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  • W. E. B. Du Bois, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem”
  • Lawrence J. Oliver

Investigations of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s public and private writings on ethnic minorities, especially African Americans, have documented her deep-seated racial prejudice and belief in Anglo-Saxon supremacy.1 Those prejudices are clearly projected in her infamous essay “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem.” Appearing in the July 1908 number of the American Journal of Sociology, the essay begins with the assertion that the “superior” race must find a practical means for speeding up the “racial evolution” of that “large body of aliens, of a race widely dissimilar and in many respects inferior, whose present status is to us a social injury.”2 Her astonishing suggestion is to have each state enlist all “negroes below a certain grade of citizenship” into a quasi-military organization that would perform dignified labor for society and thereby develop the work habits and personal discipline that will make them productive members of the social body. Yet even as she portrays blacks as inferior beings who threaten the white social order, she commends those African Americans who “in this brief time [i.e., since the end of slavery] have made such great progress” (79); indeed, “more progress in a few generations than any other race has ever done in the same time, except the Japanese” (80). This class of “decent, self-supporting, progressive negroes” is not a “problem” and deserves congratulations from white Americans (80–81).

As Cynthia J. Davis has noted, Gilman’s inconsistent views on racial and ethnic issues, always perceived through the lens of class, shifted with her audience and over time.3 As the years went by, she became increasingly racist and xenophobic and, as is well known, she embraced eugenics as the “solution” to the so-called “Negro problem.” Her racial prejudices were [End Page 25] instilled in her as a child and later strengthened by progressive-era racial theory propounded by sociologists such as her friends and mentors Lester Ward and Edwin Alsworth Ross. But as “Suggestion” indicates, in 1908 she seems to have held a sincere belief that African Americans, though racially inferior, had made progress and that their social evolution could be hastened by her bizarre though well-intentioned plan.

In order to understand the conflicted views on African Americans in “Suggestion,” we must examine the specific context in which Gilman wrote the essay, especially her engagement and activities with the American Sociological Society (ASS) and the American Economic Association (AEA) during the first decade of the twentieth century. These were the same years in which W. E. B. Du Bois was making his strenuous but largely futile efforts to convince members of both of these organizations that structural racism was primarily responsible for black poverty and crime. Neither Gilman nor Du Bois scholars have fully explored this intersection of the two writers’ progressive-era careers. Gilman, I will argue, was motivated to write “Suggestion” in direct response to an ongoing debate on race friction that was featured at the ASS conference in December 1907, a debate in which Du Bois prominently figured and in which he contended that the educated and professional class—his “talented tenth” of African Americans—was, as Gilman acknowledges in her essay, leading the race up the ladder of social and economic evolution.4

Du Bois and Gilman Among the Social Scientists

As is well known, in “The Damnation of Women” (1920) Du Bois cites Gilman by name, and the essay echoes many of the major themes of Gilman’s Women and Economics.5 Gilman, however, does not mention Du Bois in her published or private writings, and scholars have not identified any direct connections between the most famous woman and most famous African American social activists of the progressive era.6 However, given their mutual interest and participation in the ASS and AEA conferences and journals, it would be remarkable if the leading voices for women’s and African Americans’ rights were not aware of one another’s writings and reputations.

Gilman did not consider herself to be an academic scholar and, as she told her husband Houghton, her reading on social...

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