Soon after the Russian Revolution of 1917, a number of American Blacks emigrated to Bolshevik Russia, the new pro-worker state. One noted emigre was a Minneapolis postal worker named Homer Smith Jr., who wrote his autobiography entitled Black Man in Red Russia (1963).
Smith experienced racism in his birth state of Mississippi and in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn. Smith’s decision to leave the land of his birth to go to a dangerous land going through a revolution indicated severe racism’s impact on millions of Black Americans.
Smith relayed a story of one of his fellow Black emigres telling a Bolshevik that in America, there are Black conservatives. Aghast, the Russian revolutionary exclaimed, “What in a Jim Crow America does Blacks have to conserve?”
In his autobiography, Smith spoke to the Black nadir of Jim Crow apartheid that forced Blacks to be the mudsills in a white over Black hierarchical social relation.
But freedom in this post-slavery America created social conditions that greatly affected Black political thought and behavioral thinking. Smith, as a free thinker who experienced racism, decided in the words of the old rock song, “I gotta get out of this place if that is the last thing I ever do,” while most Blacks stayed and made the best of a god-awful social reality.
Smith, however, was a worker and not a member of what W.E.B. Du Bois called, in his definitive 1903 essay, “the Talented Tenth” of the petty bourgeois class of Black folk who were educated and worked as white-collar owners of their own small businesses, or as doctors, nurses, lawyers, pastors or teachers whose purpose was to “serve, uplift and advance the race.”
In his progressive essay, Du Bois said, “The Negro Race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men… education must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth…the best of this race that they guide the Mass [of Black folk]” to higher ground socially, economically and educationally. But Du Bois warned against the selfishness of individualist elitism.
Du Bois’s understanding of how to uplift the race came in direct conflict with the conservative “Wizard of Tuskegee,” Booker Taliaferro Washington, who was the founder of the trade school called the Tuskegee Institute. Washington was born in slavery in 1856 on the eve of the American Civil War. This war would, in the following decades, usher in the destruction of American slavery and the rise of Black liberal progressivism and its nemesis, Black conservatism.
The Tuskegee Institute, with the financial support of northern industrial capitalists, supported a New South sans slavery, becoming the bedrock of Black conservatism when Washington implemented the academic paradigm for his trade school, described as “the toothbrush and the plow.”
The 20th century conservatism in Black leadership stemmed from Washington. Washington’s third wife, Margaret Murray, became a womanist leader and co-founded with Mary Church Terrell the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1904, with the philosophy of “Bath, Broom and the Bible.” With this conservative idea, the NACW hoped to uplift Black families, children and mothers.
This husband-and-wife power couple helped move the first generation of freedmen and freedwomen into a conservative cohort that believed hard work, thrift and abstinence from political demands would open the door of opportunity. This social philosophy was expressed by Washington in 1895 at the Cotton States and International Exposition held in Atlanta.
His speech is known as “Cast Down Your Buckets” because Washington implored the freedpeople not to not migrate to the North but rather to stay in the South and work with the planter class to create a New South. Washington’s conservatism was demonstrated when he said, “The wisest among my race understand that agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly…In all things that are purely social, we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
To Washington’s critics, this speech was telling the world that the American Negro will accommodate to the New South of Jim Crow racist separation. Of course, the Supreme Court, a year later, validated this new America in Plessy v. Ferguson, the separate but equal case.
The pushback to this Negro conservatism was the Negro liberalism with Du Bois’s 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk, in which he described the American dilemma for the first generation post-slavery with these words: “One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts…two warring ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
Du Bois felt that a liberal arts degree would prepare the freed people as they came up from slavery, which was the title of Washington’s famous autobiography. To begin to understand the different ways Du Bois and Washington saw racism and its resolution, one should just note that Du Bois was born free in Great Barrington, Mass., whereas Washington was born a slave in Virginia. Du Bois’s doctorate in history from Harvard was a factor in his cognition, as well as Washington’s lack of any academic degrees.
Another pushback to Washington came from Blacks in the socialist movement and their organization, the African Blood Brotherhood for African Liberation and Redemption (ABB), and its members, such as Otto Huiswoud, Richard B. Moore and Cyril Briggs. Many members were of West Indian background. Their newspaper, The Crusader, explained Marx to the masses.
Of course, by the 1920s, Black nationalist Marcus Garvey expressed his solution to the Negro problem with his “Back-to-Africa” approach and his slogan “Africa for the Africans.”
Garvey’s newspaper, Negro World, was read worldwide and was banned in parts of Africa by colonialist powers. Garvey’s organization, Universal Negro Improvement Association, had tens of thousands of members, one of whom was Malcolm X’s father.
However, all these individuals and their organizations represented what became known as the New Negro. Unlike Washington and his associates of accommodationism, Du Bois and his NAACP members strongly felt that public agitation for their civil rights would lead to full citizenship with equal rights under the law.
The NAACP used its newspaper, The Crisis, and its editor, Du Bois, to write and voice their anger and their demands for the end of Jim Crow. Their philosophy was well stated by the pre–Civil War activist Frederick Douglass, who firmly stated that “power concedes nothing without demand.”
The New Negro of the 1920s and 1930s demanded their full civil rights. What connected Du Bois, the ABB and Garvey was their acceptance of the obligations to work tirelessly as New Negroes to uplift the race.
This obligation of the Talented Tenth gained new life with the Double V campaign by the NAACP during World War II, which stood for victory against totalitarianism in Europe and Asia abroad and victory against racism at home. At this inopportune time, there appeared a neo-conservative spokesperson by the name of J. Saunders Redding who said, in his 1951 book, On Being a Negro in America, “the obligations imposed by race on the educated Negro are vast and become at last onerous…I am tired of giving up my creative initiatives to this demand [which] is the primitive and false concept of race.” Redding and far too many African Americans today think within this paradigm.
In many respects, Redding’s attitude is widespread among some Black bourgeoisie today and among the Black lumpenproletariat. Far too many in each group do not recognize Trump and the newly configured GOP as a right-wing, KKK-like neo-fascist party. Trump, as leader, has demanded the execution of the Afro-Latino teens known as the Central Park Five, while Trump’s major financial backer, Elon Musk, thinks he has found his new Afrikaans-apartheid South Africa in Trump’s MAGA movement.
Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America,” anchored the CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981. His signature signoff was, “And that’s the way it is.” This signoff was that Cronkite was reporting truthful, relevant and hardcore news. Today, with the Internet of blogging, podcasts and social media platforms, one should understand, “Everyone has a right to their opinion, but not every opinion is right.”
As we move into the final weeks of this important election, a question is, “Why are a small percentage of Black men, who have traditionally voted Democrat, hesitating to vote for Kamala Harris?” This is a class and gender issue in that most Black men hesitating to vote for Harris are members of the lumpen, individuals who do not work but hustle and pimp to get rich or die trying.
My point is that 85% or more of Black men who have graduated from high school or college and who work will be voting for Harris. Those Black men who do not vote for Harris have embraced the attitude of the Black conservative Redding, and narcissistic, ahistorical, individualistic contrarianism is the bane of the lumpen. “And that’s the way it is.”
