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1 Introduction: New Negroes Forging a New World DAVARIAN L. BALDWIN “The Bogy-men Will Get You If You Don’t Look Out” —Chicago Defender, March 6, 1915 “THE DARKER MILLIONS” On a balmy Wednesday in October 1921, President Warren Harding stood before a racially mixed crowd of over one hundred thousand residents jam-packed into Birmingham, Alabama’s, Capital Park. What was supposed to be a simple speech commemorating the semicentennial of the city’s founding turned into an address haunted by the specter of the “race problem.” Harding stunned white listeners into silence and black onlookers into rapturous applause when he declared, “The negro is entitled to full economic and political rights as an American citizen .” The president certainly made an unexpected and important declaration, but his stance on political equality was hardly a benevolent one. Offering the southern Negro economic and political rights addressed what he saw as a matter of national security. From the outset, Harding soundly dismissed the strivings of social equality—racial mixing in social settings—as “a dream.” Yet he opined that racial antagonisms in the South had encouraged “its colored population” to be “drained away by the processes of migration.” Harding soberly acknowledged that the South’s “industrial dependence on the labor of the black man” must force the region into a new set of race relations. It was clear to the president that the Negro’s decision to “quit the South” could undermine the vital agricultural base of the entire country. A new Negro consciousness was in the air.1 As Harding discussed the national implications of this new Negro, he emphasized that “our race problem here in the United States is only a phase of a race issue that the whole world confronts.” For confirmation, the president implored the crowd to read the work of Lothrop Stoddard. In his best-selling books The Rising Tide of Color and The Re-forging of America, Stoddard outlined an intensifying self-consciousness among the “darker races” that threatened to undermine white 2 DAVARIAN L. BALDWIN world supremacy. According to Stoddard, the rise of Japan, Russia’s Bolshevism, and anticolonial resistance in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa brought to life what he called the “phantoms of internationalism.”Yet Stoddard found the “most chronic and most acute” dangers of this rising racial tide festering in America’s “great negro problem.” For Stoddard, the First World War created a tectonic shift in race relations. The influences of global agitation, the growth of the Negro press, and the influx of southern migrants and returning black veterans converged on American cities. He described the “great negro quarters of New York, Chicago, and other Northern cities” as “cauldrons seething with ideas and emotions.” Stoddard warned that a “radical negro movement” had arisen in cities stimulated by “foreign-born negroes,” most notably one centered around the black radical group the African Blood Brotherhood and Moscow leaders hoping to “Bolshevize America.” He further elaborated that this new Negro found expression in “urban riots” and “agrarian disturbances” alongside political agitation and the “cultural forms” of Negro arts and letters.2 While rejecting Lothrop Stoddard’s call to reassert white supremacy, black scholars and newspapers agreed that a racial armageddon—a day of racial reckoning —was near. W. E. B. Du Bois had long argued that American race relations were “but a local phase of a world problem.” The great West Indian American intellectual and “father of Harlem radicalism” Hubert Harrison was so impressed with Rising Tide’s analysis of worldwide revolt among the darker races that he began a correspondence with Stoddard. But Harrison made clear, “Naturally, since I am a Negro, my sympathies are not at all with you: that which you fear I naturally hope for.” A Chicago Defender cartoon mocked white anxieties about a new Negro more broadly, threatening “The Bogy-men Will Get You If You Don’t Look Out” (see Figure i.1). The paper went on to poke fun at Stoddard directly: “The tide that has started will continue to rise in spite of all Mr. Stoddard and the white races can do. Might as well try to stop the tide from flowing or the sun from setting!”3 For President Harding, Lothrop Stoddard, and throngs of white and black citizens alike, the rising tide of a new Negro had emerged. And this new Negro was found in both culture and politics with a race consciousness that spoke to the strivings of the darker races...

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