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Reviews in American History 29.1 (2001) 98-102



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The Grifter

Peter A. Coclanis


John David Smith. Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and The American Negro. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. xvii + 386 pp. Notes, index. $34.95.

Bad times often bring out the best or the worst in individuals and communities. During the depths of the Great Depression in the mid-1930s, an impoverished ninety-two-year-old black man in Columbus, Ohio--suffering from dementia and in constant pain from the botched amputation of his right arm seventy years earlier--found himself in luck. The owners and patrons of Columbus's leading African American hotel, the Litchford, took him in, fed him, nursed him, and allowed him to live in a room rent-free. When the old man finally died at the Litchford on November 15, 1935, he died in fellowship among friends in Columbus's black community.

It is interesting and not a little ironic that in the first years of the twentieth century--a period often seen as the "nadir" of race relations in American history--the old, forgotten invalid who lived at the Litchford, William Hannibal Thomas, was perhaps the most reviled person in the country in the eyes of African Americans. For he was the author in 1901 of one of the crudest and most racist books on "the Negro problem" ever written, The American Negro, published under the prestigious Macmillan imprint. 1 In this work, Thomas not only characterized "the negro" as bestial, depraved, mentally deficient, and morally perverted, but went so far as to question whether members of the race descended from the same species as other human beings.

The American Negro propelled Thomas, an obscure Ohio-born mulatto, onto center stage in the national debate on race. Although the maelstrom surrounding the book was as short-lived as it was furious, it still took years for Thomas--commonly viewed in the first decade of the century as a "race traitor" and "a man without a race"--to make the transition from widespread ignominy to Litchford obscurity. In his important new book, Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and The American Negro, John David Smith makes a strong case for reacquainting the public both to this enigmatic author and to his reprehensible work. [End Page 98]

Admittedly, in our own race-obsessed age, it may at first glance seem arch or, at the very least, insensitive to rescue a figure like Thomas from oblivion. Better to let him rot in his grave in Ohio than to publicize his discomfiting racial views. It is, however, precisely because Thomas's views make us squirm that Black Judas is well worth a look. That a man considered black could write as he did compels us both to extend the boundaries of racial discourse in America and to flesh out the standard story of turn-of-the-century race relations. Moreover, to those with a stake in racial essentialism--the belief in innate racial characteristics--Thomas (himself an essentialist!) is like a stake to the heart. The very existence of a man like Thomas forces us to treat people on their own terms, individually rather than categorically, as solo voices rather than as spokesmen for their race. Liberation through complication is the implicit message of the Thomas case, which message can help us better to interpret the racial views of other individuals in the American past, individuals as diverse as, let us say, Thomas Jefferson, Harry Truman, or even Alan Keyes.

William Hannibal Thomas was born in the old Northwest--either in Michigan or, more likely, Pickaway County in south central Ohio--in 1843. Neither of his parents had ever been enslaved, and Thomas's immediate ancestors on both sides of the family were mulattoes. Thomas himself was light-skinned--he could pass for white at times--which in Smith's view is crucial to understanding both his personal bitterness and his malignant positions on questions relating to Negroes and race.

Thomas's family, like most free black families in the antebellum North, was poor, and he spent much of his...

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