Loyalty to America

Since the mid-nineteenth century, especially after its defeat in the Second Opium War (1856–60), China had learned “how the West dealt with nations that rejected progress.” Seeking to escape this subjugated status, it not only avidly studied American translations of international law but also sent its subjects to the United States and Europe to “learn something of the outside world.”Footnote ¹⁷ Encouraged by these developments and by the passage of racial-equality and civil rights legislation after the Civil War, African Americans felt a need to identify with American claims to civilization and celebrate the perceived superiority of its civilization over Chinese backwardness. After all, as Kevin K. Gaines observes, “the false universalism of civilization reigned” for a large number of Black elites by the turn of the twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁸ However, African Americans did not blindly revere American civilization. Instead, they expressed their pride and trust in the country to reassure white people that the Black population was sincerely patriotic and therefore justified in demanding full citizenship rights.

Some African Americans forthrightly cited China’s purported need for civilization to illuminate the supposed greatness of American achievements. The Elevator was the most widely read Black newspaper in California in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Its editor, Phillip A. Bell, realized that “pointed attacks on white society” would invite “potentially dangerous verbal and physical reprisals.” He therefore decided to emphasize “the basic political allegiance that blacks and whites shared” and demonstrate African Americans’ “overwhelming patriotism” in his newspaper.Footnote ¹⁹ This explains why The Elevator published an oration on 5 April 1873, celebrating the new heights of American “glory” in contrast to alleged Chinese darkness. Believing that the abolition of slavery had awakened “new hopes and higher and holier aspirations in the breast of the [African American] race,” the unidentified speaker asserted that China had heard “the deep-toned thunders of our voice.” The Chinese worshiped “the true principle of all human government” as embodied in “that sublime document of our independence” and opened their ports to “the commerce of a people from a different civilization,” the address went on. Consequently, “benighted” China was seeing “the day-star of hope” rising above its “grossly darkened horizon.” With the Chinese supposedly looking respectfully toward the United States, the speaker urged African Americans to remember that “these are indeed propitious days for the cause of justice and human liberty.”Footnote ²⁰

Samuel Harrison, a highly esteemed African American minister, delivered a similarly heartening sermon at the Methodist Episcopal Church in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1876. Given on the centennial of American independence, his address praised the United States for occupying a moral high ground with “the abolition of slavery.” As the country was now “regenerated and redeemed from our national sins,” he said, Americans could justifiably censure the Chinese for practicing “heathenism,” while the Chinese could no longer criticize Americans for enslaving Black people. Instead, China and other “nations of the East” were imploring the United States, “Come over and help.” They were also sending “their sons” to study “our laws and institutions,” Harrison told his audience jubilantly.Footnote ²¹ Harrison was clearly referring to the Chinese Educational Mission led by Yung Wing, the first Chinese graduate from Yale. The program began sending young Chinese students to learn about American institutions and technologies in 1872, but it ended abruptly in 1881.

Benjamin William Arnett, a Black American administrator, minister, and politician, was so committed to proving African Americans’ loyalty that he deemed the “civilizing” of China not only a white man’s burden but also a Black man’s. He expressed this view while addressing the Georgia Industrial College for Colored Youth in 1899. As a well-read man, he naturally knew the imperialist implications of “the white man’s burden,” a phrase coined by British writer and poet Rudyard Kipling not long before. Still, to encourage Black students to become “useful and honored citizens,” Arnett urged them to assist white Americans in fulfilling this mission. In March, the Cincinnati Times Star published a cartoon depicting seven races “by different heights.” What gave Arnett “hope and joy” was that “the American negro” stood next to the white man, “the highest in the line.” This symbolized to him recognition that Black people were second only to white Americans “in intelligence, in refinement and culture, all that belongs to our Christian civilization.” As “the two great forces in the country,” they shared the responsibility of civilizing “the Chinaman,” who was placed last in the line. The white man’s burden was therefore “the burden of the negro” and “a joint burden,” Arnett claimed.Footnote ²²

To illustrate their attachment to the American nation, Black Americans particularly stressed their support for American missionary efforts in China, which started in 1830. In 1891, Winfield Henry Mixon, a presiding elder of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Alabama, published a pamphlet to connect Black Christians to the American nation by emphasizing their staunch religious faith. As he stated in the preface, it was his “highest ambition” to “serve my race, my church, and my God.” While expecting China to be “drenched,” “washed,” “cleansed,” and “purified” by the “ever flowing fountain” of biblical “wisdom,” he exhorted his church to carry “the torch of African Methodism” and to “go on christianizing and enlightening the benighted lands.” This mission should not cease until the Chinese and other “backward” peoples were “awakened.”Footnote ²³ When addressing the general conference of the AME Church in Wilmington, North Carolina, on 4 May 1896, Arnett expressed a similar pride in being part of the religious force dedicated to “civilizing” China. Besides congratulating his fellow church members for living in “an age of religious liberty and toleration,” he viewed the conversion of China and other “heathen” lands as one opportunity for African American Christians to “work for the elevation of our race and the salvation of mankind.” Arnett excitedly proclaimed that “the M.E. Church and the M.E. Church South are marshalling their forces” to bring China “under the influence of our christian civilization.”Footnote ²⁴

However, these announcements reflected Black religious leaders’ intention to associate African American Christians with mainstream civilization rather than their actual participation in evangelizing China. Before the twentieth century, independent Black churches did not send missionaries abroad. White churches did send Black evangelists overseas, but “only” to Central and West Africa, where “disease took a great toll on white missionaries.”Footnote ²⁵ Still, Black religious leaders always appeared enthusiastic about white missionaries’ purported progress in China. Arnett was no doubt zealous in broadcasting the efficacy of religious enlightenment in such “backward” countries as China. In December 1884, he spoke at the Centennial ME Church in Baltimore to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the church. To impress the audience with African Americans’ patriotism, he recalled the defense of the city by “the black and white, the master and slave” and their homage to the American flag during the War of 1812, before moving on to praise American missionary “achievement” in China. He claimed that, in China, “thousands of young men and women” were receiving education “under competent teachers” just because of American missionary labor. US churches would never cease their “moral and religious work” around the world, Arnett proudly announced.Footnote ²⁶ A pastor of a small Black church in Brunswick, Georgia, G.W.F.P. was equally fervent in demonstrating his Americanness, believing that praising missionary achievements in China could be one “very best” way to “serve the people.” In an 1898 sermon, he asserted that “the mighty stream of Christianity” was striving to reach “the human deserts in heathen lands.” “The teeming millions of China” had seen “a great light” as a result. Greatly encouraged, G.W.F.P. urged the church to “move on and on, like the river in its life giving flow, until we are all lost in the sea of God’s everlasting love.”Footnote ²⁷

America’s religious and commercial interests were mutually supportive in China. Witnessing the rapid commercial expansion of the United States, some Black people felt more confident in reporting missionary achievements among the Chinese. One example was William E. Matthews, a Presbyterian layman and the leading African American venture capitalist in Washington, DC. Because of this dual identity, Matthews not only donated generously to Black public institutions but was also keen on promoting commerce as a means to advance American missions overseas. In an 1885 article, he called money a “mighty helper” to Christianity, “especially so to the great mission fields of the world.” For example, aided by commerce, American missionaries had reached China and other “savage tribes and peoples,” eradicating “much of their cruel customs.” In front of “the blessings of civilized life and the influence of Christianity,” Matthews wrote, “heathenism and idolatry” were “fast fading away” in these places. He proudly proclaimed that “Christian nations and Christian races are the dominant nations and races of men,” while Christian civilization seemed “destined to spread over all the earth.”Footnote ²⁸

In addition to highlighting African Americans’ identification with the upbeat side of American civilization, the trope of China also embodied their concerns that America might not remain healthy if it continued to ignore the calls for justice from Black people. Gail Bederman notes that, in her antilynching campaign in the 1890s, Black woman activist Ida B. Wells “manipulated the discourse of civilization.” She warned white northerners that they risked imperiling “American civilization and American manhood” if they continued to tolerate lynching in the South.Footnote ²⁹ By referencing China’s underdevelopment, other African American voices appealed to white American fears not only about the decline of American civilization but also about the erosion of its daily aspects, like livelihoods. These emphases effectively integrated African Americans’ demands for racial justice into their loyalty to the American nation.

On one hand, China appeared to African Americans as an embodiment of the uncivilized traits that Americans must evade but were exhibiting due to their racism. For example, on 27 June 1891, the Virginia Richmond Planet cautioned white southerners against staying in a Chinese-style seclusion. By agitating for racial segregation, the paper asserted, “the fair Southland” imitated “the exclusiveness of China” and erected “walls of prejudice.” Consequently, “progress and capital” could not enter “one of the fairest sections of the face of the globe.” “Colored persons” vehemently opposed this obstinacy, as none of them would “have it like China,” the Planet claimed.Footnote ³⁰ Based in the Midwest, the Kansas Topeka Call did not single out the South for criticism. It instead warned American Christianity against degenerating to the level of Confucianism in China. As Confucius “dwarfed” the “moral and intellectual condition of China,” the Call stated on 9 September 1893, racial “injustice or oppression” distorted the essence of the Christian faith. The “peerless Anglo-Saxon” should really practice “Christ’s teachings” and recognize that “justice and duty, and not color and race,” embodied “divine favor,” the paper urged.Footnote ³¹

On the other hand, China also represented an economic landmine that the United States should navigate carefully for the benefit of both African Americans and the entire nation. China’s allegedly outdated financial system was especially alarming to Black people. The debate over the free coinage of silver in the 1890s supplied a valuable window into this African American concern. After adopting the gold standard in 1879, the United States experienced prosperity in the 1880s. However, the severe financial crisis of 1893 and the subsequent decline in agricultural prices forced Americans to reconsider the necessity of silver coinage. Silverites – those who advocated for an unlimited supply of silver – quickly formed an alliance with racial segregationists. Both groups claimed that the Northeast treated the South and the West as “economic colonies” and used African Americans as “pawns.”Footnote ³²

Many Black American voices naturally resisted free silver but couched their opposition in patriotic terms. Highlighting the shabby performance of China’s silver-based currency was a key step in this effort. John H. Deveaux, the founder and editor of the Georgia Savannah Tribune, exemplified this approach. Though he published the paper as the “mouthpiece of Negro Republicanism,” Deveaux worked “cooperatively with white Republicans and Democrats,” arguing that Black Americans should win “recognition by their ability and devotion to principle” rather than by race or politics.Footnote ³³ When silver coinage became a contentious issue in the 1896 election, the Tribune naturally refused to regard it as “a partisan warfare.” Instead, on 19 September 1896, it cited China’s “debased” monetary system and the resulting “trivial fare” for workers to warn Silverites against making American workers similarly “undignified and depressed.” “Hardy” American workingmen required “higher wages” guaranteed by a robust currency, it said. The United States must uphold its “settled financial policies” of “honest money,” particularly the gold standard. This could bring forth “prosperity” to the nation rather than “Negro domination in the South,” the Tribune reassured its readers.Footnote ³⁴ Dennis S. Thompson, an African American resident of Kansas City, expressed a similar view on silver. Writing in the Enterprise, a Black Republican newspaper published in Omaha, Nebraska, he, like most Republicans, advised that the United States maintain the gold standard, just as “the leading commercial nations of the world” did, rather than adopting “a common standard with China.” Black Americans must “stand for a sound and stable currency,” he believed, because supporting the “free coinage of silver” would “hurt the millionaire very little.” Given this reality, they should “vote intelligently not for price or political favors, but for patriotism” in the 1896 election, stated Thompson.Footnote ³⁵

The death of the “colored boy” Wakefield added a tragic yet heroic dimension to African Americans’ efforts to maintain America’s economic standing above that of China. Wakefield, whose given name remains unknown, was a Black American laborer in New Iberia, Louisiana. After protesting a wage that was “but little better” than what was paid in China, he was beaten to death by “a brutal mob.” Reporting this event on 2 February 1889, the New Orleans Weekly Pelican attributed the tragedy to “the old seeds of slavery” that lingered in the South as “an ineradicable curse.” Wakefield’s “two fatal disqualifications” – being “colored” and being “honest” – sealed his fate.Footnote ³⁶ Defining Wakefield’s demand for a wage higher than that of a Chinese worker as honest and characterizing white southerners’ reaction as a remnant of slavery, the Pelican positioned China at a stage of development that the United States had surpassed and should never revert to. Underpinning this perspective was the intention to invoke the trope of China to prevent the United States from declining to a lowly status.

These commentaries do not signal Black Americans’ concession to white America on racial issues. Instead, they reflect an identification with the idealistic vision of America, which occupied a high moral ground and boasted a superior civilization. By demonstrating their unwavering loyalty to such a nation, African Americans intended to compel white America to treat them in line with its proclaimed lofty principles. China, due to its alleged backwardness in both culture and economy, became a convenient reference that Black commentators employed to highlight African Americans’ correct choice of civilization over savagery, and loyalty over betrayal.

Eagerness to assimilate

While expressing their loyalty to America, Black Americans also conveyed their desire to be accepted as civilized. However, it was white men who “laid exclusive claim to both civilization and manliness” in the late nineteenth century. Black men challenged this “Anglo-Saxon ideal” by demonstrating a zeal and ability to assimilate into the dominant culture.Footnote ³⁷ While most of the African Americans examined in this essay were men, they were naturally eager to take that step. In their narratives, China remained a less civilized Other, but the emphasis shifted to the effects of its attitudes toward Western civilization. By acclaiming China’s efforts to civilize and lamenting its occasional refusals to continue, African Americans stressed their own readiness to join the mainstream society through cultural assimilation. They wished to illustrate their eligibility for full citizenship rights in this way.

In believing that any progress China made must result from its assimilation of a more advanced civilization, Black Americans conceded that the dominant American culture was basically desirable. Absorbing its tenets was therefore a prerequisite for African Americans to uplift themselves. Frederick Douglass, the most noted Black activist of the nineteenth century, was known not only for his tireless struggle for African American rights but also for his openness to cultural assimilation. In his 1869 “Composite Nation” lecture delivered in Boston, Douglass asserted that “all great qualities are never found in any one man or in any one race.” The United States could become “all the stronger” if it received the Chinese “as friends” and gave them “a reason for loving our country and our institutions.” However, despite his concession that the Chinese “might well teach us valuable lessons,” Douglass envisioned the learning process as primarily unidirectional: while Chinese children attended American schools in San Francisco, “none of our children” were in Chinese schools, “and probably never will be.”Footnote ³⁸ On 27 July 1871, Douglass's New National Era further implied that African Americans should learn from civilizing powers. In an article published by Douglass’s New National Era, G.W.M. of Howard University contended that “civilization must be communicated.” This tradition started with God, who “first communicated the light to a few” before those few spread it among humanity, he claimed. The Chinese people’s rise to “civilization and refinement” could thus only occur through “contact with a civilization outside of themselves.” Open-mindedness was essential for any race to progress, G.W.M. concluded.Footnote ³⁹

Black American educator and editor H. T. Kealing substantiated the point from the perspective of historical experience. In 1899, he published a pamphlet to help people predict the future of African Americans. Among the reasons for poor prophesies, Kealing specifically mentioned predictors’ neglect of the fact that “each new condition creates its own spirit, if not actually new powers.” “Vitalized contact” with others would create new conditions and make a people “very different from the original stock,” transforming them into “a new force” and “active factors in the world’s progress.” For instance, China, “long inert and barbarous,” took on “entirely new qualities” just because the “sanguine Western civilization” permeated its “mummied veins,” believed Kealing. Benefiting from “the vivifying power” of the West, it was no longer “sorely vexed and raped,” but would produce “a strength and power in the next century commensurate with her numerical and territorial magnitude.” By the same token, southern Black people had “free schools” just because of the North’s “military occupancy” of the South during Reconstruction, Kealing observed. This learning process not only spread the “liberal Christian and altruistic spirit” among African Americans, but also could compel “the lion and the lamb” to “lie down together.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Besides illuminating the general law governing racial advancement, the trope of China also helped Black Americans identify examples to showcase the efficacy of cross-racial assimilation. Viceroy Li Hung-chang (Li Hongzhang), the man in actual charge of late imperial China’s diplomacy, personified the benefits of absorbing an “advanced” civilization. Li visited the United States in 1896, garnering a huge amount of attention from American society. Noting the contrast between Americans’ “welcome to Li Hung [sic]” and their “contempt” for “the Chinese in general,” African American doctor J. M. Henderson believed that this was due not only to Li’s power and fame, but also to “his great friendship for General Grant,” the eighteenth President of the United States. Li thus became “the only one [Chinese] who did not look more or less like a heathen”; even “an untraveled American of the average class” would be willing to “sit down to table” with him, “not feel[ing] some repugnance.” Also because of their open-mindedness and “new idea,” Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington had dispelled “the most obstinate prejudice.” Henderson encouraged ordinary African Americans to emulate them and “credit the race with the honor” that the world “readily pays” to such individuals.Footnote ⁴¹ Li’s “great friendship” with Ulysses S. Grant dated back to 1879, when he welcomed the former US President in the Chinese city of Tianjin. Ensuring that “no honor should be wanting to the General,” Li extended considerable hospitality to Grant, which “set the stage for a successful visit to Peking.”Footnote ⁴²

In stark contrast, China’s tragic fate at the hands of Western powers exposed the detrimental effects of provincialism. The prominent African American Enlightenment thinker Alexander Crummell articulated this perspective in his 1875 Thanksgiving Day address. Despite his fear that contact might lead to “dependence,” he insisted that Black Americans needed “the contribution of divers[e] perceptible and imperceptible gifts” from others. Crummell cited China’s humiliating defeat by Britain and France in the Second Opium War to illustrate the importance of “this principle of association.” The two nations “humbled the vast empire of China” and its “semi-civilized inhabitants,” offering “the grandest illustration in history of the results of combined power,” Crummell stated. “We children of Africa in this land” were no different from “any other people,” he argued. They should immediately overcome their “lack of the cooperative spirit,” whether among themselves or with the rest of America.Footnote ⁴³

Sharing the belief in the necessity of learning from non-Black cultures, some African Americans concentrated on encouraging white people to help achieve that goal. They acknowledged that white America had developed more rapidly but argued that this progress came at the cost of Black people’s equal access to opportunities and resources. White Americans who assisted in African American uplift earned acclaim from African American commentators. They invoked the benevolence that China supposedly received to portray helpful white persons as shining examples of generosity. One such figure was Charles Sumner, an abolitionist and statesman during the American Civil War. Calling him “the American Socrates, Cicero and Demosthenes combined” in 1885, African American attorney and jurist D. Augustus Straker lauded him for devoting his “whole life” to African Americans’ “enfranchisement, amelioration and elevation.” Sumner not only helped “the American negro” but extended his liberality to “the Chinaman” and all the disadvantaged peoples. “True equality” was “the basis of all his actions,” Straker commented.Footnote ⁴⁴

As the chief means to elevate a race, education received due attention in African American discourses. Given their perceived warm reception of the Chinese coming to study, white Americans should be more willing to educate fellow Americans of African descent, asserted Black American commentators. In 1882, T. T. Tucker, a white minister from Mississippi, claimed at a church congress that the “elevation of the Negro” should be the sole responsibility of “Southern missionaries.” He opposed the involvement of northerners, asserting that “WE SOUTHERN PEOPLE KNOW THE NEGRO BETTER THAN YOU DO.” However, Crummell rejected this view by referencing China. He emphasized Black Americans’ desire to learn only from persons of “lofty virtue.” While white southerners were the “heirs of a spirit of dominancy,” they would be “tempted to a system of feudality or peonage.” White northerners were different, Crummell said. Among other things, they displayed a “lofty culture” and a “freedom-loving spirit” that even attracted “delegates” from China to study. African Americans should not be “entirely shut out” from “the peculiar civilization of the North” and “its very best elements.” They needed “Northern teachers, preachers, and philosophers” to educate them “graciously and fruitfully” until they were “re-fashioned, enlightened, and lifted up to the very highest planes of civilization, grace, and manhood,” Crummell argued.Footnote ⁴⁵

As an integrationist African American leader in Cleveland, Ohio, Harry C. Smith favored neither “militant protest” nor “any trace of segregation.” Instead, he urged Black youths to “stay in school” and prepare themselves for meaningful participation in American life.Footnote ⁴⁶ The type of school that he envisioned was “white or mixed,” as he clarified in his Cleveland Gazette on 5 June 1886. Believing that people from China and other “remotest regions” were coming to the United States to “catch the inspiration and strength of Anglo-Saxon culture and learning,” he had good reason to argue that “isolation is death.” The “system of separate schools for colored children” was totally inadvisable, for African Americans’ “salvation” could only come through “contact, close and intimate.” White America should not deny them access to “common schools,” which represented “the surest and swiftest road to true equality and manhood,” Smith concluded.Footnote ⁴⁷

This call resonated with sympathetic white Americans. One was Atticus G. Haygood, the president of Emory College and a leader among liberal white southerners who advocated for sectional and racial reconciliation. In a speech delivered at Monteagle, Tennessee, on 1 August 1883, he stated that “the Negro in the United States ought to be educated.” Believing in the “essential unity” of all human beings, Haygood argued that white America should bring “the Gospel, and the Christian civilization” to “the Negroes in America,” just as it had done in China. He concluded the talk by defining Black people’s access to education as a “natural, God-given right.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Unionist minister and abolitionist A. D. Mayo was another example. Addressing the National Sociological Society in 1900, Mayo observed that the “pious wives and ‘glorious maiden aunts’” in New England and New York were welcoming Chinese “boys and girls” into their homes for education at “the people’s common school and the colleges.” Similarly, “every Southern state” should keep running “normal and industrial college[s] for the race” of African Americans. African American graduates from these institutions could transform the African American neighborhood from a “hell town” to “a specimen of ‘what the South is doing for its colored folk,’” predicted Mayo.Footnote ⁴⁹

Noting the perceived enthusiasm of the Chinese for studying American culture, Black American leaders and journalists encouraged their own community to emulate this zeal and become self-starters in assimilating respectable values to dispel stereotypes. In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution became law, guaranteeing African American men the right to vote. On 6 April 1874, speaking in Chico, California, to commemorate its fourth anniversary, African American minister W. H. Hillery still sounded exhilarated. Not only did he praise the US government for being “true to Liberty and to the rights of man” and thus setting a “brilliant example … before the world,” he also invoked the reaction of “distant” and “superstitious” China to illustrate the urgency for African Americans to catch up quickly. Hillery specifically mentioned the 1868 Burlingame Treaty as evidence that China had decided to mount “the omnipotent car of progress” and head to “a higher and more glorious destiny.” African Americans should exhibit the same “deep settled purpose of advancement” to achieve “a full and complete recognition of all the rights, privileges and immunities of a freeman” and to eradicate “every mark and vestige of cruel caste prejudices,” urged Hillery.Footnote ⁵⁰ Signed in Washington, DC, on 28 July 1868, the Burlingame Treaty mainly aimed to encourage Chinese immigration to the labor-short United States while protecting American privileges in China. Article VII promised Chinese nationals “all the privileges” of US “public educational institutions,” but the pledge was reciprocal rather than unilateral.Footnote ⁵¹ More importantly, Anson Burlingame, the retired US minister to China who headed the Chinese delegation, “exceeded his instructions” and signed the treaty without authorization from the Chinese government.Footnote ⁵² Obviously unaware of this context, Hillery simply wished to use the perceived Chinese interest in American knowledge to inspire Black people to become respectable citizens through education.

The late nineteenth century was also an age of technological advances in the United States. For instance, after the construction of the first electrical plant in New York City in 1882, many American homes and city streets were illuminated by electricity. In the same year, China launched its first electricity generation facility in Shanghai.Footnote ⁵³ This simultaneity prompted Black American journalist and editor Charles Alexander to exhort African Americans to catch up with “material” progress. He claimed that China “worshiped” such American “Gods” as Thomas Edison and was learning to harness “the forces of electricity.” With “strong” arms, “lofty altruism and deep religious fever,” and a “firm mental basis for a splendid intellectual development,” “the poor Negro” should likewise make full use of the “better opportunities” that the United States offered “along industrial lines.” “All the lofty positions to which white men aspire” would then be within his reach, Alexander promised.Footnote ⁵⁴

In addition to encouraging Black people to actively assimilate into the dominant culture, both intellectually and materially, African American leaders also looked to China as a source of inspiration for achieving this goal. Wiley Lane, the first Black American professor of Greek at Howard University, favored the establishment of a scholarship fund. He conceded on 16 February 1884 that this idea came from “Mr. Yung Wing of China,” who had sent 120 Chinese youths to the United States for academic study. If African Americans had a similar fund, it would do “inestimable good” for their younger generation. Black American students could then pursue fields beyond theology, which was compulsory under existing aid programs. Their “advanced education” would make them “patriotic” while enabling them to achieve “the highest standard of excellence attainable in American life,” Lane declared.Footnote ⁵⁵

The Chinese example that Lane praised was the Chinese Educational Mission. Yung Wing was one of the two Chinese supervisors in Hartford, Connecticut, where the Chinese students received school education. However, this study program was financed by the Chinese government rather than by social or private funds. Lane might have been unaware of this detail at that moment, but he must have read journalistic and other accounts of the pupils’ quick assimilation, which led him to place the same demands on his own race’s education. According to Liel Leibovitz and Matthew Miller, “Hartford’s notables were impressed by the [Chinese] boys’ adjustment.” They believed that their “quick learning of English and other signs of assimilation” affirmed “the potent American spirit and its triumph” over China’s “becalmed and ineffectual traditions.” Newspapers in New England often published “cheerful reports” of the students’ “achievements,” exclaiming that they were being “civilized.”Footnote ⁵⁶

The Chinese boys’ performance even helped the mission win the support of Mark Twain. The American writer was known for his early racist characterization of Chinese immigrants in Ah Sin (1877), although he came to publicly denounce US imperialism in China in 1900, as discussed at length in Selina Lai-Henderson’s Mark Twain in China.Footnote ⁵⁷ Not only did Twain hike with the students on some weekends, he also contributed money to help acculturate them to the “American way of life” and the “Christian gospel.” When the Chinese government threatened to close the mission in 1880, partly due to concerns over the boys’ Americanization, Twain intervened by personally talking with Ulysses S. Grant and asking him to write to Li Hongzhang, who had hosted the former President in Tianjin the previous year. Grant did contact Li, but the fate of the mission was already sealed.Footnote ⁵⁸ It was the students’ much-publicized assimilation that provided the catalyst for Lane to encourage his race to follow suit.

China’s supposedly enthusiastic reaction to missionary education demonstrated to Black Americans that church schools could effectively assimilate their race into mainstream culture. Since American missionaries had arrived in China, running schools was a part of their daily work. The Chinese appeared especially eager to receive Western, mainly Christian, education to strengthen themselves at the end of the nineteenth century, when China faced a severe crisis of national survival.Footnote ⁵⁹ In its report to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church on 19 May 1892, the Executive Committee of Colored Evangelization cited this perceived Chinese interest to illustrate the effectiveness of church schools in uplifting Black Americans. The committee argued that “if we cultivate the Negro children, we shall inevitably reap a harvest of adults into our churches.” One “need only” refer to the church’s achievements in China to understand “the power of the school in the hands of the wise missionary,” it concluded.Footnote ⁶⁰

When African Americans really took steps in the suggested direction, Black American leaders were eager to report their progress, revealing their alertness against accusations of Black people’s un-Americanness. China’s stereotyped sluggishness, despite its efforts toward civilization, served as a foil. A historically African American institution of higher education, Howard University, developed rapidly after its founding in 1867. On 21 September 1871, Frederick Douglass’s New National Era expressed strong pride in informing readers that even “far-off China” had become a devoted disciple of Howard. Howard acted “like a kind parent,” extending its arms and “offering to each and to all equally maternal care.” Always maintaining high standards, it was “casting her mite for the general good of America,” the paper proclaimed.Footnote ⁶¹ Bishop W. J. Gaines of Georgia was another Black American leader who took pride in African Americans’ potential for civilization, contrasting it with Chinese inertia. As he stated in an 1897 book, the people in China “despised” a teacher “as much as a Christian missionary,” preferring “darkness rather than light.” However, “this was not true of the negro,” Gaines asserted. Not only had “the negro” ceased to harbor “unkind feelings” toward white southerners because of slavery, he even looked “with admiration” upon white people’s “wonderful civilization.” Black persons wanted to “imitate” and “emulate” white Americans and to forget past “wrongs” in their “march to better things,” so that their children could have “a chance in the race of progress.” The “desire for knowledge” had become a “passion” among African Americans, Gaines announced with enthusiasm.Footnote ⁶²

Utilizing China’s widely known drive for modernization in the late nineteenth century as a reference, Black Americans portrayed their race as eager and able to assimilate into the dominant, white American society. The perceived disparity between Chinese and Black American progress served to reinforce the assertion that African Americans were more apt to be considered civilized alongside white Americans. In this way, white America had no justifiable reason to deny the Black population full equality as American citizens. Highlighting African Americans’ intention of assimilating into the dominant culture, therefore, did not indicate a diminishing of their self-worth in front of white people. Instead, it was a tactic to prove that African Americans were truly American in both thought and culture.

White American hypocrisy

In contrast to Black people’s zeal for embracing the dominant culture, white Americans appeared reluctant to reciprocate by treating them with equality and humanity, according to African American opinions. Not only did they exhibit an aversion to darker races, they also were accused of treating African Americans with particular harshness, displaying a blatant disregard for their citizenship. China, always denigrated as an uncivilized Other, seemed to garner more attention from white America and, at times, even demonstrated greater civility toward Black Americans than white Americans did. African American voices stressed this dissonance to underscore the glaring inconsistency between white Americans’ rhetoric and their actions, as well as the absurdity of their persistent anti-Blackness.

One notable inconsistency existed between publicly stated principles and the actual treatment of people of color. For African Americans, the contempt directed at China suggested that white Americans were just as hypocritical everywhere in the world. In 1883, a war erupted between China and France over the control of Vietnam. Believing that peace, even one humiliating to China, would be better than conflict, American minister to Beijing John Russell Young offered to mediate. However, France rejected his offer and subsequent American efforts to arbitrate. The United States thus remained on the sidelines, doing nothing to stop France from finally defeating China in 1885.Footnote ⁶³ Witnessing this American inaction, the Cleveland Gazette accused the United States on 29 November 1884 of violating its “avowed principles” and siding with “the strong against the weak,” simply because “the Chinese are colored.” In the same way, white Americans “forget the Negro,” even though the Black man had been “a helpful factor to this Nation,” averred the Gazette.Footnote ⁶⁴

While China and France were embroiled in a war over Vietnam, Black American clergyman and civil rights leader T. McCants Stewart was teaching in Liberia. He consequently referred to both Africa and China when highlighting white people’s inconsistencies worldwide. On 19 January 1884, Stewart sent a letter to the New York Globe from Africa, invoking white persons’ condescension toward China to support his finding from travels along the West African coast: white men approached nonwhite people “with the Bible in one hand, and the sword or the lash in the other.” In Africa, he learned that a white church owner “literally” seized two Black youths “by the back of their necks (in the collar) and pitched them out!” This proved that white people were just as “aggressive, overbearing, insolent” in Africa, in “Atlanta, Georgia,” and in China, Stewart proclaimed.Footnote ⁶⁵ In the New York Freeman on 20 August 1887, he reiterated that “our Caucasian brethren” urged people to behave according to the Bible while treating “innocent and defenseless” Black individuals as “wild beasts.” They “domineer wherever they go,” whether in America, Africa, or China, Stewart argued. They trampled upon the rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” promised to “the Negro” and other darker peoples.Footnote ⁶⁶

Meanwhile, African Americans cited white people’s seemingly disparate treatment of different races of color to accentuate their hypocrisy. In particular, they pointed to the allegedly favorable attention that China received as evidence. Some concentrated on white Americans’ starkly contrasting reactions to injustices against China and Black America. While both Chinese immigrants and African Americans suffered from mob violence, diplomatic treaties compelled the US government to apologize to or even indemnify China on several occasions.Footnote ⁶⁷ Its habitual silence on anti-Black atrocities led African Americans to lament that their race bore the brunt of white American colorphobia. On 12 June 1886, the Cleveland Gazette published an open letter, condemning President Grover Cleveland’s advisers for “wink[ing] at the outrages” against “the defenseless Negro” in the South while “join[ing] in an apology” to China for “the murder of a few moon-eyed celestials upon the Pacific coast.” The letter’s author, writing under the alias OBSCURITY, found it especially infuriating that the Cleveland administration was even willing to “indemnify that Government” of China. The letter challenged the President to explain what he or his advisers had “said or done publicly or privately in condemnation of the brutal outrages” against African Americans.Footnote ⁶⁸

White Americans’ ostensible concern for the welfare of the people in China contrasted with their indifference to African Americans’ plight as well, provoking condemnation from Black American voices. On 15 December 1883, the Cleveland Gazette urged the United States to ensure that “every citizen, be his color what it may,” enjoy all his constitutional “facilities, privileges and rights” before “rais[ing] our voice” in defense of China in its war with France. Otherwise, “gross discriminations [sic] because of color” could render “equal rights and privileges but an idle mockery,” the paper warned.Footnote ⁶⁹ Another critical voice came from Black American publisher G. L. Knox, who was born a slave in 1841. When Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, giving slaves “an opportunity to fight to free themselves and save the union,” Knox joined the Union army. In his postbellum life as a barber and the editor of the Indianapolis Freeman, he believed in racial accommodation and refused to segregate his own race.Footnote ⁷⁰ It was therefore fitting for the city of Lafayette, Indiana to invite him to speak celebrating the anniversary of Emancipation on 24 September 1894. Knox defined the day as one in which “every Afro-American” and “Caucasian” should “take a part,” since the day had removed “the great curse” – slavery – from the nation. However, amid all the benefits that Black people had been promised, “over ten thousand” of them had been killed since Emancipation. This formed a bleak contrast with America’s dispatching of “missionaries to China.” African Americans had “not as much cause for rejoicing,” he reminded his audience.Footnote ⁷¹

Although an accommodationist on Black–white relations, the rapidly ascending Booker T. Washington was also angered by inconsistencies in white southerners’ treatment of former slaves and overseas nonwhite peoples like the Chinese. In October 1899, he attended a meeting in Huntsville, Alabama to discuss the “upbuilding of the South.” Reiterating that “Christianity and education” were crucial to the “elevation of the Negro,” Washington demanded that “private philanthropy and the Christian church of the white South” be directly involved. But what disappointed him was the stark contrast between southern white denominations’ attention to Black Americans and that to other nonwhite peoples, including the Chinese. They spent “annually about $544,000” trying to “elevate the ignorant and degraded” Chinese and other people of color, but only “$21,000 for the benighted at your doors.” Though promising not to “have one dollar less go to the foreign fields,” Washington urged “the Christian South” to pay “increased attention” to “the 800,000 of Negroes by whom it is surrounded.” After all, as white southerners’ “safety and property” depended on the Black population, “every dollar” spent educating them would be “an interest-bearing dollar,” he argued.Footnote ⁷²

Of course, white Americans were not really benevolent to China. Whenever there was a perceived injustice against Americans in that country, they reacted fiercely, contradicting what they professed to both China and Black America. The consistent disregard for African Americans, regardless of how white Americans treated the Chinese, only underscored the severity of anti-Blackness. On 5 November 1892, the Cleveland Gazette published an article by white judge Albion W. Tourgee, censuring the US government for not caring “a fig” about the rights of African Americans. According to Tourgee, American Christianity “waxes hot over the burning of a mission house in China” but looked on “smiling and unconscious” when Black Christians died “for the crime of having black skins and desiring a freeman’s rights.” The white man acted in this way simply because he was “white and represents civilization (?) and Christianity (?),” Tourgee averred, with the question marks indicating his strong disapproval.Footnote ⁷³ As the honorary professor of legal ethics at Buffalo Law School, Tourgee organized the Citizens Equal Rights Association in 1892. He later served as attorney for the plaintiff Homer Plessy in Plessy v. Ferguson. Though the Supreme Court eventually upheld the “separate-but-equal” principle in 1896, Tourgee became known among African Americans as the “earnest seeker of justice for the Negro.”Footnote ⁷⁴

D. Augustus Straker made a similar argument on 19 October 1895, insisting that white American consistency was a most effective way to prevent African Americans from revenging injustices. In a letter to the Freeman, he disapproved Black southerners’ use of “the torch against their white oppressors,” fearing that it could harm those persons who had “no sympathy with lynching.” Instead, he asked his “brethren in the South” to expose white northerners’ inconsistency and force them to be consistent. If the North denounced lynching as vehemently as they did “insults to missionaries in China,” then “lynchings will soon cease.” Therefore the Black man should tell “the story of his oppression to the North” so that “an enlightened public opinion” could develop in that part of the country, believed Straker.Footnote ⁷⁵

As history has shown, neither white northerners nor white southerners really heeded such suggestions. Consequently, Black Americans not only kept exposing white hypocrisy but demanded that they solve America’s own problems before attempting to solve those in China. For one thing, given the uncivilized nature of anti-Blackness, they believed that white people should become truly Christian before evangelizing the Chinese. C. H. J. Taylor, a prominent Black American lawyer and politician, made this assertion while urging American churches to shoulder the responsibility for racial equality. Speaking before the Second Baptist Church Lyceum in Washington, DC in April 1894, he accused American Christianity of not only sanctioning “color prejudice” but also causing Black people to hate themselves. White Christians therefore needed true Christianity more than foreign countries like China. Taylor demanded that “every missionary” be recalled from these places and “not a dollar” spent on “missionary projects in foreign countries” until Americans thoroughly reformed their churches.Footnote ⁷⁶ Writing in the Freeman on 15 July 1899, Charles Alexander also condemned white Americans’ perverted ordering of evangelizing priorities. Given their “pleasure in lynching and hanging from year to year,” white Southerners were regarded as a depraved population. Their “depravity” proved that they needed “the services of missionaries” more than the Chinese “heathen,” Alexander stated. Returned missionaries could provide them with “correct methods of education” and “a rigid enforcement of the laws of our land.” Calling back missionaries from China and other foreign lands embodied “the only remedies” for white America’s lack of “civilization,” Alexander believed.Footnote ⁷⁷

If American missionaries were unwilling to return, African Americans expected the Chinese to force them to do so. On 11 September 1889, a group of white regulators entered the home of a Black American doctor in Montgomery, Alabama. The doctor sent several of them to “the other world” before fleeing. The remaining regulators moved the bodies to “a place of concealment” and returned to the house, where they killed the doctor’s daughter despite her pleas for “justice,” “mercy,” and “protection due an innocent woman.” This cold-blooded act angered African American editor Timothy Thomas Fortune, who was known as “one of the able, fearless and sarcastic of New York journalists.” On 19 April 1890, he ridiculed in his New York Age that white Americans committed such barbarities “almost under the very nose of the State authorities” while “sending hundreds of missionaries” to China and other foreign countries. This inconsistency made them “a generation of hypocrites.” Fortune urged China to “drive American missionaries from her country at once and tell them go home and put their own house in order.”Footnote ⁷⁸

Black Americans justified their demands for equality not only by highlighting the particularity of the African American plight but also by emphasizing that addressing these issues could be more rewarding than efforts to civilize China. White Americans’ deliberate neglect of this reality only heightened perceptions of their hypocrisy. J. R. Clifford was “one of the most distinguished Negroes” in central West Virginia. He used his newspaper, the Pioneer Press, to censure “dishonest” white persons who sought Black American votes but oppressed Black people.Footnote ⁷⁹ For his sympathy to people of African descent, O. P. Fitzgerald was apparently not the kind of white man that Clifford detested. In the Pioneer Press of 16 January 1892, this bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, admitted that his “interest in the Negro race is profound and biding.” Believing that evangelizing Black people could “save the republic,” he vowed that he would never “go into spasms over the yellow-skined [sic] heathen in China” while “do[ing] nothing in behalf of the millions of Negroes in our midst.” “The Negroes owe us something, and we owe them something,” Fitzgerald insisted.Footnote ⁸⁰ Richard B. Montgomery was another African American publisher who highlighted the worthiness of Black people’s racial uplift in relation to the elevation of China. Following his consistent ideology of racial accommodation, Montgomery published an article by Mend Holmes, a white man from Rockford, Illinois, in his Wisconsin Weekly Advocate on 28 May 1898, to stress the value of educating African Americans. Holmes believed that “no part” of China was “more needy or hopeful” than America’s Black population in terms of Christian education. With “abundant evidence of reason as well as instinct,” African Americans could be “raised to a plane of useful citizenship and true Christian character” through proper instruction, he contended. This result not only would repay the “debt of humanity, justice and reparation to the brutalized millions in the very bosom of our republic,” but also could facilitate America’s “foreign missions,” Holmes predicted.Footnote ⁸¹

In the final years of the nineteenth century, the United States acquired several overseas territories through annexation or war. Among these places, Hawaii, Cuba, and the Philippines had significant Chinese populations. As the US government deliberated how to manage these communities, African Americans invoked China’s perceived stubbornness to criticize white America for neglecting the value of Black American advancement. S. R. Scottron was “one of the best known and most highly esteemed Afro-Americans in Brooklyn.” On 19 September 1899, he noted in his letter to the Brooklyn Eagle that the United States had acquired “territories very largely inhabited by Chinese and other Asiatic races.” If the Chinese were “old men, with fixed ideas,” he observed, African Americans were “children,” with “blank,” “new born” minds. While the Chinese were “old in an opposite philosophy and experience,” African Americans, along with American Indians, were ready to embrace “only those things distinctly American.” Now that African Americans possessed “all the qualities” necessary to become one part of the American body politic, equality would only encourage them to “cheerfully” develop “every inch of territory acquired by his government,” rather than becoming a threat to America as the obstinate Chinese did, claimed Scottron.Footnote ⁸²

However, even when perceiving the Chinese as less civilized and less hopeful, Black Americans still described China as more tolerant than white people toward their race. In so doing, they aimed to shame white Americans, who often despised China, rather than elevate China’s status within the civilization hierarchy. On one hand, Black American commentators believed that no colorphobia existed in China. Some cited African Americans’ personal experiences to substantiate the point. For instance, on 12 July 1890, the Cleveland Gazette quoted Black American vocalist Frederick J. Loudin, “one of the most extensively traveled men” in Ohio, as saying that the “rulers” of China and other countries had taken him “by the hand as a man and a brother.” However, he was “denied a room and temporary board” at a hotel in Cleveland “on the ground of his color!” Considering this discrimination “‘humiliating’ in the extreme,” the Gazette called on the white American press to courageously “publish the name of the hotel” which insulted Loudin.”Footnote ⁸³ On 3 June 1899, Maggie E. Wilson, a Black woman singer who traveled with Loudin’s Fisk Jubilee Singers around the world, echoed in the Colored American that she understood “the true meaning of freedom” in all countries “save my own nativity.” China was among those nations where she could enjoy “life from true protected principles.” The “humiliating” contrast led African American expatriates like Wilson to “forget the existence of America,” her letter assured its readership.Footnote ⁸⁴

The Fisk Jubilee Singers were an African American troupe established at Fisk University in 1871. Loudin assumed leadership in 1882 and took it on a six-year global tour in 1884. On their way back from Australia in 1890, Loudin and his performers visited China, as some scholars mention in passing.Footnote ⁸⁵ A look into the North China Daily News, an English-language newspaper published by British expatriates in Shanghai, reveals more details. Leaving Hong Kong on 2 March 1890, the troupe reached Shanghai and stayed there until 22 March, when they departed for Japan and San Francisco. While in Shanghai, the company performed at the Lyceum Theatre, which was built and maintained by the British. One of the most popular songs was Wilson’s “Cleansing Fires.”Footnote ⁸⁶ However, no evidence proves that Loudin ever visited Beijing to see the Chinese emperor in person. His claim that the ruler treated him as a brother was merely a discursive tactic intended to shame racist white Americans. Wilson’s assertion might be accurate, given the troupe’s stay among liberal-minded Europeans.

On the other hand, the rules governing daily life in China were said to be more rational than those in the United States. In 1889, President Benjamin Harrison appointed Frederick Douglass the next US minister to Haiti. But a problem soon arose: would Douglass be allowed to travel to his post on a white-American-manned vessel? On October 18, the Detroit Plaindealer was confident that he would, in view of white American seamen’s perceived submission to Chinese norms. When American vessels visited China in the past, the paper reminisced, the Chinese regarded white men as “inferior” and forced them to “view all this assumption of superiority with philosophic forbearance.” As white Americans had given up “useless and foolish kicking” in China, the Plaindealer did not think that “Fred. Douglass’ appearance” would provoke any “real trouble” aboard an American ship.Footnote ⁸⁷ In 1894, the arrest of three Black American youths even prompted the Kansas Parsons Weekly Blade to suggest that African Americans migrate to China. The trio were taken into custody for “disturbing the peace of the wagon bridge near Whittaker’s brickyard” in Michigan. While one was sent to the county jail and the other two awaited trial, the paper ridiculed on 3 November that Black people could face imprisonment for disrupting the peace not only of wagon bridges but also of “dry goods boxes, coal sheds, etc.” It urged them to relocate to China or “some other places where people don’t hold the peace of their bridges in such sacred reverence.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Generally, African Americans shared white society’s view of China as being less modern and less civilized than the United States. However, their resistance to white Americans’ colorphobia prompted them to empathize with the Chinese, though their emphasis on American identity led them to insist that white America prioritize uplifting Black Americans. White America’s failure to respect people of color and to do so in the right order revealed its hypocrisy concerning Black–white relations. By highlighting the humanity and benevolence of allegedly barbaric China, African Americans aimed to cast that hypocrisy in a sharper relief. Undergirding all these efforts was their intention to hold up China’s perceived backwardness as a mirror that could reflect and clarify white Americans’ insincerity to Black Americans.