Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC

Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life

Paula C. Austin

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781479808113
• eBook ISBN:
  9781479870684
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The fullest account to date of African American young people in a segregated city

Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC offers a complex narrative of the everyday lives of black young people in a racially, spatially, economically, and politically restricted Washington, DC, during the 1930s. In contrast to the ways in which young people have been portrayed by researchers, policy makers, law enforcement, and the media, Paula C. Austin draws on previously unstudied archival material to present black poor and working class young people as thinkers, theorists, critics, and commentators as they reckon with the boundaries imposed on them in a Jim Crow city that was also the American emblem of equality.

The narratives at the center of this book provide a different understanding of black urban life in the early twentieth century, showing that ordinary people were expert at navigating around the limitations imposed by the District of Columbia's racially segregated politics. Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC is a fresh take on the New Negro movement, and a vital contribution to the history of race in America.

1

“A Chronic Patient for the Sociological Clinic”

Interdisciplinarity and the Production of an Archive1

The Negro problem was in my mind a matter of systematic investigation and intelligent understanding. The world was thinking wrong about race, because it did not know. The ultimate evil was stupidity. The cure for it was knowledge based on scientific investigation. [ . . . ] Whites said, Why study the obvious? Blacks said, Are we animals to be dissected and by an unknown Negro at that? [The Philadelphia Negro] was as complete a scientific study and answer as could have been given [ . . . ]. It revealed the Negro group as a symptom, not a cause; as a striving, palpating group, and not an inert, sick body of crime; as a long historic development and not a transient occurrence.

—W. E. B. Du Bois, “Science and Empire,” Dusk of Dawn (1940)2

E. Franklin Frazier joined Howard University in Washington, DC, as head of the Sociology Department in 1934. Frazier was part of a core group of New Negro intellectuals brought in by Howard’s first black president, Mordecai Johnson. Johnson, who came to Howard in 1926, was determined to help further position Howard at the nexus of New Negro knowledge production, hiring, in addition to Frazier, Alain Locke in philosophy, Rayford Logan in history, Charles Drew in Howard’s College of Medicine, Ralph Bunche in political science, Abram Harris in economics, and Charles Hamilton Houston in the School of Law.3 Frazier, born just across the border in Maryland, had been an undergraduate at Howard, having received from his black Baltimore high school the annual scholarship to attend the preeminent university. By 1930, he had completed his PhD at the Chicago school of sociology, thought of as the leading site for sociological training in the US, and had been a Russell Sage fellow at Columbia University in New York City.4 Frazier had also, by this time, developed a close mentor relationship with W. E. B. Du Bois, who tried to advocate for Frazier when he had been forced to leave Atlanta University for his 1927 publication of what was to some a controversial essay, “The Pathology of Race Prejudice.”5 Frazier’s work built on what Du Bois outlined in the above quote about his 1899 research project The Philadelphia Negro, that of the mobilization of “scientific investigation” to correct notions of racial inferiority, and a paradigmatic shift away from a biological causation theory of what were identified as “racial” differences in the United States.6

E. Franklin Frazier was heir to Du Bois’s turn-of-the-century innovations in empirical research. Just as Frazier was publishing his most influential work, The Negro Family in the United States (1939), Du Bois reflected on the ways in which The Philadelphia Negro “revealed” what he saw as an essential truth: poverty in black communities had a historical and structural causation; long-term environmental factors of racial and economic discriminatory policies were to blame.7 Du Bois’s methodological approach heralded a general move in sociology that, according to one scholar, “sought to shed its ties to moral philosophy” and rather “presented an ‘objective’ picture of society.”8 The Philadelphia Negro sought to disavow race as a biological concept by proving the structural and historical causations of poverty, demonstrating the impact of a history of racial and economic discrimination on African Americans. Du Bois hoped, as did other black reformers and an emerging group of black social scientists, Frazier included, that the professionalization of social science fields would help legitimize remedies for and theories about black poverty, licentiousness, and crime.9 Despite the ways in which Frazier’s work was later used to advance a “culture of poverty” thesis, Frazier’s research, like Du Bois’s earlier studies, sought to make a structural argument rooted in Jim Crow racial segregation for the ways he found black culture, and specifically poor and working-class black culture, to be deficient.10

Just as he was putting the final touches on Negro Family in the U.S., Frazier embarked on a two-year research project for the American Youth Commission. The AYC was part of the American Council on Education, a federal agency privately funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1937, the AYC “selected” for a “special Negro study” the “problem” question of “What are the Effects, if any, Upon the Personality Development of Negro Youth of their Membership in a Minority Racial Group?”11 The national study aimed to “emphasize new ways of looking at race relations.” Despite Du Bois’s early interventions, and even the Chicago school’s and Franz Boas’s turn to culturalist explanations for differences among people, AYC project supervisor and sociologist Robert L. Sutherland wanted the study to straddle a “middle position between race as a biological [and race as] a social fact.”12

Frazier’s resulting publication, Negro Youth at the Crossways: Their Personality Development in the Middle States, would engage many of the concepts that became better known in The Negro Family in the United States and on which Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 An American Dilemma would build.13 Negro Youth sought to “determine what kind of person a Negro youth [was].” The study aimed to examine the psychological impact of Jim Crow discrimination on black adolescent “personality development.”14 It was part of a series of publications that included sociologist Ira De Augustine Reid’s 1940 In A Minor Key: Negro Youth in Story and Fact; anthropologist (William Boyd) Allison Davis and psychologist John Dollard’s Children of Bondage, originally titled American Children of Caste (1940); anthropologist William Lloyd Warner’s Color and Human Nature: Negro Personality Development in a Northern City (1941); and Charles S. Johnson’s Growing Up in the Black Belt: Negro Youth in the Rural South (1941).15

The studies emphasized links between black family structures, class, and what Frazier would define as both cultural and psychological “pathologies,” albeit temporary and mostly environmentally caused.16 Young people were especially vulnerable to social forces that included family, community, school, and religious institutions. In the study, Frazier sought “to determine what kind of person a Negro youth is or is in the process of becoming as a result of the limitations . . . placed upon his or her participation in the life of the communities in [DC].”17 He aimed to advocate for the end of racial segregation (and ultimately racial prejudice), arguing that “the class structure of the Negro community” significantly influenced family, community, school, and religious institutions.18 He posited that Jim Crow restrictions had a worse impact on black poor and working-class young people, producing feelings of inferiority and ultimately antisocial behaviors. Still, he maintained the straddle laid out by the project’s director, defining personality as being a product of both “biological inheritance” and “social experience.”19

This focus on youth was partly a result of the early twentieth-century emergence of “child science” in a number of disciplines, including social work, psychology, and psychiatry. The Progressive Era federal Children’s Bureau in DC launched a number of programs and produced a number of advice manuals on childrearing and education. The Depression ushered in renewed interest in the nuclear family, but many young white people were delaying marriage until their economic circumstances improved and instead engaging in premarital sex. Young people’s abilities to participate in recreational activities were also severely curtailed, so young white men were spending more time “hanging around corners, creating mischief, and in general hell-raising to break the monotony of their daily lives.” Young white girls and women were reading “cheap magazines.”20

While juvenile delinquency had become seen as environmental, child science experts proposed medical and psychological treatment, including “mental hygiene” clinics and a visiting teacher program, rather than addressing structural socioeconomic inequities. Most of these services, however, were not readily available to poor and working-class African American young people.21 Just as the new juvenile justice system was professionalizing, black juvenile delinquency was being highly monitored, and programs and policies were crafted around it. While some police forces around the country were “embrac[ing] new models of social welfare-minded friendliness [toward] children,” these children were seldom immigrants, or black migrants, or poor and working-class African American long-term residents.22 Despite a cultural shift in thinking and a recognition of the structural realities brought to bear by economic crisis on white youth, social science and psychiatry persisted in attempting to understand the cultural and behavioral “pathologies” of poor and working-class black youth.

Even with the equivocation required by the AYC, Frazier and his generation of New Negro intellectuals welcomed the pivot away from concepts about racial inferiority as a biological fact.23 By the time Frazier arrived at Howard University in the mid-1930s, Howard was already the center of New Negro intellectual life. Philosopher Alain Locke had become the head of Howard’s Philosophy Department in 1921 and would soon after edit the Survey Graphic’s “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro” and publish his subsequent anthology, The New Negro: An Interpretation.24 As the title of this chapter reflects, Locke’s Survey Graphic essay “Enter the New Negro” celebrated this new direction in the social scientific study of black life. Locke posited that because of “intellectual” advances and a renewed “keen curiosity,” “the Negro [was] being carefully studied, not just talked about and discussed.” Along with other New Negro intelligentsia, Locke lauded the “new objective and scientific appraisal” “rather than the old sentimental interest,” believing it heralded an opportunity for both “cultural exchange and enlightenment,” and an “era of critical change.”25

Though Locke insisted that this “new negro” was no “social ward or minor,” and could no longer be portrayed as “the sick man of American Democracy,” the interwar period saw renewed social science interest in black poor and working-class communities. In the wake of the racial violence of summer 1919, researchers and reformers became invested in “the study of race relations” as a way to identify ways to prevent future conflicts.26 The Great Depression also enhanced the economic crises and discrimination affecting the large portion of African Americans already living in poverty in the capital. New Deal programs, as has been assessed by historians since and as had been assessed contemporarily by many local black reformers and political activists, often did not address the needs of the most vulnerable African Americans.27 While many interwar reformers and social scientists, like Du Bois before them, identified policy and structural inequities, they continued to research these communities looking for answers to poverty, health disparities, behaviors deemed as culturally distinct, and ways to prevent racial tensions.

Sometime after Locke came to Howard, Frazier’s predecessor in sociology, William Henry Jones, mobilized the university’s resources to conduct two research projects in the wake of the DC 1919 Red Summer. In 1925, Jones was called on to conduct a twenty-six-month survey, the goal of which was “to discover some of the social forces and factors which [were] powerful determinants of the cultural aspects of Negro life in Washington.” Funded in part by one of the many iterations of the Washington Interracial Committee, organized after the 1919 riot, and at the behest of the Juvenile Protective Association of D.C., a Progressive Era social welfare agency, Jones, with the help of students from his “Social Pathology” class, researched and then published Recreation and Amusement among Negroes in Washington, D.C.28

In the study, Jones identified both acceptable and “pathological” forms of recreation, which “demoralized” the community.29 The research revealed the new interest in urban leisure and recreation tied to black migration in the interwar era. Its findings suggested a causal relationship between inadequate appropriate options for the use of idle time and racial violence. Jones found that “the routinized life [of an urban center], along with mechanical and impersonal relationships, produce[d] a great deal of social unrest and stress.” City dwellers required “relaxation and relief from intense psychic and muscular application.” But for black migrants in particular, the city needed to “control and conserve play,” in order for them not to seek “relief [in] the old and more deeply rooted racial habits.”30

Two years later, Jones published The Housing of Negroes in Washington, D.C.: A Study in Human Ecology where he stated that the 1919 riot had “resulted from the effects of a rather heavy influx of Negro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 “A Chronic Patient for the Sociological Clinic”: Interdisciplinarity and the Production of an Archive
• 2 “Course We Know We Ain’t Got No Business There, but That’s Why We Go In”: Racialized Space and Spatialized Race
• 3 “I Would Carry a Sign”: The Politics of Black Adolescent Personality Development
• 4 “Right Tight, Right Unruly”: Interiority and Wish Images
• Conclusion: The Detritus of Lives with Which We Have Yet to Attend
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author