The Matter of Black Living

The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930

Autumn Womack

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780226806914
  9780226806747
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226806884
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Examining how turn-of-the-century Black cultural producers' experiments with new technologies of racial data produced experimental aesthetics.

As the nineteenth century came to a close and questions concerning the future of African American life reached a fever pitch, many social scientists and reformers approached post-emancipation Black life as an empirical problem that could be systematically solved with the help of new technologies like the social survey, photography, and film. What ensued was nothing other than a "racial data revolution," one which rendered African American life an inanimate object of inquiry in the name of social order and racial regulation. At the very same time, African American cultural producers and intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Kelly Miller, Sutton Griggs, and Zora Neale Hurston staged their own kind of revolution, un-disciplining racial data in ways that captured the dynamism of Black social life.

The Matter of Black Living excavates the dynamic interplay between racial data and Black aesthetic production that shaped late nineteenth-century social, cultural, and literary atmosphere. Through assembling previously overlooked archives and seemingly familiar texts, Womack shows how these artists and writers recalibrated the relationship between data and Black life. The result is a fresh and nuanced take on the history of documenting Blackness. The Matter of Black Living charts a new genealogy from which we can rethink the political and aesthetic work of racial data, a task that has never been more urgent.

1

The Social Survey

The Survey Spirit

“The Survey Spirit”: Origins, Evolution, and the Radical Operations of the Social Survey

W. E. B. Du Bois had the social survey on his mind on November 19, 1897, when he delivered “The Study of the Negro Problems” to members of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Du Bois drafted the speech while he was knee-deep conducting fieldwork among the black population of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward for what would become The Philadelphia Negro (1899), his pioneering sociological study of the “social condition and environment” of the “forty thousand or more people of Negro blood living in the city of Philadelphia.”1 Part appeal to major universities to fund social-scientific studies of black life and part endorsement for his forthcoming study, the speech outlined a four-pronged approach to the “systematic study” of the “Negro Problem,” or, the “social phenomena arising from the presence in this land of eight million persons of African descent.”2 In contrast to social scientists and race reformers who, in approaching what the racialist Nathaniel Shaler described as the “experiment of making a citizen of the Negro,” reduced the “problem” of modern black life to a formula that could be solved through abstracted statistical methods, Du Bois championed an interdisciplinary methodology and an expansive conceptualization of black sociality.3 Combining historical study with statistical investigation, and anthropological measurement with qualitative interpretation, Du Bois endeavored to produce a framework that would render black life an animate and diverse social body while producing a storehouse of “Truth” that would serve as the basis for reform.4 As he reminded his audience, the ever-enigmatic “Negro Problem” “is not one problem, but rather a plexus of social problems, some new, some old, some simple, some complex.”5 The methodological answer to the study of “Negro Problems,” then, was the equally multitudinous social study, two of which Du Bois was already undertaking: the Atlanta University Studies that he began directing the following month and the soon-to-be-completed The Philadelphia Negro. In both cases Du Bois employed the research method that was taking shape in the largely female world of settlement work typified by Jane Addams’s Chicago-based Hull-House: first-person investigation, detailed daily schedules, and an ethos of influence through proximity. And like his predecessors turned collaborators—both Lucy Salmon and Isabel Eaton worked with him on The Philadelphia Negro—Du Bois was confident that when published as a social survey, his findings could intervene into the experimental world of social science.

If Du Bois had the survey on his mind in the final years of the nineteenth century, then perhaps it was there to stay. We can also discern the whisperings of the social survey in his debut novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911). Published on the heels of The Souls of Black Folk’s success, Du Bois ultimately dismissed his attempt to fictionally represent the intersecting lives of white cotton speculators and Southern blacks in the aftermath of Reconstruction as something of a failed novelistic enterprise. In his 1949 autobiography Dusk of Dawn he simply noted, “I tried my hand at writing fiction and published ‘The Quest of the Silver Fleece’ which was really an economic study of some merit.”6 But if Du Bois was unimpressed with his own efforts at fictionally “dramatizing the so-called Negro Problem,” then he found refuge in the Atlanta University Studies.7 Published on either side of Quest, the collaborative research projects administered by the historically black college’s sociology lab aimed to, in the words of Du Bois, “study the American Negro” by dividing “the various aspects of his social conditions into ten great subjects” that would each be studied for one year “until the cycle is completed,” before beginning the “same cycle for [a] second ten years.”8 As Du Bois imagined it, the successively unfolding project would proceed for a century, at the end of which “we shall have a continuous record of the condition and development of a group of 10 to 20 millions of men—a body of sociological material unsurpassed in human annals.”9 The project folded in 1916, just six years after Du Bois left his appointment at Atlanta University, but not before he had successfully put forth twenty publications, including The Negro Church (1903), The College Bred Negro (1910), and Morals and Manners of Negro Americans (1914). If Du Bois’s plan for a century’s worth of sociological study is in keeping with Brent Hayes Edwards’s classification of him as “the paradigmatic black proponent of centennial logic,” then it also reinforces his abiding preoccupation with the social survey in particular and, more generally, the work of locating a form that could record the ongoing development and “continuous” movement of black life.10

The social survey was still on Du Bois’s mind when he authored a scathing review of Claude McKay’s 1928 novel Home to Harlem, a critique that is rooted in nostalgia for the kind of social and spatial management that underpins The Philadelphia Negro and progressives’ agendas more broadly.11 And the social survey was at the forefront of his consciousness in 1941 when he gathered the leaders of historically black colleges and universities for the first Phylon Institute, where he pitched the idea of the Negro Land Grant, a reactivation of the then-defunct Atlanta University Studies.12 In fact, of the countless formal, political, and disciplinary undertakings that Du Bois would recruit over the course of his career, the social survey arguably enjoyed the longest shelf life.

Despite the scholarly impulse to read The Philadelphia Negro and the early Atlanta University Studies as reflective of a distinct phase of Du Bois’s “reformist empiricism,” which by the turn of the century would quickly give way to sociological skepticism and an embrace of editorial agitation and literary pursuits, the enduring place of the social survey in Du Bois’s oeuvre was neither out of step with nor distinct from his aesthetic and political predilections.13 Rather, the social survey and the literary were deeply related enterprises whose intermittent interplay is indicative of an understudied epoch in the production of turn-of-the-century black fiction, one in which literature emerged not simply in opposition to social studies but as social study.14 My treatment of social science and black fiction’s overlaps resounds with Roderick Ferguson’s reading of sociology and African American literature in Aberrations in Black. Juxtaposing works from twentieth-century writers like Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Toni Morrison with canonical sociological treatises, Ferguson illuminates how “African American culture as an epistemological object produced dialogical relations that both exceeded the formal parameters of its interlocutors and confused the distinctions between factual and fictive enterprises.”15 Where Ferguson concentrates his attention on mid-twentieth-century texts and theories, this chapter argues that blurring the boundary between fictive and factual precedes the formalization of sociology. As a result, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century works that are taken as sociological, or at least social scientific, often take shape along the lines of fantasy and formal experimentation, while the social survey itself was a highly speculative mode. In other words, the supple contours of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social science provide the occasion to reassess the relationship between black fiction and social science’s primary modalities, not least of all the social survey.

Du Bois was not alone in his persistent interface with the social survey. Although it has been sequestered to the footnotes of Progressive Era policy and histories of social work, the social survey was actually the predominant tool for social scientists and social workers during the first decades of the twentieth century.16 The American social survey adopted and adapted the fundamentals of its British predecessors and reformulated its method and logic to respond to a turbulent postbellum landscape. Mobilized by countless white reformers and social scientists who, in operating as self-appointed social engineers, sought to assert order over what they perceived to be a chaotic and disorderly world, the social survey also took hold in racially distinct sites.17 As we will see, the social survey’s primary attributes—documenting the social, with an emphasis on a deeply attached and emotionally connected observer—allowed for a radical rewriting of Western science’s visual and racial epistemologies and, in turn, shaped a new black literary practice that, borrowing from Alain Locke, I call “social document fiction.” As the staging ground for the articulation of a new body of racial data that flew in the face of the statistical status quo, and as the rubric for formal and aesthetic experimentation, the social survey existed in dynamic interplay with black literary arts from its emergence in the 1890s to the late 1920s, when it began to be supplanted by standardized sociological protocols. In this regard, perhaps no other method encompassed the challenges wrought by reconciling data and social life or reflected the fundamentally visual nature of this effort more than the social survey.

In what follows, I begin by tracing the emergence of the social survey and outline the key features of the genre. The survey’s preoccupation with both conveying and constructing the social landscape required an ever-expanding repertoire of visual methods and metaphors, which ultimately reconstituted the very nature of the social-scientific observer. The latter part of the chapter reconstructs the antagonistic relationship between the insurance agent turned race theorist Frederick Hoffman and the black mathematician Kelly Miller that was staged across their competing texts. In his review of Hoffman’s pessimistic analysis of black morbidity statistics, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, Miller summons the social survey while celebrating the value of literary texts like Sutton Griggs’s 1899 experimental novel Imperium in Imperio for their capacity to manifest the survey’s ethos. Reading Imperium in Imperio as a text that reworks and ultimately realizes the social survey’s promise of dynamic social documentation while issuing a strident critique of an ocular-centric visual methodology, this chapter ends with a consideration of two “standard” social surveys: Charities’ “The Negro in the Cities of the North” and Alain Locke’s 1925 special issue of Survey Graphic, “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro.” Despite their ties to social-scientific institutions and regulatory reform projects, each survey supplies the formal and conceptual conditions of possibility for articulating blackness as a geographic and epistemological “elsewhere.” This sense of elsewhere signals what Brent Hayes Edwards draws out as a “a shared logic of collaboration and coordination” whose unstable and continuously shifting nature is crucial to imagining a racial community that takes shape beyond the nation-state.18 In the social survey, this elsewhere is where blackness is coordinated beyond the boundaries of sociological classification and in the asymmetries that supply its expressive force. Thus, both publications position blackness less as the object of study or the pathway to geographically specific information, and more as an invitation to embark on what Fred Moten describes in a different context as the process of “constant searching and research” that emerges at the nexus of aspiration for recognition and refusal to be circumscribed within the production of racial data.19 Over the course of this chapter, as I move through seemingly disparate sites, I argue for the social survey as a form that made black life visible in new, though not unproblematic, ways.

---

•

In her 1916 handbook The Social Survey, a “guide for social survey work,” Dr. Carol Aronovici, Philadelphia’s director of the Bureau for Social Research, lamented the “enormous waste of human life and energy that is going on in our midst.” Appealing particularly to “social workers and socially minded citizens,” Aronovici warned that the social degeneration plaguing the nation would have a far-reaching and irreversible impact. It is not, she reasoned, “merely affecting the individual,” but “the loss is clearly social and productive of conditions which are a handicap to the attainment of the high achievement that this democracy is capable of.”20 Likely, the social “waste” that Aronovici had in mind were the tenement dwellers whose living conditions continued to alarm progressives, as well as high unemployment rates and the steady migration of African Americans from the South to major Northern cities. As the title of her project suggests, the social survey was advanced as a tenable solution to the crisis of modernity and to sociology’s methodological gaps. Dismissing sociology as a depersonalized “field of speculation,” Aronovici encouraged social scientists and reformers to return to the community as a site of inquiry and a methodological guide. “The great laboratories, which are open before us in the midst of the people,” she argued, are where we might “gather all the facts.” “When the facts are known,” she reasoned, “an awakening of the American people is bound to result.”21

A minor figure in Progressive Era reform, Aronovici’s anxious defense of the social survey reflects a broader crisis in knowledge production that characterizes the efforts of turn-of-the-century social reformers and social scientists who, through the dissemination of and investment in incontrovertible evidence and raw data, endeavored to make sense of the period’s profound social, political, and industrial upheavals. By the turn of the twentieth century, sociology emerged as a viable solution. But even as social reformers reached for its organizing principles, American sociology was still searching for its methodological center of gravity. When it came to the study of race in particular, writes Mia Bay, the “still forming social science disciplines,” particularly sociology, were “based on theoretical speculations rather than on empirical research.” For those “bent on creating ‘grand theories’ of society that could be employed to analyze and solve the social problems of the gilded age,” continues Bay, “the founding fathers of American sociology invariably explained racial inequalities with reference to natural laws.”22

As frustrating as it was, the unstable methodological terrain also provided opportunities for innovation and elaboration. Especially appealing was the power afforded to the accumulation and presentation of objective facts and unfiltered data. For social reformers who, as did Du Bois, often doubled as social scientists, their research agendas were buoyed by what the historian of science Dorothy Ross describes as the “belief that the recital of actual conditions would arouse the civic consciousness and inform public action” and by the desire to take advantage of the cracks in sociology’s nascent methods.23 As Du Bois put it: “There is only one sure basis of social reform and that is Truth—a careful, detailed knowledge of the essential facts of each problem. Without this there is no logical starting place for reform and uplift.”24 Reporting the “facts” was, of course, far from a novel political strategy. This was, after all, what encouraged the wide circulation and wild popularity of the antebellum slave narrative, a genre that repeatedly tried to awaken the nation’s moral conscious by proffering eyewitness accounts of the institution of slavery as it really was.25 The social survey departed from previous reform agendas in its construction of the entire social as an undertheorized laboratory and an untapped scientific resource. As both the problem and the solution, social landscapes—Chicago’s West Side immigrant communities, New York’s primarily black Tenderloin district, and the American South’s Black Belt—would provide the rubric for a systematic reform agenda and a social-scientific praxis.

By the 1880s the social survey had migrated from London, where Charles Booth innovated a seventeen-volume study of poverty, The Life and Labor of People in London, to the world of US college settlement houses, where it quickly took root as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Data and the Matter of Black Life
• 1 · The Social Survey: The Survey Spirit
• 2 · Photography: Looking Out
• 3 · Film: Overexposure
• Coda: Racial Data’s Afterlives
• Color plates
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index