In a 1910 keynote address before the second meeting of the newly founded National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Franz Boas, the nation’s preeminent anthropologist, rejected the biological salience of racial distinctions. He then told the integrated audience it was “obvious” that “our race problems will become the less intense, the less the difference in type between the different groups of our people.” Considering racial discord a consequence of racial difference, Boas argued that making black Americans look more like white Americans via racial mixture would reduce “the acuteness of race feeling.”Footnote 1 His address initiated a glacial revolution overturning scientific support for biologically separate human races endowed with distinct levels of reason, intelligence, and morality, but his advocacy of racial mixture to solve racial strife never became mainstream.Footnote 2 Curiously describing racial mixture as the “one aspect of the solution of the Negro Problem [that] lies entirely in the hands of the Negro,” Boas called upon black Americans to support his proposal.Footnote 3 Few, however, seemed eager to even acknowledge it.
With blaring headlines across mainstream newspapers, widespread white opposition to Boas’s proposal is easily discernible. Black responses proved far more circumspect. Baltimore’s Afro-American, for example, extensively detailed the two-day NAACP conference but printed nothing on Boas’s address.Footnote 4 Prominent black attendees like Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Kelly Miller have no known recorded responses. Boas broke with the white American scientific, legal, and cultural consensus on the existence of biologically distinct human races, but black Americans met Boas’s remarks with public silence. How, then, can historians know what they thought of his proposal to eliminate racial strife by eliminating racial differences?
Scholarly attention on racial mixture in the Progressive Era United States has mirrored the disparate levels of black and white responses to Boas’s address. Since whites were the ones inscribing bans on interracial marriage into law, penning fearmongering headlines, and carrying out the violence against the supposed violators of the sexual color line, historians’ attention has largely been on what whites thought and did. This has resulted in numerous analyses illustrating how interracial marriage bans shaped white conceptions of race and enforced an artificial color line.Footnote 5 Such analyses offer extraordinary insight into how whites constructed the idea that interracial unions were unnatural to create a near-unanimous white opposition that undergirded white purity policies, segregation, and white supremacy. Yet, presuming the archives do not offer much on black positions or that black views were immaterial given their dearth of political power, such works offer little on black thought and action.Footnote 6 Peter Wallenstein’s Race, Sex, and the Freedom to Marry (2014), for example, purports to tour “all of American history.”Footnote 7 Never, however, does he focus on black views. Such omissions not only leave unanswered whites’ racist charges of black interracial covetousness, but also fail to account for the ways in which black activists combated white supremacy in all of its manifestations and how black and white thought, even when seemingly in alignment, dramatically differed.
Despite being marginalized in much of the history, black discourse over racial mixture proved foundational to the process of black identity formation. Historian Kevin Gaines terms such discourse “part of the larger intellectual struggle of extracting a positive black identity from pejorative racial theories.” For Mia Bay, black debate over the issue epitomizes the central tension within black thought—a drive to uphold race pride by stressing the race’s uniqueness while defending against racism by emphasizing equality. According to Michelle Mitchell, turn-of-the-century black thought over interracial reproduction reveals a burgeoning concept of race destiny—the “wide-ranging yet singular notion that black people shared a common fate.”Footnote 8
Yet still more needs to be done to capture the breadth and complexity of black views, how their positions differed from those of whites, and their recognition of the failures in seemingly antiracist white thought. Black discourse over racial mixture illustrates a divergence not seen in white thought between overwhelming black support for the legal right to interracial marriage alongside widespread black unease with exercising that right. In other words, black Americans fought for the legality of something many personally rejected. Additionally, as William Pickens of the NAACP warned five years after Boas’s address, “The lack of adequate knowledge of the Negro’s real interest, motives and opinions” was “one of the greatest defects” in white attempts to resolve racism.Footnote 9 Had Boas examined nearly any prior black views on racial mixture, he would have seen virtually no support for his ideas. The nation’s leading progressive voice on race relations offered a completely unworkable plan to remediate racial strife because he did not understand black thought. Cognizant of white opposition, Boas offered caveats to appease whites but seemed utterly oblivious to or dismissive of even the possibility of black resistance to their own racial obliteration. Such oversights fundamentally hampered his understanding of the very nature of the nation’s problem. Eradicating racial distinctions would not dismantle white supremacy and the way he proposed mixture should occur only reinscribed the racial hierarchy he proposed to dismantle.
The perilous nature of the topic for black Americans, particularly in highly visible contexts like Boas’s address, however, has made accessing their views difficult. Historian David Levering Lewis aptly described the issue as “deadly delicate.”Footnote 10 Booker T. Washington insisted that black progress depended upon denying interest in what many euphemistically termed “social equality.” He even rejected a ten-thousand-dollar donation to his Tuskegee Institute in 1906 on the condition that he debate novelist Thomas Dixon on the matter.Footnote 11 Yet this very avoidance of the topic and rote denials of interest itself restricted black thought. As Pickens complained in 1910, “Whenever a Negro begins to speak for the rights of his race he feels it necessary to tell the world that he is not an aspirant after ‘social equality’ or a defender thereof.”Footnote 12 Black Americans could not freely engage in public discussions over anything that seemingly fell under the expansive banner of “social equality” without fear of white reprisals. Yet the precarious nature of the topic itself makes seeming archival silences all the more revealing of black priorities. As Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh found of enslaved women’s sexual lives, “what they chose not to say [often] revealed what and whom they valued most.”Footnote 13
Black views during the Progressive Era are particularly salient given the period’s turmoil. Historian Rayford Logan termed the turn of the century the nadir of American race relations as racial strife and the antiblack violence and rhetoric upholding it had never been worse.Footnote 14 Jim Crow decisively limited black rights across the South but was spreading north too, as were attempts to create a biracial order confining all with any known black ancestry to one side of a racial color line. Meanwhile, the black population underwent enormous internal changes. What historian Joel Williamson described as the “great age of passing” (1880–1925) apexed around 1910 as many with ambiguous racial presentations began living as if they were white. Thousands and eventually millions who could not or would not pass sought to lessen their oppression by moving north in what became the Great Migration (1910–70). The generation coming of age were the children and grandchildren of those who had been enslaved and began terming themselves “New Negroes” to denote a break from earlier generations and to mark a new confidence, outlook, and confrontational style.Footnote 15 By the 1920s both a cultural outpouring (later termed the Harlem Renaissance) and separately a mass Black Nationalist movement under Jamaican leader Marcus Garvey enticed millions to its ranks and ushered in a celebration of blackness. Simultaneously, the scientific revolution that Boas inaugurated against the biological salience of race spurred self-reflection among black intellectuals over the meaning of race itself. Without a biological basis, many questioned how racial consciousness and solidarity could or should be maintained.Footnote 16
Given the importance of understanding black views at this critical crossroads, scholars must look to underexplored sources where black views did surface. The same year as Boas made his proposal, another white man similarly suggested eradicating racial boundaries via racial mixture. John James Holm, a self-styled anthropologist, solicited black responses to publish inside his book, Holm’s Race Assimilation: Or, the Fading Leopard’s Spots; a Complete Scientific Exposition of the Most Tremendous Question That Has Ever Confronted Two Races in the World’s History. The black essayists inside Holm’s tome could more freely offer their positions to a far less known white thinker than Boas. Holm asked his respondents their position on interracial marriage being legal, its morality, and whether racial mixture could solve the nation’s racial woes.Footnote 17 For black Americans, responding to a prominent proposal like Boas’s seeking mass racial mixture without regard to legal marriage was an inherently insulting prospect and one laden with peril. Insisting that interracial marriage be legal to a relatively unknown anthropologist represented a far safer and more respectable prospect.
By examining the black responses to Holm’s proposal, historians can envisage contemporary black reactions to Boas and thereby start to forge a more complete understanding of black thought in the Progressive Era United States. Even still, assessing black views among Holm’s essayists is far from straightforward as many did not directly respond to his inquiries. Akin to politicians asked an unwinnable question, they answered with what they preferred to discuss instead. Their non-answers or alternative answers nevertheless speak volumes about their priorities and favored solutions and suggest how historians might better access black views by looking to what is both said and not said regarding this decidedly delicate issue. Others demonstrated that even seeming agreement with whites could be predicated upon wildly opposite aims. Black opposition to racial mixture was built not on racial chauvinism but rather around “romantic pluralism”—the idea that black Americans should be able to exist alongside whites in equality, in all spheres of life, as they made their own distinct contributions to the world. Or, as eminent black sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois succinctly explained to a predominantly white audience in 1921, “The reasons are ours and not yours.”Footnote 18 As the white political, cultural, and intellectual establishment consolidated race into a binary structure in the 1910s, many black Americans also sought their own intra-racial unification of sorts, or at the least opposed a purposeful dilution of their race. Their reasons, however, could not have been more distinct from white drives to reinforce their racial dominance.
Examining the black-authored essays within Holm’s Race Assimilation shows the era to be alive with black discourse over the future of the race, demands for citizenship rights, and drives to foster a positive racial destiny—ideas steeped in concern over reproduction, respectability, and color consciousness. Black Americans welcomed Boas’s dismissal of race’s significance in terms of human capabilities, yet they mobilized race for dramatically different purposes than both the famed anthropologist and whites seeking to maintain a racial hierarchy. Unlike white hysteria over white racial “purity,” racial integrity for black Americans meant solidarity for self-protection, race pride, and the race’s very survival.Footnote 19 That meant seemingly that antiracist calls for the erasure of racial differences, such as Boas and Holm proposed, could prove as threatening to black futurity as white fearmongering over racial mixture to justify white supremacist policies.
Such threats were only compounded by the manners in which Boas and Holm positioned black views. As a Jew and a foreigner, Boas held a liminal position and yet one of purported racial neutrality. His assumption therefore that black Americans should accept becoming white reinforced long-standing tropes that they coveted whiteness. Further, by giving his proposal as the keynote address at an NAACP conference, Boas fueled erroneous allegations that demands for integration represented desires for interracial liaisons. Holm went even further than Boas to misconstrue black positions. Reversing the custom of white abolitionists writing prefaces for slave narratives to authenticate the text’s authorship and credibility, Holm literally surrounded his ideas in black “endorsements,” with the book’s introduction written by a black minister and eleven black-authored essays at its end. Despite claiming that the essayists “scarcely need an introduction,” he introduced them in the authenticating style of abolitionist prefaces before presenting each as fully aligning with his proposal.Footnote 20
Far from Holm’s framing of the essayists endorsing his plan, they demonstrated black intellectual resistance to white supremacy appearing under the guise of antiracism. Black Progressive Era views on racial mixture revealed a true antiracist path forward in which their race would not have to disappear into whiteness to achieve racial peace but could instead obtain full rights while maintaining black identities. Akin to opposition to “color blindness” today, black Americans at this crucial juncture recognized the flaws in proposals that would deny their experiences, culture, and future, but did nothing to rectify the white supremacy at the core of the nation. The essayists insisted that the right to legal interracial marriage served as a bedrock of equality, even as many hoped that legalizing such marriages would actually decrease the number of interracial relationships.
Progressive Era race making
The white public had long considered racial mixture an abomination. Mere rumor of interracial marriages could incite antebellum antiblack violence.Footnote 21 To derail President Lincoln’s 1864 reelection campaign, Democrats posing as Republicans even invented a new term, “miscegenation,” to that claim the Republican Party promoted inverting the social hierarchy through racial mixture. Widespread white belief in the unnaturalness of interracial marriage became, according to Peggy Pascoe, “the foundation of post-Civil War white supremacy.”Footnote 22 Such beliefs even acquired scientific backing, such as when statistician Frederick Hoffman (1896) catalogued racial mixture’s supposed deleterious effects. Mixture, according to such writings, would contaminate white “purity” and lead to national (i.e. white racial) “suicide.”Footnote 23 The era’s most popular fiction, Dixon’s avowedly racist The Leopard’s Spots (1902), presented the era as a dire contest for racial hegemony: “The future American must be an Anglo-Saxon or a Mulatto! We are now deciding which it shall be.”Footnote 24 Thousands of whites regularly sought to ensure the future’s direction through ritualistic, spectacle murder under the guise that only “lynch law” could protect white women from “black brutes.” White mobs propagating this “myth of the black rapist” murdered at least four thousand black men, women, and children in the Jim Crow era.Footnote 25
Eugenics, the “science of human breeding,” boomed in popularity during the Progressive Era and provided a fresh veneer of scientific rigor for white opposition to racial mixture.Footnote 26 Immigration quotas, compulsory sterilization, and marriage restrictions epitomized the confluence of Progressive and eugenic beliefs by purporting to use science to solve social problems. Mainstream American eugenics presented as fact that “race mixing” led to inferior, dysgenic offspring and would “lead to endless friction.”Footnote 27 As of 1910, twenty-nine states seemed to agree as they barred interracial marriage, and half the remaining states proposed bans soon thereafter. In the white racial imagination, black people were biologically and permanently inferior, racial mixture endangered the white nation, and American law, culture, and extralegal violence reflected this.Footnote 28
Yet, even by the early twentieth century, the white racial milieu had not yet fully built a binary classification system placing all with any known African ancestry on one side of a racial color line. As historian Matthew Guterl describes the era, “‘white’ and ‘black’ were not yet stable, easily defined identities.” Certainly, the nation was well on its way to a “bi-racialist sensibility,” but in 1910 race and color were not yet fully seen as interchangeable.Footnote 29 For instance, millions of recent arrivals to the United States, despite hailing from Europe, were not considered “white” by “Old Stock” Americans. Simultaneously, while in practice many were considered black if they had any known black lineage, under the law one could become a different race simply by crossing state lines that varied in their legal definitions. In 1910 Tennessee became the first to codify a “one-drop rule,” confining those with any trace of black ancestry to one side of a racial color line. Yet, fearing that “a remote, perhaps obsolete trace of Negro blood” lay within elite families, Virginia only crept nearer to “one drop” that year by moving the color line from those with one quarter to one eighth African ancestry.Footnote 30 The Progressive Era project to bifurcate racial categories was decidedly underway but not yet complete when Boas sought to halt its advance.
Racial lines had hardened considerably by the 1920s. Champions of white world supremacy, such as Madison Grant (1916) and Lothrop Stoddard (1920), pushed racial essentialism and biracialist sensibilities to their apex—culminating in the National Origins Act of 1924 favoring migrants from Northern and Western Europe and Virginia’s adoption of the one-drop rule in 1924.Footnote 31 Subsequently, Walter Plecker—Virginia’s registrar of vital statistics, a eugenicist, and leader of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America—scoured birth certificates to ferret out those he believed were attempting to pass as white.Footnote 32 Where once stood some flexibility or at least ambiguity over racial demarcations, Progressive Era race making codified stark delineations.
Thus Boas’s 1910 proposal marked a clear break with the direction of most of the era’s racial thought. He tentatively embraced antiracism by rejecting biological significance to racial distinctions and assumptions that racial mixture proved harmful. Nevertheless, he continued to uphold white supremacy by the manner in which he insisted mixture should occur. Boas had not proposed an egalitarian comingling of races into a mixed-race population but the diluting or “bleaching” of the black population to the point of unrecognizability. Rejecting that the white population had to “be infused with a certain amount of Negro blood,” Boas instead proposed introducing more white lineage into the black population.Footnote 33 Offering a biological solution to what he admitted was a social problem of white racism, Boas insisted that black people need not just assimilate into white society but amalgamate with it to become physically indistinguishable from it.
For Boas, reproduction along the gendered–racialized lines in which mixture had historically occurred with greatest frequency served as the swiftest route to his “raceless” future. Emphasizing that women have a finite reproductive capacity, whereas men could theoretically have an infinite number of children, Boas argued that white male/black female pairings would be the most efficient method for “the relative proportion of Negro blood in the following generations [to] becom[e] less.” In other words, Boas called for more white fathers and fewer black ones, as well as reproduction under exploitative conditions as his plan relied upon the long-accepted (by whites) practice of white men having out-of-wedlock children with black women.Footnote 34 Despite calling for the violation of the era’s biggest racial taboos, in practice Boas’s plan fully adhered to white racial norms of exploiting black women and sought not a “raceless” future but a white-presenting one.
With 88 percent of the American population classified as white and 11 percent black in 1910, demographics alone would ensure that the resulting population from extensive mixture would be white-dominated.Footnote 35 Martin Delany, often considered the father of black nationalism, had warned of this possibility in 1880: “A general intermarriage of any two distinct races would inevitably result in the destruction, the extinction of the less numerous of the two; that race which preponderates entirely absorbing the other.”Footnote 36 Yet, for Boas, the fading away of black Americans was more than just a question of numbers, but a white supremacist assumption of which race should endure. Although the advancing “one-drop rule” would consider the resulting population from Boas’s schema black, the white anthropologist emphasized the retention of white—not black—identities. He did not envision a mixed-race, multicultural population but the disappearance, arguably even the death, of the black population while leaving white identities—and white supremacy—ostensibly unaltered.Footnote 37
Black ethnographers had long insisted that science did not support claims of racial superiority or inferiority and thus might have been presumed to welcome Boas’s rejection of race’s biological salience.Footnote 38 Yet accepting their own racial oblivion proved another matter entirely. When Thomas Dixon claimed five years before Boas’s address that “ninety-nine Negroes out of every one hundred” sought mixture and wanted to become white, Howard University Professor Kelly Miller spoke for many of his race when he adamantly denied the accusation. In an open letter, Miller retorted that he knew “of no colored man who advocates amalgamation as a feasible policy solution” nor “hope[s] and dream[s] of amalgamation.” Miller, in fact, advocated black racial consolidation with “extreme blacks” marrying “those of lighter hue” to form “a more solid and compact ethnic group.”Footnote 39 Nevertheless, Miller did not denounce racial mixture as he held that even black people who opposed it would not “proclaim that [they are] so diverse from God’s other human creatures as to make the blending of the races contrary to the law of nature.”Footnote 40
Thus, while black Americans undoubtedly welcomed the denouncement of race’s biological salience by the leading white anthropologist, conjoining this with his proffered solution of removing racial differences via racial mixture made Boas’s proposition both a nonstarter and a minefield. Like Miller, few openly countenanced the notion of black eradication via the adoption of white identities. Yet, if they spurned Boas’s proposed solution, would they also lose the benefits of his rejection of the significance of racial difference? If there were no meaningful scientific distinctions between races, on what grounds could or should they seek to maintain racial integrity? How should the race navigate a new and unfolding scientific landscape while combating the violence and segregation from the old but still vigorous scientific and popular consensus? If they were to accede to Boas’s proposal, would that confirm allegations that they sought white paramours and to become white? Such lies excused the lynching of black men and the rape of black women. Even if black Americans welcomed Boas’s proposition, open agreement threatened their safety. Open dissent risked losing Boas (and his dismissal of race’s biological salience) as an ally.
Six months after Boas’s address, Du Bois, who had invited Boas to speak at the NAACP meeting, broke his race’s silence by featuring Boas’s address as the lead article in the second issue of the NAACP’s new mouthpiece, The Crisis. Presumably not coincidently, the month before publication, Du Bois wrote in another periodical that the “wholesale intermarriage of races during the present generations would be a social calamity” and nothing less than “spiritual death.”Footnote 41 Although not a new position for Du Bois, these were his most explicit remarks on the subject to date.Footnote 42 Never referencing Boas, Du Bois maintained that interracial marriage should be legal in principle but should nevertheless be avoided. In a later publication, Du Bois showed that he opposed not just Boas’s proposed solution but his entire conceptualization of the problem. Far from seeing interracial marriage as a means to alleviate racial tension, the “deep seated racial antagonisms and hatreds” were reason enough for Du Bois to advise avoidance of such unions. He further doubted that even “in the next millennium race lines will wholly disappear.”Footnote 43 Clearly, the black sociologist’s views differed markedly from the white anthropologist’s.
Nevertheless, for Du Bois, Boas’s denial of race’s biological significance apparently outweighed Boas’s promotion of a problematic solution. In balance, Boas’s address primarily stressed the dearth of evidence supporting the significance of racial distinctions. Only in the last third did Boas present mixture as a solution. Lacking the blaring headlines of mainstream papers and published months after the initial clamor, Du Bois appeared to be directing focus to the position on which he and Boas agreed without imperiling his relationship with an influential ally, who carried far more weight in the academy and who, unlike Du Bois, was considered “objective” on racial matters.Footnote 44 Uplifting the antiracist aspects by publishing the address, Du Bois tried skirting its white supremacy by ignoring Boas’s concluding proposal and rejecting its central tenets elsewhere. His delicate positioning embodies what Daphne Lamothe describes as black thinkers’ critically “adapt[ing] and adopt[ing]” white anthropological insights for their own purposes. They adopted what challenged “non-Whites’ presumed subhumanity” but adapted what reinforced “a Western subject/non-Western object dichotomy.”Footnote 45
Holm’s Race Assimilation
Such adoption and adaption appeared too in the black-authored essays within Holm’s Race Assimilation. Promotional material for the book likened its potential influence to that of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but the book and the black views within it received little attention at the time and have received little attention by historians since.Footnote 46 The massive tome contained over four hundred pages outlining Holm’s proposal to solve racial strife via racial mixture. He maintained that his book contained “ample scientific proof that racial admixture is inevitable, that intermarriage prohibition is an outrage to human justice,” and “that the future greatness of this country depends upon the peaceful assimilation of all its people,” via racial mixture.Footnote 47 Holm, a Wisconsinite by birth who spent the second half of his life in Florida, had been a student of Orson Squire Fowler, a prominent phrenologist who held that the pseudoscience demonstrated black inferiority.Footnote 48 Although Holm has no known record denouncing his mentor’s views, he claimed in his book to be a fierce defender of racial equality.
Holm’s subtitle, “The Fading Leopard’s Spots,” not only referenced the day’s most popular fiction but sought to overturn its author’s central premise. While Dixon condemned racial mixture as a great evil imperiling the (white) nation, Holm stressed that “the variety of races in our country means future greatness and unlimited possibilities; and that when these races are judiciously crossed, scientifically mated, a new man will in time result, with marvelous intellectual and physical powers.”Footnote 49 Where Dixon saw a threat, Holm envisioned the building blocks of national success. Ostensibly, their views for the nation’s future could not have been more antithetical.
Holm considered racial mixture both a solution to racial inequality and ethnologically beneficial. Unlike Boas’s dismissal of race biologically, Holm embraced romantic racialism as he considered racial differences real but rejected traditional racial hierarchies.Footnote 50 In an argument for “hybrid vigor,” Holm deemed the offspring of a white and a black person “a posterity superior to all others.” That superiority, for Holm, depended upon the mixing of heterogeneous properties, but also upon the relationship being “in a loving-state.” Children born to loving couples, Holm argued, “inherit the excellent qualities of both” parents, while those “imperfectly blended are … inferior to their parents.”Footnote 51 While Boas seemed unconcerned by legal bars to interracial marriage, Holm abhorred such bans. He considered them “an outrage to human justice, contrary to a fixed law of Nature, [and] demoralizing to both races” as they fueled lynch mobs, promoted out-of-wedlock relations injurious to black women, and hindered the loving attachments he deemed necessary for superior posterity. For Holm, legal marriage would be ethnologically advantageous, moral, and just. Boas, indifferent on the morality, only viewed mixture as a means to erase racial strife with no biological benefits.Footnote 52
Holm’s exaltation of hybrid superiority, however, made his arguments parallel long-established white claims that the talents of mixed-race figures were due to their white ancestry. Claiming that “ninety per cent of the so-called ‘smart niggers’ of superior capability are of mixed breed,” Holm thought this stemmed from the mixture itself and not the white lineage. Yet his examples made it a distinction without a difference given that he made no analogous statements regarding talented whites having racially mixed backgrounds. He even speculated that acclaimed figures well known to be of only African descent, such as poet Phillis Wheatley, had a racially mixed lineage. Holm expressed the antiracist position that “extraordinary ability” was “not confined to any one race,” but he reiterated common tropes that discounted examples of black brilliance while leaving all white examples intact.Footnote 53 His belief that racial mixture without loving attachments produced inferior posterity also aligned with racist beliefs deeming the mixed population inferior given the long history of enslavers’ sexual abuse of black women.
Akin to Boas, Holm deemed racial mixture the swiftest route to racial harmony and likewise stressed that this process need not significantly change the white population as he emphasized the “assimilation by amalgamation of the Afro-American” (not of whites or a merging of cultures or races). Holm declared that “the real Negro,” which he defined as a person of entirely African descent, “will disappear in a very few generations” and made no equivalent statement about “real” whites disappearing.Footnote 54 Neither Boas nor Holm envisioned a mixed-race nation but a white nation in which the black populace had been diluted away. Ending racial strife, for both anthropologists, meant eliminating the black population. Accepting either anthropologists’ position that black people needed to mix with whites to obtain racial peace was akin to accepting long-standing claims that black people were the problem—not white racism.Footnote 55 Boas and Holm denied black inferiority and considered whites at fault for prejudice, but their “solutions” called for the black population, not whites or white supremacy, to disappear.
To demonstrate support for his ideas, Holm presented eleven essays by ten black contributors at the end of his tome that he claimed to have “spared neither time nor expense in selecting … for this book,” as well as purposefully seeking out a range in ages, “the amount of Negro blood, and other striking physical and mental contrasts.” He did not explain his rationale for including only essays by black authors; presumably he had sought essays from whites too but received none, or none he opted to publish. Instead, he cited abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Douglass as providing “spiritual assistance.” Accordingly, he addressed readers not with “I” but with “we” since he believed himself to be cowriting the book with these forerunners.Footnote 56
Holm’s essayists
Despite Holm’s framing of the essayists as supporting his proposal, none were. While they disagreed with one another in vital ways, all opposed abandoning racial integrity for the promise of racial peace. Removing recognizable black identities might alleviate racial strife but would necessitate abandoning what many considered a unique racial destiny. The essayists proved unwilling to accept such a Faustian bargain and instead offered their preferred solutions for ending racial strife while defending the legal right to interracial marriage as a matter of principle. Holm’s essayists, like Du Bois’s adaptation of Boas, attempted to foreground what was helpful—such as Holm’s stress on the need to legalize interracial marriage—and ignore or rework what was harmful, encouraging widespread mixture that would eliminate the black population. Unwilling to endorse or condemn racial mixture, the essayists instead celebrated racial integrity and demonstrated how removed from their realities Holm’s and by extension Boas’s proposals were.Footnote 57
Centrally, essayists seemed highly cognizant of the paranoia rationalizing lynching and Jim Crow that made even mention of the topic risky. Thus, like the black silence regarding Boas’s address, some avoided the very subject of Holm’s work. The book’s introduction, penned by M. Edward Church, a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (A.M.E.Z.), for instance, contains no hint of the book’s controversial topic as he only uses oblique references to “a cause that concerns the vital interest of both races in America.”Footnote 58 Two essayists likewise sidestepped direct engagement even as they illustrated their disagreement with Holm. John H. White, an Indiana minister and a doctor of divinity whom Holm described as a “Colored Caucasian” because of his light skin, confined his essay to an origins account of humanity typical of much nineteenth-century black ethnography. He emphasized a single creation event for all humans but stressed a unique role ahead for black people. While White’s position can be interpreted as supportive of racial mixture given that he mentions that it occurred throughout history, he also touted the race’s potential, ending with a call for equal opportunity to allow his race to “develop into a great, progressive race, and lead again.” Reminiscent of Du Bois’s 1897 “Conservation of the Races” address maintaining “that Negro blood has yet a message for the world,” interracial relationships appeared natural to White but undesirable considering the distinct role he envisioned ahead for the race.Footnote 59 He emphasized equality of opportunity as a solution to racial strife, and his silences on interracial marriage itself and Holm’s proposal were highly, if subtly, suggestive of disagreement.
Similarly indirect, Alabama teacher Sophia Cox Johnson’s essay celebrated black women’s strides in respectability since Emancipation. Indignant at varied complexions within a single household, Johnson condemned such visual evidence of “promiscuity.” Yet she obliquely presented this as a problem of the past being rectified through racial uplift leading black women to eschew the very types of relationships Boas suggested.Footnote 60 Avoidance was the only option in Johnson’s mind because interracial marriages, she appeared certain, would not be legalized anytime soon and grandiose theories from Holm or Boas trampled upon her efforts to suppress immorality. Asked by Holm about legalizing interracial marriage, she ignored the question that overlooked her lived reality and instead only praised black women’s strides to avoid illicit relationships. Neither she nor White endorsed Holm’s position and indeed implied their opposition, yet Holm included their essays as evidence of black support.
William Pickens, who went on to warn in 1915 of the harms of whites’ lack of understanding of black views, proved far less circumspect than Johnson and White in his essay. A celebrated and well-known orator who taught classics and sociology before becoming a field secretary for the NAACP, Pickens non-euphemistically thought that the races should get to know one another better and thanked “heaven” that “carnal intercourse … is not the only variety of contact possible between two races.” Pickens lamented that whites attached a transgressive stigma to even platonic interactions that forced the race to deny interest in intimate interracial relations. Such denials, Pickens held, had become perfunctory, hampered demands for justice, and stymied day-to-day interactions that he held could actually pacify racial animosity. Racial mixture, particularly as it occurred between the “worst sort,” according to Pickens, would not solve “bad intercourse.”Footnote 61 Legal marriage, he suggested, would be beneficial, but it was only one component of a much larger realm needing reform. Fostering healthy interactions in all areas of life would connect the “better class” of each race and thereby improve relations. Workplaces, churches, and schools, Pickens stressed, needed integrating to allow non-romantic interactions to flourish.Footnote 62
With interracial marriage barred in all states with substantial black populations, most other respondents confined themselves to defending the need to legalize interracial marriage—not to encourage racial mixture but to allow equal rights. James E. Shepard, the president of a training school that is now North Carolina Central University, insisted that “the State has no right to regulate the social status of the individual.” Widely considered one of North Carolina’s most respected black citizens, Shepard’s biographer depicts him as a centrist between Washington and Du Bois. For Shepard, marriage was purely a matter for individuals to determine and state involvement was a grave injustice. Yet, like White, Johnson, and Pickens, instead of dwelling on Holm’s proposal, Shepard focused primarily on what he considered a surer route to racial peace: ending whites’ “color prejudice.”Footnote 63 Shepard, Holm, and Boas agreed that the problem lay in white thought but differed on whether that necessitated changing white minds or black bodies.
Magazine editor and poet James E. McGirt, also of North Carolina, likewise endorsed legalization but little more. Freedom, he insisted, required “freedom of marriage and association.” The laws inhibiting it therefore “MUST GO.” Yet he insisted that he did “not advocate social equality or amalgamation,” just as he did not “oppose or advocate gravitation or evolution of the course of the stars. They are fixed by higher laws than those made by human legislation.” Racial mixture, to McGirt, simply represented a natural process in need of no elaborate theories in support—such as Boas and Holm provided. Interracial marriage merely needed to be legalized and let alone.Footnote 64
Shepard and McGirt embodied an agnostic position on racial mixture that deemed it neither good nor evil, merely a private choice. Legalization remained a fundamental prerequisite for justice, but individual relationships and these essayists’ personal preferences about them were superfluous to the larger principles at stake. The agnostic position would face severe testing in the wake of heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson’s marriage to a white woman in 1912 (months after a white woman he wed in 1911 took her own life). Irate white legislators introduced bans in half the states without them—seeming confirmation of McGirt’s position that “advocacy” of interracial marriage, through a notorious marriage or anthropologists’ proposals, incited opposition. A reluctant NAACP, however, lobbied against the proposed bans “not because the Association advocates intermarriage, which it does not, but, primarily, because whenever such laws have been enacted they become a menace to the whole institution of matrimony.”Footnote 65 The (Richmond) Planet, a black-authored newspaper, similarly reported that “the majority of the Colored people—and a large majority of them—do not approve” of Johnson’s “private actions,” but “from the standpoint of personal liberty, a White man has the moral right to marry a Colored woman and vice versa.”Footnote 66 The New York Age likewise held, “We do not need to favor the marriage of blacks and whites as a personal matter, but we do need to stand by the principle that blacks and whites shall be free to marry if they so desire.”Footnote 67 The NAACP and black commentators were clear that they opposed Johnson’s “disreputable” behavior but nevertheless defended his legal right to wed interracially, just as Shepard and McGirt upheld the right as a fundamental component of equal citizenship.
Several essayists grounded their support for legalization in morality. Bishop J. W. Smith, of North Carolina, held that bans should be overturned as he deemed them designed to “besmear filth over the good name of the Black race” as “so-called amalgamation” played out as “fornication and adultery.” Smith, known as “the militant writer” for his editorials decrying racial injustices in the A.M.E.Z.’s Star of Zion newspaper, believed that there was “no such thing as amalgamation or miscegenation between human beings,” as all were “of one blood.” Given this, Smith thought “mixed” marriages were “entirely within the range of propriety.”Footnote 68 Legalization of interracial marriage therefore would prevent lewdness and decrease the number of interracial relationships as he thought many would avoid them if they could be solemnized.
Smith embraced a position typical of many of his race throughout the prior century who treated as catechism the biblical phrase “of one blood” to emphasize a fundamental unity among humanity as all races stemmed from the same creation event (monogenesis) and were thus owed the same rights. The phrase sought to counter white ethnographers’ explanations for racial differences stemming from separate creation events (polygenesis).Footnote 69 Insisting that all arose from the same origins not only served as a powerful argument against slavery and discrimination but also mandated legalizing interracial marriage.
As Smith underscores, however, adherence to “of one blood” did not equate to embracing interracial marriage as anything more than something in need of legalization. Most directly of all the essayists, Smith responded in the negative to Holm’s queries: “I have been asked if I believe that amalgamation or miscegenation between the white and black races will solve the Negro problem. No sir.” Thus Smith differed vitally from Holm even as Smith, like Boas, saw no biological significance to race. Racial mixture carried no ethnological benefits for Smith, as no true mixture occurred, so he could only agree with Holm’s position on the morality of legalization. Nevertheless, and despite his declaration of naturalness, he professed that he would not “marry outside [his] race.” He considered a rationale for the seeming contradiction so commonsensical that it needed no explanation.Footnote 70 The unique role White, a fellow minister who had also invoked monogenesis, envisioned for the race as a race suggests a possible explanation for Smith’s personal opposition.
Another member of the A.M.E.Z. Church, Bishop Alexander Walters, also considered interracial marriage bans deeply immoral. In 1911, Walters, who had been president of the National Afro-American Council, would become vice president of the NAACP. In his essay for Holm’s book, Walters held that the exploitation and rape that black women had long suffered were “CRIMES WHICH ARE CALLING ALOUD TO ALMIGHTY GOD FOR VENGEANCE, AND WE ARE COMPELLED TO SUFFER AS A NATION UNTIL SUCH WRONGS ARE RIGHTED.” The laws treated black women as “nothing but a ‘thing’ to be used by [white] men.” Ending bans, he insisted, would therefore bring about the equitable treatment of black women—reducing nonconsensual relationships and allowing consensual ones legitimacy. Undoubtedly, Walters, who also wrote passionately about protecting the “sanctity of marriage” in his autobiography, would have been outraged by Boas’s acceptance of out-of-wedlock relationships and emphasis on black women’s particular role, considering it Boas’s admission of black women as mere “things.”Footnote 71 In the audience for Boas’s address, Walters presumably struggled to maintain his composure.
New York teacher and lecturer Anna D. Borden concurred with Walters that interracial marriage bans harmed black women. Yet whereas Walters professed that God’s wrath over illicit relationships fell upon the nation, Borden lamented that black women alone bore the stigma. To be “COMPLETELY EMANCIPATED FROM THE THRALLDOM OF THE PAST,” Borden held, interracial marriage needed to be legalized. Until that time, black women should treat “any approach of white men as an unpardonable affront.” Borden suggested no opposition to interracial marriage itself but decried illicit relationships.Footnote 72 She and Holm agreed upon the baneful effects of bans and the unfairness of critiques of black women, but she did not consider racial mixture a solution. Like Walters, she sought legalization to bring about basic freedom, not mass mixture, and also suggested that legalization would lead to less mixture as white men would avoid such relationships if they could be legitimized. For Borden, Boas’s proposal and its disregard for legal wedlock and emphasis on black women’s role would be especially heinous.
Borden underscores Michelle Mitchell’s contention that black discourse on interracial sex was “highly gendered” in an “inequitable fashion,” meaning that the burden of avoiding interracial relationships rested primarily on black women.Footnote 73 Borden adamantly rejected that onus and wrote a second essay for Holm’s book critiquing black, male leaders for their hypocritical stance wherein they condemned the unwed mothers of mixed-raced children yet gladly married their light-skinned offspring. She called for both to be accepted or rejected. Likewise, those who espoused pride in their unmixed complexion, she insisted, should not “‘degrade’ your offspring with foreign blood.” Rather than critiquing mixture, Borden targeted inconsistency and colorism hurting dark-skinned black women in particular and demanded that leaders prioritize repealing bans over condemning black women.Footnote 74
Borden also decried race disloyalty built upon what she considered the conflation of heritage and identity. Some race leaders, particularly men, she bemoaned, brag of possessing white lineage, but Borden held that their identity should be determined by who had best served them—“the dearest person on earth,” their mother. Boas and Holm wanted the abandonment of black identities, but Borden sought preservation of race pride and loyalty, irrespective of mixture levels, and thus a more expansive definition for her race. Race pride, for Borden, was a weapon against racism, not an instrument of it, and racial loyalty remained vital irrespective of mixture. Where Boas stressed the “efficiency” of black women having the children of white men to rapidly shed racial differences, Borden celebrated the continuation of black identities via a respect for black motherhood as she held that one could not be “only one-half Negro” if raised by a black mother and abandoned by a white father.Footnote 75 Despite such differences, Holm included not just one but two essays from Borden.
Borden and Johnson’s positions embodied much of what Margaret Murray Washington, cofounder of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC), termed the “New Negro Woman.” Built by Black women’s racial-uplift discourse at the turn of the century, such women demanded the same respect as white women received, particularly “authorial control of their bodies.” The NACWC’s promotion of black women’s respectability was deeply tied to purging any illicit associations from past, out-of-wedlock mixture. NACWC national organizer Victoria Earle Matthews, for instance, held that black women were deserving of respect, not stereotypes, as they rebuilt their “ruined castle of honor.” Likewise, Mary Church Terrell, the NACWC’s first president, maintained that the organization’s role lay in the “sacred domain” of building “purer homes.” Terrell held that “no sound argument could be produced to prove that there is anything inherently wrong in the intermarriage of the races,” but believed that, “under existing conditions,” interracial unions “could bring very little happiness.”Footnote 76 The NACWC took no official position on interracial marriage, yet contended that bans left black women vulnerable to sexual exploitation. Thus, like Johnson and Borden, black women’s foremost organization advocated for “respectable” homes and veneration of women instead of accusations against them.Footnote 77
Far from Boas and Holm’s aim of spurring mass mixture, decreasing the amount of mixture undergirded Pickens, Shepard, McGirt, Smith, Walters, and Borden’s support for legalization. They offered no ethnological support for mixture and saw legalization as only part of the battle to obtain justice. To them, legalizing interracial marriage would not end racial divisions; it would only allow legitimacy and serve the symbolic and practical purposes of protecting black women and promoting equal treatment. Where Boas thought that marriage bans might slightly “retard” the pace of mixture, many of the essayists instead considered bans encouragement for white men to engage in illicit relations with black women, as they could not seek redress if they were abandoned. Unmarried white women could sue ex-lovers for “breach of promise to marry” and even for child support. Black women, who could have no promise of marriage from white men, could not do the same. Indeed, in 1915 Pickens held that “a law to compel fathers to marry the mothers would break up more miscegenation in a week than a law prohibiting marriage will break up in twenty-five years.”Footnote 78 Legalization, to these essayists, would guard the race from the very loss of integrity that Holm and Boas sought.
Such views aligned with those of leading black contemporaries. Du Bois certainly concurred as he considered interracial marriage bans “an open bribe to amalgamation” and “wicked devices to make the seduction of women easy and without penalty.”Footnote 79 Fierce antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett stressed that bans left “the white man free to seduce all the colored girls he can.”Footnote 80 Even Booker T. Washington professed to understand why some would fight for legalization. In 1911, he told a researcher that he “never looked upon amalgamation as offering a solution” and held that he knew of “few Negroes who favor it.” He nevertheless defended those who sought legalization as not seeking such marriages, “but because they had been led to believe that where race distinctions exist they pave the way for discriminations.” Washington proclaimed that while he did “not wholly share this view,” he understood their principled attempt to break down legal barriers.Footnote 81
One essayist, however, was somewhat aligned with Holm’s and Boas’s positions, yet vitally inverted the causal mechanism. Reverend J. W. Wood, a pastor in what Holm described as one “the largest and most cultured churches on the Gulf coast,” believed racial mixture to be the ultimate resolution to “bickering,” but foresaw a slower and less intentional process than the white anthropologists proposed. Wood thought that social and economic equality would precede widespread mixture, but, once obtained, nothing would be able to halt mixture. At most, he saw mixture and social and economic improvement as coterminous forces and believed that eventually “the Negro race will be a race of ‘white Negroes’” through black advancement and white acceptance of that advancement. For Boas and Holm, mixture would produce assimilation; for Wood, equal opportunities would lead to mixture. The physical result might appear the same, with Wood’s suggestive phrase that black people would lose their “stainspots,” but his ordering meant that the races would combine as recognized equals rather than one enveloping the other. In essence, Boas and Holm called for widespread racial passing; Wood foresaw a racial merging.Footnote 82
Wood comes closest to a positive view of interracial marriage. Those with such sentiments tended to see such unions as inhibiting segregation, increasing white allies and empowering black women. Few such views appear among the essayists, although Borden and Walters would welcome legalization’s protection for black women. Nevertheless, Borden and Walters envisioned a decrease in interracial relationships with legalization. Wood did not inherently see racial mixture as a positive occurrence, merely a neutral one signaling racial progress in other domains. Charles Chesnutt, the leading black literary figure of the era, although self-described as “seven-eighths white,” was one of the era’s few black commentators who considered mixture itself to be a positive development.Footnote 83 In 1900, he argued that obtaining “homogeneity of type at least in externals” was “a necessary condition of harmonious social progress.”Footnote 84 Few others held similarly.
While Wood came closest to agreeing with Holm and Boas, another essayist disagreed with the entire purpose of Holm’s book and certainly would have considered Boas’s proposal harmful. Professor G. E. Davis, of what is now Johnson C. Smith University in North Carolina and a relatively well-known figure, thought white fears over racial mixture irrational but allowed that “there will always be racial peculiarities and distinctions” in the form of race pride that could be “insisted upon,” presumably even through legislation. For Davis, the races could coexist without conflict so long as they avoided “topics that arouse useless contention.” In other words, Davis believed that whites would eventually allow black Americans to live in peace if everyone left this “bugbear” alone. Practicing this avoidance, most of his essay dwelt on areas of interracial cooperation instead of the questions Holm asked.Footnote 85
Davis comes closest to an avowedly oppositional position. Black contemporaries who opposed mixture tended to do so on the ground of race loyalty and concerns that it fueled racist myths. Smith’s profession that he would not “marry outside [his] race” evoked such a stance even as he deemed interracial marriage entirely proper. Johnson and her concern for respectability arguably move her close to opposition, but her views on interracial marriage versus illicit relations could not be differentiated given her indirectness. Pickens, Smith, Walters, and Borden’s hopes that mixture would decrease with legalization and White’s emphasis on the unique destiny in store for the race suggest that these essayists would at least discourage such relationships, even if their stress on legalization kept them in the agnostic camp. William H. Ferris, an educator and minister who later edited Marcus Garvey’s Negro World, serves as a representative example of a black contemporary opposed to racial mixture. Ferris “honor[ed] the Anglo-Saxon for desiring to keep his race stock pure,” but he rejected their methods of bans and violence. He considered interracial marriage an “evil” but a lesser one than out-of-wedlock relations and, accordingly, still advocated legalization.Footnote 86 Thus even black opponents of racial mixture rarely supported its ban.
Accordingly, as much as Holm distorted black views when he framed the essayists as supportive of his proposal, he inadvertently provided a revealing range of black views and a suggestive parallel of black thoughts on Boas’s proposal. Given that essayists rested their tolerance for racial mixture upon its legality, Boas’s proposal would have garnered even less support than Holm’s due to Boas’s disregard for legal marriages. Boas’s priority lay in achieving rapid racial mixture, but the essayists showed a clear preference that if racial mixture occur, it should happen within marriages. Far beyond mere Victorian mores, black insistence on legal wedlock centered upon recognition of their fundamental equality. Holm at least recognized the vitality of legal wedlock and thereby garnered partial “adoption.” Some were perhaps unwilling to endorse either position for fear of incurring white retribution, but all essayists seemed to genuinely balk at the idea of actively encouraging racial mixture to hasten their own eradication.Footnote 87 Instead, they chose to focus on Holm’s antiracist portion—legalization—and downplayed other aspects or offered their own preferred solutions. Their seeming silences on Holm’s direct queries were in fact expressing their preferred route for ending racism, which did not include changing their racial presentations. Their approaches were akin to Du Bois’s emphasis on Boas’s rejection of racial hierarchies while he wrote against racial mixture elsewhere. The essayists readily “adopted” legalization, something black activists had long sought, yet they would only “adapt” Holm’s and Boas’s advocacy of mixture to focus instead on what they considered realistic and desirable alternatives to obtain equality.
Adoption, however, did not mean advocation. Holm’s Race Assimilation; or, The Fading of the Leopard’s Spots received notice in only one black-authored publication. The Cleveland Gazette’s glowing review, however, reads like publisher promotional material and is as utterly vague on the book’s subject as Church’s introduction. Perhaps because the book lacked salacious quotes from black essayists in support of racial mixture, white periodicals ignored it. For black periodicals, as with Boas’s address, there was little to be gained from a retort either to Holm’s ideas or to his misrepresentation of the essayists, and only danger in drawing attention to it. In contrast, the black press dwelt at length on the accusations in the novel to which Holm’s title alludes.Footnote 88 Denouncing the clear racism of Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots proved far savvier than tackling Holm’s or Boas’s pretense of antiracism.
Misrepresenting black thought
Despite Holm seeking out black responses, he seemed oblivious to their actual views. No essayist recommended that racial mixture be pursued or that it held ethnological benefits. Instead, they disavowed Holm’s plan, confined themselves to legal principles, or avoided the topic to advance their own solutions. While most essayists endorsed the right to interracial marriage in principle, none upheld it as a solution. Racial mixture, to the essayists, at most would result from racial peace, not create it. Just as integration demands were about equal access, not a desire to mingle with whites, the essayists did not seek racial mixture; they wanted an equitable society, not an erasure of black identities. Holm, however, presented himself and the black essayists as so aligned that they “complete [each other’s] arguments.”Footnote 89 The range of at best semi-agreement, non-endorsements, and rejections that he published indicates that he received far less support than he presented himself as having, or did not understand the vital differences between his proposal and the essayists’ positions. Either way, his framing of the essays commodified black thought for white consumption by stripping away the essayists’ critiques that white society, not black bodies, needed to change to obtain racial peace.
Both Boas and Holm discounted black opposition and presumed that black Americans would welcome the “opportunity” to become white. Both failed to understand the role of black race pride or that it fundamentally differed from white race pride. Confident that the “scientific” principles he espoused would be deemed unassailable, Holm argued that a more “logical” recognition of racial categories than the one-drop rule would soon arise. His ill-placed certainty aside, until his or Boas’s ideas took hold, those who wanted to obtain the rights of citizenship would not be able to admit to any black ancestry and thus would have to renounce their racial identity and community for the hope of obtaining basic rights. The choice looked little different from racial passing and all the loss that entailed—a loss both Boas and Holm were openly dismissive of.Footnote 90 Indeed, Holm considered “stupid race pride” among black Americans “a fad,” the “warped” effects of white propaganda, and a “disease” contracted from southern whites. He even deemed black pride partially responsible for discrimination: “Any Negro who boasts of the purity of his blood … is his own greatest enemy, not because of the fact that he is pure, but because the anti-Negro sentiment is thereby incensed.” Boas likewise called for the rejection of black solidarity: “The less Negro society represents a party with its own aims and its own interest distinct from those of the members of the white race … the more satisfactory will be the relation between the races.”Footnote 91 By failing to understand the role of black race pride, Boas and Holm could neither anticipate nor understand black opposition.
Both also seemed oblivious that racial mixture would not provide relief from Jim Crow. Given laws in 1910, save Tennessee, the mixtures they proposed would have eventually placed the resulting progeny on the white side of the law. They either could not anticipate the move to render as nonwhite all with any black lineage, or sought with their proposals to stem the tide of such laws. In 1921 Boas speculated that “in a race of octoroons, living among whites, the color question would probably disappear.”Footnote 92 Yet the US Supreme Court had already made abundantly clear in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that segregation applied even to those with one-eighth African ancestry. Being an “octoroon” did not prevent Homer Plessy, the plaintiff in the infamous “separate-but-equal” case, from being confined to the “colored car.”Footnote 93
Had Boas sought black testimonials for his proposal, he likely would have been met with a sidestepping of the subject. The evasive strategies that Holm’s essayists employed, even with the less respected white thinker, illuminate the general silence surrounding Boas’s address and underscore the difficulty, but necessity, of seeking out black views. Had Holm or Boas critically examined nearly any prior black writings on the subject or merely taken black people at their word when they continually denied allegations that they coveted white paramours, Boas and Holm should not have been surprised by the lack of support for anything more than legalization. The consistent refrain from black commentators throughout the previous century and into the twentieth was an “emphasis on two not always compatible themes: human sameness and racial distinctions.”Footnote 94 Black Americans fiercely maintained their equality with whites (thereby necessitating interracial marriage’s legality), but few were willing to consent to the erasure of what many considered their unique racial destiny or abandon the security and support of racial solidarity.
Through either obliviousness or disregard, Holm distorted black positions just as much as Thomas Dixon when he had earlier claimed that “ninety-nine Negroes out of every one hundred” sought to become white. Nearly all of the essayists defended the legal right to interracial marriage, but Holm conflated that with black embrace of his plan for mass racial mixture. As the essayists made clear, they agreed with Kelly Miller that supporting the right to interracial marriage was the “expression of a belief, not the utterance of a preference.”Footnote 95 Black support for interracial marriage stood on principle, meaning that even those opposed to it would not condemn it as unnatural. Calling for mass racial mixture—in or outside legal wedlock and in a manner intentionally aiming for the disappearance of the black population—was never going to win black support. As David Walker put it nearly a century earlier, those who would “slave his own colour” to marry someone “just because she is white ought to be treated by her as he surely will be, viz: as a NIGER[sic]!!!!.”Footnote 96
Conclusion
Despite very different schemas, both Dixon and Holm used black insistence that interracial marriage be legal to allege black support for racial mixture. Boas at least made no assumption of black support even as he put the onus on them to accept the unequal ways in which he proposed mixture should occur. Dixon, Holm, and Boas could not account for the ways in which black thought differed from white thought, envision a nation in which racial difference and racial equality coexisted, or seek a “raceless” future that was not in fact a white future. Dixon and the white anthropologists ostensibly sought very different futures, but the results of each approach would be the same: black subordination to whites, through racial caste or racial absorption. Black commentators recognized the overlap and rejected all iterations. They remained as unconvinced by the “racist anti-racism” of Boas and Holm as they were by Dixon’s overt racism.Footnote 97
Progressive Era black Americans did not see racial mixture as a solution but did not deem it unnatural either. To deny their right to marry interracially would be a denial of their common humanity. To concede the naturalness of interracial marriage would be a forfeiture of equality. Black and white opposition to racial mixture, in other words, substantively differed as most black opponents still deemed it natural, just undesirable. Black support also differed from white support as few black “proponents” wanted anything more than its legality. They needed to maintain their race’s humanity while also upholding differences in character and potential destiny to promote race pride. They had to transcend racial categories to demand citizenship rights but needed racial solidarity to protect themselves from racialized attacks and sought to maintain an identity to vindicate their race’s capacity.Footnote 98 Boas and Holm failed to understand black solidarity and pride as functionally antithetical to how white solidarity and pride operated.
As Miller put it in a retort to Dixon’s allegations of black interracial covetousness five years ahead of Boas’s address and Holm’s book, “Civilization is not an attribute of the color of skin, or curl of hair.” Accordingly, he saw no need for physical changes to assuage white racism. Black hearts “already beat at a normal human pace”; thus, Miller asked, why “would you desire to change?”Footnote 99 Whether from racial provocateurs such as Dixon, who aimed to strengthen racial barriers, or Boas and Holm, who hoped to destroy racial boundaries, all assumed that black Americans would consent to becoming white and distorted black views to meet their agendas. They either sought black subordination through genocide, racial terror, and racial hierarchy, or wanted a genocide of another type—the complete disappearance of black identities through their obliteration into whiteness. Recognizing the similarities in whites’ mainstream calls for segregation and fringe proposals for complete amalgamation, Miller, Du Bois, the essayists, and even those who did not deign to respond to Boas’s proposal sought equality without having to fundamentally change to appease white racism; they wanted interracial marriage legalized not to enter a “raceless” future but to ensure basic equality.
Despite being misrepresented for white consumption, Progressive Era black commentators upheld what was useful in white thought and subverted what was not. Without a specific focus on black views, even accounts incorporating black support for legalizing interracial marriage can overlook how that support differed from white support. Legalization was not only fundamental for equality and justice, but would, many black commentators hoped, reduce the number of interracial relationships. This position put many in the seemingly paradoxical position of fighting for interracial marriage’s legalization to support racial integrity.
Historians must also consider the tremendous constraints under which black commentators expressed their positions, both the violent repercussions in an age of lynching and the political considerations of opposing apparent white allies. Black commentators sometimes needed to express themselves in indirect ways that historians must carefully glean from the occasionally meager existent record of black thought. Their positions are nonetheless present even in the silences. The delicacy with which many handled the risqué topic further underscores the need to appreciate the skill with which they made their views known. The black essayists’ focus on topics other than what was asked of them reveals both the guarded nature of their responses and their savvy methods to “adapt” an undesirable proposition by making their own priorities known instead. The masked responses accordingly also suggest that black-authored positions produced for a white-authored publication surely differ from private, intra-racial discourse in which their views could be more safely given.
Progressive Era black commentary on racial mixture illustrates a wide spectrum of thought during a perilous time but reveals a consistent drive for racial equality and racial preservation too often mischaracterized to fit the agendas of white men as diverse as Thomas Dixon, John James Holm, and Franz Boas. Black views on racial mixture were far from homogeneous or simple, but their commitment to justice was clear, even against the mischaracterization endemic in disparate white views. Progressive Era black Americans sought to assert their race’s humanity while also preserving differences in character amid changing conceptions of race and increasing constraints placed on it.
Open access
