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Reviews in American History 33.2 (2005) 203-210



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Future Generations

Michele Mitchell. Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny After Reconstruction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 388 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $59.95 (cloth); $22.50 (paper).

In her novel Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900), African American author and social critic Pauline Hopkins captured the profound sense of crisis that took hold among black Americans during the decades following Reconstruction: "We thought that with the abolishment of slavery the black man's destiny would be accomplished. . . . [Yet today] a condition of affairs confronts us that [abolitionists] never foresaw: the systematic destruction of the Negro by every device which the fury of enlightened malevolence can invent. . . . This new birth of the black race is a mighty agony. God help us in our struggle for liberty and manhood!" (p. 1). Confronted by the escalation of violence, the curtailment of political rights and educational opportunities, and the onset of de jure segregation that characterized the era of Jim Crow in the South, as well as by an intensification of racism nationwide, African Americans at every level of society—from impoverished farm laborers to relatively elite professionals like Hopkins—struggled to identify and enact strategies for collective progress in the late 1800s and early 1900s: Should African Americans stake their futures in the United States or flee a country that oppressed them and seek opportunity in Liberia instead? Did turn-of-the-century U.S. imperialism create a new opening for black men to demonstrate their worthiness for citizenship or merely underscore the shared plight of people of African descent, whether in the United States, Cuba, or the Philippines? Were African American women the race's greatest hope for progress and uplift or did their sexuality and domestic habits condemn future generations of black Americans to disease, immorality, and recklessness? African American men and women argued these and other questions as they sought a way forward after Reconstruction.

A basic premise of Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction is that African Americans living in the post-Reconstruction United States believed that black people shared not only a [End Page 203] common past but also a mutual future. This widely held belief, argues author Michele Mitchell, had important consequences: "For post-emancipation women and men, the wide-ranging yet singular notion that black people shared a common fate enabled activists to propose a number of strategies—political, social, cultural, moral, physical, religious—to ensure the collective's basic human rights, progress, prosperity, health, and reproduction" (p. 8). Moreover, several factors caused African Americans to turn increasingly inward—to issues like domesticity, morality, and sexuality—as they endeavored to identify collective strategies for progress between the late 1870s and the 1930s. Mitchell's stated aim in Righteous Propagation, then, is to examine "critical moments when African Americans contended that the race shared particular interests as a sociopolitical body and that the collective's future depended upon concerted efforts to police intraracial activity" (p. 9).

Scholars working in the field of African American history have long noted a shift in leadership at the turn of the twentieth century, a time when many black activists—especially in the South—altered their emphasis from advocating for political and civil rights to stressing the potential of various methods of collective self-help, from strivings in education to morality and property ownership, as the best plan for advancing black interests. Both aspiring-class and elite community organizers in particular emphasized the need for all African Americans to cultivate the characteristics of respectability—including industry, piety, and sexual modesty—as a means of uplifting the race. Quite often, historians' analyses of this shift have cast such efforts as "accommodationist"—an argument epitomized by criticisms of Booker T. Washington—and a retreat from more "radical" demands for immediate and full equality, as exemplified by W. E. B. Du Bois's response to Washington's famous speech before the Atlanta Cotton Exposition of 1895. At...

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