Transnational Progressivism: African Americans, Native Americans, and the Universal Races Congress of 1911

This association will direct its energieos exclusively to general principles and universal interests, and will not allow itself to be used for any personal or private interests. The honor of the race and the good of the country will always be paramount.

On February 27, 1916, Joseph F. Gould, a white associate member of the Society of American Indians (sai), sent a letter to W. E. B. Du Bois, suggesting that African Americans and Native Americans collaborate. “Certain of the Indian’s problems are the same as those which beset the Negro, especially that of exploitation,” he wrote, “and for that reason it seems to me that cooperation in some lines might be secured between the naacp, and the Society of American Indians.”¹ Why did Gould think that American Indians and African Americans should work together? He did not elaborate. His letter, however, illustrates the frequent intersections of Black and Native histories. The letter also suggests a similarity between these histories. But broad similarities are only the beginning. How might we explore such intersections? One place to begin is to connect these histories to African American and Native American responses to colonialism during the Progressive Era. More specifically, we can focus on African American and Native American involvement in the Universal Races Congress (urc) held at the University of London, July 26–29, 1911.²

This essay explores the link between African American and Native American intersecting histories and their responses to colonialism. While scholars have speculated why Blacks and Natives were not close allies, few have discussed the parallel opposition of Blacks and Natives to similar forms of oppression or their common stance against colonialism. I argue that Black Americans and Native Americans found common ground in responding to colonialism, at least in part, by traveling to London.³

The implications of this investigation are at least twofold. First, it illustrates that there was a relationship between African Americans and Native Americans in the early twentieth century, long after the familiar scenes of alliance and conflict in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is useful, then, to place Black and Native histories in conversation with each other by focusing on their engagements with major events of the early twentieth century where agitation against racial discrimination and colonialism was prominent, including the Universal Races Congress. And second, this investigation places Afro-Native history firmly upon the international stage, demonstrating that both groups understood themselves within a global context: as not simply national but significantly transnational progressives.

Fig. 1.

Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois; Dr. C. A. Eastman. Reprinted with permission from the Department of Special Collections and University Archives, W. E. B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Charles Eastman and W. E. B. Du Bois attended the urc in order to respond to colonialism. They believed that a central component to fighting injustice was to advocate for full citizenship, for at this time both groups suffered a citizenship that was at best partial. Their relationships to the US nation-state were distinct in obvious ways. Though Black Americans were US citizens, their citizenship was impaired; they were disenfranchised from voting and excluded from all manner of equality in the public sphere. By 1911 most American Indians still did not possess US citizenship and lived impoverished lives on neglected reservations. Although manifested in different forms, partial citizenship affected both Black Americans and Native Americans.

Historian Frederick Hoxie argues that members of both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) and the Society of American Indians (sai) believed that “securing US citizenship . . . would empower their members to become forceful actors in the nation’s democracy” (Indian Country 225). Hoxie stresses further that Indians, in particular, believed “this new legal status could enable them to live outside the control of the Indian office and battle against hostile assaults from white neighbors” (231). This does not mean that either group was simply assimilating, giving up Black or Native ways of life. Nor does it...