The years 1899 to 1904 were pivotal in African American history broadly and in the life of Booker T. Washington in particular. During this period, Up from Slavery was published and became the best-selling autobiography of an African American, a distinction it retained until the 1965 publication of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Students of history who engage the life and thought of Booker T. Washington by reading Up from Slavery and other primary sources that provide insight into his life, thought, and vision for Black people will gain deeper insight into the complexity and multidimensional leadership of African Americans in the twentieth century.
1904–1909
JACK JOHNSON
Howard Bryant
Starting in 1898, two years after Plessy, public accommodations in the South—streetcars, bathrooms, buses, restaurants, down to something as simple as a drinking fountain—were segregated in a coordinated legislative assault. These laws were passed in every Southern state, from Louisiana and Mississippi to Georgia and Tennessee. By 1902, no segment of Southern society contained social ambiguity. In the North, Midwest, and West, there was equal unambiguity in regard to hierarchy. The American empire was a white one—and this was also evident in the realm of sports.
During this period, baseball and several of its nascent organized leagues had been integrated. White players, aware of the empire and their place in it, systematically removed the Black players from the field. They did this first not by edict but by violence. A late-nineteenth-century second baseman named Frank Grant had his calves and shins pierced so often by white players sliding deliberately into his legs—instead of the base—that he began wearing thin slabs of wood to protect them.
By the turn of the century, no organized white league fielded Black players. By the time of the first World Series in 1903, Black players were excluded from professional baseball.
But that very same year, a mirror was placed in the face of white supremacy. The mirror existed in reality, in the flesh and blood, fist and muscle, of a Black boxer, Jack Johnson. Born in 1878 in Galveston, Texas, Jack Johnson, whose full name was John Arthur Johnson, became the World Colored Heavyweight champion in 1903.
Away from the speeches and the laws and the treaties that could be broken when backed by a gun, the true arena of white supremacy was inside the ring, one-on-one.
The white champions were protected by racism, by their refusal to fight Black champions. While John L. Sullivan and Jim Jeffries, the iconic names of early white boxing, built their legend without fear of losing to a Black man, those who encountered Jack Johnson were not as fortunate. It would take more than two thousand fights before a white champion accepted Johnson’s challenge to fight—and finally put white supremacy to the test.
In 1908 in Australia, Johnson destroyed Tommy Burns to become the first Black man to win the heavyweight title. The writer Jack London, ringside for the fight, looked at Johnson in the ring, holding the mirror up to white America—the entire white race, actually—and saw the mediocre reflection of Burns, who could not beat Johnson or save them. It was London who birthed the term the “great white hope.”
That ignited the search for a fighter, as The New York Times would write often, who could restore the dignity of the white race. The search reintroduced Jeffries, spawned the “fight of the century,” and articulated the white desire—through the defeat of this singular symbolic Black man—to prove that its quest for white empire was not constructed on a faulty blueprint. London, in his account of the Johnson-Burns fight, had offered these final words: “But one thing remains. Jeffries must emerge from his alfalfa farm and remove that smile from Johnson’s face. Jeff, it’s up to you.”
But in 1910 Johnson pummeled and humiliated the unretired, now-mediocre Jeffries. White rioting resulted in the deaths of twenty-six Black people in incidents across the country.
The spectacle Johnson created in the ring showed America what it truly was: a nation that espoused the aspiration to freedom and equality but demanded white supremacy. His challenge shifted from inside the ring to outside it. Johnson, once he became a national figure, took on the characteristics of myth quickly and completely. Symbolically, he represented the Black male in the white nightmare: strong and indomitable—and oversexed in his preference and appetite for white women. He became so symbolic that his existence appears almost to be a caricature or a deliberate construction of the prototypical embodiment of all white fears of Black masculinity.
By extension, Johnson also became symbolic of Black freedom—the freedom to wear gold teeth, to kiss white women in public, to marry them in private (and thus to be desired and not repulsed), to drive expensive cars, to take America’s material ostentatiousness—the fruits of empire intended only for whiteness—and keep it all for himself. Johnson did all this and more at a time when most Black Americans were laboring to survive in homes and fields.
In 1910 Congress passed the White Slave Traffic Act, prohibiting the transporting of white women across state lines. That brought Johnson down, eventually sending him to prison due to his marriage to a white woman. He then became the rallying point for a quest for reputational rehabilitation for the ensuing century.
What happens to the person when they become a symbol? Can they be recovered? Can they exist beyond what they embody? In this wrestling over symbols, the individual is sacrificed. They become the unknown. Johnson’s eternal value to the American story has never received the balance of most historical figures who are viewed as part person, part of the times in which they lived. Johnson is almost completely defined by his time period—what his presence meant to the white order, his threat to empire. While rogue to some Blacks, offensive to others, inspiration to others still, he was just a man—except to whites who viewed him as a threat. America is unwilling, except in the strictest academic terms, to label Johnson’s years the most calculatedly racist period of the twentieth century, and because of that unwillingness, it talks about itself through Johnson.
So this fascinating man of morbid defiance—neither heroic nor villainous—lives on as an almost mythological barometer. There is, in all this, a certain exploitation at work, for the price Johnson paid was not the 117 years he and his reputation lived unpardoned for the crime of marrying a white woman. Rather, America’s inability to reconcile even the clearest truths about its foundations meant his personal humanity has never received the proper priority. It was never about him.
1909–1914
THE BLACK PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL
Beverly Guy-Sheftall
The acceptance of African American women as intellectuals—thinking women—has been elusive, but we have a long history as producers of knowledge, even when that production has not been fully recognized.
An example is the American Negro Academy (ANA), the first learned society of persons of African descent in the United States, which was founded in Washington, D.C., in March 1897 by seventy-eight-year-old Reverend Alexander Crummell. Born in New York City and educated at Queens’ College, Cambridge, Reverend Crummell was an Episcopalian minister, educator, and missionary, as well as one of the most prominent and visionary nineteenth-century Black intellectuals. The ANA did not bar women from membership (limiting them to fifty), but during its thirty-one-year existence it remained an all-male organization from 1897 to 1924. Its constitution announces itself as “an organization of authors, scholars, artists, and those distinguished in other walks of life, men of African descent, for the promotion of Letters, Science, and Art.” Its overall goal was to “lead and protect their people” and be a mighty “weapon to secure equality and destroy racism.”