chapman Armstrong, anticipated that Hampton students would fan across the South to teach the members of their communities still mired in the legacy of slavery, manual skills, and rudimentary letters in order to render them useful members of Southern society. The “Hampton Idea,” first articulated by Armstrong and later popularized by Hampton graduate Booker T. Washington, who went on to found Tuskegee Institute in 1881 and become a national spokesman for the race, was that an industrial education would elevate the station of Blacks by giving them the manual skills and the moral character that would make them fit for civil society. Armstrong faulted slavery and its negative effects rather than any inherent inferiority in African Americans for the moral, intellectual, and political inadequacies he identified in their communities. Understanding the word “industry” to mean broadly “diligence in the pursuit of a goal” and more narrowly to mean “the application of manual skills in the production of some agricultural or mechanical object,” he considered the school’s emphasis on an industrial education in preference of schooling in a classical education the key to saving Black people from the primitive conditions in which slavery and impoverishment kept them mired.⁵

It was under this premise that Alice Bacon, a Hampton teacher, founded the Hampton Folklore Society (HFS) in 1893. The society, whose members were composed of students, alumni, and some teachers, worked until they disbanded six years later to collect data gathered from the communities in which they lived and worked.⁶ Students brought with them to the Hampton campus knowledge of folklore from their Southern homes. Non-resident members of the Society (many, but not all, of them Institute graduates), known as “correspondents,” often worked as teachers in other parts of the South (for example, South Carolina, Florida and Alabama), and probably obtained folklore from their own students (Waters 8). The organizational efforts of the Hampton Folklore Society were new and untested, for folklore groups were just beginning to be organized in the 1890s. The group’s emphasis on scholarly presentation and scientific investigation departed from prior methods because up to that point individuals interested in African American folklore, like Joel Chandler Harris, moved between “disciplined presentation of data and literary adornment of it” (Waters 37). HFS members understood folklore to be the repository of cultural memory and communal values, and yet they worked within an institution that saw little value in African American culture if it deviated from hegemonic norms that were associated with progress.⁷ The question arises, then, what did the HFS members have in mind when they went out to collect folklore?

Hampton’s commitment to putting its students on the road to economic and social progress compelled them to choose from several options vis-à-vis their relation to folk culture and communities. They could express an uncritical belief in folklore (a perspective which was discouraged by their instructors and benefactors); they could disavow Black folk traditions as backward and see themselves bringing progress and civilization to their people; or they could choose, as Donald Waters maintains members of the Hampton society did, to commit themselves to protecting Black folklore from contempt and ridicule by submitting it to careful and respectful study and presentation (Waters 46–47).

The second choice—the idea of racial uplift through cultural assimilation—proved equally compelling according to Lee Baker, who stresses that the founders and members of the Hampton Folklore society saw their attempts to record the cultural practices of rural Blacks as a contribution to the larger institution’s mission. They could show that industrial education accomplished its goal of “fostering the so-called Christian civilization of its graduates,” he argues, by using folklore to underscore how much of these people’s African traditions remained entrenched and in need of uprooting.⁸ Certainly Bacon aspired to have HFS members bridge and show the divide between their own literate, upwardly mobile existences and the illiterate and impoverished lives of most Black folk. But the Hampton community’s shared goal of closing that gap was deeply invested in removing any remaining traces of African heritage and African American slave culture.⁹

Armstrong and Bacon’s goals were virtually indistinguishable, with the exception of Bacon adding an interest in historical preservation to Armstrong’s “civilizing mission” (Baker, “Research” 55). Bacon’s interest in conservation and her belief in modernity’s inevitable advancement is evident in an 1893 letter she circulated to Hampton graduates and interested parties:

The American Negroes are rising so rapidly from the condition of ignorance and poverty in which slavery left them, to a position among the cultivated and civilized people of the earth, that the time seems not far distant when they shall have cast off their past entirely, and stand an anomaly among civilized races, as a people having no distinct tradition, beliefs or ideas from which a history of their growth may be traced. If within the next few years care is not taken to collect and preserve all traditions and customs peculiar to the Negroes, there will be little to reward the search of the future historian who would trace the history of the African continent through the years of slavery to the position which they will hold a few generations hence.¹⁰

Bacon imagined progress for the Negro to be synonymous not only with economic upward mobility but also with assimilation to Euro-American cultural norms. Many adherents to the Hampton philosophy associated backwardness and primitivity with any traits that deviated from a White social norm, as well as with anything identified or identifiable as African in origins. Blackness and impurity are linked in the minds of Booker T. Washington’s readers when he provocatively declared that his most pressing aspiration as a teacher was to introduce Tuskegee students to the uses of a toothbrush because he and his teachers noted “the effect that the use of the toothbrush has had in bringing about a higher degree of civilization among the students.”¹¹ Washington’s emphasis on hygiene throughout his autobiography indicates his shared understanding with Bacon and Armstrong that the goal of an industrial education should be the figurative “whitening” of the school’s Black students, both morally and socially.

Nonetheless, Bacon’s letter also makes it clear that she considers it regrettable if progress were achieved at the expense of Negro cultural heritage. Hampton officials’ belief in African Americans’ cultural assimilability was progressive for its time, but Bacon understood that it might not be completely positive to the future development of the race if the consequence of assimilation was the loss of identity. Bacon’s hesitation at the idea of fully erasing Negro cultural heritage even as Black communities modernized becomes more palpable when we consider the statements of HFS’s Black membership. Their reflections on their relation to the uplift work in which they engaged points to issues that are both complex and fascinating.

Their letters and essays emphasize in part the connection between educators and their not so distant past, between teachers and their illiterate, less acculturated pupils. HFS members, like other students, faculty, and graduates of the school were committed to a project of racial uplift that strove to address economic and racial inequality. Rather than framing their descriptions of their “less civilized” peers in terms of class, they did so in terms of culture (Baker, “Research” 51).¹² And as a consequence, their shared definitions of social mobility exerted a pressure on cultural formations, resulting in the stigmatization of traits typically associated with African or African American communities. Baker writes that in this earlier period:

Uncivilized Blacks were the ones who believed in conjure doctors, told the animal stories, sang the work songs, and gyrated their bodies in the ring shouts and jook joints. They were also the field hands, manual laborers, domestics, and washer women who never had the opportunity to attend one of the normal schools in which strict discipline and obsession with proper behavior convinced students they had become civilized. And it was the uneducated and less refined souls who were held responsible for the vice, promiscuity, and debauchery associated with all black Americans. Moreover, many Negro elites found the main culprit of their neighbors’ cultural degradation in African cultural patterns. (“Research” 52)

Nonetheless, despite the potency of the Hampton Ideology, which emphasized racial “cleansing,” its folklorists retained a sense of connection to the traditions their teachers encouraged them to leave behind in pursuit of mainstream notions of progress. For example, Daniel Webster Davis wrote in a correspondence to Robert Russa Moton (both were elected officers of the organization, and Moton went on to succeed Booker T. Washington as president of Tuskegee) that he found folk games such as ring plays to be “sweet” and “fair” like a dream. He also described taking pleasure in the memory of participating in these games. Waters argues that equating “expressions of Negro folklore” with a dream underscores the strangeness of these traditions to the “normal conscious activity of proper black educators or, more generally, of properly educated black people.” Yet he also astutely notes that the educators’ expressions of sympathy and memory “emphasized the broad continuities between unlettered folk and educators” (Waters 50).¹³

Some African American members and supporters of the society emphasized more than disdain, ambivalence, or nostalgia in the researcher’s approach to the collection of Negro folklore. Educator Alexander Crummel, for example, cautioned HFS members to “offer a positive and not a negative interpretation of their African heritage” (Baker, “Research” 57). And activist and writer Anna Julia Cooper cautioned society members not to lose sight of their people’s genius in the face of what must have seemed to be an “overpowering” model of civilization. Cooper warned against a definition of achievement and success that would compel the Negro to accept the notion that “Anglo Saxon ideas, Anglo Saxon standards, Anglo Saxon art, [etc.] must be to him the measure of perfection,” and reminded her audience that “the American Negro cannot produce an original utterance until he realizes the sanctity of his homely inheritance.”¹⁴ These statements, resonating with cultural pride, clearly anticipate the thinking of New Negro intellectuals who would follow a generation later.

Hampton Folklore Society scholars thought deeply about the value of African American folklore and their work as collectors, and they also considered the uses to which that work would be put. In fact, the group’s origins were based on an article linking science and the study of race, published in The Atlantic Monthly by Nathaniel Shaler, a Harvard professor of paleontology and geology. Despite the intrinsic racism of Shaler’s essay, “Science and the African Problem” (1890), it suggested to Alice Bacon the idea of starting a society of folklorists. Shaler argued that the transplantation of Africans to the New World constituted “a most remarkable experiment,” which offered the opportunity to study the “improvability of the lower races of mankind” (cited in Waters 10). He proposed that a systematic study of Negro “improvability” be taken from three methods of inquiry: one, a historical investigation that would examine the slave trade to ascertain the African origins of slaves; two, an anthropological study to assess the physical and mental characteristics of Blacks in the United States and to compare those traits to those of Africans; and three, a study of “the social and civic quality of the race” to determine how to secure its advancement (Waters 10–11). Although Shaler accepted many of the crudest stereotypes of the African American character (he believed, for example that Blacks were promiscuous, were naturally rhythmic, and were in need of supervision), he did believe that Whites’ assumptions about Black folk were formed in “the midst of a great darkness” and scientific inquiry was necessary for their enlightenment (Waters 12). The Hampton folklorists, recognizing the severity of America’s race problems, must have desired to participate in an organized, collective scientific inquiry of these issues (Waters 12). At the same time, the Society departed from Shaler’s belief in genetically based racial difference by embracing the Hampton ethos of environmentalism, which argued that Blacks had an innate capacity for social and intellectual improvement.¹⁵

Like participants in the related disciplines of anthropology and sociology, by this time in the 1890s, folklorists viewed themselves as participating in a “scientific” endeavor, and they considered their professionalism evident in the objectivity and thoroughness of their studies. In underscoring the precision of folklore collection as science, Hampton folklorists were indebted to the influence of William Wells Newell, Franz Boas, and their colleagues who founded the American Folklore Society (AFLS) in 1888.¹⁶ The founders of the AFLS sought to describe the concept of folklore with a precision that it had lacked up to this point. Its founders considered the then popular definition of folklore—“a particular kind of mental and cultural expression with its ‘own set of facts’” —to be unnecessarily vague. So they shifted definitions of and added nuance to the term by having it refer to “oral transmission and its traditional, or conventional character” (Waters 23–25). Newell also insisted on the importance of methodological rigor in the study of folklore. He recognized that folklore needed to be written down in order for it to be studied systematically, but he also considered it essential that the collector refrain from adding to, “adorning” to render more literary, or otherwise tampering with the “evidence” (Waters 27). Newell argued that folklore was entirely different from literature although both made use of figurative devices. Where literature was “systematic” in its application of such devices, folklore used them as a matter of convention and not aesthetic judgment. Newell concluded that the addition of aesthetic principles to conventional materials was the equivalent of falsifying the material; it would fundamentally change the data. “Folklore, in other words, is a separate and independent subject, not a subset of literature” (Waters 28). The AFLS founders established folklore’s suitability for scientific inquiry by locating it under the rubric of anthropology as part of culture, namely the oral tradition. They considered any similarities between literature and folklore to be coincidental, occurring merely because both are modes of communication.¹⁷

Boas and Newell rejected evolutionary ideas of racial and cultural development, as did Armstrong, Bacon, and the other Hamptonites. Instead, they focused on analyses of the historical, geographic, and social factors that determined the development of oral traditions; these analyses were facilitated by scrupulous methods of collection. AFLS founders discovered that their agenda intersected with that of the Hampton Folklore Society, so much so that Newell, acting as secretary of the AFLS, traveled to Hampton in May 1894 in order to personally address the group at one of its first meetings and to recruit its members for his organizations membership.¹⁸ Newell’s address, which was later published in the Southern Workman in July 1894, covered familiar rhetorical ground, including remarks on the importance of recording cultural traditions that were in the process of disappearing. Newell defined folklore as “the learning or knowledge peculiar to the Negro race. It is that mass of information which they brought with them from Africa, and which has subsequently been increased, remodeled, and Anglicized by their contact with the whites” (Waters 186). Calling folklore a “body of thought [that] belongs to the past,” that was vanishing under the march of African Americans’ educational progress, he asked the society members to consider what purpose was served by their turning their attention to “these out-grown notions and usages” (Waters 186).

Newell’s answers to that question diverged. On the one hand, he professed a humanistic vision, claiming membership in no race other than the human race and declaring that races existed “to be merged in the unity of races, as rivers flow to disappear in the ocean.”¹⁹ Yet he also suggested that folklore reveals that “each [race] has its distinctive customs, ideas, and manners.” Newell expressed ambivalence over the impending erasure of “racial memory” and suggested that only folklore (defined as race-knowledge) could preserve it. Thus, he declared, it was the responsibility of the individual to preserve the “memory of his race” in order to “to tell of the height to which they rose, the depth through which they have passed.” Finally, Newell also touched on the mobility and dynamism of African traditions, a subject that Black scholars like Du Bois and Locke would remark on to much greater effect in their own writings. Newell stated that Negro folktales were cosmopolitan by virtue of the ground they had traversed: “These tales are by no means solely the possession of Negroes; on the contrary, a good many are nearly cosmopolitan. Proceeding from some common center, they have traveled about the world, and that by several different routes, meeting in America by the way of Africa, by that of Europe, and it may be, also by that of Asia. So extraordinary a phenomenon in itself excites curiosity to a high degree” (Waters 187–89). Newell’s remarks underscore the ambivalence that many felt about the value of African American folklore, suggesting that it preserves the race’s “depths,” but that it also embodies a cultural dynamism that could edify the race. These remarks, mere drops of enlightenment in a sea of negative racial constructs, would take on new and previously unimagined manifestations in the hands of New Negro intellectuals who found inspiration and insight in the proponents of this emerging science.

Heartening as Newell’s support proved to be, Lee Baker’s descriptions of HFS members’ participation in the national meetings of the AFLS illustrate some of the complexities faced by African American scholars who were sometimes treated as native informants as often as they were considered ethnologists. For example, when a Hampton delegation, consisting of Robert Moton, F. D. Banks, William Daggs, and J. H. Wainwright, attended the December 1894 meeting in Washington, D.C., they were well received by well-known scholars of ethnological research like Boas, Frank Hamilton Cushing, J. Walter Fewkes, and Newell. Here, Moton challenged the deformation of African American music by minstrels and categorized “Negro Folk Songs” into secular and spiritual music. He and his colleagues then formed a quartet and performed samples of the music to illustrate Moton’s descriptions. The reaction of the audience while positive and enthusiastic, was telling. Newell and Thomas Wilson’s proposal that they record the performance on phonograph suggests the wall between scientist and informant had been breeched with the introduction of the phonographic equipment.²⁰ Their enthusiasm for the equipment’s ability to reproduce sound with “exactness” would seem to suggest that they believed themselves to be witnessing a moment of cultural authenticity as opposed to a demonstration that might approximate the music in its indigenous setting (Baker, “Research” 64–65). Moton and colleagues were not alone in finding their academic personae stripped away. For example, on another occasion, while waiting for the arrival of a graphophone when preparing to travel to the AFLS’s annual meeting, Bacon realized it would not arrive in time for her group’s presentation. In its stead she proposed, as Baker puts it, “the real thing”:

a most delightful paper by Prof. D. W. Davis of Richmond, on ‘Echoes from a Plantation Party,’ which may be worth studying up on. Davis is a full blooded Negro, a teacher in Richmond and the authority of a number of dialect processes. He takes a real interest in the old customs of his own people, and has been at considerable pains to collect all he can …. I asked him if he would be willing to describe it [his paper] in New York at the annual meeting and he says that he can …. The songs are a great part of it. It is rather better than a phonographic reprint as he gives it.²¹

Davis’s “full blooded” Black body wedged him into a paradoxical corner, rendering him simultaneously more fit (because there was ocular proof of his cultural authenticity) and less fit (because he troubled the line between scientist and subject) to assume the ethnologist’s identity.

Despite the obvious difficulties of the Hampton folklorists’ attempts to establish their scientific credentials, obvious links can be made between their groundbreaking work and the more radical work and politics of the New Negro intellectuals. But first, significant changes had to be made in the social and historical landscape before American society could see an upsurge of interest in African American folklore in the twentieth century. Waters notes that folklore studies at Hampton slowed to a “standstill” after 1900 because Bacon moved to Japan, weakening the links with Shaler, Newell, and Boas, and more importantly because funding from philanthropists dried up. In that time between 1900 and 1920s, however, Black activists mounted “a major political and organizational effort to balance the influence of the Hampton idea [of African American inferiority].” This shift in thinking accompanied a change in anthropological studies, which did not focus on African American culture until well into the twentieth century.²²

Only after the emergence of influential groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the twenties, Waters argues, “were the educational forces sufficiently balanced that room again appeared for the academic study of Negro folklore” (Waters 51–52). In the intervening years, moreover, Franz Boas became a major force in the shaping of the American school of anthropology, introducing new ideas about cultural relativism that would transform social constructions of race. He also trained or worked with a generation of students and scholars who would go on to make a deep impression on the American consciousness including, among many others, Melville Herskovits, Elsie Clews Parsons, and Zora Neale Hurston. Finally, the ethic of the Black intellectual shifts from this period in the late 1890s. Where, for example, Armstrong sought to train and morally elevate Black teachers, who would then go on to instill “character” in other Blacks at the elementary level, the next generation of Black intellectuals, who often repeated or represented the schoolteacher’s trajectory southward into Black rural communities, were less interested in the transference of character and far more interested in the translation of culture across geographic, historical, and social boundaries.²³ They strove, in other words, to articulate a cohesive idea of Negro culture that would be recognized as a valid part of American national identity. These ideas did not come to fruition until a generation of folklorists and ethnologists, following in the footsteps of the HFS members, had been trained to regard folklore as the fullest expression of a people’s lived experiences, as opposed to evidence of a community’s quaintness or backwardness.²⁴

Franz Boas and the Attack on Scientific Racism

Lee Baker has argued that in examining New Negro representations of Black culture, it is crucial to consider the geographic proximity of the movement to Columbia University at the precise moment that Franz Boas was spearheading new anthropological approaches to race and culture through his theories of racial equality and cultural relativity.²⁵ New York’s density and compactness made it an ideal setting for fostering bohemian, intellectual communities that strived to overturn convention; the cultural innovators of the Harlem Renaissance could easily find affinity with the academic advances taking place on Columbia’s campus.²⁶ Boas began teaching at Columbia in 1896 as a lecturer in physical anthropology, and was promoted to professor in 1899. The position became permanent in 1901. He would usher in a sea change in the field from his perch at Columbia, transforming anthropology from a discipline that constructed and affirmed racist constructs to one that bolstered egalitarian notions, anti-racist activism and legislation, and integrationist social policies.²⁷ The American school of anthropology, under Boas’s leadership, favored meticulous descriptions of cultures that represented the circulation of cultural traits among bordering groups through the exhaustive comparison of evidence from “material culture, ceremonial, social organization, recorded history, language, mythology, and folklore” (Deacon 149). In order to understand any culture, Boas argued, it had to be situated within its historical and geographic context, and its particular traditions had to be taken into consideration. This approach to understanding culture, he argued, challenged the idea that any culture possessed a higher or lower value than another.

Boas, born in Minden, Germany in 1858, was educated at the Universities of Heidelberg, Bonn, and Kiel, where he was trained in conducting empiricist and positivist research, methods that influenced his future scholarship.²⁸ He retained throughout his career a commitment to empirical research. Boas rarely proposed grand theories and he rejected the notion that the social sciences should be used to engineer social policies or relations. Nonetheless, his progressive views on race and immigration were well known and his theories were enthusiastically taken up and appropriated by racial vindicationists²⁹ like the New Negro intellectuals. Most likely, Boas’s radical racial politics arose from his personal struggles with anti-Semitism. Although born into middle-class privilege, as a Jew he suffered from political persecution, which caused him to migrate to the United States in 1886.³⁰ Once in the States, Boas continued to experience anti-Semitic discrimination. For example after serving as assistant chief to Frederick Ward Putnam at the World Columbian Exposition in 1893, despite his impressive credentials, he had difficulty securing a permanent position in an American university until his appointment at Columbia.

From that point on he would begin to teach and extend his influence over an impressive range of individuals, many of whom gained stellar national reputations, including Alexander Goldenweiser, Robert Lowie, Paul Radin, Alfred Kroeber, Edward Sapir, Melville Herskovits, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Particularly during World War I, when the numbers of male graduate students were depleted by the demands of the war, Boas took an active role in educating and mentoring women in anthropology. His support of women’s participation in the field went against the much more common social opposition to women’s professional goals. By 1912, when he published The Mind of Primitive Man, Boas had achieved his highest standing within the profession.

In addition to teaching at Columbia, Boas also assumed a position as assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), again in 1896; in 1901 he was promoted to curator. During this period, anthropology was primarily a museum-based profession. At the AMNH Boas undertook major research expeditions, including the Jesup North Pacific Expedition. He struggled to exhibit the material procured during these expeditions at the museum in a way that challenged ideas of racial inferiority, but he met resistance from the evolutionists who dominated the field. Baker describes the debates, ostensibly over exhibition styles, but really over the merits of scientific racism, that were conducted through letters to the editor of Science that Boas exchanged with Otis T. Mason, president of the Anthropological Society of Washington, and John Wesley Powell, director of the Bureau of American Ethnology. In one letter Boas argued, “It is my opinion that the main object of ethnological collections should be the dissemination of the fact that civilization is not something absolute, but that it is relative, and that our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes. I believe that this object can be accomplished only by the tribal arrangement of collections” (Baker, From Savage to Negro 104).

Boas mounted challenges to evolutionary anthropology and other forms of scientific racism like eugenics in a variety of venues, such as essays, editorials, and speeches. Giving his first public address in 1894 at the American Association of Anthropological Societies, he delineated the racism that governed anthropological discourse. He laid out the fundamental principles of the environmentalists by warning against evolutionary theories that tended to view certain traits as expressions of racial character rather than as an effect of social surroundings.³¹ Although he deferred to physical anthropologists who maintained that their findings proved racial inferiority, Boas contended that there was an overlap of supposedly racial traits among various groups. He concluded:

the fundamental difficulty of collecting satisfactory observations lies in the fact that no large groups of primitive man are brought nowadays into conditions of real equality with whites. The gap between our society and theirs always remains open and for this reason their mind cannot be expected to work in the same manner as ours. The same phenomenon which led us to the conclusion that primitive races of our times are not given an opportunity to develop their abilities prevents us from judging their innate faculty. (234)

Boas used arguments like this to contest methods of research that emphasized the comparison of cultures while refusing to study them holistically, and in relation to the total culture.

Boas viewed anthropological investigation, founded on empirical research and taking into consideration historical and social contexts, as a tool for proving the equal potential of the races. This approach, he argued, would demonstrate that societies, regardless of their racial makeup, all revealed cultural and artistic accomplishments. In an address delivered at the Second National Negro Conference in May 1910 called “The Real Race Problem,” Boas took up the fallacy of presumptions of racial inferiority, focused on the inevitable mingling of Black and White races in American society, and introduced some preliminary thoughts on solving the race problem.³² He began by acknowledging the “fact” of racial difference, announcing that “the anthropologist recognizes that the Negro and the white represent the two most divergent types of mankind” (22). Boas pointed to differences in color, hair, and facial features as easily recognizable. Yet despite these biological differences, he disputed the rationale for assigning superiority or inferiority to either race. “When we consider inferiority and superiority from a general biological point of view, it must be interpreted as meaning that one type is nearer to certain ancestral forms than another. In this sense, the anthropologist must say that in certain respects the Negro resembles the hypothetical ancestral forms of man more than does the European; while in other respects the European shows greater similarity to the supposed ancestral form …. On the whole, the morphological characteristics of the two races show rather a specialized development in different directions than a higher development in one race as compared with the other” (22). On the question of mental capacity, Boas again invoked a theory of diffusion arguing that differences in brain size and capacity between the two races “is exceedingly small” compared to the “range of variability” of brain size and form in either race (22).

Boas’s rejection of scientific racism was based on the strict application of anthropometrical statistics used to support his claims, or to refute the validity of others’ claims. But he also argued that any interpretation must take into consideration as well a “painstaking investigation of the social conditions with which the phenomenon is correlated” (22). Thus, an examination of the period of development of Black and White children must take into account the more favorable social situation of Whites. Boas concluded that between Whites and Blacks, “The existing differences are differences in kind, not in value” (23). In another essay, “The Negro and the Demands of Modern Life,” he cited similar statistics to argue that there is no proof that licentiousness, laziness, or lack of initiative are intrinsic characteristics of the race.³³

Just as Boas argued that perceptions of African American inferiority were based on fallacious assumptions, so did he find that views of Africa frequently betrayed the biases of its commentators. Too often, he argued, Whites’ perception of Africa “is based altogether too much upon the condition of the uneducated descendant of the American Negro slave” whose collective achievement was stunted by his or her participation in forced labor, the absolute break from African traditions, and the difficulties of assimilation into the dominant group (“Real Race Problem” 23). In reality Boas argued, indigenous African societies, albeit “primitive,” had developed flourishing and complex agricultural, industrial, and political organizations.

Finally Boas disputed the notion that mulattoes had “inherit[ed] all the vile characteristics of both parental races, and none of their good qualities” by attacking contradictions in anti-miscegenation rhetoric. He reiterated the argument that those making claims of hereditary causes for racial inferiority had to also take social factors into account and by comparing interbreeding among animals and across a wide range of cultures, he demonstrated that hybridity has consistently resulted in positive outcomes for many species and societies (“Real Race Problem” 23–24). In the case of sub-Saharan Africa and Northern Africa, for example, he stated, “The development of culture, and the degree of assimilation of foreign elements, depend in the whole area, not upon the purity of the race, but upon the stability of political conditions, which during long periods have been characterized by alternation of peaceful development and of warlike conquest” (24).

The status of the mulatto was important to consider because, as Boas astutely pointed out, with the lack of immigration from Africa, the likelihood of the Negro race remaining “pure” was unlikely. “The gradual process of elimination of the full-blooded Negro may be retarded by legislation, but it cannot possibly be avoided,” he claimed (25). Boas strongly believed in the likelihood and value of African American assimilation into the dominant culture. Working from the assumption that miscegenation would continue to take place primarily between White men and Black women, he suggests that the “relative proportion of Negro blood in the following mixed generation” will decrease and similarities between Whites and Blacks will develop. He viewed this as a positive development, one that would minimize racial animosity stemming from what he called “racial feeling.” Racial feeling, Boas argued, depended on two causes: one, contact between two races that were relatively proportionate in number (because social divisions could arise when the numbers of each were sufficient to enable the development of a strong economic presence and habits particular to each race), and two, the “amount of difference of type” (25). Boas argued that the race problem would be alleviated “the less the difference in type between the different groups of our people, and the less the isolation of certain social groups” (25). He therefore concluded that at least part of the solution “lies entirely in the hands of the Negro himself.” The less the Negro represented his culture as distinct from that of the White race, “the more satisfactory will be the relation between the races” (25).

It may seem contradictory, given these beliefs, that Boas publicly urged African Americans to recognize and harness the greatness of their African past. But the vindication of that heritage was necessary for the cultivation of ideas of social equality between the races which might then lead to the wholesale assimilation that Boas predicted. In “Industries of the African Negro,” he asserted, “this loss of connection with the historic past is without doubt one of the most degrading influences in human culture.”³⁴ The argument was accompanied by numerous illustrations of African artistic and industrial achievement culled from the African and South Pacific Collections of the Royal Ethnographical Museum of Berlin, such as pottery, ornately decorated weapons, and elaborate wood carvings. If American Negroes failed to achieve similar accomplishments, their social and cultural disintegration could be attributed to European influences. “Their former activities disappeared, and a new kind of work was forced upon them that had no relation to their inner life” (222). Boas, using a vocabulary that would resonate with an audience conditioned by the industrial school system to appreciate the improvability of the African American, asserts, “industrious life reigns throughout the [typical African] village” (224). A deeper awareness of African industriousness would reveal various African societies’ concern with the manufacture of useful goods and textiles, with a social cohesion and organization that were dependent on the equitable dispensation of justice, and with beauty, among other laudable qualities.

In a May 30, 1906 commencement address at Atlanta University entitled “The Outlook of the American Negro,” delivered at the invitation of W. E. B. Du Bois, Boas encouraged the gathered students to strive for a level of achievement similar to that reached by their African ancestors:

If, therefore, it is claimed that your race is doomed to economic inferiority, you may confidently look to the home of your ancestors and say, that you have set out to recover for the colored people the strength that was their own before they set foot on the shores of this continent. You may say that you go to work with bright hopes, and that you will not be discouraged by the slowness of your progress; for you have to recover not only what has been lost in transplanting the Negro race from its native soil to this continent, but you must reach higher levels than your ancestors had ever attained.³⁵

Critics frequently cite Du Bois’s reference to this address in Black Folks Then and Now (1939) as evidence of Boas’s influence on him. Du Bois wrote, “Franz Boas came to Atlanta University where I was teaching history in 1906 and said to a graduating class: ‘You need not be ashamed of your African past’ and then he recounted the history of the Black kingdoms south of the Sahara for a thousand years. I was too astonished to speak. All of this I had never heard and I came then and afterwards to realize how silence and neglect of science can let truth utterly disappear or even be consciously distorted.”³⁶ George Hutchinson cites this as one example of the existence of often overlooked interracial networks of American modernist intellectual exchange during the first decades of the twentieth century, arguing that the connections between Boasian anthropology, pragmatism, and the Harlem Renaissance illustrate a “confluence of [these] communities of interpretation’ [that offer] a model of the sort of effective interdisciplinary and intercultural exchange to which many academic intellectuals today aspire.”³⁷ Moreover, he makes a case for Boas’s influence in establishing the institutional and intellectual context in which the Renaissance imagination flourished.³⁸ In a similar vein, Vernon Williams argues that Black intellectuals found affinity with the anthropological principle that social differences had cultural and not racial explanations; and as they adapted this theory to their own work, they passed on Boas’s legacy of progressive, egalitarian politics (4).

The Politics of Influence

Boas and his students mounted an assault on racism by articulating a theory of multiple “cultures” in place of a unified, vertically stratified “Culture,” and by insisting that cultures be judged from within their own relative value systems.³⁹ This “culture concept” contributed to an ideology of cultural pluralism to which Harlem Renaissance figures found themselves drawn.⁴⁰ Boasian anthropology’s presence can also be felt in the self-reflexivity of New Negro literature, in the writers’ assumptions that tradition is dynamic and that culture is always changing and adapting to circumstance, and in the assumption that indigenous peoples are subjects and collaborators, not mere objects for study.⁴¹ It is a common feature of Harlem Renaissance criticism to note that writers worked from the assumption that Southern slave culture was dying due to the post-emancipation period’s growing modernization and urbanization.⁴² Hurston, for example, writing to Franz Boas in 1927, emphasized the urgency of collecting folklore at that historical juncture, telling him, “It is fortunate that it is being collected now, for a great many people say, ‘I used to know some of that old stuff, but I done forgot it all.’ You see, the negro is not living his lore to the extent of the Indian. He is not on a reservation, being kept pure. His negroness is being rubbed off by close contact with white culture.”⁴³ Even this ethic was informed by what Marc Manganaro, referencing James Clifford, calls the anthropological “allegory of salvage.”⁴⁴

This allegory of salvage lies in tension with the simultaneous awareness that culture persists in mutable and adaptable forms. Both Du Bois and Hurston, for example, represent Southern communities as heterogeneous and fluid in some instances, while in others they ascribe to a depiction of the Black Southern culture as a relic of the past, or in Hurston’s case, privilege ideas of Negro culture that stress its authenticity and purity from outside contract. Paying sustained attention to these emphases cultivates in their readers an acute awareness of the discursive and symbolic uses to which the New Negro put constructions of the South. For example, in “The New Negro,” Alain Locke described the migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North as a “deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern” (6). By relegating the South to medieval times, Locke signals its ultimate demise, a figuration that, one could argue, is necessary for the very constitution of a Harlem Renaissance. In other words, it is through the identification of “there and then” as backward that New Negro intellectuals could establish their “here and now” as progressive and forward-looking. Consequently, they took on a multilayered project: to document the cultural transformation that was occurring at the turn of the century, to preserve the remnants of what they perceived as a dying slave culture, and to interrogate the dynamics between the New Negro intellectual, the dominant culture, and the Black subjects of their art. Boasian anthropology—and by this I mean the intellectual tradition produced and practiced by Boas and his students—played an important role in this social and intellectual movement.

Because of their enthusiastic reception of social science theories, Black intellectuals played an active role in the Journal of American Folklore (JAFL) during the Renaissance years. For example, between 1917 and 1937, the JAFL dedicated fourteen issues, known as the “Negro Numbers,” to African American folklore. JAFL editors actively courted New Negro intellectuals like Arthur Huff Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, Arthur Schomburg, and Carter G. Woodson, who all contributed to the journal (Baker, From Savage to Negro 144). From its inception in 1888, Baker argues, the JAFL was committed to making African American folklore a central component of the society and its journal. Its initial organization included a department of Negro folklore and its editorial policy dedicated a quarter of the journal’s space to the subject. Newell, the JAFL’s first editor from 1888 to 1900, recruited Alice Bacon and the Hampton Folklore Society in order to get around the blatant racism and unprofessionalism of AFLS’s White southern members (Baker, From Savage to Negro 146). The society’s interest in African American folklore waned after Newell’s departure from his editorial post, but was revived in 1920 when Boas made a determined effort to develop the program in African American folklore and to train Black graduate students.⁴⁵

The influence of social sciences was widely recognized by Black scholars during the early decades of the twentieth century. For example, Alain Locke, in two 1935 book reviews for the journal Opportunity (both entitled “The Eleventh Hour of Nordicism”), links art and the social sciences in their abilities to end ideologies of White supremacy. In the January “retrospective review of the Literature of the Negro for 1934,” Locke praises Nancy Cunard’s Negro, An Anthology, among other literary works produced that year for hurling “shell, bomb and shrapnel at the citadel of Nordicism.”⁴⁶ The second of this two-part article was published a month later, and in it Locke argues that sociology and, even more importantly, anthropology have set their sights on “Nordicism” through “scientific encirclement and bombardment.”⁴⁷ The appeal of Boas’s assault on scientific racism is clearly articulated by Locke, but his review also makes clear the point at which the New Negro agenda began to diverge from that of Boas’s own, namely in Locke’s unabashed enthusiasm for the notion that the social sciences might be used as an instrument in the service of social reform, as a weapon to combat White supremacy. Boas’s anti-racist, liberal politics were certainly well known, as he did not hesitate to voice them in conversations, letters, and essays written for popular publication. Yet he also resisted the politicization of scholarship such as that suggested by Locke in “The Eleventh Hour of Nordicism.” Boas considered objectivity a necessary prerequisite for academics to maintain their integrity. Baker astutely notes, however, that New Negro intellectuals’ keen awareness of the “racial politics of culture” made them less wary than Boas of using anthropology to try to reform social attitudes about race:

Schomburg, Fauset, Hurston, Woodson, and to a certain extent Locke pressed into service the liberal politics, relativistic orientation, and credentials of anthropologists who limited their exploration of African American culture to research and academic journals. Although the intellectuals of the movement were always careful scientists and historians or creative artists and performers, they were clear that scholarship and performance by and about black people involved political stakes that were entwined and woven into the very fabric of the movement to transform race relations and the meaning of being black in America. (Baker, “Research” 74)

The New Negro intellectuals’ investment in a collective project of social reform, their exploration of the limits and possibilities in racial solidarity, and their celebration of “race consciousness” are all areas where they diverge from Boas’s application of his theories on race and culture; yet, they were indebted to Boasian anthropology for the concepts, vocabulary, and the modes of representation that they used to advance their agenda of racial reform and uplift through artistic achievement.⁴⁸

This agenda led Arthur Fauset (novelist Jessie Fauset’s brother), for example, to underscore the African origins of Negro folklore, and to argue that both varieties of tales were endowed with the same fundamental traits of “human kinship and universality.”⁴⁹ The building blocks of race pride can be ascertained in his declaration that, alluding to Aesop’s fabled African origins, “Africa in a sense is the home of the fable; the African tales are its classics” (243). Fauset was a highly trained and rigorous folklorist whose orientation reflected the ideology of the American Folklore Society’s leaders. He shunned literary embellishment of folk materials, for example, and privileged authentic recreation as opposed to interpretation. Thus Fauset minimized the role of the storyteller in his presentation of the folktale, arguing, “as in the case of all true folk tales, the story teller himself was inconsequential; he did not figure at all—a talking machine might serve the purpose just as well” (240). Certainly, there are differences that can be ascertained among the stances and approaches taken by the various New Negro intellectuals. A figure like Hurston was supremely unconcerned with the blurring of disciplinary and generic boundaries, whereas Sterling Brown can be aligned with Fauset because he too, insisted (this time from a poet’s point of view) that literature not be confused with sociological materials.

Writers and intellectuals like these found numerous points of engagement with folklore, anthropology, and ethnography, yet they did not always feel compelled to follow the proscribed methods of these disciplines because their aims differed from that of Boas and his students, who set out to redefine culture. As Lee Baker astutely observes, the New Negro intellectuals emphasized, in addition, the racial politics of culture (From Savage to Negro 168–87). Boas viewed relativism, for example, as a means of enhancing the fieldworker’s objectivity while conducting research, not as an instrument for promoting racial or cultural pride. But Black intellectuals used the nonhierarchical, relativistic view of culture to formulate and articulate a discrete “race consciousness” that bound Black people together through their common heritage in Africa and shared goals of social advancement and emancipation. According to Baker, “Artists and intellectuals turned to the blues and spirituals, holiness churches and ring shouts, as well as other traditional cultural practices to offer an empowering way to transform segregation into a form of congregation by challenging the derogatory assessments that the culture of rural Negroes was backward and inferior” (“Research” 73). But in “The Mind of Primitive Man,” published in the Journal of American FolkLore, Boas explained how a relativist orientation was best suited for use in the field: “the student must endeavor to divest himself entirely of opinions and emotions based upon the peculiar social environment into which he is born. He must adapt his own mind, so far as feasible, to that of the people whom he is studying. The more successful he is in freeing himself from the bias based on the group of ideas that constituted the civilization in which he lives, the more successful he will be in interpreting the beliefs and actions of man.”⁵⁰ The connections between Boas’s theories and his desire for social justice are obvious. Nonetheless, he treated with suspicion attempts at merging scholarship with social reform because he feared losing his objectivity. Thus he preferred to write dispassionate reports on fieldwork to anything that suggested propaganda.⁵¹

Because Boas believed that African American’s cultural assimilation would contribute to the resolution of the race problem in the United States, he was “absolutely opposed to all kinds of attempts to foster racial solidarity” (cited in Baker, “Research” 72).⁵² This conviction may have grown from his own experiences growing up as a secular Jew in Germany. Since the late eighteenth century, German Jews had expressed a desire for, and had achieved, social advancement and integration by assimilating economically, and to a lesser extent socially and culturally, into the larger society. The diminishment of religious tradition and observance was one consequence of this process.⁵³ Yet the possibility for integration was not at all obvious for African Americans in the post-Reconstruction Era and early decades of the twentieth century. That period ushered in a multitude of instances of systemic racial violence and exclusion including the eruption of lynching incidents and race riots against African American communities, the institutionalization of Jim Crow segregation, and the wholesale disenfranchisement of Blacks from civic life, all of which made the goal of integration seem unlikely and the need for racial solidarity all the more necessary.

W. E. B. Du Bois, another, equally influential figure in the study of race and culture, keenly understood this. Like Boas, Du Bois was instrumental in the formation of a discipline in its modern form, namely sociology; and he made critical theoretical interventions in conceptualizations of race and culture at a pivotal point in the formation of the discipline. Unlike Boas, his influence is not always accepted as incontrovertible fact. Lee Baker, Faye V. Harrison, and Irene Diggs argue that although Boas’s institutional base in the academy afforded him the opportunity to “redirect scientific approaches to race,” other more marginalized scholars, like Du Bois, anticipated and even influenced Boas’s scholarship.⁵⁴ Baker argues, for example, that Du Bois’s early understanding of the color line contributed to the culture concept by distinguishing between “the cultural aspects of race and the social relations of race.” In his 1897 paper “The Conservation of Races,” presented at the first meeting of the Negro Academy, Du Bois argued that despite the existence of racial differences, “when we thus come to inquire into the essential difference of races we find it hard to come at once to any definite conclusion.”⁵⁵ The reason Du Bois gave—that more differences exist within individual racial groups than between the different races—anticipates Boas’s theory of diffusion.⁵⁶ Yet Du Bois’s seminal role in modern American constructs of culture is often overlooked because he lacked the institutional power and authority that Boas possessed as a White scientist who was viewed as objective, and who held influential posts on editorial boards and in a prestigious department in the Academy.⁵⁷

In the following chapter, I will discuss Du Bois’s significance as a cultural and intellectual patriarch on New Negro artists and authors. His early career illustrates the many similarities between his struggle against scientific racism and Boas’s own engagement with these issues. Yet his departure from academic discourse and engagement in social and political activism also points to the reasons why African Americans sought to cohere under a shared racial identity and illuminates the communal and cultural spaces in which they looked to find spiritual healing, political solidarity, and social justice.