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  • The New Race Consciousness: Race, Nation, and Empire in American Culture, 1910–1925*
  • Matthew Pratt Guterl

In the good old days white people derived their knowledge of what Negroes were doing from those Negroes who were nearest to them, generally their own selected exponents of Negro activity or of their white point of view....Today the white world is vaguely, but disquietingly, aware that Negroes are awake, different, and perplexingly uncertain.

Hubert H. Harrison,
“The New Race Consciousness” (1920)

For three days in late July 1911, despite the “sweltering heat of midsummer,” thousands gathered in London for the First Universal Races Congress. W. E. B. Du Bois, editor of Crisis magazine (the organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP]), and a leading advocate of civil rights for the “American Negro,” attended the congress as a correspondent and was elected co-secretary of the American delegation. The Races Congress, Du Bois hoped, would provide an excellent forum in which to rebut the claims made by Booker T. Washington during his tour of England in 1910. To the great consternation of Du Bois and the fledgling NAACP, Washington’s [End Page 307] ameliorative approach to race problems had won great acclaim in Britain, and the Crisis editor subsequently embarked on a breathtaking series of lectures in England designed to steal support away from the Tuskeegee machine. The divisive political thrust of Du Bois’s trip to England was, however, undermined by the congenial ethos surrounding the Races Congress. A unity of purpose, it seemed, had mitigated any chance for public acrimony over “the Negro problem” in America. Indeed, after a warm and cordial discussion with Du Bois in London, Washington’s man-on-the-spot, R. R. Moton, concluded that Du Bois’s participation in the event marked no real threat to “the Wizard’s” reputation or influence. 1

Later, remembering the friendly spirit of the event and the overwhelming body of social scientific work presented, Du Bois conceived of the Races Congress as “a meeting of widely separated men, as a reunion of East and West, as a glance across the color line or as a sort of World Grievance Committee.” 2 Without regard for the suffocating heat of London, or indeed for the hints of war in Europe, Du Bois marked the First Universal Races Congress as an event of profound significance for those “fifty different races” representing “fifty countries” who participated. “When fifty races look each other in the eye, face to face,” wrote Du Bois, “there rises a new conception of humanity and its problems...in the continual meeting of strangers comes gradual illumination.” 3 Gathered in the hallowed halls of the Imperial Institute, the several thousand representatives of “fifty different races”—some came from India and Africa, but most represented the various imperial powers—spoke earnestly of the need for greater benevolence, faith, and, perhaps more important, patience in the “burden” of uplift and civilizing. Curiously, Du Bois barely noticed the overwhelming celebration of empire present at the Congress, and he shared none of the disgust felt by fellow NAACP member Mary White Ovington, at the surprising absence of anti-imperialist agitation. 4

The evasion of critical discourse on empire was partly a logical [End Page 308] result of the “liberal internationalism” of the Universal Races Congress —an internationalism “rooted in the ethical concern to transcend national divisions...in the promotion of a world order that could secure the perpetuation of peace”—and, one might add, the continued profitability of imperialism. 5 The first stirrings of anticolonialism were, of course, present at the congress in more than a few papers and in the tangible connections made between colonial activists during the course of the event. In the comparative context of the Races Congress, the Egyptian national and strident Pan-Africanist Dusé Mohamed Ali and the South African activist John Tengo Jabavu, together with other nationalist leaders from India, Egypt, and Haiti, forged ideological ties in support of nascent anticolonialism and in direct opposition to the general thrust of the congress. 6 Such connections, however, were masked by the incorporative “liberal” atmosphere of the congress—a subtly coercive and consensual liberalism that manifested...

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