Bodies That Work. Tami Miyatsu

Holly Springs and then in Memphis. One of her earliest fights with white patriarchy was a suit against a Jim Crow railroad company in 1884 at age twenty-two, when she was forced to move to the smoking car by the conductor and baggage man. Her undaunted action against prejudice alarmed the community and led to her dismissal as a teacher in 1891. Even though she eventually lost the case, she went on to a career in journalism and lecturing, but never relaxed in her attacks with both voice and pen. One of two militant endeavors she made in the 1890s was the publication of an eighty-one-page booklet titled The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition, co-authored by Frederick Douglass, Ferdinand L. Barnette, and I. Garland Penn in 1893. Twenty thousand copies of the pamphlet that denounced the exclusion of African Americans from the fair’s management positions and employment were distributed in the fairground. The publication was, to borrow Robert Rydell’s words, a cultural text underscoring “the cultural construction of racism in post-Reconstruction America and the struggles by African Americans for social justice.” This radical pamphlet even met with criticism from blacks who feared to lose “what little support remained among whites for social, economic, and political rights for blacks in America” (xiii). Another assault that she launched was her anti-lynching crusade to Britain in 1893 and 1894. Her scathing criticism of American lynch law received enthusiastic support from people in Britain. Her campaign was extensively reported in American newspapers including the Chicago Inter-Ocean, infuriating white Southerners.

3. Ida B. Wells, “A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892–1893–1894,” in Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900, ed. Jacqueline Jones Royster (ca. 1895; repr., Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1996), 82. African American women’s revision of the slave past had started several years earlier. In 1892, the following three important works, both fiction and nonfiction, by black women appeared: Ida B. Wells’s Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892), Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South (1892), and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy or, Shadows Uplifted (1892). See Chapter 3 for the details of Ida B. Wells’s anti-lynching campaign that carried her beyond the Atlantic.

4. Louis R. Harlan, introduction to Up from Slavery: An Autobiography, by Booker T. Washington, ed. Louis R. Harlan (1901; repr., New York: Penguin, 1986), vii–xliii; Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography, ed. Louis ←13 | 14→R. Harlan (1901; repr., New York: Penguin, 1986), 73, 164–65; Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, Irvine Garland Penn, and Ferdinand L. Barnett, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in World’s Columbian Exposition: The Afro-American’s Contribution to Columbian Literature, ed. Robert W. Rydell (1893; repr., Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 11. We can conclude that the publication of Wells’s Red Record (ca. 1895) preceded Washington’s speech in September because Wells reprinted the Douglass letter in her work with no reference to his death and published it under her maiden name, Wells. Douglass passed away in Washington, D.C., on February 20, and Wells married attorney Ferdinand L. Barnett on June 27, after which she used the surname Wells-Barnett in her publications. Historians, such as Robert Rydell and Louis Harlan, agree that Washington had been a relatively obscure figure until 1895. His first appearance on a public stage was when he gave an address at the Labor Congress at the Columbian Exposition in 1893. White business leaders of Atlanta later learned about his accommodationist remarks and invited him to speak at the opening-day ceremony of the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition in 1895. Despite the widespread image of his Faustian views, Washington is known among historians as an enigmatic person: he secretly committed himself to the anti-racism movement, which includes fundraising and preparing for suits to nullify the Jim Crow laws with his hired lawyers (Harlan, introduction to Up from Slavery, xvii). Yet his reputation as an accommodationist spread not only through his Atlanta speech, but also due to his autobiography, Up from Slavery. Born a slave in antebellum Virginia in 1856 and freed by the Emancipation Proclamation at age nine, Washington was later given an opportunity to study at the Hampton Institute, a normal agricultural secondary school established by a former Union general, Samuel Chapman Armstrong. He learned “the virtues of self-reliance, hard, work, and thrift” from Armstrong, his respected mentor whom he praised as “a more than a father to him” (Harlan, viii–ix). After spending years teaching to freed slaves in Virginia and failing to pursue a career in either law or politics, Washington was given the mission of building a secondary industrial school in Alabama, later named the Tuskegee Institute. Both whites and blacks welcomed his book, Up from Slavery, as a “moral text”: for white readers, it dispelled their sense of guilt over the historical exploitation of the black race and brought large donations to the Tuskegee Institute. For instance, whites allegedly shed tears and praised his humanitarianism: “It is now long ago that I … resolved that I would permit no man, no matter what his colour might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him” (Washington, Up from Slavery, 165). For blacks, it provided a role model for how to succeed in the world. Washington’s Atlanta speech is considered to have caused tremendous and extensive changes in race relations, as seen in the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, which sanctioned segregation under the separate but equal doctrine. In 1899, Washington still expressed his optimistic idea about lynching: “[T];here is a strong public sentiment growing in the South against the crime, ←14 | 15→and I believe within a few years, through the aid of the best negroes and the best white people, it will be blotted out.” See “An Interview by Frank George Carpenter in the Memphis Commercial Appeal,” December 2, 1899, Booker T. Washington Papers (hereafter cited as BTW Papers), Vol. 5: 1899–1900, ed. Louis R. Harlan, and Raymond Smock (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 281.

5. Theda Perdue, Race and the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition of 1895 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 1–2. Twelve American cities, including Philadelphia, New Orleans, Chicago, and Atlanta, hosted international expositions from 1876 to 1916, attracting nearly one million visitors from inside and outside the country. The Cotton States and International Exposition was one of five international expositions that Southern states hosted during the period from 1885 to 1907. Southern states were particularly eager to give an impression of racial harmony, which was essential for ensuring industrial and agricultural productivity in the South, to potential customers and investors. The emerging race leader’s Atlanta speech endorsed the “New South,” characterized by a diversified economy and racial harmony, along the same lines first advocated by Henry W. Grady, managing editor for the Atlanta Constitution in the 1880s.

6. Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916, 5th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 74; W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Souls of Black Folk,” in W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings, edited by Nathan Huggins (1903; repr., New York: Library of America, 1996), 398; W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, in W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings, edited by Nathan Huggins (1940; repr., New York: Library of America, 1996), 549–802; W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Social Significance of Booker T. Washington,” Du Bois Review 8, no. 2 (Fall 2011): 370. Despite being Washington’s contemporary, Massachusetts-born William Edward Burghardt Du Bois nurtured a view of race issues that was quite different from those of the Tuskegee founder’s. I personally believe it was this difference that caused them to promote opposite measures for addressing the race problem. According to his autobiography, Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, a little mill town with a small black population in western Massachusetts. Mary Sylvia, his widowed mother, supported the family, relying on her income from odd jobs and neighbors’ charity that included a large rented house. Although his family was by no means wealthy, Du Bois attended school from age five or six to 16 years of age. Even when he associated with the sons of local upper-class whites, he writes, he had few memories of being refused or embarrassed by his companions on account of his race. However, when he graduated from high school as the only “colored” student, his ambition to study at Harvard failed because of the lack of resources, as well