Broken Brotherhood: The Rise and Fall of the National Afro-American Council

Preface

Preface I first became interested in the National Afro-American Council in the late 1990s, while writing a biography of North Carolina congressman George Henry White, an unsuccessful early aspirant to the group’s presidency. As with other aspects of White’s life, I found clues to the Council’s origins and activities but little documented evidence of its activities or prominence. Most historians who discussed the Council had dismissed it as primarily, if not exclusively, a vehicle of Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Machine and all but ignored the Council as otherwise irrelevant to the period. Like other groups of the period, the Council at first seemed a victim of the developing ideological chasm within the ranks of African American leaders. Years later, when I returned to this subject, my initial research efforts were rewarded with a surprising number of detailed newspaper accounts of the Council’s annual meetings, both in African American weekly newspapers—where I had expected to find the accounts—and in a large number of mainstream daily newspapers , where I had not expected to find either extensive or neutral coverage of the meetings. In every city where it met over its decade of existence, the Council received long, generally (and uncharacteristically) objective accounts from the white newspapers—accounts far more balanced, in fact, than from the black newspapers, which were often split between expressions of devoted membership and derisive scorn, depending on the partisan loyalty of the editor. Because no official records could be located for the Council after the first three years, these newspaper accounts quickly became the only viable option for reconstructing the later history of this long-dead organization. Limited correspondence between Council leaders and others was available and proved to be a rich secondary source for opinion, if not factual detail; but the absence of collected private papers for several of the principals made the search arduous. Memoirs by such key players as Alexander Walters, Mary Church Terrell, Ida Wells-Barnett, and John Green revealed their surprisingly selective memory for detail. Many of the most active members barely mentioned the Council at all, while others, like William E. B. Du Bois, bitterly disenchanted by Tuskegee machinations, all but glossed over their own membership in obvious favor of ix competing and successor organizations. What was it about the Council that made it so elusive, I wondered? As I worked, it became clearer to me that the Council had been an inspired but flawed attempt to unify an increasingly fractionalized population, in the face of extraordinary internal pressure and external obstacles on almost every side. That it was even attempted, given the setting in which it emerged, seemed most remarkable to me; that it managed to survive for ten years, beset by internal bickering and sabotage, was little short of a miracle. Many of its members moved on to help found, after 1909, the enduring National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). But without the instructive trial-anderror precedent of the Council and its flaws, I concluded that the NAACP could never have succeeded; that most historians overlooked the Council or dismissed it entirely, then, seemed the height of absurdity. Even though its existence was comparatively brief—barely a decade—the Council was the only truly national civil rights organization during the late 1890s and early 1900s, certainly the only nationwide grouping, with representatives from every state and most territories. And for all its structural weaknesses, the Council was easily the most resilient of a number of smaller, mostly regional, civil rights organizations with which it coexisted or overlapped, some of whose members it even attempted to bring together in one forum: the Constitution League, the New England Suffrage League, the National Suffrage League, the National Racial Protective Association, even the vaunted Niagara Movement, which seemed destined, if only for a moment, to co-opt the Council entirely. None could match the geographic reach of the Council, or the enduring loyalty of its core membership, especially in the conservative South, where most African Americans still resided. None held annual meetings in major cities, attended by delegates from across the nation. Certainly none sent their leaders to the White House for regular consultations. The Council emerged during a period of almost nonstop organization by African Americans at all social levels for varying purposes. Whether the Council spurred or simply capitalized on the growth of such organizations cannot be determined, but it clearly benefitted from the social ferment. Some of these new...