Public Culture: Diversity, Democracy, and Community in the United States

Chapter 10. To Serve the Living: The Public and Civic Identity of African American Funeral Directors

Chapter 10 To Serve the Living: The Public and Civic Identity of African American Funeral Directors Suzanne Smith [I]t dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and wandering shadows. —W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man The House of Diggs . . . the funeral home that does the most to serve the living. —Advertisement for the House of Diggs Funeral Home, Detroit, Michigan, 1965 African Americans historically have had a fraught relationship with public culture and, consequently, with their public identity. W. E. B. Du Bois’s metaphor of the veil, which captures both the envy and contempt black Americans have felt toward the white world, centers on the idea of the veil as visual barrier. The veil both obscures the wearer from being seen and empowers one’s ability to survey others without being noticed. The portrayal of invisibility as depicted in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man offers the more stark idea that African Americans do not have a public identity as they are completely ignored by those who, through their own racism, refuse to acknowledge their existence. The message of both of these seminal African American texts is clear: public culture has no place for those individuals who do not fit the dominant white ideal of American identity. For this reason, any examination of African Americans’ attempts to participate in public culture must first begin with the acknowledgment that these ventures were rarely, if ever, welcomed by the larger American society. How, then, do we begin to understand African Americans’ place in American public culture? How has the African American fight for racial equality and full citizenship been shaped by this pattern of exclusion from the public sphere? One of the most useful ways to measure the public and political life of minority groups involves acknowledging that some of the most strategic activity occurs in covert and hidden ways—from “behind the veil.” Political anthropologist James C. Scott argues that subordinate groups are always negotiating a type of “infrapolitics,” which he describes as the “hidden transcripts” of resistance that oppressed groups use against the “public transcript ” of the “dominant elites.”1 Scott argues that “[s]o long as we confine our conception of the political to activity that is openly declared we are driven to conclude that subordinate groups essentially lack a political life . . . [t]o do so is to miss the immense political terrain that lies between quiescence and revolt.”2 Consequently, it is essential to find ways to more closely examine how the “infrapolitics” of African Americans influences their relationship to public culture. In order to understand this dynamic, I present here a brief case study of the history of African American funeral directing, which will provide an example of how one group of African Americans has sought to influence public culture and have a public identity. African American funeral directors hold a unique place in African American life. Often the most successful business people in their respective communities, African American funeral directors historically have used their prominence as local leaders to actively engage in public life. The advertisement copy from Charles C. Diggs’s funeral home, the House of Diggs, quoted in the epigraph raises an intriguing question: how do African American funeral directors “serve the living” while burying the dead? Since the funeral industry began in the mid-nineteenth century, African American funeral directors have worked actively as civic leaders, politicians, and civil rights organizers. Moreover, these funeral directors sustained the cultural life of their local communities by acting as lay—and sometimes ordained—religious leaders, sponsoring radio stations, and pro250 Suzanne Smith moting the arts and education through outreach programming. Yet relatively little...